Summary
You are misunderstanding the purpose of the dialog. It is in context of a conflict between worldviews. All worldviews are self-reinforcing memeplexes, which are intrinsically stable because of protective and deflecting sub-memes in the complex. However, all worldviews are also incomplete, and have falsifications and incoherencies. And one of our psychological traits is our ability to maintain self-blindness and self-deception about incoherencies and falsifications of our views. Breaking a worldview memeplex is only accomplished by psychological stress, forcing the holder's attention onto falsifications and incoherencies. The speaker is trying to bring attention to problem areas for an atheist/materialist worldview, by noting the key relationship, experiential, and values based aspects of our lives it has grave difficulty dealing with, and by doing so possibly inspire the psychological stresses that could break the rival worldview to his own. As this was a podcast for Christian faithful, the secondary point of referencing problems for atheist/materialists is to prevent the faithful from considering straying.
Meme theory and memeplexes
Meme theory, that ideas compete for space in our minds, is a very useful concept, that explains a lot about human social behavior and beliefs. One of the discoveries that meme thinkers made while exploring this idea, is that memes often travel in self-reinforcing collectives, that tend to make them stable in our minds long-term. Richard Dawkins attacked meme-plexes as irrational and parasitic, while labeling ideologies and religions as such parasitic meme-plexes. This was far too narrow view. The methodologies of science, music theory, most of our complex ideas and conceptual methodologies are memeplexes. Memeplexes are not intrinsically bad, they are essential to how we think and function.
Dawkins was reacting to the methods that religious views responded to his rational attacks on religion. His disputants would do things like cite the successes of religion (Look at positive, reinforcing evidence), bring up reasons to discount his attacks and critical test cases (sometimes by rationalizations or fallacies), and deflect by attacking his own alternative worldview. This collection of activities are generally part of most stable memeplexes. They are protective tactics incorporated into a memeplex that keep a view stable in a memetic environment where competing memeplexes are an ongoing threat to displace the one in one's own mind. Dawkin's disparagement of religion as a parasitic memeplex, when all his own views were also memeplexes, and very likely have the same properties he was disparaging, was a noteworthy failure to understand his own theoretical framing of ideas.
What is the most philosophically correct way to challenge a worldview?
The best framing I have found for how to think about, and challenge, a collection of ideas is to treat them as a Lakatosian Research Programme. Imre Lakatos, after the successful attacks on Popperian falsification by Kuhn and Quine, came up with an alternate version of the scientific method, by which a Research Programme is treated as a core set of assumptions, which are adapted with ancillary patches as contrary evidences are discovered. This model allows one to call the Big Bang hypothesis a single Programme despite its repeated adaptations over time, and explains why falsifying test cases to some of its predictions were known of, and set aside for later resolution, in some cases for decades. Here is a summary of Lakatos' thinking: https://www.scientowiki.com/Imre_Lakatos
Under the Research Programme framework, the rationale to adopt a particular Progremme, is a consilience of the supporting evidences for a programme, the potential for the programme to address outstanding refuting evidences, and the power/utility of a programme to provide fruitful/useful framing to advance science research. Lakatos considered this consilience to be evaluable under the categories of "progressive", where a Programme has few outstanding problems, and they are being addressed, while it is highly useful in spawning new investigations, vs. "regressive" where a Programme spawns very little research, and challenges are addressed by multiple special exception patches that make the overall Programme less useful predictively.
Lakatos was talking about science theories, but his Research Programme thinking is very applicable to philosophic worldviews as well. Evaluating the consilience of evidences for or against a worldview, and the overall "life health" of living by a worldview, are how one would apply Lakatos' thinking to worldview competition. Note the "auxiliary assumptions" from Lakatos are the defensive memes of Memeplex theory.
The right way to do an evaluation of competing worldviews is to carefully accumulate the for and against evidences, examine the validity of protective auxiliary assumptions (many protective memes are actually fallacies), and look at the overall utility of the worldviews to live life well. Note that the two commentators agreed that Alex's worldview seemed to be effective and useful in living life, so it scored well on that metric.
Challenging worldviews the right way is amazingly difficult -- it has taken philosophers centuries to do so
Spiritual dualism, tied to some specific religious doctrine, has been the dominant worldview for most of humanity for almost all of our history. Challenges to both spiritual dualism, and to specific religions, have been an ongoing project within philosophy for centuries. The Rennaissance and Enlightenment both broke the thought-constraints of religions. Parallel attacks on spiritual dualism, both from a materialist and an idealist perspective, have also been centuries-long philosophic projects. Falsifying test cases for religious doctrine and textual claims are the primary content of these efforts, along with plausibility arguments for alternative worldviews to spiritual dualism. Despite these efforts to accumulate counter evidences and arguments, both religion and spiritual dualism remain the popular dominant worldviews today.
However, there was a change in this dynamic in the early 20th century, when one of the competing worldviews, reductive physicalism, became the dominant worldview of the intellectual leader class. The reason for this was very clearly described in The Rise of Physicalism essay: https://www.davidpapineau.co.uk/uploads/1/8/5/5/18551740/papineau_in_gillett_and_loewer.pdf Reductive materialism achieved dramatic success in explaining chemical theory based on physics principles, and biochemistry proved extremely fruitful in explaining cellular dynamics. Genetics, digestion, blood oxygenation, etc -- many of the mysteries of life dynamics, were well explained by reductive chemistry -- far more effectively than the dualist Vitalism theories. The extension of reductionism to the origins of life in the Urey-Miller experiment added to the potential of this alternate worldview.
The process of critique of a dominant worldview has been applied to reductive physicalism as well
Ever since the "Rise of Physicalism", advocates of competing philosophic worldviews have attempted to compile a suite of challenging test cases for reductive physicalism. As physicalism has been dominant for a little under a century, this has not yet been a centuries-long process. As with all worldviews, there are multiple variants to physicalism, and some critiques apply only to one variant.
One of the more aggressive variants was Logical Positivism, and the dismissal of "metaphysics" as not real was a major theme and objective of the Logical Positivists. LP tried to reject metaphysics as meaningless, by applying the Verification Principle to meaning. Paraphrasing: "any statement which cannot be verified at least in principle is meaningless". The greater objective of Logical Positivism was to banish most of philosophy from philosophic discourse, limiting philosophy to logic, linguistics, and possibly the philosophy of science. Logical positivism was decisively refuted by, among other methods, asking what the verification of the Verification Principle consisted of? The Verification Principle is itself a metaphysical claim about the nature of meaning, hence its use to try to banish metaphysics from philosophy unsurprisingly applied to itself as well.
The video's "nothing is real unless it can be measured" is likewise easily refuted by a similar recursion. Is measurement measurable? Is realness measurable? They
are CONCEPTS, in abstract space. They belong to Popper's World 3, and are not material, and not measurable, but if they were not "real" then the statement referencing them is nonsense.
These two examples illustrate one of the challenges to materialism/physicalism -- basically physicalism requires the existence of and interaction with abstract objects, making it not monist. Many physicalists today accept that physics involves both matter and information, hence it is effectively a form of dualism. This is not fatal problem, but is a major patch and weakens the intuitive attraction of the worldview.
Other issues raised include the stalling out of the global reductionist programme for the last 75 years or so (see section 5): https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-reduction/; the failure of abiogenesis research post Urey-Miller; the failure of the neuroscience effort to reduce consciousness to neuroscience: https://www.meetup.com/philosophy-cafe-central-maryland/events/303288776/?eventOrigin=group_upcoming_events; the rejection of Scientism and acceptance that there are non-science sources of knowledge: Has Scientism drastically declined as a worldview in the last 100 years? the consensus among philosophers of mind both that qualia exist, and that the hard problem of consciousness has not been solved by any physicalist model of consciousness: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1LFTMUSP8VEWB?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp; and Hempel's dilemma that physics, being an intrinsically open field of investigation, cannot exclude causal interaction or dualism from potential future physics, so that "physicalism" as a doctrine rejecting idealism or dualism can never be clearly articulated in any way that is not falsified.
Note, under the Research Programme approach to worldviews, ALL worldviews have apparent falsifications or other challenges. So the identification of challenges to reductive physicalism is not fatal to a physicalist worldview -- so long as physicalists admit to the challenges, and take them on as long-term projects to try and address them.
What is the result of two dominant competing worldviews, each of which have flaws, or challenges?
Trying to characterize the sociology of the decline of Christianity, and rise of Physicalism, was the subject for Charles Taylor's masterpiece A Secular Age. Taylor noted that there are strong advocates for both worldviews in our society, but that most people have absorbed and understood that both Christian dualism, and secular Physicalism have valid concerns about them as worldviews. Taylor described the consequence as leading to unstable worldview commitments, where life crises cause the majority of less committed holders of one view or another to change their affiliation.
For the religious, the deconversion cause tends to focus on empiricism, and evidence-based problems for religion, or on the moral failings of religious doctrine. For the secular, the deconversion tends to focus on the difficulty to fit morality, values, consciousness, first person experiences, selfhood, and agency into a physicalist worldview. Taylor calls this collection of properties "enchantment", and considers the physicalist worldview to involve the banishment of enchantment from our lives.
I have had online dialog with a number of people who have had "conversion" experiences. As I mostly frequent secular forums that also discuss religion, most of those have been with former Christians who have converted to atheism, and are now mostly reductive physicalists. Their motivating deconversion triggers have been a mix between general empirical refutations of their religion, and the moral problems of an evil God who created and maintained evil (The Problem of Evil).
In the real world, I have seen two deconversions by friends. One was a nephew, who was raised in the Evangelical movement -- but was always a poor fit due to his intellectual curiosity and intrinsic empathy. His move away was initially driven by his brother coming out as gay, and his family's subsequent ejection from their church. He continued his ministerial studies anyway, and joined a more "open" evangelical church, only to discover they were a bunch of grifters, pressuring the flock to donate to the church under bogus "prosperity gospel" bs. The bullying by his senior pastor, along with his discovery that an anabaptist theologian he admired and liked was a sexual predator, triggered a crisis of faith for him, as he believed in "by their fruits you shall know them". His spiritual deconstruction was years long, end emotionally gut-wrenching. He is back in Christianity, now in a progressive "process theology" movement, but admits to regularly wondering if God is real. This deconversion was mostly morally based.
Another was a family friend, and close friend of my father in law. The two were atheists together, sometimes joking about how one non-physical idea or another was a "category error". This friend was always cheerful, optimistic, hardworking and an excellent design engineer. He was also an alcoholic, and was tricked out of the value of his inventions and pension at a small company he was the primary inventor for. Escaping his alcoholism thru 10 step spirituality, and facing economic and professional failure due to misplaced trust in supposed friends, led him to embrace the entire suite of "enchantment", and his wife's kindness focused brand of Christianity. For him, the lack of enchantment, plus failures in applied living for physicalism, were the triggers for his deconstruction then reconstruction.
So -- I have seen this instability of worldviews as a real phenomenon in this world. The triggers to prompt a reconsideration of worldview most commonly involve a major life crisis, and the process is generally not rational, nor pretty.
Also, there are alternatives to the either/or duality of dogmatic Christianity, or dogmatic reductive physicalism. I have conversed with many physicalists who have evolved less dramatically into emergent, or pluralist worldviews, and both Christians and New Age who have chosen to focus on Love over any dogma.
So -- what was the video getting at?
Breaking the hold of a rival worldview takes an intellectual and/or psychological crisis. And the problem for reductive physicalism is the lack of enchantment in its worldview.
The most noteworthy aspects of life that is lost under disenchantment is morality, values, and the reality of self and interactions. By focusing on "love" -- which is all of a qualia, a core moral value, and an abstract concept -- and is crucial to our life in all three forms, the podcasters commenting were citing the most dramatic and important of the features lost to us under "disenchantment". Our agency as initiators of -- anything -- is almost as important a loss, hence "free will" was raised as well. They considered Alex to be too "rational" in his ability to rationalize, plus to have too well-run a life to feel a crisis, such that they were unlikely to be able to trigger a deconstruction crisis for him by focusing his attention on what is lost thru disenchantment. But Destiny they considered to have a less-well-run personal life. And as a romantic, and therefore an acceptor of the reality of Love and values, they thought him a possible candidate to reconsider his worldview if his attention were focused on love and personal agency.
They admitted that an alternative worldview might not end up with their form of Christianity, as they realized that Alex is basically a Deist.
Those two were confident in the stability of their own worldview, but an interesting corollary podcast would be some non-Christians discussing the possibility of triggering a deconstruction process for the two speakers in this one ...
