https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=GIsbUHDVwpw
And then I was getting flooded with emails. I would get emails every single day and it was always pretty much the same story. It was, you know, I grew up vaguely religious, became an atheist in my teen years. Now, you know, I’ve reached the end of that and I don’t know what to do. Like, where do I go? How do I do this? How do I connect these things together? What’s going on? And so that led me to making videos myself because I was like, I’m not gonna answer all these people. I can’t answer all these messages. So I thought, okay, so let’s try to take some of the big questions that I saw and try to answer them through YouTube. And so that was five years ago, I guess now. I think that that’s a fantastic tool to bring it there. You said yourself and your brother, like decoded it and made it kind of, you know, palpable for normies to understand it to an extent. And, you know, we constantly talk about at the end of every stream or at the end of every interview it’s kind of like, what’s the plan going forward? Now for me, you know, I’ve got three kids, 12, 16 and nine. So the 12 and the 16 year old in the last six months have been introduced to the likes of an Uber boy. Where you can talk about what holds interest in teenagers when it’s kind of music or it’s kind of pop culture. But in the same breath, the lads are learning these intrinsic qualities, these morals and this history. And I think it’s like the best way forward. And when we talk about hope, that there’s hope in the content, if that makes sense. And just in terms of the YouTube side of it, you know, everyone wants to jump on YouTube, get a camera and get up and going. Everyone wants to do that. It seems to be the done thing. But there’s a lot to be said then for the content that’s coming through, you know? You can hit so many different facets. And the fact that there’s a place for what you’re doing now in terms of deciphering Christianity is just amazing. How do you feel the whole YouTube kind of mechanism? Oh, I think for now it’s fine. For sure YouTube’s scary because of its censorship. So you always weren’t worried that things are gonna start to tighten and clamp down. But I’ve been really excited to see, or like let’s say when I started doing this, when I met Jordan Peterson and I talked to Jordan Peterson, I felt like my brother and I were the only people that could understand these things. And then we saw Jordan and we’re like, wait a minute, he’s talking about very similar things that we are. And so I realized, wait, he could understand me. And so I, and he did, but now it’s changed. Now it’s completely changed. And now I’m surrounded by people that are super intelligent, extremely insightful, who have a desire to transform their lives, who have a desire to mend their relationships, and do it through return to Christianity. Some of them may be less explicitly so, but always this kind of desire to reconnect. And so, let’s say I started the Symbolic World podcast, but now it’s a whole ecosystem where we have people writing for our blog. We have articles that come out almost every week. There are people, other people making videos that are kind of in the same vein, doing more niche things, interpreting movies, interpreting different aspects. So it’s, I think it’s super exciting. And so that for sure is, my hope is people. My hope is not in the state and in all these things that are happening around us. I don’t have a lot of hope for that, but I definitely have hope in people. And I have hope when I talk to someone. Yesterday I talked to a man who, when I met him, was just coming out of like angry atheism, you know? And that was like two years ago. And so I’ve talked to him twice now, or no, three times I think now I’ve talked to him. And now I talked to him last time, and he was just telling me about how he’s just been reconciled with his family, how he’s going to church, you know? He’s living with his wife and he’s writing a text and trying to integrate the poetic eddas, the eddas, the Northern eddas with kind of Christian thinking. I was like, wow, this is amazing. Like, so amazing. So I’m, and then there’s also other things happening. Like, I don’t know if you know about the Lord of Spirits podcast, which is a Orthodox Christian podcast about trying to help people understand the Old Testament and the more mythological aspects of the Old Testament in a way that is coherent with our experience today. And that’s been amazing. It just kind of popped up and all of a sudden there it was. I had allies, I had people that were doing similar things than I was. And like I said, if I project myself back 10 years ago, that was not the case. Like even online, there was nothing like this. Yeah, it’s interesting you say that because again, a lot of things go back to the negative, like the experience that we’ve had over the last two years. Some of the experience that many of us have had from feeling kind of ostracized out of the wider society or ashamed for having beliefs that are deemed to be objectionable. But I think you’ve touched on something that is hopeful that I think a lot of us neglect to see is we’ve found a lot of like-minded people and not like-minded in that we all think the same. We think that there’s something not quite right in society and we’re now sharing ideas. We’re doing things like this. You were good enough to grace us here with a very insightful discussion, which is, means a lot to me personally. I like sharing it with people. So this is something that I’ve found purpose in. I think Peter has found purpose in. And like Peter, I’m learning things I would have never have learned before had these things not happened and had this media. The media can be a lot of bad things, but it has made people like yourself, Jordan Peterson, and a lot of very inspirational speakers come to mind that I’ll listen to their podcasts, take insights, and instead of becoming angry and bitter, I start to become more introspective, look at myself, look at my own self-improvement and make periodic changes and have a better life, having a better mindset, and then trying to share that with people on a more simplistic, like I’m no intellectual, but I can share a basic idea and a lot of people resonate towards that as well. So that’s given me purpose. And do you think that perhaps maybe the wider society will start to appreciate that more as time goes on because we might see a generation of people genuinely more interested in listening to ideas perhaps they didn’t conceive of before not being as closed off? I think, but I think it’s definitely opened up a space. The internet and YouTube has opened up a space which prior to that was almost completely shut down, not was completely closed off. Media had become completely programmed with 10-minute segments and this kind of all that pre-digested content that it was just fed to us, but YouTube and this kind of media landscape has definitely opened up a space for thought which wasn’t there before. And I think that that’s wonderful. I think that’s great. And the thing that excites me the most even, even more than what I said before was to see it land in my own life, which is, I go to this little church where there were, until two years ago, until a year ago, there’s a top 20 people, like never more than 20 people in that church for 30 years. And so all of a sudden now it’s changed. Now all of a sudden there’s all these people and there are these people that are, there are few of them who have in part come, let’s say to the church through the things that I talk about. And so now it’s like I have people, I have people like physical people that I talk to and that I relate to, because I never had that before, I’ll be honest with you. It’s so cool. Like for a very long time I never had that before. So all of a sudden that’s like I have this weird like community and like, and they have their own strengths. Like there’s a guy in our parish now who’s amazing in liturgy and like knows all the services and everything. And I’m not very good at that. So he’s teaching me how to do the different services and stuff. And so there’s this feeling like all of a sudden there’s even the possibility of actual, of real communities. And that’s what I hope for most people too, is that we also have to be able to take this online stuff offline and then go back and find real, participate in real communities. And it’s hard because it’s so easy. It’s a lot easier here because it’s like, I can have access to, you know, a hundred people that I agree with, whereas in the real world, it’s messier. So, but that’s what I hope as well. Like that’s to see that happen more. [“Pomp and Circumstance”] [“Pomp and Circumstance”]