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

27:40That very chapter he discusses the liturgical thanks and offering at that altar. So from the earliest days, Christianity had this sort of altar-based form of worship. Again, another Reformation distinctive is that they begin to move away from the idea of an altar towards a table, right? So you have sort of a desacralizing of the worship space to not be a Eucharistic offering, but a shared meal, which, and we're not totally opposed to the idea of it being a shared meal, but it's first and foremost a worship offering. If you go back to Abraham, Abraham built an altar. God is always worshiped at an altar, at least the biblical God.

28:19So 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 theology. And many of the Reformers were actually very influenced by rabbinic theology, by the Talmud even. So the Reformation has a stream of influences, Renaissance humanism, all those things play into that. And it's just very— Well, Luther was not in that category, though. No? He was not interested in rabbinic theology, but he was influenced by what's a text called the Theologia Germanica, which was a Neoplatonic text. And so there's also some evidence that scholars have pulled up that suggests that Luther might have had an interest in Hermeticism.

29:06I'm not saying that that dominates his idea, but more so with Calvin and some of 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'd like to punch Moses' teeth out. So Luther didn't even like the Old Testament at times, but again, he's a boisterous sort of, you know, satirical character at times. So it's hard to know exactly. The most hilarious theologian in history. He was very 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 mischaracterize because I know Luther wrote about the Jews and their lives.

29:44That's a famous text that he wrote, so I'm aware of that. But just in terms of the general trends of the Reformation outside of Luther with Calvin, Zwingli, Melanchthon, even later Lutherans were very involved in the founding of Rosicrucianism. Johann Andrei is believed by some scholars to be the author of the Rosicrucian Manifesto. I forget exactly what it's called. So that is there, and a lot of that has to do with Kabbalistic ideas. Who were the Rosicrucians? This was an Enlightenment-era secret society of sorts, which in the 1600s, 1700s, there was a lot of these that were popping up everywhere.

30:25Because you still had, in Protestant countries, you had certain laws that would, and in Catholic countries as well, they would forbid participation in secret societies. They would forbid practicing of the occult in various ways. But you also had court alchemists and people that would kind of, like John Dee, he was the court astrologer to the queen. So they would kind of do these things on the down low, secretly. And so you get a rise of these secret societies. This is where some of the first speculative Masonic lodges start to pop up in the 1500s, 1600s in Europe. 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, seemed to be involved in some of the rise of Kabbalistic influence in the West.

31:16and that I think contributes in part to the Rosicrucians who, according to, there's a great book by Dame Frances Yates called Rosicrucian Enlightenment. She actually argues that the Enlightenment itself was heavily influenced by Rosicrucian ideology. So they were Neoplatonists. They were into magic, alchemy. So they were really interested in the idea of transmuting metals, you know, 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 orthodox theology.

31:59So all of these sort of different strains and strands in the hermetic world. But basically you're describing witchcraft. Yeah, you could say that, yeah. Huh. 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 007. Did you know that? No. Yeah, so the 007, which is two balls and a cane, which is two 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 007 from. And Ian Fleming consciously took that from John Dee. But 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.

32:53I 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. Inflation makes credit card statements particularly scary. You work 40, 50 hours a week just to buy groceries and gas, things you used to 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 homeownership.

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34:08So in the Orthodox tradition in the church, the Bible is read aloud. Yeah. Are Orthodox encouraged to read the Bible on their own? Sure. I mean, St. John Chrysostom actually said famously that the laity have more need of reading the scriptures than even the monks or the priests, because monks and priests live in the liturgy, which for those that don't know, in the Orthodox Church, basically every aspect of the liturgy and the liturgical calendar is Bible. It is scripture constantly. It's like every aspect of it. And so Christosom's argument was laity need to be in the Bible more than they do because they live it.

34:52So if you're not in the liturgy all the time, like those people are, the best substitute is the little church, which Christophism 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. So one of the reasons there was a reformation in the first place is because the Catholic church over time began to hide the Bible from Christians and it was not published in the local language in Europe. It was in Latin. It was the Vulgate.

35:29And Luther's great breakthrough was to publish it in German, to translate it himself into German. Did the Orthodox Church do the same? Yes. In fact, this is one of the differences between the pre-Vatican II Roman Church and the Orthodox Church is that the Orthodox always put it 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 not inherently wrong to maintain that linguistic heritage, but it's also possible to put it in the vernacular for the people.

36:13uh i mean that's the whole idea behind translating the bible into you know the languages of the people so that they can understand it uh but that is one of the differences pre-vatican two but interestingly after vatican two there were both protestant and orthodox influences on the reforms of the roman catholic church and thus rome then became emphasizing they began to emphasize the vernacular after vatican two 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? This is, again, a huge misunderstanding that we would argue we believe is part of proto-Christianity.

37:00It's part of Hebrew proto-Christianity. So when you go back to the book of Kings, when you go to the book of Exodus, and you see the way that the tabernacle and then later the temple are described, they are tremendously ornate. You've got gold images of angels and you've got the Ark of the Covenant with, you know, angelic imagery on it. So we don't believe that real Old Testament Christianity or Old Testament Judaism, you could say, not rabbinic Judaism. We think that's something different that developed in the fourth and fifth century. It is something different. Yeah. But proto-Christianity or the Hebrew tradition was not iconoclastic.

37:36They 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 that, the more I thought about that, it's like, well, you can't actually say all images are bad because capital F-A-T-H-E-R, that's a type of an image. The Orthodox Church, we don't typically image God the Father. We think that, as Jesus says in the book of John to the Pharisees, he says, no one has seen the Father at any time.

38:12And he's quizzing the Pharisees there because he's saying, so who do you think Moses was interacting with on Mount Sinai if no one saw the Father? Because it says Moses saw God face to face. Jesus is basically saying, I was talking to Moses. I'm God. That's why the Pharisees want to stone him in that chapter, because he's saying he's the face of God that was interacting with Moses. So this is why the book of Colossians, the book of Hebrews call Jesus the icon, I-K-O-N in the Greek, the image of the Father. This enrages the Pharisees. So we think that iconography directly flows out of the incarnation, the Son being the image of the Father.

38:53Thus, throughout the early church, you have the development of the liturgy, even in the first and second century, and this has been shown through archaeological evidence, through people who study liturgy, they're called liturgists. Even Protestant Anglican liturgists note that the early church had altars, they had imagery, even synagogues in the first and second century. One of the famous cases is the Dura Europa Synagogue in Syria. I think it's from the early 200s. It's lined with images, paintings of Old Testament scenes and imagery. So the Orthodox Church, if you look at the DeRodio-Europa Synagogue, is the most natural development of if Christianity was going to open up to the Gentiles.

39:36It 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 priest, who's a great Russian Orthodox priest, Father Vladimir, he took us on a pilgrimage to Italy. And I was like, why are we going to Italy? That's not Rome. Well, there's a thousand years of Christianity prior to the rise of the medieval papacy in Italy. There's tons of Orthodox places that you could go to, right, in Italy. And so we went to the catacombs in Rome.

40:14And lo and behold, when the Christians were persecuted in their underground in the catacombs in the first, second, third century, by the way, you can never see all the catacombs. Like we spent a whole day just in one of the catacombs in Rome. There's altars, there's images that they painted in the first, second, third 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, people couldn't read back then. Most of the Roman Empire was illiterate. So when they would go to these services in the catechums or wherever, they would be hearing the Word of God.

40:53That'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 how the church decided what books go in and which ones don't was what's called the lectionaries.

41:28Lectionaries are the daily liturgical readings in the churches. So when the church fathers were having these councils and they were meeting, and the canon of scripture doesn't actually get solidified, at least for the Orthodox Church, until the 6th and 7th century, they would say, okay, which ones do we have a tradition that says Paul wrote or Matthew wrote? Which ones are in the daily lectionaries? And if you're a Protestant, you believe in Sola Scriptura, the idea that liturgy and liturgical tradition play this huge role in the determination of the canon make it very difficult to say that we're based on Scripture alone.

42:04Sola Scriptura. So Orthodoxy is not based on just the Bible? No, we would say the Orthodox Church is based on the idea of apostolic succession, that the apostles appointed successors in various bishoprics and c's 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 of those elements go into what the basis of the Orthodox Church is. Whereas, you know, in the Protestant world, you have elected elders or something like that, but you don't have this sort of three-tiered stool of apostolic succession, tradition, and Bible altogether.

42:55What are the practical differences? As a weekly communicant in an Orthodox Church, how is that different from being a Catholic or Protestant? Um, well, certainly we would have more similarities to a Roman Catholic than most Protestants or evangelicals. You know, there might be a high church Protestant or Anglican communion that would have some similarities with Orthodox church. But I think, uh, you know, for the Orthodox world, um, fasting is a lot more integrated into what we do than most. Fasting. Yeah, there's a lot of fasting days in the Orthodox Church calendar. What does that mean for you?

43:37Just abstaining from certain foods. Lent is a little more rigorous for the Orthodox than it is for— Why fasting? Well, we think that Jesus and the apostles and people like John the Baptist kind of set the tone for retaining an element of asceticism in the Church. So obviously some people could take that to the extreme. We're not Hindu yogis, you know, sitting out under a tree trying to 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.

44:22Basically learning to control the passions is what that's part of. How often do you fast? I am not the best at fasting because I have really weird gut biome issues, so I don't fast as much as I should. It's very challenging. But there's also nuances for medical issues. But the Orthodox Church fasts quite a bit, usually from various meats and stuff like that. But it's not just fasting that's different. And I think for the Orthodox Church, it's not just about food. Fasting is also almsgiving because you're sort of, it's self-denial that's not just about diet. It's also you, for example, during Lent, it would be appropriate to confess more.

45:14It 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 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 or Protestant can't come and just commune.

45:53Most churches are way more open about that. It's very strict in the Orthodox Church in terms of communion. 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 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 just a lot more serious, I think, in the Orthodox Church than it is elsewhere.

46:28But we do have some of the sacramental principles like confession to priests that Protestants don't have. So again, there's a whole milieu of wide scope of differences between. Everybody wants your attention. Think about all the apps, the shows, the podcasts, the websites that compete for your attention, everybody, you can't keep up with it. You're probably wasting a lot of your life. Hallow is not a waste of your life. The Hallow app can make your life. Hallow is the world's number one prayer app and a constant topic of conversation in my family, literally every day at dinner. We should come over.

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47:41It really will change you. Of all the things we advertise, we know this works. hallow app at hallow.com slash tucker three free months again that's hallow.com slash tucker and get three months completely free you will love it how is it since the religion you described was originally tethered to a government an empire how has becoming orthodox changed your view of government and its role um that's an interesting question you know i was when i was a calvinist i I was more like a sort of a libertarian, you know, get the state out of everything. It is the religion of libertarianism, isn't it? But as I got more into historic Christianity, I started to realize that, well, maybe republicanism isn't like the highest form of government.

48:29Like 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 have been, you know, quite a few people, especially after Scientific Revolution, 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— Well, naturally. Yeah. They have a vested interest in probably that, right? 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.

49:14True. Plato wrote even back in his day that, and he was, of course, a proponent of republicanism, but he wrote that the more decentralized in the sense of democracy, he didn't like democracy at all. He thought that that would eventually lead to mobocracy and the rule of the passions. Because the oligarch in that type of a democratic setting has the incentive to appeal to the biggest number at the lowest basis, lowest common denominator. And then it becomes incumbent upon him to really play on the passions of the mob. So why not debase the people because they're easier to control the mob? So there's an incentive that even Plato noticed back then.

49:57I think he writes in the Republic, if this happens, they're going to legalize weed. They're going to legalize everything to do with butt stuff. Yep. So it becomes fake and gay. So he sought, I think, in various ways, even 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 the society.

50:34And it's interesting because later on, by the end of his life, he seems to progress towards more of like a secret society type of governance because he has this, I guess I'm going from memory, maybe the symposium or the other one. but he argues that there's this council of night in IGHT, which is a governance board of, like, spy chiefs. Yep. And so they meet at night because the public's too stupid to know what's going on. Which is just weird because it reminds me of, like, I remember reading something about Kissinger talking about the wise men, and it's like Plato's talking about Henry Kissinger's form of secret government.

51:10And then we devolve to the level of Jeffrey Epstein. Yeah, exactly. Coney Island. exactly um yeah but it's all the same thing it's just a i mean jeffrey epstein was an idiot which no one wants to say but he was obviously when you read his writing um and so it's sort of our version of of that so i notice that the enthusiasm for liberal democracy whatever that is but our system of government are that has produced our culture enthusiasm is waning for that like i don't know many people who, I don't know anyone who wants dictatorship, just to be clear, but I don't know anybody, I literally don't know anybody who thinks the current system is working.

51:50So that suggests it probably won't last. So what comes next and what should come next? Yeah, there's no easy answer to that. I mean, I think, again, when you look at Christian history, even in the West or in the Orthodox East, you have a pretty normative tradition of kings and queens, kings, preferably kings, but, and that happens through a semi-sacramental service called a coronation service. So, you know, the Orthodox Church always coronated emperors, czars, kings, some of the most famous, you know, kings in the history of the Orthodox Church, you know, fought massive battles, they went to war.

52:30So, I think one thing that ties into this idea of a de-Christianizing of the state, which is part and parcel with that sort of tendency in the Calvinist, you know, libertarian type of tradition, the classical liberal ethos, is there was a famous Russian statesman, Pobinazia, he wrote a book, Reflections of a Russian Statesman, around 1890s, and he said, when you de-Christianize the state, you don't get liberty, you get another cult that runs the state. Exactly. And he noticed that when... I have too. Before the Bolsheviks, right? Really? Yeah, he had looked at the French Revolution and prior examples.

53:09And he said, you just get another cult that steps in and runs things. So you're always going to be governed by religious fanatics. Yes. So the question is, which religion? You want some good ones or at least some nicer ones? 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 Macron is not religious? Oh, he's very religious. It's just not your religion. Just some other religion. Luciferian or something. I don't know what. Yeah. So, yeah, I think 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.

53:51And 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 very powerful—like, for example, Luther's Reformation wouldn't have succeeded without the German princes being behind it. Of course. Of course. They were resentful because they didn't want to spend the money. And they didn't want to be under the Pope. They were tired of the papacy. Of course. And Germany was emerging as the great power in Europe. Exactly. And like, why would you want to be ruled by Italy? Exactly. So there was a lot of resentment, papal stuff going on.

54:22Same with Henry VIII. He didn't want to be under the Pope's rules about his ladies. So those combinations of interests. By the way, there's also a Jewish influence on the Reformation as well. In fact, there were, according to Carol Quigley, even Protestant and Jewish banking interests funded the French Revolution massively. And 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 Rothschild's biography the fact that they had a long-term vendetta with the czarist attitudes towards Russians, towards Russian Jews, and Lord Rothschild wired one million rupels to B.I.

55:10Lenin. I knew about other, like the Warburgs and the shifts. They had funded Lenin and Trotsky, but I did not know that, according to Morton, they'd actually wired Lenin a million dollars, so to speak, and he was supposed to pay it back, but he never did. Well, I think the Bolshevik revolution was ideological, but I think it was also ethnic conflict to some extent, obviously. The Lord Rothschild said that. He said, we've got to, we will make the Russian Christians pay for what they did for many centuries, in his mind. Yeah, well, and they did. They made them pay. No one's paid more dearly, actually.

55:49So, 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 seems, I don't know, ascendant, but it certainly seems popular. Why is that? The internet, you know, has an interesting positive and negative effect it can have on all these domains. So I think in one way, I started looking at apologetic stuff around 2000, 2001. And back then, you would listen to people's cassette tapes. You would listen to a little MP3 on Windows Media Amp or whatever. But now, it's everywhere. The debate sphere, which is something that kind of grew, not just from me, but other people like 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 purple-haired weirdos.

56:46So, that's a lot of low-hanging fruit that, like, Ben Shapiro would do, but there also sort of accidentally almost came about a pretty intense 10 years or so of online religious debating, which, again, it just sort of happened. It wasn't something that I planned to do or anyone planned. It was just, I remember years ago, somebody said, hey, would you debate this atheist guy? He was a libertarian guy. Yeah, sure. So we did it on a whim. Then another guy, hey, would you debate this other, you know, French-Canadian atheist guy? Yeah, sure. And then it sort of snowballs into, you know, a pretty regular thing of doing online religious political debates.

57:25It'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. People tend to be solidified into their views. But younger guys are more interested in that. That's when you buy a cable package. I think that it's very natural, I think, to people in the West to do that, to debate their ideas. It's not a feature necessarily of every other society to debate their ideas.

58:08That's for sure. And increasingly, it's not a feature of our society. Exactly. We were talking at breakfast, you were a debate participant champion in school. I was too. That was normal. I don't know if it was normal, but it wasn't as weird. It wasn't seen as weird. No. Now, I don't even know that that exists. It exists on the internet. So people are going to do it. But kids in schools are not encouraged to debate, right? No, in fact, I think I remember years ago when I was doing undergrad and then grad school, they were already sort of trying to phase that out because we had a debate team when I was in undergrad.

58:41And then by the time I was in grad school, there was no debate team anymore. It didn't exist. Right, because the premium was on obedience at that point. Yeah, because they don't want you critically thinking through your positions because then you might notice patterns which are not amenable to the status quo. So, nicely put. That's absolutely right. So, but people have been on the internet debating religion and orthodoxy's gotten a hearing for the first time maybe ever in American history. Yeah. And the result is? I think, I mean, it's not the only contributor, but it did play a huge role in the rise of orthodox converts in the last five, six, seven years for sure.

59:19And 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. 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 big, I mean, in terms of viewership.

1:00:00So I think that... Who were the most fun if you had to pick a Muslim atheist feminist?

1:00:09They actually have a lot of similarities, believe it or not. 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. I do a lot of comedic stuff. So when we debate cult leaders, which we've debated several, those tend to be really funny. So they're the most entertaining. Are there any atheists left in the United States? Is that there was a new atheism movement? There was.

1:00:49That was very popular in 2000s. And I kind of think they ran out of steam. 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 okay there's some really evil shit going on in the world yeah i mean like we need some explanation and these guys are basically saying there is no explanation nothing means anything right so atheism kind of loses steam um a lot of the youtube atheists that were big youtubers just kind of petered out one of them was sticking bananas in his butt and they just like who cares that's gross weird stuff so And then other ones end up marrying dudes that are women.

1:01:35So people begin to see, this has nothing to offer. I remember vividly someone telling me that Sam Harris, the famous atheist, was really, really smart. He's really smart. And I listened to Sam Harris once. I thought, okay, it's not smart at all. Like our standards, I think, have changed, maybe. I think they've gotten higher. Do you remember when people said Sam Harris was smart? Oh, yeah. In fact, I mean, I think the tail end of that period was those debates with Jordan Peterson, and Peterson was really critiquing atheist presuppositions. I felt like he could have even gone harder on those guys because they were already sort of losing the ground publicly.

1:02:20But even Jordan Peterson is just sort of simple lines of questioning. Well, how do you know that? What's that mean? Even that wasn't enough really to help. The atheists didn't have even enough response to sort of basic internal critiques, which is a very effective way of debating and doing worldview debates is to do an internal critique where you show 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 aware enough to do that with those guys, whether it's Sam Harris or Matt Dillahunty or any of the atheists, that that was kind of the nail in the coffin for the atheists.

1:03:02Then 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? Is that more logical? I think that's literally the path for a lot of people. I don't think, I mean, I think that's actually what happened for a lot of people. And isn't it interesting that some of these high-level so-called atheists are flying with Jeffrey Epstein and going to certain— Well, sure, and have religious-level devotion to all kinds of stupid causes. So, like, they're the most religious people of all.

1:03:35Exactly. But I also, I even wonder at times, like, are they even atheists? Maybe they have other kinds of commitments. Of course not. I mean, I 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 instantly recognizable as religious faith to me. Right? Yeah, I think the approach that I take to all those debates is worldview-based. And what that means is that it's not primarily one side stacking up evidences versus the other side stacking evidences in which one way.

1:04:17It's more so analyzing our fundamental commitments or our paradigm through which we interpret the world. That's a lot more effective if you can destroy the person's paradigm for getting them to actually change their mind. Right. So one of the threads that connects everything, well, first I would say you've been thinking about, faith in a serious way much longer than most people your age i think this was a pretty secular country or i thought it was um but you were thinking about this stuff early and maybe that's why you have an advantage over a lot of us but um i've now concluded that like everything is a manifestation of religious faith and it just goes by different names and so we we missed it we thought we lived in a secular country we actually live like all countries it's a very religious country you wrote a book on what called esoteric hollywood which is basically revealing analyzing and revealing the religious symbolism within popular art yes why what is tell me the thesis tell me why you wrote it and give me some examples uh well when i was doing undergrad grad work i had multiple interests, not just philosophy and, you know, religious stuff, but also I've always been interested in film, love movies.

1:05:36I grew up in a small town, so we didn't have much to do other than drugs and movies. So I always gravitated towards that, towards the arts. I enjoy, you know, performing, doing comedic type stuff. Always wanted to be involved in some way in media. So So it was only natural, I think, to also take a lot of film classes, study a lot of lit, and then 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 propaganda, psychological warfare, how that overlaps with intelligence agencies, and how that overlaps with Hollywood.

1:06:20So 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.

1:06:59and how they use that as a kind of tool of Western propaganda during what I think is a dialectical, you know, false Cold War dialectic. But it's very instructive on many levels, how, you know, we were talking about icons earlier, but Bond is a kind of icon of sort of Western nihilistic, you know, 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 capitalistic sort of self-gratification on one side, and then over here, you've got this idea that you are a property of the state.

1:07:43Both 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'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 a science. It's not just my speculation.

1:08:17You can read like global elite writers like Jacques Attali, he'll talk about Cold War being two pillars of two sides of the dialectic but you sort of manage 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 concentrated essays on different themes and topics relating to sex cult and symbology in film and how powerful, at least in the last century, Hollywood was for giving us our religiosity, whether we knew it or not.

1:09:06We mentioned myth-making and we mentioned Plato and Plato talked about the noble lie in the Republic. We thought we were in a secular society. we were actually given an entire religious 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. And that was obvious to me, even as a child in the 70s. What was not obvious was that it was religious propaganda. Yeah. I didn't realize this was our religion. I mean, maybe not overt, but it's there, right? It's a subtle way to indoctrinate people into various types of, basically just anti-Christian ideology.

1:09:45I mean, the book is not just like a low-tier thing saying that Hollywood's evil and it's anti-Christian. Everybody knows that. This is more of an 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'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 with such recurring frequency that you think is this what is this this is almost a kind of a prophetic spirit almost yes or you know it suggests that like we're just acting in a drama whose script has been written I don't know I mean I've literally no idea but it's outside just a statistical matter it's outside the realm of chance, for example, how many times the Simpsons predicted coming events.

1:10:43Like, what is that? I have known writers on the Simpsons. They're not yogis. They're not mystical figures. I mean, I have no idea what that is, but I just noticed that it's happened. 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 about he was a genius he would write about years before what the bullshit revolution would do and what the socialists would do in russia and almost with accuracy in terms of like the number of skulls that would be melted up um that i think is prophetic in the case of a lot of what went on in hollywood in the last you know several decades that's more so propaganda that's intentionally conditioning us um especially with a lot of like tech gadgetry you know the bond films actually introduced a lot of people to sort of spy world gadgetry that would then become day-to-day normal american living right i mean even cell phones like the internet itself is just old school cold war cryptography that turned into everybody's form of communication um you know a lot of the spy surveillance gadgetry or whatever that you see going on in james bond this begins to be a thing that conditions people to getting used to being surveilled, getting used to having all their lives on the internet, live streamed.

1:12:08I'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 that 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 has 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 one of this stuff. But it even gets more sophisticated into, like, studying the effects of early slasher films that it had on people.

1:12:43It would put people in, like, a catatonic state to make them more suggestible. Everybody's probably heard about subliminals. Like, all of that is related to or adjacent to the type of things that we're discussing here. Like, this is 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 the UK, especially as 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.

1:13:25And so a lot of British authors that are now famous, you know, formerly wrote or formerly worked in British intelligence. And then like William Somerset, Maugham and these different characters. Graham Greene. Graham Greene, exactly. They would go on. And then, of course, Ian Fleming. They would write into the stories what they'd actually been up to. You could write Our Man in Havana, but you couldn't actually write what you did in Havana. Exactly. um and then you'll find these fascinating nuggets you know joseph conrad is the secret agent which was one of the first uh there was one revolutionary era spy story i forget the name of it but his is sort of the most well-known the secret agent um and you've got like the states using anarchists there's a false flag event like you've got these principles in these fiction stories which seem to match up to reality.

1:14:14So I just found that fascinating that you would have all this in fiction. And then 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 it. 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? 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.

1:15:02is 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, Sirhan Sirhan, for example. Is there any evidence, do we know that's actually happened ever? I think it's very obvious that it has happened.

1:15:42I don't know what the standard of evidences would be to say with absolute certainty in a specific case. People talk about Marius van der Lube that he was used for the Reichstag. People talk about, as you said, Sirhan. 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, but they're actually working for this other group, right? 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 people that are very suggestible.

1:16:22So 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 Kirk, obviously, you know, assassinations. There were some weird things with that in terms of usually political ideologues or religious ideologues are very useful for these types of operations. um so yeah i think i think especially with jfk even you've got significant evidence if you look at the person of angleton if you look at what came out the jfk files like he was literally just passing all kinds of information to the massad it's in the jfk files there's only four four pages were about his secret relationship with the massad uh i think there was a confluence of interests as you said with organized crime cia and israeli interests all sort of had the motive in regard to JFK, but I think that's a recurring pattern is to absolutely contract it out to either organized crime.

1:17:21I mean, Murder, Inc. began as a Jewish assassination squad that was used by not just Sicilian mafia, but also at times the U.S. would contract out and use these people for operations. If you want to get rid of somebody, just use the gangsters. You're not going to do it yourself. So yeah, that's well known, I think, if you look at Operation Underworld, where the CIA was using organized crime for many years. How much evidence is there that the CIA do you think has an active role in American politics now?

1:17:54My research has mostly been past decades of that relationship, so I'm not the most up-to-date on president. The past is prologue. How certain are we that the United States, U.S. politics has been influenced by intelligence? I mean, I think when people talk about the deep state, we're talking about a sort of breakaway national security apparatus that has a tremendous amount of influence and control on domestic and foreign policy. Absolutely. 100%. I think that superstructure that is international, that is, you know, people talk about the five eyes and all that kind of stuff. I think that they do coordinate.

1:18:34And I think it's very clearly when you get up into that level, even above intelligence and CIA, when you get up into that level of like steering committees and the CFR, the trilaterals, like it's not accidental that Epstein was literally David Rockefeller's legate on the trilateral commission. He was a commissioner for it. I mean, that's that they created that for Brzezinski, right? It was Kissinger who went to David Rockefeller and said, we do have this guy, Brzezinski, he will be great for trilateral. They created it for him. and so for Epstein to essentially be at that level which is no I don't think we knew that until that you know Bannon interview came out and Jeffrey Epstein yeah I was on the Trial of the Commission I was up there with David Rockefeller

1:19:19that's 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 crimes? 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've got high-level finance, money laundering is part of that. You've got weapons trafficking is a huge part of that because if you read Whitney Webb's book, right, like it's the Adnan Khashoggi operation, which also included like filming people on that yacht, that becomes kind of a pattern for also the way that Epstein would do his stuff.

1:20:05So you've got weapons trafficking, you've got 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 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 Ariana to Rothschild, and he's saying, there's going to be a huge conflict over here, move in early, buy up resources, etc.

1:20:50because the conflicts, 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 Rothschild's biography that I just finished reading by Morton brags about how they did the same thing at Waterloo. 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 the same thing that Jeffrey Epstein was doing in the emails with Ariane Duracho.

1:21:33It's funny that they called the, you know, the thousand years after the fall of Rome the Dark Ages as compared to this. it's also crazy too that we think that there's no religious component to the world today when we seem to have all kinds of very demonic activities going on which suggests you know secret societies cults you name it so i think that the world really operates in this way versus the sort of secular mythology that we were taught yeah i mean i don't see anything secular happening really in the United States at all. And if you, I mean, I first noticed this on the LGBTQ, I can barely pronounce it, agenda question where the commitment to that was like more than just, you know, compassion for, you know, discriminated against gays.

1:22:26It was like this religious fervor. Yeah. And that was the first sign to me that actually, I think we're dealing with a faith here. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, there's the, you know, 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 an older Talmudic idea that there are these other life forms. And I think that recent films like Disclosure Day, Spielberg's Ethos, I think that plays into that idea that, no, there's not demonic stuff, because if you watch that movie, the whole thing was like, no, they're actually your friends, they're sort of alien saviors.

1:23:13Disclosure Day makes that case? Yeah, it's kind of like, don't think it's demonic, this is more of a salvific type of thing. So I think that's propaganda. So we welcome our new alien overlords. Much like Childhood's End, and if you've read Childhood's End, you know that Arthur C. Clarke, who was butt buddies with Crowley, right, they're actually promoting this idea that Carellin, who's this, he looks like a demon, right, But he's our alien savior. And he comes to Earth and gives medical advances and technological advances. And then he says, oh, by the way, I need your first generation of your children.

1:23:48And 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 propaganda in sci-fi. H.G. Wells was a huge propagandist about 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.

1:24:23So he's a Promethean, you could say. But he was also like one of the chief propagandists for the sort of Rothschild, Milner, Fabian circles that were promoting socialism and technocracy back in the 1800s, late 1800s, early 1900s. What are the consistent lies that this propaganda tells? Like what connects all of the, one of them, I'll just start by saying one of the main lies that they're committed to convincing you of is that all this is secular, it's all science-based, it's materialism, like nothing, there's no spooky supernatural. Like I noticed that. Yeah. one of the things I've done on my YouTube channel the last 10 years is what I call the Global Elite Book Series.

1:25:06And all we do in the last 10 years is like we pick various Brzezinski, H.G. Wells, Jacques Attali, Carol Quigley. I mean, you just go down the line and we read through the texts and then I do a talk on them. And what we've noticed, we've done dozens of these, is there's a consistent pattern of, I say there's like five or six commandments commandments 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 united world religion eventually. We must have full spectrum dominance, control of the area of life.

1:25:48Everything is surveilled. All the way up to, we 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 Attali's book, Brief History of the Future. that book was written in 2006 and he was the sort of kissinger to you know uh the presidents of france macron and people like that maybe even mitzvah ron i forget who who he was consultant to but he was the kissinger of france huge neocon uh type person and in that book he says towards the end of it he says we've progressed to the point where we're going to have a global brain It's the Gollum.

1:26:49He calls it the Gollum. We're all going to be linked in. You'll lose your individuality when you're linked into the global brain. He says, at the spearhead of all of this is the transhumanists. 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's sort of unified. And 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.

1:27:39exact same thing that 100 years later almost Jacques Attali says in his books about the global golem. Like that's the goal is to create this sort of homogenized, controllable. And the goal of that, and of course, and that's the point of, you know, mass migration, you know, eliminate distinctions. But the goal of all of that is what? The destruction of people? 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 helped that come to the big screen.

1:28:26But he also wrote another book that was also a movie, which is very enlightening, called 2010. It's not as good of a movie, but in 2010, it becomes more explicit that the Cold War was about producing a dialectical synthesis where the scientific elite from the Soviets and the West come together and they create the technocratic scientific priest class that rules us, that allows us to achieve apotheosis. And then in 3001, that apotheosis happens through union with AI and tech. So basically, the idea is presented, I think, in those books that we become God through technology. Ray Kurzweil, he's even said this kind of stuff.

1:29:10So the singularity, all that kind of ideology, which is not new to Kurzweil, actually. uh hegel had a version of this that he called the omega point where all the dialectical oppositions eventually synthesize into everything in his view becoming spirit which is everything becoming some sort of transcendent unified reality it's huxley's blob it's uh you know i think who's that crazy tayard de chardin the excommunicated jesuit guy he talked about the everything becoming the newosphere. And that actually influenced some of the early developers of the internet. They talked about creating this hybridized, merged idea where everything becomes essentially the net, basically.

1:29:56So I think that that's how they see these things because they worship this idea of evolution. And I'm not saying there's not degrees of like adaptation in nature, but this idea that there is a determined, controllable priest class that can steer us towards some sort of transcendent singularity omega point. That's sort of their religious, that's their eschatology. So they have, like you said, a competing eschatology. 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. Exactly. Exactly.

1:30:34And now some of those writers will 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 an allegory for immortality and resurrection through some sort of gnosis or knowledge or technology. You should replace man with God with yourself. Yeah, Crowley. Crowley's a great example of this because he's a figure who, by the way, was also working for British intelligence. Alistair Crowley was a huge proponent of this idea of man achieving apotheosis through not just tech, but through a sort of magical view of tech, which Isaac Asimov expresses in his three laws of magic or whatever, magic and technology.

1:31:21Arthur C. Clarke, same ideology. He's hanging out with the Crowleyan 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 Blavatsky heavily. She was a Fabian socialist, and Crowley was a huge fan of hers. In fact, he told people to read her writings to understand. Founder of theosophy. Yes. So Theosophy is another great example of this kind of religion of the future that Father Seraphim Rose talked about.

1:31:56In fact, he highlights Theosophy as one of the key elements in his famous book, Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, St. Seraphim Rose now. But very predictive, very accurate that this is essentially demonic. He wrote that in the 70s, basically saying where this H.G. Wells sort of idea 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 we're at. But he says this Blavatsky, satanic type ideology is what, for example, popularized yoga throughout the West. We wouldn't have yoga everywhere, every Instagram chick doing yoga.

1:32:37if it wasn't for Madame Blavatsky and Crowley. With respect, Madame Blavatsky from the surviving photographs does not look like she practiced yoga. I would not want to see her in yoga pants. No. Sorry, I couldn't resist. I am a nasty person. Why yoga? 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 buddhas. 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.

1:33:24So yoga, I think, is a way to, if you take it seriously, I'm not talking about people that just sort of stretch and do Pilates, But like the actual process of yoga is intended to initiate you and basically your, you know, the base of your spine, your chakras and all that, that's supposed to like essentially possess you. Now, I'm not saying everybody does yoga is possessed. I'm saying that that's the purpose of it is you're invoking entities to begin at your butt stuff and like go up and open up your third eye. So it's essentially an initiation process, what it's supposed to be. That's what it is in the Hindu and the Tantric tradition.

1:34:06But in the Tantric tradition, it's actually a lot of really gross stuff, which people don't know that. What does that mean? Like really gross sex stuff. The actual Tantric Buddhism, when you get into the depths of what that's about, is—and Crowley absolutely just borrowed this for his whole process of pushing yoga. you have to do all of the worst possible actions to kind of get beyond good and evil so it's kind of a Nietzschean idea of like i mean the worst thing you could think of you got to eat like feces you got to do incest like you do all the worst things to not just balance the good side but also the evil side so it's the left hand and the right hand path have to be transcended right and so their idea this is a common idea not just no this is like the inner teaching of like tantric Buddhism.

1:34:55But not just tantric Buddhism. Other groups have adopted the same idea. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. You can see why Crowley saw that as applicable to them. Exactly. Kabbalistic echoes there too. But the core idea is you have to go as far out as you can. Yes. Inversion. The principle of inversion. And we talk about this a lot of times. You know, people in our sphere, my buddy Mark Hackard, he's written a bunch of articles about orthodox theology and philosophy and Soviet history. And he's talked about some of the early, for example, Bolsheviks, one guy named Gleb Bokiai, he was very interested in sort of eyes wide shut inversion stuff as a way to revolutionize society.

1:35:40In terms of the Bolshevik revolution, there was... So commit atrocities. And, but not just like killing, but like also to promote in society like degeneracy, because that can revolutionize society. But that's true. It is. In fact, one of the key 60s countercultural revolutionaries, Wilhelm Reich, actually had the idea that in order to have a successful cultural revolution, you would have to have total open sexual pan relationships because that would remove patriarchy. And then with the rise of the goddess, and the feminine principle, that would allow the actual socialist revolution. That was his idea.

1:36:28It was a very common idea. The old-fashioned communists, the Stalinists were prudish. They were against the gay stuff. Totally against it. But the Bolsheviks had been, the pre-Stalin period had embraced that. Stalin pushed back against it. And then in the United States, in the late 50s and 60s, a bunch of revolutionary movements believe that the sla yep yep charles manson you know there was all orgies and but that that ethos of the 60s counterculture stuff wasn't just you know ginsburg and people like you know coming up with crazy ideas to party there was an earlier idea that some of the key fabian social for example 1890s some of the fabian socialists like beatrice sydney webb they actually understood that if you promoted, for example, bestiality in public art, this could undermine and destroy the UK's sexual ethos at that time.

1:37:31So they were way out of the curve, like in the 1890s. Bertrand Russell was famously pansexual, like one of, you know, Terrence 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. There's a power that comes from that, from transgression. It's demonic power. Exactly. But they never called it that. But it's clearly true. But the tantrics understood that. They actually understood that you're actually sort of taking on sort of more and more demonic energy versus God's uncreated energy.

1:38:08But it's still energy. Yeah. So when Satan promises Jesus that he can have the kingdoms, he could deliver the kingdoms. He had the power to bestow on those who worshiped him. It's real. There is a real demonic power that can be tapped into. So that's what makes it even more compelling. I mean, there's a reason people, it's like cigarette smoking. Yeah, it's bad, but people do it. Why? Because they get something out of it. there's a reason that people worship demons, not just because they're inherently perverse, but because it works short term. Yeah. Right? Yeah, absolutely. And again, that principle of inversion is well known way back into ancient, I remember reading.

1:38:55That's why you sacrifice, the Incas sacrificed children. And so the Mayas and the Aztecs and the Vikings. And like, when you sacrifice a virgin to the rain god, it actually rains. Well, like, you probably heard of Michael Aquino, right? Yeah. You know, everybody, you might have heard of his, he wrote that Mind War to Psy War document, which like the Army's doctrine of psychological warfare back in the 80s or whatever it was. And he wrote that. But he wrote another book called 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.

1:39:35So, yes, actually people do study ancient sorcery and magic 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 and 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? uh i mean you oppenheimer described himself as to a degree sort of engaging in i mean i don't know how serious he took it and i've also read some interesting critiques of oppenheimer that that argue that he was perhaps more of a propagandist than an actual scientist so in a lot of these domains of like high esoteric science i don't claim to be a scientist i'm more of a philosophy guy but i don't know but um he could have been much more of a propagandist than he was an actual that was true of a lot of the scientists involved in this it's not clear what they were creating right it's very clear that they were used to create the illusion that they were creating something yeah but it may have pre-existed them i'm just just throwing well i One thing that's interesting is that the way that some of the early people involved in those chemical sciences, you probably heard of Jack Parsons.

1:40:58He was a Crowleyan. They would sometimes describe what they were doing as a kind of ritual. So they saw the idea that you could split the atom as kind of a ritualistic principle of by doing this, you release energy, which is the very type of thing you were talking about with like the demonic aspect of releasing and trying to control the energy. Well, it raises like a question, which is like, where does the act of creation come from? So the act of creation is God's doing. So it's the act of destruction. Right. And Satan's destruction. But the act of creation, like every person who's ever, every person really who's ever engaged in any creative activity knows that there's what we call this moment of inspiration where the idea, the notion comes to you, but where does it come from?

1:41:44And people don't explore that question for some reason, but it's an open question. Like, where does that come from? Ideas pop into your mind, thoughts pop into your mind that you've never considered before, but that are just there. and so you're not really coming up with them so much as you're summoning them i guess is what i'm saying yeah and that's true for good things but it's also true for bad things is it not i mean does any living person not know what i'm talking about well so in the orthodox tradition we have this idea that your thoughts come from one of three sources it either comes from you 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.

1:42:26So there's three possible ways that you could get that inspiration. The term that's used in the Greek is logismoi, which is sort of thought forms that can sometimes occur. Usually those are in the Orthodox tradition spoken of sort of as demonic influences. But you're right to that, I think, that idea of inspiration and then putting it into your work, If you look at it from the evil perspective, that's the whole thing that Crowley talked about in magic theory and practice is that all you're doing is, he says, the world and all of its actions are equalized. Everything in the world is equal. There's nothing good or bad.

1:43:04And the true magician is the one who takes the matter or the things in the world and puts his will and intention into it and then affects an energetic change in the world. and whichever one is successful and takes on, that's the true magician. Now, I mean, Crowley is a liar and a deceiver, so I'm not trying to give him too much credit, but that is the attitude I think that a lot of people who engage in that type of an idea, they have that principle that they think that they're doing sort of magic workings in the world to affect change and that makes them the magest. Does that make sense? It does make sense.

1:43:45i i just as i get older i have come to believe that there that we're really kind of a pass through a lot of the time that we're subject to all these external forces that we don't acknowledge we don't perceive most of the time but that those are really the defining moments of our lives like we either accept or reject things presented to us from outside of us i guess is what i'm saying yeah i yeah i mean really i didn't find any significant deep analysis of this type of a analysis of like spiritual psychology i guess you could say until you know i got deeper into 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 priest orthodox priests, they're masters of human psychology.

1:44:35That's not all they are, but if you hear for decades people's confessions, you're going to be a very good psychologist if you're good at it, right? So you're going to understand, you know, not just human weaknesses and stuff like that, but you're going to understand these other influences and hopefully have the discernment to know when the influences might be from the divine or when they might be from something else. You know, one of the things that Father Saint Sarah from Rose talked about in his book, Orthodoxy in the Religion of the Future, is that he warned about coming mass delusions and what would sort of dupe large amounts of people.

1:45:16And 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 domain of charismaticism 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 ancient sort of Hindu practices.

1:46:01that's the type of Christianity that's growing in Africa, Latin, South America. It's rampant. It's a massively powerful delusion because it replaces traditional Christianity with the idea that it's something akin to voodoo, basically. If you study voodoo, it's very, very similar to charismaticism in the way that anything that you experience trumps what's in divine revelation or what's in church tradition. Like it's all about the direct sort of ecstatic experience. And so it doesn't matter what happened or came before, then that might sound like it's not that big of a deal. But take, for example, Ann Lee, right?

1:46:41The founder of the Quakers. Ann 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 bad. 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 about the—just be clear, you're talking about the shakers, not the Society of Friends. You know, so she comes out of the— Right.

1:47:19She's a schism out of the Quaker Society of Friends. Shaker. Yeah, and they were big and mean. Yeah. they didn't reproduce exactly so that's one of the downsides of like uh not a long-term strategy but it's an attack on not just patriarchy but also attack on like good sexuality in terms of producing yes uh but it's also like massive proto-feminism so it might sound counterintuitive to say that that's very similar to the 60s counterculture revolution but it's not because Because the whole idea of 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.

1:48:06That's the end goal of all that is sterility. In fact, in one of the minor prophets, I want to say it's like Amos or Hosea, there's actually a mentioning that the curse that you will get is the sterility that you desire. Does that make sense? Yes. So what I'm saying here is like you were talking about with destruction, these actions, these inversions, they are a releasing of destructive power, and the way to do that is to always invert the existing natural order. And that has a powerful effect in terms of not just creating destruction, but also creating a scenario that's then more easily manageable and controllable from cunning oligarchical types of elites.

1:48:46yes and it also infuses them with dark spiritual powers there's just no question about it it's not just the desire to get rich or the desire to control other people it's that they are filled yes i mean when justin trudeau systematically destroys his nation which he did yes um he gets something out of that and it's not just like the consulting contract that comes after it's more than that this is what annoys me about connie inc and sort of the the fake conservative side of those who they're unable to diagnose what's really going on because number one they don't have like the right spiritual component but they're also averse to all ideas of subversion and conspiracy oh that's all crazy but it's like but isn't that a much better explanation of justin trudeau or these kind of they're not just dummies who are like liberal they're actually perhaps consciously malicious of course or they're or they're or they're tools of or tools of a higher powers right but it's not it's not a joke it's not that they're just like stupid it's like lame effeminate 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 that's an accident well when you read a lot of these global technocratic oligarchical elites they're a lot smarter than people think and much more faithful yeah you know they're not agnostics um that's for sure so let i want to wrap this up to go back to orthodoxy and its view of the future 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.

1:50:42It's like, you know, there's a beginning and end to history. Like everyone feels that that's true and there's going to be an end to all this. Who knows when it comes? But there are a lot of people who are very focused on that. I don't know what I think of it. Probably bad, but whatever. Leaving my thoughts aside, what is the orthodox view of the end times? Yeah, one of the crucial components to contrast the Orthodox perspective to those sorts of dispensational Christian Zionist perspectives is that they've missed what the first advent, in our view, did. So we don't believe that the kingdom of God is postponed to the end of the world.

1:51:22We think that at the first advent, as Christ says many times in the gospel, the kingdom is here, the kingdom is in your midst, the kingdom is the presence of the Holy Spirit. This generation will not pass away before I come back. And we believe in what's called partial preterism. Many of the church fathers, especially Christosom, 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 appropriate that the temple would pass away now that what the temple was a type of, which is the church, is here.

1:51:58So 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 temple administration with the showbread and the lampstand and all that, those things are fulfilled in, in our view, what the Orthodox Church is. The earth, our church possesses those things in the here and now. So sometimes in theology, it's called the already not yet principle. So the kingdom of God, the end times are here now. They began at the first advent.

1:52:37So for us, for example, the book of Revelation, most people, most evangelicals, oh, that's into the world. And that's John Hagee and the seven blood moons of Israel. No, no, it's now. Like we live in the eschatological reality. When you go to the divine liturgy, that is heaven on earth. now. It's not a postponed end of the world. There is an end of the world, but Jesus brought the end of the world at his first advent. And one way that we know this is that most of the time when you ask 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 thou at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool, every time that's cited in the New Testament, it's cited about his ascension, which happened after he died and was resurrected.

1:53:21It'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 sent his apostles out throughout the Roman Empire. You have this prophecy in Daniel 2 that the empire under which this Messiah is born eventually becomes the kingdom of the Messiah within three centuries. the Roman Empire becomes essentially the Orthodox Catholic Church. So we see all of that as fulfilled when he ascended and began his reign in his church. Thus, there is an end of the world, but we don't sit around speculating about news headlines about when that's coming, because we're already in the end of the world now when we go to the divine liturgy.

1:54:08That is the eschaton in the here and now. Does that make sense? It does make sense. It does make sense. So So that kind of like changes your responsibility as a Christian living in the world. Exactly. And it also doesn't make us worship some atheist nation state in the Middle East that was created by the Rothschilds and the UN in 1948. Oh, that's not in your liturgy? No, I'm saying like my duty is not to John Hagee's shofar and the blood moons or whatever. Blood moon pies. What are blood moons? You know who John Hagee is? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, he always tries to play on whatever. I can never be mad at John Higgy because he just seems so lost.

1:54:52Sad. But he's a deceiver. Yeah, but I mean, he was doing this big thing a couple years ago about, the blood moons of Israel, the end times are signified by the blood moons. So I just made the joke of blood moon pies because if you know what a moon pie is, it's like, you know, because he's a portly fellow. He is, yeah. He's at the Moon Pies. So does that, but it means then the Orthodox are not waiting for the next life. They're like engaged in this one. Well, it's a both end, right? So it's not that we focus all of our time and energy on here in the now or, you know, politics or the social order.

1:55:33We have sort of, I guess, tiered responsibilities. I mean, obviously, you know, for us, kingdom of God would come first. The church 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 history of the, say, Middle Ages, the Latin church, this idea that, well, to be celibate and single is good, but if you're married, that's somehow bad or lesser, right? We would say there's many goods versus this idea of a sort of a strict good or evil. That comes out of the dialectics that Augustine had.

1:56:13Augustine had a very specific idea that, just as an example, he said that marital sex, in his mind, St. 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 created thing. And if it's enraptured with a created thing, like in the moment of sexual release, then you're in some way not focused on God. So he had a dialectical view of sin and good and evil and of the will. The Orthodox view doesn't have that view.

1:56:50In fact, we think that there's the possibility of many different goods. So married life is good and has graces, and there might be certain advantages to living a single celibate life, but it's not inherently somehow holier than if you're married. and a lot of orthodox monastics will even admit that that that a lot of married people can achieve a higher level of sanctity even than some monastics because just sacrifice in itself is not i mean i desire mercy not sacrifice right so just sacrificing itself doesn't necessarily equate to 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.

1:57:33But 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. Thank you very much.