All right, all right. Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you doing well. It is. Defan Maloney,

you from Freedom, Maine. Hope you are enjoying a glorious, gorgeous, lovely weekend. And we're here to

talk philosophy. We are here to take questions. I'm here to solve problems and chew gum,

and I'm all out of gum.

That's right. I wish, actually, I did an entire show, or a portion of a show, many years ago

with tough guy, Duke Nukem Voice. I was breastfeeding using Black and Decker tools.

But I decided that I, I've decided I should never really do that again because it's a little

too tough of the old vocal chords. I end up with a sort of Paul Young style year off from singing.

So I hope you are having a glorious day and I'm certainly happy to take your questions, comments,

issues, challenges, problems. And I'm not trying to lure the, I'm not trying to lure the atheists back in, but I have

questions. I'm not trying to lure the atheist back in particularly, but I do have questions.

And one of the questions, I suppose, which it certainly took me quite a while to figure out

in my own life,

an embarrassingly long period of time, perhaps.

But one of the basic questions I think that it's important for atheists to have in their minds and to hopefully answer in the world is this.

So if you don't believe in God, what higher goals or purposes do you sacrifice your pleasures for?

Because, you know, there's a real tension in life.

For me, maybe there is less for other people, but there's a real tension in life.

A lot of complicated tensions in life.

One of them, obviously, is just basically around sort of food and exercise, right? So I did a call-in show this morning, and I was

like, oh, I've got a little bit of time. I could write another chapter of my new book, which I'm

loving, by the way. I could write another chapter of my new book, which I'm loving, by the way.

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