Jay Dyer: Demons in Hollywood, CIA, Secret Societies, Lone Gunmen, Epstein & Attacks on Christianity

Jire, thank you very much for doing this. I have a lot of questions to ask you, but I want to begin with orthodoxy. You are one of the most visible and maybe effective evangelists for orthodoxy, Christian orthodoxy, certainly in your age cohort, maybe in the country. Uh, you're Orthodox. Why are you Orthodox? What is Orthodoxy?

Uh, I am Orthodox because I went through a long journey trying to figure out what authentic Christianity is. And so I was raised Baptist. That took me eventually into Catholicism when I was about 20, 21. I think I read St. Augustine's City of God. I read a bunch of his other works and I thought, well, Baptist isn't right because I'm finding in the church fathers all these teachings that are not Baptist. And so that kind of gradually took me in the realm of traditional Roman Catholicism. Uh, did that for a long time. And as you get into, I think, the more recent problems of Vatican 2, post-Vatican 2 theology, that led me to the question of how do I reconcile this with what I know the first thousand years of Christianity teaches. So long story short, uh, it took me about eight or ten years. I finally came to the Orthodox church about ten years ago. So that's the simplest, quickest reason is cuz I think...

>> The first thousand years of Christianity, I think to most modern Christians, certainly American Christians, that's like a black hole. What does that even mean? The first thousand years of Christianity.

>> It's an area that we're not taught. I know that when I went to college, the only thing that we talked about from that whole period was like Augustine's Confessions and maybe, maybe one other book or two.

>> Then we have something called the Dark Ages and nothing happens.

>> Nothing about Byzantium. Didn't even exist. And then like these people called the Medici make a ton of money in Italy and start funding beautiful art, and that's the beginning of civilization.

>> So I, and I remember at college I was like pressing the department like, why don't we study some medieval stuff, some Byzantine stuff, and they were like, why should we? We don't care about that Christian stuff. So, um, yeah, I think there's probably a little bit of an intentional desire to suppress that, uh, for, I mean, American education, I think, is pretty much brainwashing. So, um...

>> So, but one sentence: this might take between Constantine in the 4th century and the Renaissance you had Christian civilization.

>> The most successful empire in history is the Byzantine Empire, from Constantine all the way up until, you know, the fall of Byzantium to, to the, to the Muslims. So, um...

>> Why, why do you say it's the most successful?

Uh, it's a common sort of academic assessment just in terms of their—they flourished on a gold standard for a really long time. Um, they started clipping the gold money, clipping like the, uh, Roman Empire in the west had done before them and other empires. So they, they fell prey to usury as well.

>> Yeah.

Uh, so they fell to a lot of the same issues that empires tend to fall to: human weakness and weakness, like recognizable stuff, degeneracy, all of that. Um, also, rabid nationalism had a tendency to break down empires as well. Um, I like Spengler, and I think if you read Oswald Spengler, he talks about how there's kind of a life cycle. But I think the unique aspect of the Byzantine empire was that it was explicitly Christian, based on Orthodox Christianity. Um, and so in many metrics of what it is to be successful or flourishing, it flourished. Um, but, uh, it did fall. I think, again, I'm not trying to measure Christianity just on worldly success, but I do think it does play out in that way at times, right? If you're, if you're really based around Christ, if you're, if your theology or civilization is logoscentric, then it's going to play out that way. You're just going to prosper because you're aligned with what's true. You're aligned with that transcendent source. So, um...

>> Anyway, for me, that journey ended up being eventually with Orthodox Christianity. Um...

>> So, but just really quick back to the Byzantine Empire. Did you know it existed before?

>> How many people are aware that there was a Byzantine Empire and know anything about its outlines?

Not many people in the West. Again, there is a very clear, especially if you take humanities courses, you know, the way they're constructed in, in college and in, and maybe even younger private type schools, like you go from—you do the Presocratics, you do Plato and Aristotle, and then you do Augustine, maybe a Stoic or two, and then you jump to Descartes. So you skip that whole period. And not just to say Byzantium, but also, you know, the Latin West was, uh, you know, explicitly Christian as well. I think that's, it's intentionally overlooked. Um, they don't want people reading what brilliant thinkers were doing in the Middle Ages because that's—this is where we get universities. Universities come out of Byzantium. They come out of the West. Um, so do hospitals. So some of these very fund—science itself actually comes out of that whole period. So but we are taught, we think that no, these are all post-Enlightenment, you know, post-scientific revolution developments. They're not. They're medieval developments. So a lot of that suppressed. A lot of that I had to kind of just read and learn on my own.

>> I mean, medieval is an adjective, but also an epithet that's medieval—by drawing and quartering somebody. The Dark Ages, they were dark. Like...

>> That's all Voltaire. That's all sort of an atheistic, uh, French Revolutionary attack on what came before, uh, by design.

>> When did you learn that?

Well, I was really interested in medieval thought, scholastic theology in college in my 20s. And so I was reading Aquinas and reading all these guys as I had all these atheist professors who were, uh, constantly debating with them. Um, I even did a, I did a public debate my sophomore year with the atheist professor. So I would be reading all those guys, studying philosophy and history, and then debating with those guys, and then coming to, you know, my own conclusions about that stuff through just reading. So...

>> Interesting. I, I keep interrupting you. So that led you to Orthodoxy?

Long story short, yeah, roundabout way. I went from traditional Catholicism in my 20s to eventually—I took about 8 to 10 years to study Orthodox stuff pretty intensely. So that would be because I'd put a lot of time into reading the, the Latin church fathers. So I was reading Jerome and Ambrose and a lot of Augustine's works. And then I realized I've never actually read the Eastern Church Fathers. And if you get into church history in that first millennium that you talked about, you realize that all the seven/eight ecumenical councils of that first millennium, they're actually all held in the east. They're all called by the, the emperors, the Byzantine. They're not called by the pope. Certainly the pope was either there or had legates there. So the west was represented, but it was, in its ethos, it was essentially eastern and eastern in its Orthodox theology. So I, I just decided to go on a long reading track of reading all of those guys as best I could for many, many years. So that would be like the Cappadocians, that would be Basil, the two Gregorys, St. Cyril of Alexandria, St. Maximus the Confessor, St. John of Damascus. Those are some of the key figures in that milieu of the first thousand years that set the tone of all of Christianity in terms of its most fundamental doctrines: the Trinity and Christology, right? That's, that's what Christianity is. Those two doctrines are the key sort of lynchpin that it all hangs on. So the first thousand years is dominated by those topics. And that, in a roundabout way—a lot of people don't realize this either—that actually conditions what type of Christianity you're going to have, how it's going to affect society, how it's going to affect your life. Um, so for example, if you have a very truncated version of say evangelicalism that's only based around just how you're saved, right, that's not going to affect society. And so those types of Christianities, or I would say deviations, they're also very susceptible to being used by other groups. I know you just had a, you had a guy on talking about...

>> Evangelical Zionism and dispensational theology.

>> Because that theology is sort of based around an imminent, you know, end of the world type scenario.

>> You sort of retreat and you're not able to create a vibrant cultural effect of Christianity. That's by design. People figured that out that were very cunning a few centuries ago. They realized that that's a kind of Christianity that can be useful. So...

>> That theology, which I'm not an expert in, but have heard a lot about in the last couple of years, is so totally incompatible with what the New Testament actually says...

>> That it makes you wonder like what kind of church could fall for that? And it would be a church with a pretty thin theology and...

>> Exactly.

>> Right. And a structure that couldn't do anything about apostasy.

>> And it's also antithetical to the Christianity of the first thousand years. And the reason I keep saying the first thousand years is that that's not just where we get these doctrines of the Trinity and who Jesus is formulated, but we also get the Bible. The Bible itself comes out of decisions of church fathers centuries after the apostles.

>> Yes.

So if we're going to have a church or a religion based on the Bible, we really already truncate Christianity because the Bible itself, in our ethos, is a liturgical document. It's actually part of a liturgy. It's not a personal devotional book primarily. So to divorce it from that context, divorce it from the community that produced it, is what produces sort of aberrant, truncated versions of the religion that make it susceptible to princes, foreign governments, NGOs, think tanks, foundations. They become essentially tools of soft power, which is what I think much of the evangelical Protestant world today—not indicting the individuals, but the groups, the denominations—they're very easily bought off. Uh, for example, very wealthy families in the west, uh, about 100 years ago, were able to buy off many of the mainline Protestant denominations and turn them into effectually NGOs. Um, just one example: the Rockefellers. And they're not the only family, but they're one of the families that invested very heavily in not just the UN but also the World Council of Churches to create a sort of a supra-international version of the UN that would be for religions. And they were very explicit in their biographies about how this was to basically make it kind of an NGO. So make Christianity into kind of a form of soft power for American interests, really oligarchical interests. Um, and that's one of the, one of the weak points I would say of Protestant theology, evangelical theology, is that it's very susceptible to that. Not to say that the Roman Catholic Church or even amongst the Orthodox Church, there aren't people that are susceptible to the same types of subversion, but I think it's a lot more difficult when you have an ancient, historic type of church that has certain structure, structural integrity and normativity to it.

>> Right?

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Because unlike Billy Bob's strip mall church, the 2,000-year-old church can say, "Wait a second. We've never believed this. We've never done this. Why would we be changing?" There is a sense of continuity.

>> There is. There's also—you like—if you have the attitude of a standard sort of Protestant evangelical person, there's nothing in history settled because every generation kind of has to reinvent the wheel. They have to redo all the same controversies and crises all over again because they could have all been wrong. Nothing is settled, right? Because for Protestant evangelical Christianity, the Bible and the apostles are kind of like the end. I know that a lot of Protestants would say, "Well, we like Athanasius. We like, you know, St. Augustine or whoever." But when you actually go and read them, they have bishops, they have relics, they have the Eucharist, they have all these elements that don't align with the Protestant Reformation. So, I was an avid Calvinist. I was super into John Calvin and all that stuff when I was a younger guy. And it was, it was, uh, unsettling, you know, to read these guys and realize, well, they don't teach Calvinism, so what am I going to do here? Either not be a Christian or I can align myself with whatever the first thousand years of Christianity actually is. And I say the first thousand years, too, because Catholics and Orthodox share that, that first thousand years. So, we both have that in common. So, I think that narrows it down. It's either going to be Roman Catholicism or it's going to be Orthodoxy cuz...

>> What about, um, Orthodoxy struck you as non-Calvinist? Like what are the differences, the big differences?

>> So, you know, Calvinism is not just predestination and, and the sort of, um, strict, uh, soteriology or salvation doctrines. It's also iconoclasm, which ends up, I think, affecting one's view of art and aesthetics.

>> Idol smashing. Correct.

Um, and I was a very avid sort of iconoclastic Calvinist when I was young. Um, um, it's also very, um, rigid in terms of its view of social structure, church and state. Uh, I, I, the more I read the church fathers, the more I got into that kind of a theology, I realized that like Calvinistic sort of republicanism doesn't really match up with Byzantine imperialism or monarchy, you know, the traditional views of the churches' take on governance.

>> The Byzantine Empire is a theocracy.

>> Yeah. Well, yeah, pretty much. What's interesting is that there are spheres, right? So, you have basically, if you think about the Byzantine double-headed eagle, that symbol is one body of the people, but church and state as two separate heads. So, there's spheres of authority, but one body that they share, which is the people. So, uh, and then the west to a degree had this until the Middle Ages when you get sort of a rise of, um, the 11th century papacy, which becomes also the state. So you get a Papal States and a sort of under pope. Uh, Dictatus Papae is the, is the famous document that says the church is also a state now. Um, but until that time, the norm was church and state sort of working in unison. Symphonia is what it's called in the Greek. So that's what I had to, to grapple with. But Calvinism really doesn't see it that way. It's a lot, it's more like a, um, it more, it favors republicanism. There were, there were famous battles between in England, for example, the Presbyterians, uh, and the, the monarchists. So they actually had a huge fight within the history of the English Reformation as to whether they would be Anglican sort of monarchists or whether they would be Presbyterian Republican Calvinists. So that was a famous, uh, you know, Reformation battle. Um, but long story short, again, like you know, Calvinism, I think, is just, it's antithetical to the first thousand years of Christianity. Not so much because of those aesthetic or cultural issues. It's also Christologically errant in that the whole idea of what salvation is is ultimately one's legal standing in terms of what's called justification by faith alone or penal substitutionary atonement. This idea that you're justified by God through a sort of notional acceptance of a set of ideas and then God's attitude towards you changes. So it's dispositional, but it's not focused on an actual ontological change in the person. Orthodox theology is very different. God's disposition is based not on purely a legal stance but on your actual ontological change. So a metaphysical change in you versus a dispositional attitude. So I don't, maybe we don't get too heavy into philosophy, but I...

>> I do want to. What's the difference between the two?

>> Basically, uh, there's an idea in the Middle Ages called nominalism. Have you heard of that?

>> Yes.

>> Okay. So nominalism is the idea that there are only names to things, not essences. So there's no human nature. There's no dog nature. When we talk about natures or classes or sets of things, we're not giving a, an ontological metaphysical status. We're just simply classing things together linguistically in a set. The Middle Ages, the ancient world, the time of Paul or the, you know, church fathers, they thought very differently. They thought that things have natures. They have essences. And so the words aren't just terms or nominal—name-ism. They actually describe what's really there in them metaphysically. Okay. So there is human nature. And in Orthodox theology, Christ assumes.

>> Who would deny that?

>> In the Middle Ages, it begins with people like William of Ockham. So Ockham is the first nominalist and...

>> The man with the razor.

>> The exactly, he's known for that. Um, and he challenges some kind of established ideas of like essential—it's called essentialism—that things have essences.

>> And so he also goes up against this idea of universals, that there's no such thing as a universal class or essence of a thing.

>> And that had been kind of the norm since Plato and Aristotle as well. But um, so you get a denial of essentialism and essences. And then, then you get another guy named Gabriel Biel, and he's very influential on Martin Luther. And so when the Reformation kicks off, there's this debate about how could you be called righteous if you're not in fact righteous. So if as a human being you are, you know, menstrual rags as Isaiah says, as the reformers said, then how could God call you righteous without being a liar? Well, enter in nominalism. And nominalism is able to say, "Ah, because things don't actually have essences, they just have names. And so if God calls you that, you are that legally, even though in actual fact you're wicked." So that was, yeah, that was, and Luther was very happy to utilize that nominalistic, uh, approach. And by the way, this is not just my theory. There's, there's famous Lutheran scholars. There's a book called Harvest of Medieval Theology by Heiko Oberman, and the whole thesis of that book by a Lutheran is that, yeah, Luther had to use nominalism. So, so we're also though moving away not just from theological squabbles, but the idea that things have natures, and that's—this is how we get to David Hume and Kant and these Enlightenment figures which give us the, you know, scientific revolution supposedly. This is how we get to there's no male and female. So, you can see kind of the logical train here. If things don't have essences, well, then they don't actually have genders, right? Objectively, because everything is just a name. So, I can just name myself he, him, or he-it, right? I'm not trying to go too fast or too far in the sense of like theology. But I'm saying there's, there is an ideological sort of progression that you can get from nominalism to where we are now with postmodernism...

>> And then with essentially, you know...

It's just interesting that an adult could believe in something like that. I mean, having lived your life, known people, known animals, seen nature...

>> And arrived at the conclusion that nothing has essence, everything is just what we call it, like that. That flies in the face of your experience. It has to, right?

>> What's that saying that, uh, you have to be an academic to be really stupid? I mean...

>> I guess that's right.

>> Yeah. To be indoctrinated into believing some sort. I remember Terence McKenna. Do you remember the psychonaut Terence McKenna? I remember reading him one time and, and, uh, he says something like, "This is all just magical thinking. You know, this, if you take the shroom, you're going to see that things don't have essences, that things just have names, and you just change the name." And I'm like, that's the gender idea right, right there.

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>> Yeah. And that's just its kind of apogee. You know the, you know the gender insanity is just the most obvious...

>> But it has a precedent in this theology, this theology debate which most—I've never heard that before. Huh. I'm sorry to hear that about Luther, who I've always loved. There's a lot to love about Luther, for sure. Um, quite...

>> He would actually chase the devil away with farts, which I think is great.

>> Quite a robust man and a happy family life and everything about him I like. But that is impossible to defend on. It just flies in the face of reality.

>> Yeah. And even modern scholarship in the Protestant world. There's a great book by, uh, Alister McGrath out of England. Uh, I think he's Anglican. It's called Iustitia Dei, and his book was kind of a landmark in Protestants coming to the table and saying, okay, look, Luther's doctrine of salvation is not in the first 1500 years, unfortunately. So...

>> So this, the understanding of salvation that preceded the Reformation was that people had to be changed in their essence...

>> In order to be saved.

>> Yes. So there's an actual participation in what Orthodox theology calls the uncreated energies. So we believe that God has infinite divine energies and operations, attributes as it's called in the west. Um, and for Orthodox theology—and this is the patristic teaching as well—we participate in that. So we're not just changing legal status. We're actually participating in the life of God himself. Which when you go back and you read the New Testament, you, you're like, "Oh, actually that makes more sense." Because Jesus says in John 17 that he came to give us a share in the glory that he had with the father before the foundation of the world. So divine glory can't be a creature. And so Jesus is equating grace with divine glory. So unless you think God has created parts, which would be polytheism or some form of idolatry, uncreated grace has to be, uh, a reality that's a participable thing.

>> Well, Jesus promises that the Holy Spirit will flow into people and change them...

>> Right?

>> And that happens.

>> Spirit's not a creature, because then you would be anti-Trinitarian. So absolutely, this is why Peter says in his epistle, right, that we become partakers of the divine nature. So very strong language in, in the New Testament, in the epistles, for what we call theosis in the Orthodox church. Paul says, for example, in Thessalonians that it is the dunamis or the power of God that is at work in him. So the actual power of God, which can't be a created thing or a created grace—which unfortunately even in Latin Roman Catholic church in Middle Ages, created grace becomes a normative thing where what you're getting is just another form of created—the Orthodox church is saying no, no, no, the incarnation itself tells us that the uncreated united itself to human nature in incarnation and that Jesus deified the human nature that he assumed with his own immortality. Grace and uncreated energy.

>> The role of the Bible, um, in the Protestant world versus the Orthodox world. You described it this way. I think you said in Protestant Christianity, the Bible is seen as like a, a tool, as a, what's a guide. Of course, the guide, the only guide really, and it is a, a devotional.

>> Yeah.

>> But in the Orthodox, uh, church, it's a liturgical document.

>> Correct.

>> What does that, what does that mean?

>> Liturgy has to do with, uh, the, the Greek word of offering or offering of thanks, offering of praise. But it's also in the Hebrew tradition. We think that that was proto-Christianity, the ancient Hebrew texts. Uh, it was part of, for example, David's psalms. Those were psalms that David wrote to be sung at the temple liturgy. Right?

>> So liturgy is a sort of structured form of worship that, um, Orthodox, uh, you know, Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Episcopalians—they have a very structured form of worship that is called liturgy. But, um, originally it just means sort of offering. And even in Pauline epistles, like the book of Hebrews, you know, towards the end of it in chapter 13, Paul talks about Christians have an altar that they eat from that the Jews that serve at the tabernacle have no right to eat from, because our altar is the true altar, which is thus a liturgical altar. That very chapter he discusses the liturgical thanks and offering at that altar. So from the earliest days, Christianity had this sort of altar-based form of worship. Again, another Reformation distinctive is that they begin to move away from the idea of an altar towards a table, right? So, you have sort of a desacralizing of the worship space to not be a Eucharistic offering, but a shared meal, which—and we're not totally opposed to the idea of it being a shared meal, but it's first and foremost, uh, a, a worship offering. If you go back to Abraham, Abraham built an altar. God is always worshiped at an altar, at least the biblical God. So for us, the Reformation then represents a form of turning away from that. It's a form of sort of Judaizing. It's a form of returning to a form of rabbinic, rabbinic theology. And many of the reformers were actually very influenced by, uh, rabbinic theology, by the Talmud even. Uh, so, so the, so the Reformation has a stream of influences. Renaissance humanism, all those things play into that. And it's just very...

>> Well, Luther was not in that category though. No...

>> He was not interested in rabbinic theology, but he was influenced by what's a text called the Theologia Germanica, which was a Neoplatonic text. And so there was also some—there's also some evidence that scholars have pulled up that suggests that Luther might have had an interest in Hermeticism. I'm not saying that that dominates his idea, but more so with Calvin and some of the, uh, the Swiss reformers, they were a little more directly influenced by rabbinic theology and talmudism, but not so much Luther. No, Luther was very anti—I mean, he didn't even like Moses. He said, "I like to punch Moses' teeth out." So, so Luther didn't even like the Old Testament at times. But again, he's a boisterous sort of, you know...

>> He certainly was.

>> A satirical character at times. So, uh, it's hard to know exactly...

>> The most hilarious theologian in history.

>> He was very hilarious. Uh, um, so it's hard to know exactly when he's always being literal. He might just be joking around. But no, I don't mean to mischaracterize, because I know Luther wrote, uh, about the Jews and their lies. That's a famous text that he wrote. So I'm aware of that. But just in terms of the general, you know, trends of the Reformation outside of Luther, with, uh, Calvin, Zwingli, Menno—uh, even later Lutherans were very involved in the founding of Rosicrucianism. Johann Andreae is believed by some scholars to be the author of the Rosicrucian manifesto. I forget what exactly what it's called, but, uh, so that is there. And a lot of that has to do with, with Kabbalistic ideas.

What, who are the Rosicrucians?

Uh, this was an Enlightenment-era secret society of sorts. Uh, which in the 1600s, 1700s, there, there was a lot of these that were popping up everywhere because you still had in Protestant countries you had certain laws that would, for—and in Catholic countries as well. They would forbid participation in secret societies. They would forbid, uh, you know, practicing of the occult in various, various ways. But you also had court alchemists and people that would kind of, uh, like John Dee. He was the, you know, court astrologer to, to the queen.

>> So they would kind of do these things in, in, on the, on the down low, secretly. And so you get a rise of these secret societies. This is where some of the first speculative Masonic lodges start to pop up in the 1500s, 1600s in Europe. Uh, but you also had a very interesting confluence of Hermetic and Kabbalistic groups that were popping up, particularly, uh, Spanish rabbis that were very popular in Spain seem to be involved in some of the, the rise of Kabbalistic influence in the west. Um, and that, I think, contributes in part to the Rosicrucians, who according to—there's a great book by, uh, Dame Frances Yates called, uh, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. She actually argues that the Enlightenment itself was heavily influenced by Rosicrucian ideology. So, um, they were Neoplatonists. They were into magic, alchemy. So they were really interested in the idea of transmuting metals, you know, into the philosopher's stone, which, uh, some people thought was a real thing you could do. And others thought, well, that's just an allegory for how to undergo transformation into your better self or to become God in a literal sense—uh, not in the sense of Orthodox theology—but so all of these, the sort of different strains and strands, uh, basically heretical world...

>> Witchcraft.

>> Yeah, you could say that, yeah.

>> Huh.

>> A form of it. But again, that's all very diverse. Uh, I mean, I think in the case of John Dee, for example, he's the first 007. Did you know that?

>> No.

>> Yeah. So the, the 007, which is two balls and a cane—which is two, O, 7—that's how John Dee would sign his secret letters to the queen. Um, because he was one of the influences on James Bond. So that's where we get 007 from. That's, and, and Ian Fleming consciously took that from, uh, John Dee. But I, my—my thesis, and other people think this as well—is that when he created this sort of magical angel language that he called Enochian, after Enoch, it was just a way to do spy codes and ciphers. It wasn't—I mean, he might have actually done some rituals, but it was also very useful as a tool for sending messages to Elizabeth that other people couldn't decode.

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So in the Orthodox, uh, tradition, in the church, the, the Bible is read aloud.

>> Yeah.

>> Um, are Orthodox encouraged to read the Bible on their own?

>> Sure. I mean, St. John Chrysostom actually said famously that the laity have more need of reading the scriptures than even the monks or the priests, because monks and priests live in the liturgy—which, for those that don't know, in the Orthodox church, basically every aspect of the liturgy and the liturgical calendar is Bible, it is scripture constantly, it's like every aspect of it. Um, and so Chrysostom's argument was, laity need to be in the Bible more than they do because they live in the world. So if you're not in the liturgy all the time like those people are, the best substitute is the little church, which Chrysostom calls the house. So the household is, in the Orthodox idea, kind of a little mini church. So absolutely, we got to be in the Bible all the time. Um, and that shows that we're not anti-Bible like a lot of sort of Protestant evangelicals think.

So the—one of the reasons there was a Reformation in the first place is because the Catholic Church over time began to hide the Bible from Christians, and not—it was not published in the vernacular, in the local language in Europe. It was in Latin. It was the Vulgate. And Luther's great breakthrough was to publish it in German, to translate it himself into German.

>> Did the Orthodox church do the same?

>> Yes. In fact, this is one of the differences between the pre-Vatican 2 Roman church and the Orthodox church is that the Orthodox always put it in the vernacular.

>> Everything—the liturgy, the homilies are supposed to be in the vernacular of the people. In fact, the Vulgate itself was originally the vulgar Bible. It was the Bible of the people. And so, yeah, I think there was an element to where the Latin church, the Roman church had just sort of solidified into a kind of a tradition that—and it's, it's not inherently wrong to maintain that linguistic heritage. But it's, it's also possible to put it in the vernacular for the people. Uh, I mean, that's the whole idea behind translating the Bible into, you know, the languages of the people so that they can understand it. Uh, but that is one of the differences pre-Vatican 2. But interestingly, after Vatican 2, there were both Protestant and Orthodox influences on the reforms of the Roman Catholic Church, and thus Rome then became emphasizing—they began to emphasize the vernacular after Vatican 2.

What is—you said you're an iconoclast, a smasher of idols. Orthodoxy famously incorporates icons, paintings on wood...

>> Uh, into its worship.

>> What is that?

This is, again, a huge misunderstanding that we would argue we believe is part of, uh, proto-Christianity. It's part of Hebrew proto-Christianity. So when you go back to the book of Kings, when you go to the book of Exodus, and you see the way that the tabernacle and then later the temple are described, they are tremendously ornate. You've got gold images of angels, and you've got the Ark of the Covenant with, you know, angelic imagery on it. So we don't believe that real Old Testament Christianity—or Old Testament Judaism, you could say, not rabbinic Judaism, we think that's something different that developed in the fourth and fifth century.

>> It is something different.

>> Yeah. Um, but proto-Christianity or, or the Hebrew tradition was not iconoclastic. They were against idols, but not all imagery. In fact, and this is something that really changed my mind when I was a Calvinist. If you think about it, the Bible is a book, but words are just iconographic versions of images. They're a type of image.

>> Of course.

>> And so, the more I thought about...

>> Written word. Yeah.

>> The more I thought about that, it's like, well, you can't actually say all images are bad because capital F-A-T-H-E-R. That's a type of an image. In the Orthodox Church, we don't typically image God the Father. We think that as Jesus says in, in the book of John to the Pharisees, he says, "No one has seen the father at any time." And he's quizzing the Pharisees there because he's saying, "So, who do you think Moses was interacting with on Mount Sinai if no one saw the father?" Because it says Moses saw God face to face. Jesus is basically saying, "I was talking to Moses. I'm God." That's why the Pharisees want to stone him in that chapter, because he's saying he's the face of God that was interacting with Moses. So this is, this is why the book of Colossians, the book of Hebrews call Jesus the icon—I-K-O-N in the Greek—the image of the father. This enrages the Pharisees. So we think that iconography directly flows out of the incarnation. The Son being the image of the father. Thus throughout the early church, you have the development of the liturgy even in the first and second century. And this has been shown through archaeological evidence, through people who study liturgy. They're called liturgists. Even Protestant Anglican liturgists note that the early church had altars. They had imagery. Even synagogues in the first and second century. Uh, one of the famous cases is the Dura-Europos synagogue in Syria. I think this is from the early 200s. Uh, it's lined with images, paintings of Old Testament scenes and imagery. So the Orthodox church—if you look at the Dura-Europos synagogue—is the most natural development of, if Christianity was going to open up to the Gentiles and it was coming out of the temple and synagogue liturgical system, it is exactly what it would look like. It would look like an Orthodox church. And lo and behold, that's what Orthodox churches look like. And by the way, I remember, uh, 2023, uh, my, my priest, who's a, a great Russian Orthodox priest, uh, Father Vladimir, we—he took us on a pilgrimage to Italy, and I was like, why are we going to Italy? That's—isn't that Rome? Well, there's a thousand years of Christianity, you know, prior to the rise of the medieval papacy in Italy. And there's tons of Orthodox places that you could go to, right, in, in Italy. And so, we went to the catacombs in Rome. And lo and behold, when the Christians were persecuted and they're underground in the catacombs in the first, second, third century—by the way, you can never see all the catacombs. Like we spent a whole day just in one of the catacombs in Rome. There's altars, there's images that they painted in the first, second, and third century. So even the catacomb church had liturgy, had imagery. Plenty examples of this. The church fathers also write about it as well. So those are huge, I would say, differences between. And remember, the people couldn't read back then. Most, most of the Roman Empire was illiterate.

>> So when they would go to these services in the catacombs, wherever, they would be hearing the word of God. That's why Peter says, "This is the word of God which was preached to you." Paul says to Timothy, "Pass on all the things that you heard from me in the presence of many witnesses." So that oral teaching, that oral hearing of the liturgical worship was the norm. And then one of the things that really cracked it for me as a Protestant—when I love Protestantism—was when I learned that, by the way, I learned this from evangelical scholars: one of the things that developed the canon of the scripture itself, in terms of like how the church decided what books go in and which ones don't, was what's called the lectionaries. Lectionaries are the daily liturgical readings in the churches. So when the church fathers were having these councils and they were meeting, and the canon of scripture doesn't actually get solidified, at least for the Orthodox church, until the sixth and seventh century—they would say, uh, okay, which ones do we have a tradition that says Paul wrote or Matthew wrote? Which ones are in the daily lectionaries? And if you're a Protestant, you believe in sola scriptura, the idea that liturgy and liturgical tradition play this huge role in the determination of the canon makes it very difficult to say that, you know, we're based on scripture alone, sola scriptura.

>> So, Orthodoxy is not based on just the Bible.

>> No. We would, uh, we would say the Orthodox Church is based on the idea of apostolic succession—that the apostles appointed successors in various, bishop, bishops and sees throughout the Roman Empire. Uh, it's based on the tradition, which could include the lives of the saints. It could include, uh, liturgy. It could include all kinds of rights of the church fathers, canons of the councils. Those are traditions, uh, and the Bible. So all, all of those elements go into what the basis of the Orthodox church is. Whereas, you know, in the Protestant world, you, you have elected elders or something like that, but you don't have this sort of three-tiered stool of apostolic succession, tradition, and Bible altogether.

What are the practical differences as, as a weekly communicant in an Orthodox church? How is that different from being a Catholic or Protestant?

Um, well, certainly we would have more similarities to a Roman Catholic than most Protestants or evangelicals. You know, there might be a, a high church Protestant or Anglican communion that would have some similarities with Orthodox church, but I think, uh, you know, for the Orthodox world, um, fasting is a, is a lot more integrated into what we do than most people.

>> Fasting.

>> Yeah. There's, there's a lot of fasting days in the Orthodox church calendar.

>> What does that mean for you?

>> Oh, just abstaining from certain foods. Lent is a little more rigorous for the Orthodox than it is for...

>> Why fasting?

>> Uh, well, we think that Jesus and the apostles and people like John the Baptist kind of set, uh, this, the tone for retaining an element of asceticism in the church. So obviously some people could take that to the extreme. We're not Hindu yogis, you know, sitting out under a tree trying to, you know, roll around and poop or whatever. But, uh, we do think there is virtue in training the body to be subject to the will so that the body's desires and passions don't control us. So that's why fasting has an important role. Um, basically learning to control the passions is, is what that's part of.

>> How often do you fast?

I am not the best at fasting because I have a really weird, uh, gut biome issues. So, I don't fast as much as I should. Uh, it's very, it's very challenging. But there's also people that—there's nuances for medical issues. Um, but the Orthodox church fasts quite a bit, usually from various meats and stuff like that. But, uh, it's not just fasting that's different. And I think for the Orthodox church, it's not just about food. Uh, fasting is also almsgiving, because you're sort of—it's self-denial that's not just about diet. It's also—you for example during Lent, it would be appropriate to confess more. Uh, it would be appropriate to give more than you normally would. So, we make a pretty big deal about things like almsgiving, whereas—and I'm not saying that other groups don't give, but I think that's stressed a lot more in the Orthodox church than it is perhaps in Protestant churches or, um, other domains. Um, but I mean, these are just kind of—there's immense differences, I would say, between just, just the, uh, I mean, communion is a lot more serious in the Orthodox church. You don't commune unless you're Orthodox. You can't—like we don't have what's called open communion. So...

>> Roman Catholic can't come or Protestant can't come and just commune.

>> Uh, most churches are way more open about that.

>> Uh, it's very...

Strict in the Orthodox church in terms of communion. And usually within the liturgy the priest says, you know, all who are baptized Christians who have prepared themselves through confession may approach the table. Um, because we take it very seriously. We think it is actually, you know, the body, blood, soul, and uncreated energy of Christ. So we don't we don't want to treat that lightly. And I'm not saying that Protestants don't have a reverence for their version of the sacrament, but it's it's it's just a lot more serious, I think, in the Orthodox Church than it is elsewhere. Um, but we do have some of the sacramental principles like confession to a priest that Protestants don't have. So again, there's there's a whole millu of wide scope of differences between everybody wants your attention. Think about all the apps, the shows, the podcasts, the websites that compete for your attention. Whatever you can't keep up with it, you're probably wasting a lot of your life. Hallow is not a waste of your life. The Hallow app can make your life. Hallow is the world's number one prayer app and a constant topic of conversation in my family literally every day at dinner. You should come over. This July, Hallow is releasing a study on saints, figures like St. Paul, Ruth, Jon of Arc. Real people, real struggles who wound up turning their lives toward Jesus in a way that saved them forever. Paul's story is amazing. It's an amazing story. Probably the most effective persecutor of Christians in the ancient world. Murdered them. And then one day, famously on the road to Damascus, Syria, he met Jesus and everything changed. You can't read that story enough. Each of these stories will help listeners unlock what God sees in their lives. Now that summer is here, today is the perfect time to take a step back with Hallow. It really will change you. Of all the things we advertise, we know this works. Hallow app at.com/tucker. Three free months. Again, that's hallow.com/tucker and get three months completely free. You will love it.

How is it since the religion you describe was originally tethered to a government, an empire? How has becoming Orthodox changed your view of government and its role? Um, that's an interesting question. I, you know, I was, when I was a Calvinist, I was more like a sort of a libertarian, you know, get the state out of everything type. >> It is the religion of libertarianism, isn't it? >> Um, but as I got more into historic Christianity, I started to realize that, well, maybe republicanism isn't like the highest form of of government. Like, maybe it's not necessarily the best. And I'd never read any critiques of, you know, Republican governance and whatnot, but it turns out there had been, you know, quite a few people, especially after uh scientific revolution. There were there were conservatives and right-wingers who were writing pretty, I would say, substantial critiques of Republicanism. I think even members of royal families were writing pretty good critiques of um >> Well, naturally, >> yeah, they have a vested interest probably that, right? But I mean, no, but there were um liberal in the best sense-minded people, people who believed in inable rights who argued that a republican form of government, self-government, democracy would um devolve into tyranny. >> True. I Plato wrote even back in his day that and he was of course a proponent of republicanism, but he wrote that the more decentralized in the sense of democracy, he didn't like democracy at all. He thought that that would eventually lead to mobocracy and the rule of the passions because the oligarch in that type of a democratic setting has the incentive to appeal to the biggest number at the lowest basis, lowest common denominator >> and then it becomes incumbent upon him to really play on the passions of the mob. So why not debase the people because they're easier to control the mob. So there's an incentive that even Plato noticed back then. I think he I think he writes in the Republic if this happens they're going to legalize weed. >> They're going to legalize uh everything to do with butt stuff so it becomes fake and gay. >> Um, so he sought I think in various ways even as as a pagan philosopher to try to figure out some way to have a society based on sort of objective almost mathematical principles. By the end of the Republic, it's sort of like you get the impression that he thinks that you need to go study mathematics on the top of a mountain for 20 years and then you come back and then you sort of instantiate mathematical forms into into the society. And it's interesting because later on by the end of his life he seems to progress towards more of like a secret society type of governance because he has this um I think it's I'm going from memory maybe the symposium or the other one but he he he argues that there's this council of night in IGT which is a governance board of like spy chiefs. Yep. >> And so they meet at night because the public's too stupid to know what's going on. So, uh, which is just weird cuz it reminds me of like I remember reading something about Kissinger talking about the wise men and like it's like like he's a Plato's talking about like Henry Kissinger's form of like secret like secret guy. >> Then we devolved to the level of Jeffrey Epstein from Exactly. Coney Island. >> Exactly. >> Um, yeah, but it's all the same thing. It's just a I mean Jeffrey Epstein was an idiot which no one wants to say, but he was obviously when you read his writing. Um, and so it's sort of our version of of that. >> So I notice that the enthusiasm for liberal democracy, whatever that is, but the our system of government or that has produced our culture, the enthusiasm is waning for that. Like I don't know many people who I don't know anyone who wants dictatorship just to be clear, but I don't know anybody I literally don't know anybody who thinks the current system is working. So that suggests it probably won't last. So what comes next and what should come next? >> Yeah, there's no easy answer to that. I mean I think again when you look at Christian history even in the west or in the Orthodox East, you have a pretty normative tradition of kings and queens, >> preferably kings, but um and that happens through a semi-sacramental service called a coronation service. So you know the Orthodox Church always coronated emperors, Zars, kings, some of the most famous, you know, kings in the history of the Orthodox Church, you know, fought massive battles. They they went to war. So I think one thing that ties into this idea of a decianizing of the state which is part and parcel with that sort of uh tendency in the Calvinist uh you know libertarian type of tradition the classical liberal ethos is there was a famous Russian statesman Paponatia who wrote a book uh reflections of a Russian statesman around 1890s and he said when you decianize the state you don't get liberty you get another cult that runs the state. Exactly. >> And he noticed that when before >> I have too >> before the Bolshe before the Bolshevixs, right? So yeah, he had looked at the French Revolution and prior examples and he said you just get another cult that steps in and and runs things. Um, and >> so you're always going to be governed by religious fanatics. So the question is which religious? >> You want some good ones or at least some nicer ones or Yeah. >> I've noticed that just from knowing people who run countries like they're all deeply religious people. Most won't admit it. You think Mcronone is not religious? Oh, he's very religious. It's just not your religion. >> Some other Luciferian. I don't know what. Um, yeah. So, yeah, I think the the Reformation, whether it intended to or not, ultimately kind of severed the relationship that the church had already sort of normalized between church and state, that symphonia that we talked about. And then you get and it's a confluence of interest. It's not just ideologues like Martin Luther or whatever. In fact, many of the reformers had uh very powerful like for example, Luther's reformation wouldn't have succeeded without uh the German princes being behind it. So he >> of course they were resentful because they didn't want to spend the money. >> They didn't want and they didn't want to be under the pope. They were tired of the >> course and Germany was emerging as as the great power in Europe and like why would you want to be ruled by Italy? >> Exactly. So there was a lot of resentment papal stuff going on. Same with Henry VII. he didn't want to, you know, >> be under the pope's rules about his ladies. So, >> uh, those combinations of interests and by the way, there's also a Jewish influence on the reformation as well. In fact, there were, according to Carol Quigley, even Protestant and Jewish banking interests funded the French Revolution massively. Um, and he's got he's got a great chapter on the rise of the Pyboss system in France, which is the Rothchild banking system. Um, and then I just read in the Rosell's biography, uh, the fact that they had a long-term vendetta with the Tsarist attitudes towards Russians, uh, towards Russian Jews. And, uh, Lord Rothschild wired 1 million ruples to Bi Linen. I knew about other like the Warbergs and the shifts. They had funded Linen and Trosky, but I did not know that according to the Morton, they had actually wired uh Lenon a million dollars uh so to speak, and he was supposed to pay it back, but he never did. >> Well, I think the bullshik revolution was ideological, but I think it was also an ethnic conflict to some extent. Obviously, >> the Lord Roel said that. He said, "We've got to we will make the the Russian Christians pay for what they did for many centuries in his mind." Yep. Well, and they did. They made him pay. Uh, no one's paid more dearly, actually. Um, so Orthodoxy, I mean, a lot you just said I didn't know because I know so little about orthodoxy. I knew nothing about it three or four years ago. Now, it it seems, I don't know, ascendant, but it certainly seems popular. >> Why is that? Uh, the internet you know has an interesting positive and negative effect it can have on all these domains. So I think in one way what you know I started looking at apologetic stuff around 2000 2001 and back then it was you would listen to people's cassette tapes you would listen to an little MP3 on Windows media amp or whatever. Uh, but now it's everywhere you know the debate sphere which is something that kind of grew not just from me but I mean other people like you know Crowder used to go do the sort of come convince me debate people and then Ben Shapiro would go debate the you know college kids the purplehaired weirdos so that's a lot of lowhanging fruit that like Ben Shapiro would do but there also sort of accidentally almost came about a pretty intense 10 years or so of online religious debating uh which again it just sort of happened. It wasn't something that I planned to do or anyone planned. It was just I remember years ago somebody said, "Hey, would you debate this atheist guy?" He was a libertarian guy. Yeah, sure. So, we did it on a whim. Then another guy, "Hey, would you debate this other, you know, French Canadian atheist guy?" "Yeah, sure." And then it sort of snowballs into, you know, a pretty regular thing of doing online religious political debates. Uh, it's gotten very popular throughout many outlets and I think that is a huge contributor because especially if you're a young guy who's interested in ideas you want to debate your ideas you want to have them challenged you want to know if your position is solid or if it's weak >> um the older you get the less you want to do that tend people tend to be you know sort of solidified into their views but younger guys are more interested in that so I think >> that's when you buy a cable package >> and but I think that It's it's very um it's very natural I think to people in the west to do that to debate their ideas. It's it's not a feature necessarily of every other society to debate their ideas. >> That's for sure. And increasingly it's not a feature of our society. >> Exactly. >> We were talking at breakfast you were a debate participant champion in school. >> Mhm. >> I was too. That was normal. It was normal but it wasn't we as weird. >> It wasn't seen as weird. Yeah. >> No. Now I don't even know that that exists. I don't >> It exists on the internet. So people are going to >> kids in schools are not encouraged to debate, right? >> No. In fact, I think I remember years ago when I was doing undergrad and then grad school, they were already sort of trying to phase that out because we had a debate team when I was in undergrad and then by the time I was in grad school, there was no debate team anymore. It didn't exist. >> Right. Because the premium was on obedience at that point. >> Yeah. because they don't want you critically thinking through your positions cuz then you might notice patterns which are not amendable to the status quo. >> Nicely put. That's absolutely right. So, but but people have been on the internet debating religion and orthodoxyy's gotten a hearing for the first time maybe ever in American history. >> Yeah. And the result is >> I I think I mean it's not the only contributor but it did play a huge role in the rise of Orthodox converts in the last five six seven years for sure. Um, and again it just all of that I would I guess is providential because again nobody in our sphere our circles plan to do this. We thought it would be fun to do. I do a lot of different things. I don't just debate. So it's just sort of one of the side things I enjoyed to do at times. Um, and that ended up for whatever reason being being a lot more popular than I would have expected. So, uh, you know, we've debated many of the top atheists, Muslims, Jews are not huge on doing apologetics. It's not, they don't evangelize. So, there's only been a few Jewish guys that even won to debate. Um, we've done a lot of political debates, feminist debates that have been pretty pretty big. I mean, in terms of viewership. Um, so I think that >> who are the most fun if you had to pick a Muslim, atheist, feminist. >> They actually have a lot of similarities, believe it or not, between uh Muslims are not very fun to debate. I wouldn't say that that they're the most fun. I mean, atheists can be fun because they get really triggered with certain uh entailments, but probably the funnest debates are some of the more idiotic cult types of people. They actually end up being very comedic. So, I do a lot of comedic stuff. So, when we debate cult leaders, which we've debated several, those tend to be really funny. So, they're the most entertaining. >> Are there any atheists left in the United States? Is that >> there was a movie >> that was very popular in 2000s and I kind of think they ran out of steam as the worse things got in the west the less appealing atheism was because it has no explanatory power. So when people start especially after COVID and all that sigh up like people noticed okay there's some really evil going on in the world. Yeah, I mean like we need some explanation and these guys are basically saying there is no explanation. Nothing means anything, right? So atheism kind of loses steam. Um, a lot of the YouTube atheists that were big YouTubers just kind of petered out. One of them was sticking bananas in his butt and they they just like who cares? That's gross. Weird stuff. >> So and then other ones end up like marrying dudes that are women. So uh people begin to see like this has nothing to offer. I remember vividly someone telling me that Sam Harris, the famous atheist, was like really really smart. He's really smart. And I listened to Sam Harris once. I thought that it's not smart at all. Like if that's your ver like our standards, I think have changed maybe. And I think they've gotten higher. >> Yeah. >> Remember when people said Sam Harris was smart? >> Oh yeah. In fact, I mean, I think the the tail end of that period was those debates with Jordan Peterson and and Peterson was really critiquing atheist presuppositions. Uh, I think I felt like he could have even gone harder on those guys because they were already sort of losing the ground publicly. Um, but even Jordan Peterson's just sort of simple lines of questioning. Well, how do you know that? What what's that mean? You know >> even even that wasn't enough really to like help like the atheists didn't have even enough response to sort of basic internal critiques which is a very effective way of debating and doing doing worldview debates is to do an internal critique where you show the the fundamental contradictions within another person's worldview. Yes, >> that is one of the most devastating ways to go about debates. And um I think Peterson was was aware enough to do that with those guys, whether it's Sam Harris or uh Matt Dylan or any of the atheists that that was kind of the nail in the coffin for the atheist. Then we had co and then people were just like, "All right, we need an explanation for freaking demons." >> Yeah, >> these guys say there aren't demons. Obviously, there's Epstein demonic level going on, so probably God exists, right? I think that's literally the path for a lot of people. I don't think I mean I think that's actually what happened for a lot of people. >> And isn't it interesting that some of these highlevel so-called atheists are flying with Jeffrey Epstein and going to >> for sure and have religious level devotion to all kinds of stupid causes. So like they're the most religious people of all. >> Exactly. But I also I even wonder at times like are they even atheists? Maybe they have other kinds of commitments. >> Of course not. I mean, I don't I look at Sam Harris infrequently, but whenever I run across Sam Harris, he seems like a full-blown religious fanatic to me. His religion is whatever it is, humanism or Zionism or whatever, but his commitment to it is is instantly recognizable as religious faith to me. >> Mhm. >> Right. >> Yeah. I think, you know, the approach that I take to a lot of those debates is worldview based. And that what that means is that it's not primarily one side stacking up evidences versus the other side stacking evidences and which one you know way. It's more so analyzing our fundamental commitments or our paradigm through which we interpret the world. That's a lot more effective if you can destroy the person's paradigm for getting them to actually change their mind. >> Right. So, one of the threads that connects everything you're Well, first I would say you've been thinking about faith in a serious way, much longer than most people your age. I think this was a pretty secular country or I thought it was. Um, but you were thinking about this stuff early and maybe that's why you have an advantage over a lot of us. But, um, I've now concluded that like everything is a manifestation of religious faith >> and it just goes by different names and so we we missed it. We thought we lived in a secular country. We actually live like all countries it's a very religious country. You wrote a book on what called esoteric Hollywood which is basically revealing analyzing and revealing the religious symbolism within popular art. >> Yes. >> Why? What is Tell me the thesis. Tell me why you wrote it and give me some examples. Uh, well when I was doing undergrad grad work I had multiple interests not just philosophy and you know religious stuff but also I've always been interested in film love movies. Um, grew up in a small town so we didn't have much to do other than drugs and movies. So >> uh so I always gravitated towards that towards the arts. Um, I enjoy you know performing doing comedic type stuff. Always wanted to be involved in some way in media. So it was only natural I think to also take a lot of film classes, study a lot of lit and then you know sort of bring them all together, synthesize all these ideas and uh just for a long time I was just blogging for fun as I was doing undergrad grad school. I would blog about movies I was watching and I was also studying like propaganda, psychological warfare, uh how that overlaps with intelligence agencies and how that overlaps with Hollywood. So, uh, the book ended up being the product of just a lot of college and grad school research, particularly uh, about figures like Ian Fleming, how he would take sort of his own personal experiences in black ops and intelligence and then put that into the character of James Bond. I mean, he's not the only influence, but he's one of the main influences on his character. and then how Bond was such a powerful iconographic image to do Cold War propaganda. So I just always found that relationship fascinating between all these domains. You've got literature, you've got movies, you've got intelligence stuff and all kind of playing together and how they use that as a kind of tool of Western propaganda during what I think is a dialectical, you know, false cold world war dialectic. But >> it's very instructive on many levels how you know we were talking about icons earlier but Bond is a kind of icon of sort of western nihilistic uh you nichi and uber man right that was used in the cold war to contrast against Soviet ideas of the collective man the new man the uh you know versus the individual man um you've got capitalistic sort of self gratification ation on one side and then over here you've got this idea that you are a property of the state both of these are dialectical opposites right and usually the way dialectics work in terms of big term strategy is to synthesize these so uh I was also studying Hegel and Hegelian dialectics in college and how that that's and he does say that there's thesis and synthesis there's a good academic research which I think demonstrates that Hegel was also influenced by cobalistic ideas so you have the two pillars of mercy and severity and then you the synthesis of those two extremes that can be a way of managing and controlling. Um, and people have got this down to a science. It's not just my speculation. You can read like global elite writers like Jacquali. He'll talk about cold war being two pillars of two two sides of the dialectic that you sort of manage the the middle ground and you can synthesize and bring them together. So essentially what I argue in that book is just through a lot of different essays that I wrote analyzing Kubric and Spielberg and David Lynch and uh Hitchcock a lot of different directors uh in the first book not all negative just sort of doing analysis. I'm not saying that everybody's involved in a grand conspiracy. It's more of uh concentrated essays on different themes and topics relating to sex, cult, and symbology and film and how powerful at least in the last century Hollywood was for giving us our religiosity whether we knew it or not. You know, we mentioned uh mythmaking and we mentioned Plato and you know Plato talking about the noble lie in the republic. We thought we were in a secular society. We were actually given an entire religious myth mythology through Hollywood. You know, Edward Bernay said, "Hollywood is the greatest engine of propaganda the world had ever seen, at least up until that time." >> And that was obvious to me even as a child in the 70s. What was not obvious was that it was religious propaganda. Yeah. >> I didn't realize this was our religion. >> I mean, maybe not overt, but it's there, right? It's it's a subtle way to indoctrinate people into various types of basically just anti-Christian ideology. I mean, the book is not just like a low tier thing saying that Hollywood's evil and it's anti-Christian. Everybody knows that. It's this is more of an analysis of analysis of like, you know, was Eyes Wide Shut perhaps a window into something like Epstein before we knew about Epstein? That kind of stuff. I think that that's fascinating to me. I'm not saying that that was Kubrick's intention. Um, but sometimes the arts, this is really really crucial with like Dosiovski like the arts can predict things even ahead of time. I'm not with such recurring frequency that you think is this what is this >> this is almost a kind of a prophetic spirit almost. Um, >> yes. Or it you know it suggests that like we're just acting in a drama whose script has been written. I don't I don't know. I I mean I have literally no idea but >> well it's outside just a statistical matter it's outside the realm of chance for example how many times the Simpsons predicted coming events like what is that >> I have known writers on the Simp Simpsons they're not >> yogis they're not mystical figure I mean I don't I I have no idea what that is but I just noticed that it's it's happened >> it does happen two different phenomena that for one like if you read Dosioski in some of his novels he would write almost with precision And I think not because he was in on it, but because he was actually kind of a genius, like he would write about >> he was a genius. >> He would write about years before what the revolution would do and what the socialists would do in Russia and almost with accuracy in terms of like the number of skulls that would be melted up. >> Um, that I think is prophetic. In the case of a lot of what went on in Hollywood in the last, you know, several decades, that's more so propaganda that's intentionally conditioning us. Um, especially with a lot of like tech, uh, gadgetry, you know, the Bond films actually introduced a lot of people to sort of spy world gadgetry that would then become day-to-day normal American living, right? I mean, even cell phones, like the internet itself is just old school cold war cryptography that turned into everybody's form of communication. Um, you know, a lot of the spy surveillance gadgetry or whatever that you see going on in James Bond, this begins to be a thing that conditions people to getting used to, you know, being surveiled, getting used to having all their lives on the internet live streamed. I'm saying that there's broader components to these types of stories that do condition us. I don't mean to go full skitso here. I'm not saying that like everything Hollywood is playing. I'm just saying that the deeper that you go into it, you do realize, for example, that uh the CIA's consulted on movies forever, forever, like all the way back to even before uh you had famous actors and actresses that were spies. I mean, a lot of people don't know this stuff. That's just kind of level one of this stuff. But it even gets more sophisticated into like studying the effects of early slasher films that it had on people. It would put people in like a catatonic state to make them more suggestible. Everybody's probably heard about subliminals. Like all of that is related to or adjacent to the type of things that we're discussing here. Like this is it's a very niche but wellstudied branch of how to use fiction to condition people. And one element that might be a little more accessible to people is that if you go back to the turn of the century, last century in in the UK, um especially as they they eventually had the official secrets act, you couldn't say what you did when you worked for British intelligence or whatever, but you could write fiction novels that kind of loosely told those stories. And so a lot of British >> authors that are now famous, you know, formerly wrote >> uh or formerly worked in British Intelligence and then like William Summerson Mahome and these different characters. >> Graham Green. >> Graham Green. Exactly. They would go on and then of course Ian Fleming. They would they would write into the stories what they'd actually been up to. >> You could write our man in Havana, but you couldn't actually write what you did in Havana. >> Exactly. >> Um, and then you and you'll find these fascinating nuggets. You know, Joseph Conrad's the secret agent, which was one of the first uh there was one revolutionary era spy story, I forget the name of it, but his is sort of the most well-known, the secret agent. Um, and you've got like the states using anarchists. There's a false flag event. Like, you've got these principles in these fiction stories which seem to match up to reality. So, I just found that fascinating that that you would have all this in fiction and then that sort of it sort of blurs the line between reality and fiction sometimes intentionally because audiences will watch things and it will sort of embed in the subconscious. And I'm not trying to be again I'm not being skitso about like you're getting programmed whether you know it or not but I don't think all plays in fiction are bad. I'm just saying people don't go to Argo to realize they're watching propaganda, but they're watching propaganda. Does that make sense? >> Of course. And that's why it's effective. >> So, uh, one question um, that appears in fiction and raises speculation in real life and it's a very specific question and you may know the answer. Is there evidence that intelligence agencies of any country have used or criminal organizations in any country have ever successfully carried out assassinations using crazy or suggestible people who don't know they're participating in it? Which is to say like lone gunman shoots public figure. Lone gunman is actually a tool of some other organization. Doesn't know he's a tool of the organization. He committed the murder but he did so maybe unbeknownst to him at the urging of some other group. Sirhan Sirhan for example, is there any evidence? Do we know that's actually happened ever? I think it's very obvious that it has happened. I don't know what the standard of evidences would be to say with absolute certainty in a specific case. You know, people talk about Marius Vanderloo that he was used, you know, for the rich. We people talk about as you said Sir Han I mean you could say Oswald perhaps was uh there is such a thing as false flag recruitment which is where people are recruited into thinking that they're working for this group but they're actually working for this other group right that's correct >> so that does occur u and I think that >> if you study assassinations and how they're conducted they don't happen often but >> they do tend to use you know uh crazy people or or people that are very suggestible so I think That's definitely probably 100% goes on. I mean, we had what was Shinszo Abbe was one of the most recent uh other than Charlie Kirk obviously, you know, assassinations that there was some weird weird things with that in terms of usually political ideologues or religious ideologues are very useful for these types of of operations. Um, so yeah, I think I think especially with JFK even, you've got significant evidence. If you look at the person of Angleton and if you look at what came out in the JFK files, like he was literally just passing all kinds of information to the MSAD. It was it's in the JFK files. There's like four four pages were about his secret relationship with the MSAD. Uh I think there was a confluence of interests as you said with organized crime CIA and Israeli interests all sort of had the motive uh in regard to JFK but I think that's a recurring pattern is to absolutely contracted out to either organize crime. I mean Murder Inc. began as a Jewish assassination squad that was used by not just Sicilian Mafia but also at times the US would contract out and use these people for operation. If you want to get rid of somebody just use the gangsters. You're not going to do it yourself. So, yeah, that's that's well known. I think if you look at Operation Underworld, where the CIA was using organized crime for many years, >> how much evidence is there that the CIA do you think has an active role in American politics? Now, >> uh my research has mostly been past decades of that relationship. So I'm not the most up to date on president but I would imagine his prologue. How certain are we that the United States US politics has been influenced by intellect? >> I mean I think when people talk about the deep state we're talking about a sort of breakaway national security apparatus that has a tremendous amount of influence and control on domestic and foreign policy. Absolutely 100%. I think that super structure that is international that is uh you know people talk about the five eyes and all that kind of stuff I think that that they do coordinate I think it's very clearly when you get up into that level even above intelligence and CIA when you get up into that level of like steering committees and the CFR the trilaterals like it's not accidental that Epstein was literally David Rockefeller's legate on the trilateral commission he was a commissioner for it I mean that's that they created that for Bzinski right it Kissinger who went to Dave Rocker and said we do have this guy Bruinski will be great for trilateral they created it for him and so for Epstein to essentially be at that level which is no I don't think we knew that until that you know Bannon interview came out and Jeffrey said yeah I was on the commission I was up there with David Rockefeller >> yeah that's one of those details that's I mean do you ever suspect that the sex, the sexual components of the Epstein story, which I don't want to minimize cuz they're awful, but do you ever suspect that maybe they're also a distraction from bigger? >> It's much bigger than that. Yeah. I mean, in a lot of those emails and text messages and things that came out, you've got like there's so many crazy examples like you've got I mean, you got high level finance, money laundering is part of that. You've got weapons trafficking is a huge part of that. Um because if you read Whitney Webb's book, right, like it's the Adon Kosigible uh operation, which also included like filming people on that yacht. Uh that becomes kind of a pattern for also the way that Epstein would do uh his stuff. So, you've got weapons trafficking, you've got the high level blackmail, you've got human trafficking, you've got um money and finance, and you've also got uh planned chaos in certain areas that you move money to prior to the chaos to benefit from the destruction, which is something that Ian Fleming had Spectre doing all the time. So I I suspect Ian Fleming was talking about the sort of uh Epstein level, Rothchild level uh gaming of different markets cuz that's a huge part of what they were doing where he's basically emailing Arn Rochall and he's saying there's going to be a huge conflict over here, move in early, buy up resources, etc. because the conflicts the the chaos is coming. They did it about Kenya uh or excuse me, Somalia. There was emails about um how to do this with the Greek debt crisis when that happened to buy up after it collapsed. Right? So that's a huge component and we know that that's nothing new because the Rothschild's biography that I was just finished reading by Morton brags about how they did the same thing at Waterlue. They they crashed the London stock market on the basis of false information and then bought it up when it crashed when they figured out that the information was false. So that's exactly what the same thing that Jeffrey Epstein was doing in the emails with uh Arian Dorado. >> It's funny that they called the you know the thousand years after the fall of Rome the dark ages as compared to this. It's also crazy too that we think that there's no religious component to the world today when we seem to have all kinds of very demonic activities going on which suggests you know secret societies, cults, you name it. So I think that the world really operates in this way versus the sort of secular mythology that we were taught. >> Yeah. I mean I I don't see anything secular happening really in the United States at all. And if you I mean, I first noticed this on the the LGBTQ I can barely pronounce it agenda question where the commitment to that was like more than just, you know, compassion for, you know, discriminated against gays. It was like this religious fervor. >> Yeah. >> And that was the first sign to me that actually I think we're dealing with a faith here. >> Yeah. Yeah. And uh you know there's a the you know you find elements of these types of ideas in various talmudic texts for example the idea of aliens uh I'm not saying that there might not be unexplained phenomena. I think there is I think there's a demonic component to it but the idea specifically of uh there's one of the trackctates that discusses the 18,000 worlds. So it's it's an older telmetic idea that uh there are these other life forms and I think that this you know recent films like Disclosure Day, Spielberg's ethos that kind of I think that plays into that idea that no there's not demonic stuff because if you watch that movie the whole thing was like no they're actually your friends there sort of alien savior >> disclosure day makes that case. >> Yeah. It's kind of like don't think it's demonic. This is more of a salvific type of thing. Um, so I think that's propaganda in my opinion. We welcome our new alien overlords. >> Mhm. >> Much like Childhood Zen. And if you've read Childhood Zen, you know that Arthur C. Clark, who is butt buddies with Crowley, right? They're actually promoting this idea that Karellin, who's this, he looks like a demon, right? But he's our alien savior. And he comes to Earth and gives like medical advances and technological advances. And then he says, "Oh, by the way, I need your first generation, your of your children." And then he takes them off and nukes Earth. So, it's like I'm going to save you by taking your kids and destroying the rest of you because you're all going to kill yourselves u if we just let you be. And I'm just giving that as one example like famous you know propaganda in sci-fi. H2 Wells was a huge propagandist about the same the stuff too. He was a high level uh he described himself as a luciferian. He says in his book God the invisible king. He says you might think that in the coming technocracy brave new world you're going to be atheist. No no no we have a different deity. His name is Lucifer. Uh he will be the deity of the future. So he's a Prometheian, you could say. Um, but he was also like one of the chief propagandists for the sort of Rothschild Milner Fabian circles that were promoting uh socialism and technocracy back, you know, in the 1800s, late 1800s, early 1900s. >> What are the consistent lies that this propaganda tells? Like what connects all of the one of them I'll just start by saying one of them one of the main lies that they're committed to convincing you of is that all this is secular. It's all science-based. It's >> it's materialism. Like nothing. There's no spooky supernatural. Like I noticed that. >> Yeah. One of the things I've done on my my YouTube channel last 10 years is uh what I call the global elite book series. And all we do in the last 10 years is like we pick various Bzinski, H2L's, Jacqu Katali, Carol Quigley. I mean, you just go down the line and we read through the texts and then I do a talk on them. And what we've noticed, we've done dozens of these is there's a consistent pattern of I I say there's like, you know, five or six commandments of the the elite that you have to be on board with. And there seems to be recurring pattern of >> um because humanity is overpop populated we must have global governance we must have a a united world religion eventually we must have uh full spectrum dominance control of area of life everything's surveiled all the way up to we did even did uh you remember Claus Schwab's uh fourth industrial revolution book that whole book that came out right before co was about how the coming crisis will bring about this sort of globalized one world order ruled over by internet of things you know Skynet type stuff and that leads to rationing and uh you know austerity all that kind of stuff that we've seen pushed by these people for so long but I think you know some of the most telling books are like Jacali's book brief history of the future that book was written in 2006 and he was the sort of kissinger to you know uh the presidents of France Mcronone and people like that maybe even meron I forget who who he was consultant to, but he was the Kissinger of France, huge neocon uh type person. And in that book, he says towards the end of it, he says, "We've progressed to the point where we're going to have a global brain. It's the Gollum. He calls it the Gollum. We're all going to be linked in. Uh you'll lose your individuality when you're linked into the global brain." He says, "At the spearhead of all of this is the transhumanist." Transhumanism is, as Julian Huxley coined the term, the future that we're going into. And so those are the elements, one world religion, one world currency, uh, one world brain, uh, everything sort of unified in, if you read Huxley, I read a bunch of Huxley's books, he says, not just in Brave New World, but he wrote another book people don't know about called the perennial philosophy. And he says, "People don't realize that any theology or ideology that allows you to have a significant degree of individuality has to be erased so that we can create the blob, the big amorphous blob where we're all sort of blended into one giant thing that's controlled." Exact same thing that 100 years later almost Jacquali says in his books uh about the global gollum. Like that's the goal is to create this sort of homogenized controllable >> and the goal of that and of course and that's the point of you know mass migration you know eliminate distinctions >> but the goal of all of that is what the destruction of people >> uh I do think that there's a pretty consistent pattern of belief amongst a lot of these people who are technocrats and transhumanists they think that technology will even to go back to Arthur C. Clark like everybody remembers 2001 Space Odyssey and you know he co-wrote that u and helped you know that come to to the to the big screen but he also wrote another book that was also a movie which is very enlightening called 2010. It's not as good of a movie, but in 2010 it becomes more explicit that the Cold War was about producing a dialectical synthesis where the scientific elite from the Soviets and the West come together and they create the technocratic scientific priest class that rules us that allows us to achieve apotheiois. And then in 3001 that apotheiois happens through union with AI and tech. So basically the idea is presented I think in those books that we become god through technology. Ray Kurtzvile or he's even said this kind of stuff. So the singularity all that kind of ideology which is not new to Kurtzvile actually uh Hegel had a version of this that he called the omega point where all the dialectical oppositions eventually synthesize into everything in his view becoming spirit which is everything becoming some sort of transcendent unified reality. It's Huxley's blob. It's uh you know I think who's that crazy Tar Desarden the excommunicated Jesuit guy. He talked about the uh new everything becoming the newosphere and that actually influenced some of the early developers of the internet. They talked about creating this hybridized merged idea where everything becomes essentially the net basically. So I think that that's how they see these things because they worship this idea of evolution. And I'm not saying there's not degrees of like adaptation in nature, but this idea that there is a determined controllable priest class that can steer us towards some sort of um transcendent singularity omega point. That's sort of their religious that's their esquetology. So they have they have like you said a competing esquetology. >> That's right. It's a competing esquetology. That's nicely put. But the goal of so the Christian esquetology is God returns and the pagan esquetology is I become God. >> Exactly. So and now some some of those writers will actually revise and reinterpret Christianity and you mentioned earlier rescriptions. Some of those hermetic groups actually had this idea that Christianity is just sort of a allegory for uh immortality and resurrection through some sort of nosis or knowledge or technology. >> You replace man with the god with yourself. >> Yeah. Crowley Crowley is a great example of this because he's a figure who by the way was also working for

British intelligence. Alistic Crowley was a was a huge proponent of this idea of man achieving apotheosis through not just tech but through sort of magical view of tech, which Isaac Azimov expresses in his, you know, three laws of of magic or whatever, magic and technology. Arthur C. Clark, same ideology, he's hanging out with the Krillian circle. I think there's also an overlooked, um, sort of satanic component to a lot of this ideology that people don't think about. But if you look at, for example, to go back to like the Milner Fabian Rothschild circles, they were promoting Madame Blavatsky heavily. She was a Fabian socialist, and Crowley was a huge fan of hers. In fact, he told people to read her her writings to understand.

>> Found of Theosophy.

>> Yes. So, so Theosophy is another great example of this kind of religion of the future that Father Seraphim Rose talked about. In fact, he highlights Theosophy as one of the key elements in his famous book, Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future. St. Seraphim Rose, now, but, um, very predictive, very accurate, uh, that this is essentially demonic. Um, he wrote that in the '70s, basically saying where this, you know, H.G. Wells sort of idea would would eventually take us by our day. And he was spot on. The book's kind of amazing if you read it. Um, literally predicting everywhere that that we're at. But he says, you know, this Blavatsky satanic type ideology is what, for example, popularized yoga throughout the West. We wouldn't have yoga everywhere. Every Instagram chick, you know, doing yoga, if it wasn't for Madame Blavatsky and and Crowley.

>> With respect, Madame Blavatsky, from the surviving photographs, does not look like she practiced yoga. Uh, I would not want to see her in yoga pants.

>> No. No.

>> Sorry, I couldn't resist. I am a nasty person. Um, but why yoga?

>> Well, uh, there's a lot of different reasons. I think that, and my wife just, she just did a whole bunch of podcasts on her YouTube channel about, uh, yoga and, uh, tantric Buddhism. Um, there's a lot of reasons why Eastern philosophy, and I'm not saying everything about Eastern philosophy is necessarily bad, but elements of Eastern philosophy is a lot more, uh, collectivist in the way that they approach.

>> Who man is and what he is in the world.

>> So, um, yoga, I think, is a way to, if you take it seriously. I'm not talking about like people that just sort of stretch and do Pilates, but like the actual process of yoga is intended to initiate you and basically your, you know, the base of your spine, your chakras and all that, that's supposed to like essentially possess you. Now, I'm not saying everybody does yoga is possessed. I'm saying that that's the purpose of it is you're invoking entities to begin at your butt stuff and like go up and open up your third eye. So it's essentially an initiation process is what it's supposed to be. That's what it is in the in the Hindu and the tantric tradition. But in the tantric tradition, it's it's actually a lot of really gross stuff which people don't know that.

>> But what does that mean? Like really gross sex? Like tan the like actual tantric Buddhism when you get into like the depths of what that's about is, and Crowley absolutely just borrowed this for his whole process of pushing yoga. You have to do all of the worst possible actions to kind of get beyond good and evil. So it's kind of a Nietzschean idea of like, I mean, the worst thing you could think of, you got to eat like feces, you got to do incest, like you do all the worst things to not just balance the good side, but also the evil side. So it's the left-hand and the right-hand path have to be transcended.

>> Right.

>> And so their idea.

>> This is a common idea, not just in.

>> No, this is like the inner teaching of like tantric Buddhism. Like if you were to.

>> But not just tantric Buddhism, I mean, there are.

>> Other groups have adopted the same idea.

>> Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. Um, you can see why Crowley saw that as.

>> Or exactly.

>> Kabbalistic echoes there too. Um, but the core idea is you have to go as far out as you.

>> And.

>> Yes, inversion. That principle of inversion. And we talk about this a lot of times and, um, you know, people in our in our sphere. Uh, my buddy Mark Hackard, he's written a bunch of articles about, uh, Orthodox theology and philosophy and and Soviet history. And he's talked about some of the early, for example, uh, Bolsheviks, one guy named Gleb Bokii, he was very interested in, um, sort of eyes wide shut inversion stuff as a way to revolutionize society, uh, in terms of the Bolshevik revolution. There was.

>> Um.

>> So commit atrocities.

>> And but not just like killing, but like also to promote in society, like degeneracy because that has the pr.

>> That can revolutionize society.

>> Um.

>> But it, that's true. It is. In fact, one of the key '60s countercultural revolutionaries, Wilhelm Reich, actually had the idea that in order to have a successful cultural revolution,

>> You would have to have total open sexual pan relationships because that would remove patriarchy. And then with the rise of the goddess and the feminine principle, that would allow the actual socialist revolution. That was his idea.

>> It was a very common, that was a very common idea.

>> The old-fashioned communists, you know, the Stalinists were prudish.

>> They were against the gay stuff.

>> Totally against it. But, you know, the Bolsheviks had been, the pre-Stalin period had embraced that.

>> Stalin pushed back against it. And then in the United States in the late '50s and '60s, a bunch of revolutionary movements believed that the SLA.

>> Yep. Yep.

>> Charles Manson, you know, there was all orgies and.

>> But that, that ethos of the '60s counterculture stuff wasn't just.

>> You know, Ginsburg and people like, you know, coming up with crazy ideas to party. There was an earlier idea that some of the key Fabian socialists for for example, the 1890s, some of the Fabian socialists like Beatrice Webb, they actually understood that if you promoted, for example, bestiality in public art, this could undermine and destroy, uh, the UK's sexual ethos at that time. So they were way ahead of the curve, like in the 1890s. Bertrand Russell was famously, uh, pansexual, like one, you know, Terence McKenna, big open relationship. So they've always understood that to remove those boundaries is actually a way to invert and then change society on a mass scale.

>> To unleash power. The power that comes from that, from transgression, it's demonic power.

>> Exactly.

>> But they never called it that. But it's clearly true. But the tantrics understood that. They actually understood that you're actually sort of taking on sort of more and more demonic energy versus the, you know, God's uncreated energy.

>> There's still energy.

>> Yeah.

>> So when Satan promises Jesus that he can have, you know, the kingdoms, he could deliver the kingdoms, like he had the power to bestow on those who worshiped him.

>> Like it's, it's real.

>> There is a real demonic power that can, yes, be tapped into. Yep. So that that's what makes it even more compelling. I mean, there's a reason people, it's like cigarette smoking. Yeah. It's bad, but people do it. Why? Because they get something out of it.

>> Yeah.

>> There's a reason that people worship demons, not just because they're inherently perverse, but because it works short term.

>> Yeah.

>> Right.

>> Yeah. Absolutely. Um, and again, that's that that principle of inversion is well known way back into, you know, like ancient. I remember reading.

>> That's why you sacrifice. The Incas sacrifice children, and so do the Mayas and the Aztecs and the Vikings. And like when you sacrifice a virgin to the rain god, it actually rains.

>> Well, like, uh, you know.

>> You probably heard of Michael Aquino, right? Yeah. Uh, you know, everybody, you might have heard of his, he wrote that, uh, mind war of sigh war document, which like the army's doctrine of psychological warfare back in the '80s or whatever it was. And he wrote that, but he wrote another book called, um, Black Magic. And the whole book is basically, I remember reading this years ago, it's basically taking the principles of Egyptian sorcery but applying it to like military psychological operations. So yes, actually people do study ancient sorcery and magic and and that kind of the CIA had a whole program, I want to say in the '70s, kind of adjacent to Project Stargate, where they were studying Satanism and the occult to sort of weaponize and try to understand, uh, these ideas and see how far they could go with them.

>> Where did nuclear technology come from, do you think?

>> Uh, I mean, Oppenheimer described himself as to a degree, sort of engaging in, I mean, I don't know how serious he took it. And I've also read some interesting critiques of Oppenheimer that that argue that he was perhaps more of a propagandist than an actual scientist. So in a lot of these domains of like high esoteric science, I don't claim to be a scientist. I'm more of a philosophy guy, but I don't know. But, um, he could have been much more of a propagandist than he was an actual scientist.

>> That was true of a lot of the scientists involved in this. It's not clear what they were creating.

>> Right.

>> It's very clear that they were used to create the illusion that they were creating something.

>> Yeah.

>> But it may have pre-existed them. I'm just, just throwing that.

>> Well, I, you know, what one thing that's interesting is that the way that some of the early people involved in those chemical sciences, you probably heard of Jack Parsons. He was, you know, Crowleyan. They would sometimes describe what they were doing as a kind of ritual. So they saw the idea that you could split the atom as kind of a ritualistic.

>> Uh, principle of by doing this, you release energy, which is the very type of thing you were talking about with like the demonic aspect of releasing and controlling, trying to control the energy, basically.

>> Well, it raises like a question, which is like, where does the act of creation come from? So the act of creation is God. Is God, you know, was that's God's doing? God acts, destruction.

>> Right.

>> And Satan's destruction. But the act of creation.

>> Like every person who's ever, every person really who's ever engaged in any creative activity knows that there's what we call this moment of inspiration where the idea, the notion comes to you. But where does it come from? And people don't explore that question for some reason. But it's an open question. Like, where does that come from? Ideas pop into your mind, thoughts pop into your mind that you've never considered before, but that are just there. And so, you're not really coming up with them so much as you're summoning them, I guess, is what I'm saying.

>> Yeah.

>> And that's true for good things, but it's also true for bad things, is it not? I mean, does any living person not know what I'm talking about?

>> Well, so in the Orthodox tradition, we have this idea that your thoughts come from one of three sources. It either comes from you in your own sort of innate spirit and creativity, which God gave you, or it comes from God, or it comes from the angelic or demonic realm. So there's three possible ways that you could get that inspiration. Uh, the term that's used in the Greek is logismoi, which is sort of thought forms that can sometimes occur. Usually those are are in the Orthodox tradition spoken of sort of as demonic influences. Um, but you're right to that. Uh, I think that that that idea of inspiration and then putting it into your work, if you look at it from the the evil perspective, that's the whole thing that Crowley talked about in Magic Theory and Practice is that all you're doing is, he says, the world and all of its actions are equalized. Everything in the world is equal. There's nothing good or bad. And the true magician is the one who takes the matter or the the things in the world and puts his will and intention into it and then affects an energetic change in the world. And whichever one is successful and takes on, that's the true magician. Now, I mean, Crowley is a liar and a deceiver, so I'm not trying to give him too much credit, but that is the attitude I think that a lot of people who engage in that type of an idea. They have that principle that they think that they're doing sort of magic workings in the world to affect change and that makes them the magi. Does that make sense?

>> It does make sense. I I just as I get older, I have come to believe that there that we're really kind of a pass through a lot of the time that we're subject to all these external forces that we don't acknowledge, we don't perceive most of the time.

>> But that those are really the defining moments of our lives. Like.

>> We either accept or reject things presented to us from outside of us, I guess, is what I'm saying.

>> Yeah. I, yeah, I mean, really, I didn't find any significant deep analysis of this type of a analysis of like spiritual psychology, I guess you could say, until, you know, I got deeper into the Orthodox tradition where they they go pretty deep into understanding this kind of stuff. Because if you think about it, like, I don't want to degrade the office too much, but like a a priest, an Orthodox priest, they're masters of human psychology. That's not all they are, but if you hear for decades people's confessions, you're going to, you're going to be a very good psychologist if you're good at it, right? So, you're going to understand, um, you know, not just human weaknesses and stuff like that, but you're going to understand these other influences and hopefully have the discernment to know when the influences might be from the divine or when they might be from something else. Uh, you know, one of the things that Father St. Seraphim Rose talked about in his book, Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, is that he warned about coming mass delusions and what would sort of dupe large amounts of people. And one of the things that he tied into Hinduism and New Age type stuff was also not just yoga, but the charismatic movement. And he was very insistent that this charismatic movement will continue to grow because it stresses the direct existential ecstatic experience as if that's necessarily from God when it could very easily be from the demonic. I think when you look at the manifestations in the, you know, the the domain of charismaticism and and how that's now crept into the Roman Catholic Church, it's crept all into the Protestant evangelical world. And it ties it very closely into, you know, ancient sort of Hindu practices. Um, it's that's the type of Christianity that's growing in in Africa, Latin, South America. It's rampant. It's a massively powerful delusion because it replaces traditional Christianity with the idea that it's something akin to voodoo. Basically, if you study voodoo, uh, it's very, very similar to charismaticism in the way that anything that you experience trumps what's in divine revelation or what's in church tradition. Like it's all about the direct sort of ecstatic experience. And so it doesn't matter what happened or came before. Then that might sound like it's not that big of a deal. But take for example, Ann Lee, right? The founder of the Quakers. Ann Lee thought that her ecstatic experiences were God telling her that women should be pastors. Women should be propheticists. Women should run the church. Sex is, she's a proto-feminist. She's a proto women bishop pastor person. She started a cult. Her cult didn't grow. It's about to die out. I think there's only three Quakers left, Shakers left. But it's a great example of the type of delusion that Western religionists have fallen into, which is that.

>> You're talking about the Shakers, just be clear. The Shakers, not the Society of Friends that.

>> You know that which.

>> She comes out of the.

>> Right.

>> She's a schism out of the the Quaker Society of Friends.

>> Shaker. Yeah. They were big in Maine. They didn't reproduce.

>> Exactly. So that's one of the downsides of like agency.

>> But it's an attack on not just patriarchy, but also attack on like good sexuality in terms of producing.

>> Yes.

>> Uh, but it's also like massive proto-feminism. So it might sound counterintuitive to say that that's very similar to the '60s countercultural revolution, but it's not because the whole idea of, you know, gay bishops or gay priests or, uh, women bishops, women priests, women pastors, it's all sterility. And so the more sterility that you get, the more your cult dies out. That's the end goal of all that is sterility. In fact, in the one of the minor prophets, I want to say it's like Amos or Hosea, like there's actually a mentioning that the curse that you will get is the sterility that you desire.

>> Does that make sense?

>> Yes.

>> So, what I'm what I'm saying here is that like you were talking about destruction, these actions, these inversions, they are a releasing of destructive power. And the way to do that is to always invert the existing natural order. And that has a powerful effect in terms of not just creating destruction, but also creating a scenario that's then more easily manageable and controllable from cunning oligarchical types of elites.

>> Yes. And it also infuses them with dark spiritual powers. There's just no question about it. It's not just the desire to get rich or the desire to control other people. It's that they are filled.

>> Yes.

>> I mean, when Justin Trudeau systematically destroys his nation, which he did.

>> Yes.

>> Um, you know, he gets something out of that, and it's not just like the consulting contract that comes after. It's more than that.

>> This is what annoys me about Concom and sort of the the fake conservative side of those who they're unable to diagnose what's really going on because number one, they don't have like the right spiritual component, but they're also averse to all ideas of subversion and conspiracy. Oh, that's all crazy. But it's like, but isn't that a much better explanation of Justin Trudeau or these kind of, they're not just dummies who are like liberal, they're actually perhaps consciously malicious.

>> Of course.

>> Or they're, or they're, or they're tools of.

>> Or tools of higher powers, right? But it's not, it's not a joke. It's not that they're just like stupid. It's like, lame, effeminate.

>> Closet gay guy runs Canada. You know, the second largest country in the world with the most natural resources of any place on planet Earth. I don't think that's an accident.

>> Well, when you read a lot of these global technocratic oligarchical elites, they're a lot smarter than people think.

>> And much more faithful.

>> Yeah.

>> You know, they're not agnostics. Um, that's for sure. So let I want to wrap this up to go back to Orthodoxy and its view of the future, its eschatology. So like a lot of, and this is directly related to the power, I think, of Christian Zionism because that derives from the Christian Zionist belief about the end times.

>> Mhm.

>> And given recent events, I think a lot of people are starting to think about history as a linear track, as like, you know, there's a beginning and end to history. Like everyone feels that that's true and there's going to be an end to all this. Who knows when it comes, but there are a lot of people who are very focused on that. I don't know what I think of it, probably bad, but whatever, leaving my thoughts aside, what, what is the Orthodox view of the end times?

>> Yeah, one of the crucial components to contrast the Orthodox perspective to those sorts of dispensational Christian Zionist perspectives is that they've missed what the first advent in our view did. So we don't believe that the kingdom of God is postponed to the end of the world. We think that at the first advent, as Christ says many times in the gospel, the kingdom is here. The kingdom is in your midst. The kingdom is the presence of the Holy Spirit. This generation will not pass away before I come back.

>> And we believe in what's called partial preterism. Many of the church fathers, especially Chrysostom, emphasized in his sermons on Matthew 24 and Luke 21 that the destruction of the temple in 70 AD was the finalizing of the reality of the kingdom coming into fruition. So, in other words, it's it's appropriate that the temple would pass away now that the what the temple was a type of, which is the church, is here. So now that the church, which is the true temple, has come, that is the surpassing of from type to antitype, right? So you wouldn't go back to types now that the reality has come. So much of what's in the Old Testament, whether it's the the temple administration with the showbread and the the lampstand and all that, those things are fulfilled in, in our view, what the Orthodox Church is. The Orthodox Church possesses those things in the here and now. So sometimes in theology, it's called the already not yet principle. So the kingdom of God, the end times are here now. They began at the first advent. So for us, for example, the book of Revelation, most people, most evangelicals, oh, that's the end of the world and that's that's John Hagee and the seven blood moons of Israel. No, no, it's now. Like we live in the eschatological reality. When you go to the Divine Liturgy, that is heaven on earth now. It's not a postponed end of the world. There there is an end of the world, but Jesus brought the end of the world at his first advent. And we, one way that we know this is that most of the time when you ask, you know, that type of an evangelical Zionist, or what, when does the reign of Christ begin? Oh, when he comes back. But every time Psalm 110, which is, "Sit thou at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool," every time that's cited in the New Testament, it's cited about his ascension, which happened after he died and resurrected. It's not about the end of the world, it's about the ascension. So the church is the kingdom. And if you go back and read the prophecies in Isaiah, in the Psalms that talk about the conversion of the Gentiles, that began when Jesus and his apostles went out throughout the Roman Empire. You have this prophecy in Daniel 2 that the empire under which this Messiah is born eventually becomes the kingdom of the Messiah. Within three centuries, the Roman Empire becomes essentially the Orthodox Catholic Church. So we see all of that as fulfilled when he ascended and began his reign in his church. Thus, there is an end of the world, but we don't sit around speculating about news headlines about when that's coming because we're already in the end of the world now. When we go to the Divine Liturgy, that is the eschaton in the here and now. Does that make sense?

>> It does make sense.

>> It does make sense. So, that that kind of like changes your responsibility as a Christian living in.

>> Exactly. And it also doesn't make us worship some atheist nation-state in the Middle East that was created by the Rothschilds and the UN in 1948.

>> Oh, that's not in your liturgy.

>> No, I'm saying like my my duty is not to, yeah. John Hagee's chauffeur and the blood moons or whatever. Blood moon pies.

>> What are what are blood moons?

>> You know who John Hagee is? Yeah. Well, uh, he, I don't, they, he always tries to play on whatever.

>> I can never be mad at John Hagee 'cause he just seems so lost. Sad, but he's a deceiver.

>> Yeah, but I mean, he, uh, he was doing this big thing a couple years ago about the blood moons of Israel. The end times are signified by the blood moons. So I just made the joke of blood moon pies because I know if you know what a Moon Pie is, it's like, you know, because he's a portly fellow, but.

>> Yeah, he is. Yeah. No. Uh, he's at the Moon Pies. So does that, but it means then the Orthodox are not waiting for the next life. They're like engaged in this one.

>> Well, it's a both end, right? So it's not that we, uh, focus all of our time and energy on the here and the now or, you know, politics or the social order. We have sort of, I guess, tiered responsibilities. I mean, obviously, you know, for us, kingdom of God would come first. The church is is what comes first. That doesn't negate, you know, the goodness of this life. So we believe in many goods, uh, not just good or evil, right? Like you might have in in the history of the say, Middle Ages, the Latin Church, this idea that well, to be celibate and single is good, but if you're married, that's somehow bad or lesser, right? We would say there's many goods versus this idea of a sort of a strict, uh, good or good or evil, uh, that comes out of the dialectics that Augustine, Augustine had a very specific idea that just as an example, he said, marital sex, in his mind, St. Augustine, I guess, said could never be, even though he admitted it's a sacrament, he never understood how it could be a sacrament because for him, it always involves some degree of venial sin because in his view, man's will is either enraptured with God or with some created thing. And if it's enraptured with a created thing, like in the moment of sexual release, then you're in some way not focused on God. So he had a dialectical view of sin and and good and evil and of the will. The Orthodox view doesn't have that view. In fact, we think that there's the possibility of many different goods. So, married life is good and has graces, and there might be certain advantages to living a single, celibate life, but it's not inherently somehow holier than if you're married. Uh, and a lot of Orthodox monastics will even admit that that a lot of married people can achieve a higher level of sanctity even than some monastics because just sacrifice in itself is not, I mean, I desire mercy, not sacrifice, right? So just sacrificing itself doesn't necessarily equate to, um, a more holy status in the Orthodox perspective, although you might be able to do certain things that you can't do if you're married. But that's a very different attitude from sort of like medieval evil Roman Catholic attitudes of like sex and marriage.

>> What a conversation. Thank you very much.

>> Yeah, thank you very much.