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

The Attempts to Suppress Christianity in Schools Jadair, 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 evangelist for Orthodoxy, Christian Orthodoxy, certainly in your age cohort, maybe in the country you're Orthodox. Why are you Orthodox? What is Orthodoxy? Speaker 2 I'm 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 2021, I think I read Saint Augustine, 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 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 1st 1000 years of Christianity teaches. So Long story short, it took me about 8 or 10 years. I finally came to the Orthodox Church about 10 years ago. So that's the simplest, quickest reason is because I think first. Speaker 1 2000 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. Speaker 2 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. Speaker 1 We have something called the Dark Ages and nothing happens. Speaker 2 Nothing about Byzantium. Speaker 1 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. Speaker 2 So I've and 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 yeah, I think there's probably a little bit of an intentional desire to suppress that for, I mean, American education. I think it's pretty much brainwashing, so. Speaker 1 So but one sentence this might take between Constantine in the 4th century and the Renaissance, you had Christian civilization. Speaker 2 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. Speaker 1 Why? Why do you say it's the most successful? Speaker 2 It's a common sort of academic assessment just in terms of their they flourished on a gold standard for a really long time. They started clipping the gold money clipping like the Roman Empire in the West had done before them and other empires. So they they fell prey to usury as well. 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. Also rat rabid nationalism had a tendency to break down empires as well. I like Spangler, and I think if you read Oswald Spangler, he talks about how there's kind of a life cycle. But I think the unique aspect of the business, the empire was that it was explicitly Christian, based on Orthodox Christianity. And so in many metrics of what it is to be successful or flourishing, it flourished, but 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 your, if your theology or civilization is logo centric, 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 anyway, for me that journey ended up being eventually Orthodox Christianity. Speaker 1 So, but just really quick back to the Byzantine Empire. Did you know it existed before? Speaker 2 How many people? Speaker 1 Are aware that there was a Byzantine Empire? Know anything about its? Speaker 2 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, and, and maybe even younger private type schools. Like you go from you do you do the the pre Socratics, 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 W was, you know, explicitly Christian as well. I think that's it's intentionally overlooked. They don't want people reading what brilliant thinkers were doing in the Middle Ages, because that's that's where we get universities. Universities come out of Byzantium, they come out of the West, so do hospitals. So some of the very 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. Speaker 1 Own. I mean, medieval is an adjective but also an epithet. That's medieval. Speaker 2 By design, I think. Speaker 1 Quartering somebody the dark ages. They were dark like. Speaker 2 That's all Voltaire. That's all sort of an atheistic French revolutionary attack on what came before, by design. Speaker 1 When did you learn that? Speaker 2 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 constantly debating with them. I even did AI, 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. Speaker 1 Interesting, I I keep interrupting your stuff, so that led you to Orthodoxy? Speaker 2 Long stories for you. 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, because I'd, I'd put a lot of time in a 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 7/8 ecumenical councils of that first Millennium, they're actually all had in the East. They're all called by the, the emperor's, the business. 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 those guys as best I could for many, many years. So that would be like the Cappadocians. That would be Basil, the two Gregorys, Saint Cyril of Alexandria, St. Maximus Confessor, St. John, 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 linchpin 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. So for example, 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. The Problems With Christian Zionism 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. They were very cunning. A few centuries ago they realized that that's the kind of Christianity that can be useful. So. Speaker 1 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. Speaker 2 And it's also antithetical to the Christianity 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. So 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 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 Princess foreign governments, NGOs, think tanks, foundations. They become essentially tools of saw 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. For example, very wealthy families in the West about 100 years ago were able to buy off many of the mainline Protestant nominations and turn them into effectually NGOs. 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 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. 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 structural, structural integrity and normativity to it that, you know, Billy Bob strip mall church, right, doesn't have. Speaker 3 Imagine the sensation, if you will, of going to sleep, feeling like you're floating, then waking up rested with no soreness from a hard or stiff mattress. That is the daily experience of people who use Brooklyn bedding. We can probably guess what you're thinking. A mattress like that is super expensive. Only Bill Gates uses a mattress like that. It's probably made in Bangladesh anyway. Wrong on all counts. Brooklyn Bedding is an American company with a seriously impressive 650,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Arizona. The company is started by a guy called John and he built it from the ground up right here in the US with no college degree. 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There's also, 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, Saint 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 younger guy. And it was, it was a 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 1st 1000 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 because but. Speaker 1 What about Orthodoxy struck you as non Calvinist? Like what are the differences? The big differences. Speaker 2 So, you know, Calvinism is not just predestination and and the sort of strict soteriology or salvation doctrines, it's also iconoclasm, which ends up, I think, affecting one's view of art and aesthetics. Speaker 1 Idol smashing? Speaker 2 Correct. And I was a very avid sort of iconoclastic Calvinist when I was young. It's also very rigid in terms of its view of social structure, church and state. 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, the traditional views of the church's take on governance. Speaker 1 The Byzantine Empire is a theocracy. Speaker 2 Yeah, well, yeah, pretty much. What's interesting is that that there are spheres, right. So you have basically everything about the Byzantine double headed eagle. That symbol is 1 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, and then the West to a degree had this until the Middle Ages when you get sort of a rise of the 11th century papacy, which becomes also the state. So you get a Papal States and a sort of under Pope Dictatus Poppy is the, is the famous document that says the church is also a state now. But until that time, the norm was church and states were 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 it more it favors republicanism. There were, there were famous battles between in England, for example, the Presbyterians 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, you know, Reformation battle. 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 1'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 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 in the philosophy, but I. Speaker 1 I do want to. What's the difference between the two? Speaker 2 Basically, there's an idea in the Middle Ages called nominalism. Have you heard of that? OK, 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 in 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, name ISM. They actually describe what's really there in them metaphysically. OK, so there is human nature, and in Orthodox theology Christ assumes. Speaker 1 Who would deny that? Speaker 2 In the Middle Ages, it begins with people like William of Occam. So Occam is the first nominalist and the razor, the exactly he's known for that. 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 universal. So there's no such thing as a universal class or essence of a thing. And that had been kind of the norm since Plato in aerosol as well. But so you get a denial of essentialism and essences. And then then you get another guy named Gabriel Bile, 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? What? Enter in nominalism. And nominalism is able to say, ah, because things don't have 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 approach. And by the way, this is not just my theory. This is 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 Luther had to use nominalism. So, so we're also the moving away not just from theological squabbles, but the idea that things have natures. And that's just, 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 Himserzee. I'm not trying to go too fast or too far in the sense of like you're not ology. 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. Speaker 1 It's interesting that an adult could believe in something like that. I mean, having lived your life, known people, known animals, seen nature, and arrive at the conclusion that nothing has an essence, everything is just what we call it like that. That flies in the face of your experience. It has to, right? Speaker 2 What's that saying? That you have to be an academic to be really stupid. Speaker 1 I guess that's right. Speaker 2 Yeah, to be a doctrine into believing some sort of. I remember Terence McKenna. Do you remember the psycho? Not Terence McKenna. I remember reading it one time and and he said 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. Speaker 4 Christians ought to be safe in the Holy Land of all places, but they are not. Keep in mind, these are the descendants of the first converts, the first people who followed Jesus, people whose families have worshipped in the land Jesus walked for centuries, for thousands of years. And these same people are now facing enormous pressure to leave, fleeing their homes amid war and anti Christian terrorism. Untold numbers of innocents are lost and without hope. Fellow Christians, but how do you support them? There are groups out there who claim to support them, whose real agenda is to move them out of their actual homeland. We think that's wrong. We think that's evil, in fact. And so we've looked far and wide to find a group that is actually supporting Christians in the Middle East, and we found one. It's called the Vulnerable People Project VPP. It's one of the very few groups consistently helping vulnerable Christians throughout the Holy Land. They deliver food and water to Christian communities trapped in Gaza, for example. They help rescue civilians. 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Speaker 2 But it has a precedent in this theology, this theology debate we're supposed to look. Speaker 1 I've never heard that before. I'm sorry to hear that about Luther, who I've always loved. There's a lot to love about. Speaker 2 Luther, he's a character. Speaker 1 Yeah, for sure, quite. Speaker 2 He would actually chase the devil lawyer with farts, which I think is great. Speaker 1 Quite a robust man, right? 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. Speaker 2 Yeah, and even Modern Scholarship in the Protestant World is a great book by Alistair McGrath out of England. I think he's Anglican. It's called Eusticia Day. And his book was kind of a landmark in Protestants coming to the table and saying, OK, look, Luther's doctrine of salvation is not in the 1st 1500 years, unfortunately so. Speaker 1 So this, the understanding of salvation that preceded the Reformation, was that people had to be changed on in their essence in order to be. Speaker 2 Serious. So there's an actual participation in what Ortho theology calls the uncreated energies. So we believe that God has infinite divine energies and operations attributes as it's called in the West. And for Orthodox theology, and this is the patristic teaching as well, we participate in that. So we're not just changing a 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, well 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 a reality. That's a participable thing. Speaker 1 What Jesus promises that the Holy Spirit will flow into people and change them, right? And that happens. Speaker 2 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 created grace, which unfortunately even a 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 saying no, no, the incarnation itself tells us that the uncreated united itself to human nature and incarnation, and that Jesus deified the human nature that he assumed with his own immortality, grace and uncreated energy. Speaker 1 The role of the Bible 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 Church, it's a liturgical document, correct? What does that? What does that mean? Speaker 2 The tour ghost has to do with 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 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 Orthodox, you know, Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Episcopalians, they have a very structured form of worship that is called liturgy. But 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 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 a 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 a a worship offering. If you go back to Abraham, Abraham built an altar. God is always worshipped 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 rabbinical, rabbinical theology. And many of the Reformers were actually very influenced by rabbinic theology, by the Talmud Even so. So the, so the Reformation has a stream of influences, Renaissance, humanism, all those things play into that. And it's just very. Speaker 1 Well, Luther was not in that category though, no. Speaker 2 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 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 satire, satirical character at times. So it's hard to know exactly. Speaker 1 The most hilarious theologian in history. He was very. Speaker 2 Hilarious. So it's hard to know exactly when he's always being literally. Might just be joking around, but no, I don't mean to mischaracter because I know Luther wrote about the Jews in their lives. 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 Calvin, Zwingli, Melanxon, even later Lutheran's were very involved in the founding of Rosicrucianism. Johan Andre is believed by some scholars to be the author of the Rosicrucian Manifesto. I forget what exactly what it's called, but so that is there and a lot of that has to do with with kabbalistic ideas. Speaker 1 What? Who are the Rosicrucians? Speaker 2 This was an Enlightenment era secret Society of sorts, which in the 16 hundreds, 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, you know, practicing of the occult in varying various ways, but you also had court alchemists and people that would kind of like John Dee. He was the, you know, court astrologer to to the queen. So they would kind of do these things in on the in 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 15 hundreds 1600s in Europe. But you also had a very interesting confluence of hermetic and Kabbalistic groups that were popping up. Particularly Spanish rabbis that were very popular in Spain seem to be involved in some of the the rise of Kabbalistic influence in the West. And that I think contributes in part to the Rosicrucians, who according to there's a great book by Dame Francis Yeats called Rosicrucian Enlightenment. She actually argues that the Enlightenment itself was heavily influenced by Rosicrucian ideology. So they were Neoplatonists. They were into the magic alchemy. So they were really interested in the idea of transmuting metals, you know, into the philosopher's stone, which 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, not in the sense of orthodoxyology, but so all of these these sort of different strains and strands. But basically in the Hermetic witchcraft, yeah, you can say that. Yeah. A form of it. But again, that's all very diverse. I mean, I think in the case of John Dee, for example, he's the first double O 7. Did you know that? Yeah. So the the 007, which is 2 balls and a cane, which is 2 bull cane. That's how John Dee would sign his secret letters to the Queen because he was one of the influences on James Bond. So that's where we get double O 7 from that's and and Ian Fleming consciously took that from John D 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. 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. Speaker 3 Inflation makes credit card statements particularly scary. You work 4050 hours a week just to buy groceries and gas, Things you you should be able to afford without thinking that much about it. Then the banks charge you 20% interest. If the system is designed to keep you underwater, it's working. But there's another option. Our friends at American Financing are doing something the big banks despise. They are helping people mortgage rates in the fives, supporting the American dream of home ownership. And they're showing home owners how to take their hard earned equity to wipe out high interest debt. Now we're against debt in general, but in this economy, most people have no choice at all. So don't go bankrupt enslaving yourself to to a lender. Average savings are about 800 bucks a month and it takes only 10 minutes to talk to a salary based mortgage consultant. No upfront fees or obligation. To see how much you can save, give American Financing a call 800-685-5696. That's 1-800-685-5696 or visit americanfinancing.net/tucker America's Home for Home. Speaker 1 Loans. So in the Orthodox tradition in the Church the the Bible is read aloud. Speaker 2 Yeah. Speaker 1 Are Orthodox encouraged to read the Bible on their own? Speaker 2 Sure. I mean, Saint 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 in the liturgical calendar is Bible. It is Scripture constantly. It's like every aspect of it. And so Chrysostom's argument was lady need to be in the Bible more than they do because they live it. 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 and that shows that we're not anti Bible like a lot of sort of Protestant evangelicals think. Speaker 1 So the one of the reasons there was a reformation in the 1st place is because the Catholic Church over time began to hide the Bible from Christians and not it was not published in the 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 translated himself into German. Did the Orthodox Church do the same? Speaker 2 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 in the vernacular everything. The liturgy 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 this, it's not inherently wrong to maintain that linguistic heritage, but it's it's also possible to put in the vernacular for the people. I mean, that that's the whole idea behind translating the Bible into, you know, the languages of the people so that they can understand it. 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 of the Roman Catholic Church. And thus Rome then became emphasizing that they began to emphasize the vernacular after Vatican 2. Speaker 1 What is You said you were an iconoclast, a smasher of idols? Orthodoxy famously incorporates icons, paintings on wood into its worship. What is that? Speaker 2 This is again a huge misunderstanding that we would argue we believe is part of 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 4th and 5th century. Speaker 1 What is something different? Speaker 2 Yeah, 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 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 FATHER, that's a type of an image. 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 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 basically saying, I was talking to Moses. I'm God. That's why the Pharisees want to stone him 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, book of Hebrews call Jesus the icon IKON in the Greek, the image of the Father. This enrages the Pharisees. So we think that iconography directly flows out of the incarnation of the Son being the image of the Father. Thus, throughout the early church you have the development of the liturgy, even in the 1st and 2nd 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 1st and 2nd century. One of the famous cases is the Duro Duroeuropo synagogue in Syria. I think it's from the early 2 hundreds. It's lined with images, paintings of Old Testament scenes and imagery. So the Orthodox Church, if you look at the Doroeuropos synagogue, is the most natural development of if Christianity was going to open up to the Gentiles, it was coming out of the temple and synagogue liturgical system 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 2023, my, my priest who is a, a great Russian Orthodox priest of Father Vladimir, we, he took us on a pilgrimage to Italy and I was like, where are we going to Italy? That's in that Rome. Well, there's 1000 years of Christianity, you know, prior to the rise of the medieval papacy in Italy. 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 in their underground in the catacombs, the first second 3rd 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, 3rd century. So even the catacomb church had liturgy had imagery. Plenty of 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 left 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 kind of Scripture doesn't actually get solidified, at least for the Orthodox Church until the 6th and 7th century, they would say, OK, 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 make it very difficult to say that, you know, we're based on scripture alone, Sola scriptura. Speaker 1 So Orthodoxy is not based on just the Bible. Speaker 2 No, we would. We would say the Orthodox Church is based on the idea of Apostolic succession, that the apostles appointed successors in various Bishop, Bishop Brixton sees throughout the Roman Empire. It's based on the tradition, which could include the lives of the Saints. It could include liturgy, it could include all kinds of rites of the church fathers, canons of the councils. Those are traditions and the Bible. So all, all of those elements go into what the basis of the Orthodox churches. 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 all together. The Difference Between Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism What are the practical differences as as a weekly communicant in an Orthodox Church? How is that different from being a Catholic or Protestant? Speaker 2 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, you know, for the Orthodox world, fasting is a is a lot more integrated into what we do than most. Speaker 1 Fasting. Speaker 2 Yeah, there's a there's a lot of fasting days in the Orthodox Church calendar. Speaker 1 What does that mean? Speaker 2 For you, oh, just abstaining from certain foods, Lent is a little more rigorous for the Orthodox than it is for. Speaker 1 Why fasting? Speaker 2 Well, we think that Jesus and the apostles and people like John the Baptist kind of set 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 yogi's, you know, sitting out under a tree trying to, you know, roll around and poop or whatever. But 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. Basically, learning to control the passions is is what that's part of. Speaker 1 How often do you fast? Speaker 2 I am not the best at fasting because I have a really weird gut Biome issues, so I don't fast as much as I should. It's very, it's very challenging. But there's also people like there's nuances for medical issues. But the Orthodox Church fast quite a bit usually from various meats and stuff like that. But it's not just fasting that's different. I think for the Orthodox Church, it's it's not just about food. Fasting is also alms giving 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. 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 other domains. But I mean, these are just kind of, there's immense differences, I would say between just just the, 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, a Protestant can't come and just commune. Most churches are a way more open about that. 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 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 the Orthodox Church than it is elsewhere. But we do have some of the Sacramento principles like confession to a priest that Protestants don't have. So again, there's there's a whole milieu of wide scope of differences between. Speaker 3 Everybody wants your attention. Think about all the apps, the shows, the podcast, the websites that compete for your attention and everything. You can't keep up with it. You're probably wasting a lot of your life. Hallo is not a waste of your life. The Hallo app can make your life. Hallo is the world's number one prayer app and a constant topic of conversation in my family literally every day at dinner. Speaker 1 You should come over. Speaker 3 This July, Hal was releasing a study on Saints, figures like Saint Paul, Ruth, Joan 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. All the things we advertise. We know this works. Hallow app at hallow.com/tucker three free months. Again, that's hallow.com/tucker and get 3 months completely free. You will love it. Speaker 1 How is it since the religion you described was originally tethered to a government, an empire? How is becoming Orthodox change your view of government and its role? Speaker 2 That's an interesting question. 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 it. Speaker 1 Is the religion of libertarianism. Speaker 2 Isn't it? But as I got more into historic Christianity, I sort of realized 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 been, you know, quite a few people, especially after 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. Speaker 1 Well, naturally. Speaker 2 Yeah, that they have a vested interest, probably that right. Speaker 1 I mean no, but there were liberal in the best sense minded people, people who believed in inalienable rights, who argued that a republican form of government, self government, democracy would devolve into tyranny. Speaker 2 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 mob ocracy 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. Speaker 1 He, I think he writes in the Republic, if this happens, they're going to legalize weed. Speaker 2 They're going to legalize everything to do with butt stuff so it becomes fake and gay. So he sought, I think in various ways, even as a 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 it's 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, I guess 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 IGHT, which is a governance board of like spy chiefs. And so they meet at night because the public's too stupid to know what's going on. So which is just weird 'cause it reminds me of like, I'm a reading something about Kissinger talking about the wise men. And like, like he's a Plato's talking about like Henry Kissinger's form of like secret sucker, like secret gun. Speaker 1 Devolves the level of Yeah, exactly Coney Island exactly Yeah. But it's all the same thing. It's just AI mean. Jeffrey Epstein was an idiot, which no one wants to say, but he was obviously when you read his writing. And so it's sort of our version of of. Speaker 2 That. Speaker 1 So I noticed that the enthusiasm for liberal democracy, whatever that is, but that our system of government, our that has produced our culture, enthusiasm is waiting for that. Like, I don't know many people. 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? Speaker 2 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 E, you have a pretty normative tradition of kings and Queens, preferably kings, but and that happens through a semi Sacramento service called a coronation service. So, you know, the Orthodox Church always coronated emperors, czars, kings is 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 dechristianizing of the state, which is part and parcel with that sort of a tendency in the Calvinist, you know, libertarian type of tradition, the classical liberal ethos is there was a famous Russian statesman of Pubinazzi. If you wrote a book Reflections of a Russian Statesman around 1890s and he said when you dechristianize the state, you don't get liberty, you get another cult that runs the state. Exactly. And he noticed that when. Speaker 1 I have two. Speaker 2 Before the Bolsheviks, before the Bolsheviks, right? So yeah, he had looked at the French Revolution and prior examples and he said you just get another cult that sets in and and runs things and you're. Speaker 1 Always going to be governed by religious fanatics. So the question is, which religion? Speaker 2 You want some good ones? Or at least some nicer ones. Or yeah. Speaker 1 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 Mccrone is not religious? Always very religious. It's just not your religion. Speaker 2 Some other Luciferian? Exactly. I don't know what. 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 a very powerful, like, for example, Luther's Reformation wouldn't have exceeded without the German prince's being behind us. So he's he of. Speaker 1 Course they were resentful because they didn't want to spend. Speaker 2 The money they didn't want and they didn't want to be under the Pope they were tired of. Speaker 1 The Pope and Germany was emerging as as the great power in Europe. And I'm like, why would you want to be ruled by Italy? Speaker 2 Exactly. So there was a lot of resentment of papal stuff going on. Same with Henry the Eighth. He didn't want to, you know, be under the Pope's rules about his ladies. So 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 Carroll Quigley, even Protestant and Jewish banking interests funded the French Revolution massively. And he's got a he's got a great chapter on the rise of the Paribas system in France, which is the Rothschild banking system. And then I just read in the Rothschilds biography the fact that they had a long term vendetta with the Czarist attitudes towards Russians, towards Russian Jews and Lord Rothschild. Wired 1,000,000 Ruples to BI Lenin. I knew about other like the Warburgs and the shifts they'd funded Lennon and Trotsky, but I did not know that according to the Morton, they'd actually wired Lennon $1,000,000 so to speak, and he was supposed to pay it back, but he never did. Speaker 1 Well, I think the Bolshevik revolution was ideological, but I think it was also ethnic conflict to some extent, obviously. Speaker 2 The Lord Rochelle 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. Speaker 1 Well, and they did. They made him pay. No one's paid more. Dearly, actually. 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? Speaker 2 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 A little MP3 on Windows Media amp or whatever. 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, well, you know, Crowder used to go do this sort of come convince me debate people. And then Ben Shapiro would go debate the, you know, college kids, the prepared weirdos. So that's a lot of low hanging fruit like Ben Shapiro would do. But they're also sort of accidentally almost came about a pretty intense 10 years or so of online religious debating, which again, it just sort of happened. It wasn't something that I plan to do or anyone planned. It was just, I remember years ago somebody said, hey, would you debate this atheist guy who's 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 ate this guy. Yeah, sure. And then it sort of snowballs into, you know, a pretty regular thing of doing online religious, political debates. 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. The older you get, the less you want to do that. And people tend to be, you know, sort of solidified into their views. But younger guys are more interested in that. So that's. Speaker 1 When you buy a cable package. Speaker 2 That I think that it's, it's very, 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 for sure. Speaker 1 And increasingly, it's not a feature of our society. Speaker 2 Exactly. Speaker 1 We were talking at breakfast. You were a debate participant champion in school. I was too. That was normal, and it was normal, but it wasn't as weird. Speaker 2 Seen as weird. Speaker 1 No, now I don't even know that that exists. I don't it. Speaker 2 Exists on the Internet, so people are going to but kids. Speaker 1 In schools are not encouraged to debate right. Speaker 2 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. Didn't exist. Speaker 1 Right, because the premium was on obedience at that point? Speaker 2 Yeah, because they don't want you critically thinking through your positions, because then you might notice patterns which are not amenable to the status quo. Speaker 1 Nicely put. That's absolutely right. So but but people have been on the Internet debating religion and Orthodox. He's gotten a hearing for the first time maybe ever in American history. And the result is. Speaker 2 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, 6-7 years for sure. 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. And that ended up, for whatever reason, being a lot more popular than I would have expected. So, 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 wanted to debate. We've done a lot of political debates, feminist debates that have been pretty, pretty big, I mean, in terms of viewership. So I think that. Speaker 1 Who are the most fun if you had to pick a Muslim, atheist feminist? Speaker 2 They actually have a lot of similarities, blue or not, between Muslims are not very fun to debate. I wouldn't say that they're the most fun. I mean, atheists can be fun because they get really triggered with certain 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 they're the most entertaining. The Death of Atheism Are there any atheist left in the United States? Is that? Speaker 2 There wasn't, you know. Speaker 1 Atheism. Speaker 2 Movement that was very popular in 2000s and I kind of think they ran out of steam as the worst 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, OK, there's some really evil shit going on in the world. 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. 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 people begin to see like this has nothing to offer. Speaker 1 I remember vividly someone telling me that Sam Harris, the famous atheist, was like, really, really smart. He's really smart. And I listen to Sam Harris once. I think it's not smart at all. Like if that's your like our standards I think have changed maybe and they I think they've gotten higher. Speaker 2 Well, I don't think. Speaker 1 People said Sam Harris was smart. Speaker 2 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. I think he, I felt like he could have even gone harder on those guys because they were already sort of losing the ground publicly. But even Jordan Peterson's just sort of simple lines of questioning, well, how do you know that? What's what's that mean? You know, even even that wasn't enough really to like help. Like the atheist 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. That is one of the most devastating ways to go about debates. And I think Peterson was was aware enough to do that with those guys, whether it's Sam Harris or Matt Dillon here into the atheist, that that was kind of the nail in the coffin for the atheist. Then we had COVID and then people were just like, all right, we need an explanation for freaking demons. These guys say there aren't demons. Obviously there's Epstein demonic level shit going on. So probably God exists, right? Speaker 1 I think that's literally the path for a lot of people. I don't think that. I mean, I think that's actually what happened for a lot of people. Speaker 2 And isn't it interesting that some of these high level so-called atheists are flying with Jeffrey Epstein and going to. Speaker 1 So sure, and have religious level devotion to all kinds of stupid causes. So like, they're the most religious people of all. Speaker 2 Exactly. But I also, I can wonder at times, like, are they even atheists? Maybe they have other kinds of commitments, of course. Speaker 1 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. Is religious faith to me right? Speaker 2 Yeah, I think, you know, the the approach that I take to all 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, wait. 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. Speaker 1 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, but you were thinking about this stuff early and maybe that's why you have an advantage over a lot of us. But I've now concluded that like everything is a manifestation of religious figure 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. Speaker 2 Yes. Speaker 1 What? Why? What is? Tell me the thesis, tell me why you wrote it, and give me some examples. Speaker 2 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, grew up in a small town, so we didn't have much to do other than drugs and movies. So, so I always gravitated towards that, towards the arts. I enjoyed, 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 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, how that overlaps with intelligence agencies and how that overlaps with Hollywood. So the book ended up being the product of just a lot of college and grad school research, particularly 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, a nihilistic Nietzschean uberman, right that was used in the Cold War to contrast against Soviet ideas of the collective man, the new man, the you know, versus the individual man. You've got capitalist is sort of self gratification on one side. And then over here you've got this idea that you are 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 I was also studying Hegel and Hegelian dialectics in college and how that that's and he does say that there's thesis into the synthesis. There's a good academic research which I think demonstrates that Hegel was also influenced by Kabbalistic ideas. So you have the two pillars of mercy and severity, and then you have the synthesis of those two extremes. That can be a way of managing and controlling. And people have got this down to the science. It's not just my speculation. You can read like global elite writers, like Jacques at the lead, he'll talk about Cold War being 2 pillars of two, two sides of the dialectic that you sort of managed 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 Kubrick and Spielberg and David Lynch and Hitchcock, a lot of different directors 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 a 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 the myth making 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 mythology mythology through Hollywood, you know, Edward Bernays said. Hollywood is the greatest engine of propaganda the world had ever seen, at least up until that time. Speaker 1 And that was obvious to me even as a child in the 70s. What was not obvious was that it was religious propaganda. I didn't realize this was our religion. Speaker 2 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 tears 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, but sometimes the arts, this is really, really crucial with like Dostoevsky, like the arts can predict things even ahead of time. I'm not. Speaker 1 With such recurring frequency that you think is this? What is this? Speaker 2 This is almost a kind of a prophetic spirit. Almost. Speaker 1 Yes, we're, 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 mean, I've literally no idea. But, well, it's outside just as statistical matter, it's outside the realm of chance. For example, how many times The Simpsons predicted upcoming events? Like what is that? I have known writers on The Simpsons, 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. Speaker 2 It does happen two different phenomena that for one, like if you read Dostoevsky and some of his novels, he would write almost with precision, I think not because he was in on it, but because he was actually kind of a genius like he would write. Speaker 1 About. Speaker 2 He would write about years before what the bolster revolution would do and what the socialist would do in Russia, and almost with accuracy in terms of like the number of skulls that would be mounted up. That I think it's 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, especially with a lot of like tack 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. You know, a lot of the spy surveillance gadgetry or whatever you see going on in James Bond, this begins to be a thing that conditions people to getting used to, you know, being surveilled, getting used to having all their lives on the Internet live stream. I'm saying that there's broader components to these types of stories that do condition us. I don't mean to go full schizo here. I'm not saying like everything Hollywood is playing. I'm just saying that the deeper that you go into it, you do realize, for example, that the CIA is consulted on movies forever. Forever. Like all the way back to even before 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 1 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 our adjacent to the type of things that we're discussing here. Like this is it's a very niche but well studied 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, 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 or formerly worked in British intelligence. And then like William Summers and Mohan and these different characters. Speaker 1 Graham Greene. Speaker 2 Graham Greene. 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. Speaker 1 You could write our man in Havana, but you couldn't actually write what you did in Havana. Speaker 2 Exactly. And then you and you'll find these fascinating Nuggets. You know, Joseph Conrad's the secret Agent, which is one of the first there was 1 revolutionary era spy story. I forget the name of it, but his is sort of the, the most well known, the secret agent. 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 that 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 schizo about like you're getting programmed whether you know it or not, but I don't think all plays and 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? Speaker 1 Of course, and that's why it's effective. So one question 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 groups. Sir Han, Sir Han, for example. Is there any evidence? Do we know that's actually happened ever? Speaker 2 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 van der Loob, that he was used, you know, for the right people talk about, as you said, Sir Han. I mean, you could say Oswald perhaps was there is such a thing as false flag recruitment, which is where people are recruited into thinking that they're working for this group, they're actually working for this other group. That's correct. So that does occur. 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, 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 Shinzo Abe was one of the most recent other than Charlie Kurt, 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. 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 of the JFK files, like he was literally just passing all kinds of information to the Mossad. It's in the JFK files. There's only four, 4 pages were about his secret relationship with the Mossad. And I think there was a confluence of interest, as you said, with the organized crime, CIA and Israeli interests all sort of had the motive in regard to JFK. But I think that's a recurring pattern is to absolutely contract it out to either organized 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 operating. 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. The CIA's Role in American Politics How much evidence is there that the CIA do you think has an active role in American politics now? Speaker 2 My research has mostly been past decades of that relationship so I'm not the most up to date on present, but I would imagine how certain. Speaker 1 Are we that the United, United States US politics has been influenced by Intel? Speaker 2 I mean, I think the 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 superstructure that is international that is, 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 to say, hey, 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 Burzynski, right? It was Kissinger who went to Dave Rockefeller and said we did this guy Burzynski would 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 Epstein. Yeah, I was on the channel Commission. I was up there with David Rockefeller. Speaker 1 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 because they're awful, but do you ever suspect that maybe they're also a distraction from bigger? Speaker 2 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. Because if you're Whitney Webb's book, right, Like it's the Anon Khashoggi operation, which also included like filming people in that yacht, that becomes kind of a pattern for also the way that Epstein would do his stuff. So you've got weapons trafficking, you've got the high level blackmail, you've got human trafficking, you've got money and finance and you've also got 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've, I suspect Ian Fleming was talking about the sort of Epstein level, Rothschild level gaming of different markets, because that's a huge part of what they were doing where he's basically emailing RN to Rothschild and he's saying there's going to be a huge conflict over here, move in early, buy out resources, etcetera. Because the conflicts, the, the, the chaos is coming. They did it about Kenya or excuse me, Somalia. There was emails about 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 Rothschilds biography that I was just finished reading by Morton brags about how they do the same thing at Waterloo. 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 Ariana Duranto. Speaker 1 It's funny that they called the, you know, the thousand years after the follower from the dark ages as compared to this. Speaker 2 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. Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, I, I don't see anything secular happening really in the United States at all. And if you, I mean, I just first noticed this on the the LGBTQ it, I can barely pronounce it agenda question where the commitment to that was like more than just no compassion for, you know, discriminated against gays. It was like this religious fervor. And that was the first sign to me that actually, I think we're dealing with the faith here. Speaker 5 Yeah. Speaker 2 Yeah. And you know, there's a, the the, you know, you find elements of these types of ideas in various Talmudic texts. For example, the idea of aliens. 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 there's one of the tractates that discusses the 18,000 worlds. So it's, it's an older Talmudic idea that 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 the movie, the whole thing was like, no, they're actually your friends. They're sort of alien saviours. Speaker 1 Make that case. Speaker 2 Yeah, it's kind of like, don't think it's demonic. This is more of a salvific type of thing. So I think that's propaganda. So. Speaker 1 We welcome our new alien overlords. Speaker 2 Much like Childhood's End. And if you've read Childhood's End, you know the Arthur Z Clarke who was but buddies with Crowley, right? They're actually promoting this idea that Caroline, 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 if we just let you be. And I'm just giving that as one example, like famous, you know, propaganda and sci-fi HG Wells was a huge propagandist about the same of the the stuff too. He was a high level. 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. So we have a different deity. His name is Lucifer. He will be the deity of the future. So he's a Promethean, you could say, but he was also like one of the chief propagandists for this sort of Rothschild, Milner, Fabian circles that were promoting socialism and technocracy back, you know, in the 1800s, late 1800s, early 1900s. Speaker 1 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. Speaker 2 Yeah, one of the things I've done on my my YouTube channel last 10 years is what I call the Global Elite Book series. And all we do in the last 10 years is like we pick various Przinski, HDLS, Jacques Attali, Carol Quigley. I mean, you just go down the line and we read through the text 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, 5 or 6 commandments of the, of the elite that you have to be on board with. And there seems to be a recurring pattern of because humanity is overpopulated, we must have global governance. We must have a a united world religion eventually. We must have full spectrum dominance, control of area of life. Everything's surveilled all the way up to we did even did remember Klaus Schwab's fourth industrial revolution book, that whole book that came out right before COVID was about how the coming crises 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, 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 Jacques Adele's book, brief history, the future. That book was written in 2006 and he was the sort of Kissinger to, you know, the presidents of France, Macron and people like that. Maybe even Mitzer honor for who who he was consultant to, but he was the Kissinger of France, huge neo con 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 golem. Because of the golem, we're all going to be LinkedIn. 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, one world brain. Everything is 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 Jacques at the Lee says in his books about the global golem like that's the goal is to create this sort of homogenized controllable. Speaker 1 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. Speaker 2 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 Clarke, everybody remembers 2001 Space Odyssey and he Co wrote that and help 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 side of a priest class that rules us, that allows us to achieve apotheosis. And then in 3001, that apotheosis happens through union with AI and text. So basically the idea is presented, I think, in those books that we become God through technology. Rick Kurzweil, where he's even said this kind of stuff. So the singularity, all that kind of ideology, which is not new to Kurzweil. Actually, Hegel had a version of this called 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, you know, I think who's that crazy TR Deschardins, the excommunicated Jesuit guy. He talked about the new everything becoming the new O sphere, 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 classic and steer us towards some sort of transcendent singularity, Omega Point, that's sort of their religious, that's their eschatology. So they have, they have, like you said, that is a competing eschatology. Speaker 1 That's right, it's a competing eschatology. That's nicely put. But the goal of so the Christian eschatology is God returns and the Pagan eschatology is I become God. Speaker 2 Exactly so. And now some some of those writers were actually revise and reinterpret Christianity. And you mentioned earlier Rosicrucians, some of those hermetic groups actually had this idea that Christianity is just sort of a allegory for immortality and resurrection through some sort of gnosis or knowledge or technology. Speaker 1 Please replace man with the God with yourself. Speaker 2 Yeah, Crawley. Crawley is a great example of this because he's a figure who, by the way, was also working for British intelligence. Aleister 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 Asimov expresses in his, you know, three laws of, of magic or whatever magic and technology. Arthur C Clarke, same ideology. He's hanging out with the Crowley and circle. So I think there's also an overlooked 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 Lebowski heavily. She was a Fabian socialist and Crawley was a huge fan of hers. In fact, he told people to read her her writings to understand. Speaker 1 Matter of theosophy. Speaker 2 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 is one of the key elements in his famous book Orthodoxy in the religion of the Future Saints. Seraphim Rose now, but very predictive, very accurate that this is essentially demonic. He wrote that in the 70s, basically saying where this, you know, HG 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 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 then Crowley. Speaker 1 With respect, Madame Blavatsky, from the surviving photographs, does not look like she practiced yoga. Speaker 2 I would not want to see her in yoga pants. Speaker 1 No, sorry, I couldn't resist. I am a nasty person. Why Yoga? Speaker 2 Well, 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 yoga and Tantric Buddhism. 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 collectivist in the way that they approach who man is and what he is in the world. So 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 you're, 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 a an initiation process was supposed to be that's what it is in the in the Hindu, in 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. Speaker 1 What does that mean? Speaker 2 Like really gross sex, like tant, the 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. Speaker 1 This is a common idea, not just. Speaker 2 In no, this is like the inner teaching of like tantric Buddhism, like if you were to. Speaker 1 But not just tantric Buddhism, I mean there. Speaker 2 Are other groups have adopted this? Sure, Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. You can see why Crowley saw that as a Playmarket Assad. Or exactly. Speaker 1 Kabbalistic echoes there too, but the core idea is you have to go as far out as you can. Speaker 2 Yes, inversion, the principle of inversion. And we talk about this a lot of times and you know, people in our, in our sphere, my buddy Mark Hacker, he's written a bunch of articles about Orthodox theology and philosophy and and Soviet history and he's talked about some of the early, for example, Bolsheviks. One guy named Gleb Bokehai, he was very interested in sort of Eyes Wide Shut inversion stuff as a way to revolutionize society in terms of the bolstry revolution there was. Speaker 1 So commit atrocities. Speaker 2 And but not just like killing, but like also to promote in society like degeneracy, because that has the print that can revolutionize society. Speaker 1 But it but it that's true, it. Speaker 2 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. Speaker 1 It's a very common, it was a very common idea and the old fashioned communists, you know, the Stalinists were prudish. Speaker 2 They were against the gay stuff. Speaker 1 Totally against it, but you know, the Bolsheviks had been the 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 believe that the SLA. Speaker 2 Yep, Yep. Speaker 1 Charles Manson, You know, there was all orgies and. Speaker 2 But that that ethos of the 60s counter culture stuff wasn't just, you know, there was an earlier idea that some of the key Fabian social for, for example, 1890s, some of the Fabian socials like Beatrice Sidney Webb, they actually understood that if you promoted, for example, bestiality and public art, this could undermine and destroy EU KS sexual ethos at that. Speaker 5 Time, so they were. Speaker 2 Way out of the curve, like in the 1890s, Bertrand Russell was famously pansexual, like one of, you know, Terence McKenna, a 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, exactly power that comes from that from. Speaker 1 Transgression. It's. Speaker 2 Demonic power. Speaker 1 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. Speaker 2 Taking on sort of more and more demonic energy versus the, you know, God's uncreated energy. But it's still energy. Yeah. So when Satan promises Jesus. Speaker 1 That he can have, you know, the kingdoms he could deliver the kingdoms like he had the power to bestow on those who worshipped him like it's it's real. There is a real demonic. Speaker 5 Power that can. Speaker 1 Yes, be tapped. Speaker 2 Into, you know, so that that's what makes it even more. Speaker 5 Compelling. I mean, there's. Speaker 1 A reason, people, it's like cigarette smoking. Yeah, it's bad, but people do it. Why? Because they get something out of it. There's a reason that people worship demons, not just because they're inherently perverse, but because it works short term. Right? Yeah, absolutely. And. Speaker 2 Again, that's that that principle inversion is well known way back into, you know, like ancient. I remember reading that's where you sacrifice the Incas, sacrifice children. So the Mayas and the Aztecs and. Speaker 1 The Vikings. And like when you sacrifice a virgin to the rain God, it actually rains well, like, you know, you probably heard of Michael Aquino. Speaker 2 Right, yeah. You know everybody, you might have heard of his. He wrote that my word, a sigh war document was 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 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 even had a whole program, I want to say in the 70s kind of adjacent to Project Stargate where they were studying Satanism in the occult to sort of weaponize and try to understand these ideas and see how far they could go with them. Where did nuclear technology come from, do you think? Speaker 1 I mean you, Oppenheimer described. Speaker 2 Himself as to a degree sort of engaging in. I mean, I don't know how serious he took it. Speaker 5 And I've also read some. Speaker 2 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. Speaker 5 I'm more of a philosophy. Speaker 2 Guy but I don't know but think that was true of a lot of the scientists involved in this. It's not clear what. Speaker 1 They were creating right. It's very clear that they were used to create the illusion that they were creating something, but it may have pre existed them. I'm just just throwing them. Well, I you know what, one thing that's interesting is that the way that some. Speaker 2 Of the early people involved in those chemical sciences that you probably heard of Jack Parsons. He was, you know, Crowley, and 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 principle of by doing this, you release energy, which is the very. Speaker 5 Type of thing you were talking. Speaker 2 About with like the demonic aspect of releasing and control trying to control the energy. Well, it raises like a question which is like where does the act of creation come? Speaker 1 From So the act of creation is God is God. You know it's God's doing, God's great destruction, right? And Satan's destruction, but the. Speaker 2 Act of creation. Speaker 1 Like every person who's ever, every person really, who's ever engaged in 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. Speaker 5 Them so much as you're summoning. Speaker 1 Them this is what I'm saying. And that's true for good things, but it's also true for bad things, is it not? I mean, does any? Speaker 2 Living person. Speaker 1 Not know what I'm talking about Well, so in the orthodox tradition we have this idea that. Speaker 2 Your thoughts come from one of three sources. It either comes from you and 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 of. The term that's used in the Greek is logismoy, which is sort of thought forms that can sometimes occur. Usually those are are in the Orthodox traditions spoken of sort of as demonic influences. But you're right to that. 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 his 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 effects 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 mages. Does that make sense? It does make sense I I just as I get older ice. Speaker 5 Have come to believe. Speaker 1 That they're, 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 that's what I'm saying. Yeah. I. Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean. Speaker 2 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 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, 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. I see you're going to understand, you know, not just human weaknesses and stuff like that, but you're going to understand the 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. You know, one of the things that Father St. Sarah from Rose talked about in his book Orthodoxy in the Religion Future is that he warned about coming mass delusions. And what? Speaker 5 Would sort of. Speaker 2 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. That'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 something it can to voodoo. Basically, if you study voodoo, it's very, very similar to charismaticism in the way that anything that you experience Trump's 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, Anne Lee, right, the founder of the Quakers. Anne Lee thought that her ecstatic experiences were God telling her that women should be pastors, women should be prophetesses, 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. 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 with the just be clear, you're talking with the Shakers, not just Society of Friends that you know, that what? Speaker 1 So she comes out of the right. She's a schism out of the the. Speaker 2 Quaker side of Friends, but yeah. And they were big in Maine. They didn't reproduce exactly. Speaker 1 So that's one of the downsides of like not a long short strategy. Speaker 2 But it's an attack on not just patriarchy, but also attack on like good sexuality in terms of producing, but it's also like massive proto feminism. So it might sound counterintuitive to say that that's very similar to the 60s counterculture revolution, but it's not because the whole idea of, you know, gay bishops or gay priests or 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? So what I'm what I'm saying here is that like you were talking about destruction these. Speaker 5 Actions these. Speaker 2 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 instruction 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. Speaker 1 Just no question about it. It's not just the desire to get rich or the desire to control their people. It's that they are filled. I mean, when Justin Trudeau systematically destroys his nation, which he did, you know, he gets something out of that. And it's. Speaker 2 Not just like the. Speaker 1 Consulting contract that comes after. It's more than that. This is what's annoys me about Connie Ink and sort of the the fake conservative side. Speaker 2 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 call. 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. Well, were there? Are there? Were there tools of or tools of a? Speaker 1 Higher, but it's not it's. Speaker 2 Not a joke. It's not that. Speaker 1 They're just like, stupid. It's like lame, effeminate closeted 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 it's an accident. Well, when you read a lot of these global technocratic. Speaker 2 Oligarchical elites. They're a lot smarter than people think and and much more faithful. Yeah, you know, they're not agnostics. Speaker 4 That's for sure. Speaker 1 So let want to wrap this up to go back to Orthodoxy and its view of the future. It's 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. And given recent events, I think a lot of people are starting to think about history as a linear track is like, you know, there's a beginning and end to history, like everyone feels that. Speaker 5 That's true, and there's going. Speaker 1 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 Orthodox perspective. Speaker 2 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. Speaker 1 Preterism in the Church, Father, especially Chrysostom. Speaker 2 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 anti type, 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 is 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 evangelical. Oh, that's end of the world and that's that's John Hagee in the seven blood moons of Israel. No, no, it's now like we live in the eschatological reality. When you go to Divine Liturgy, that is heaven on earth now it's not a postponed into the 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 time when you ask you know that type of an evangelical Zionist or whatever. When does the reign of Christ begin? Oh, when he comes back. But every time Psalm 110, which is sit down with my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool. Every time that side in the New Testament is 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 out throughout the. Speaker 5 Roman Empire, you have this. Speaker 2 Prophecy in Daniel 2 that the empire under which this Messiah is born eventually becomes the Kingdom of the Messiah. Within 3 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. Speaker 1 Changes your responsibility as a Christian living in the world. Exactly. And it also doesn't make us worship some atheist. Speaker 2 Nation state in the Middle East that was created by the Rothschilds in the UN in 19480. That's not in your liturgy. No, I'm saying like my. Speaker 1 My duty is not. Speaker 2 To you know, John Hagee's shofar and the blood moons or whatever blood moon pies. What are what are blood moons? You know who, John? Speaker 1 Hagee is, yeah, yeah, Yeah. Well. Speaker 2 He I don't they he always tries to play on whatever. I can never be mad at John Hickey because he just seems so lost. Sad. Speaker 1 But he's a deceiver, Yeah, but I mean, he, he he was doing this big thing. Speaker 2 A couple years ago about the blood moons of Israel. The end times are signified by the blood moons. So I just met the jug of blood moon pies. Because if you know. Speaker 5 What a moon pie is. Speaker 2 It's like, you know, because he's a portly fellow. But yeah, he is, yeah. He's at the Moon Pies. So does that. Speaker 1 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 focus all. Speaker 2 Of our time and energy on here in the now or, you know, politics of 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. But that doesn't negate, you know, the goodness of this life. So we believe in many goods, not just good or evil, right? Like you might have in the, in the history of the, say Middle Ages, Latin Church, this idea that, well, to be celibate and single is good. But if you're married, that's somehow bad or less right? We would say there's many goods versus this idea of a sort of a strict good or good or evil that comes out of the dialectics that Augustine. Augustine had a very specific idea that just as an example to the marital sex in his mind, Saint Augustine 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 creative 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 we 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 soul of life, but it's not inherently somehow holier than if you're married. And a lot of more Orthodox monastics will even admit that, that that a lot of married people can achieve a higher level sanctity. Even then 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 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 Roman Catholic attitudes of like, sex and marriage. What a conversation. Thank you very much. Speaker 5 Thank you very much.