https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=tAwq1hORhxw
Alright, hey folks. Let’s see. Got eight people. Alright. Let’s do this. As you can see, I am back in my home. We left South Carolina at the end. I think we arrived on the first week of November. We drove from South Carolina where everything was green and we drove up. It was really crazy. We’re driving up through Virginia and then finally up home. As we were going, we went through fall. We started out green and then the leaves were getting yellow as we were moving up and then red and finally brown. By the time we got to Montreal, there was snow on the ground. There’s been snow on the ground ever since we’ve been here and it hasn’t gone away. Usually in November, snow lasts, doesn’t last. It just falls on the ground and then it just goes away. I am happy to be back though, to get back into all my stuff. I’ve been trying to get my carvings in line and at the same time, I’ve been also trying to get all these videos done. All right, I’m going to get these questions ready, but I’m happy to be back. All right, here we go. OK, so I’m going to start with the questions. Make sure I can see the chat. One of the things I’m going to be doing is going to be one of the things I’m going to be doing before the new year is get better organized in terms of in terms of how I do the videos, how I do this Q&A, everything. So. All right, here we go. I keep going back up. All right, a little more comments. So we’ve got 31 comments, but I don’t think that’s 31 questions. I think that’s I think people got into discussions on Patreon. OK, all right, here we go. All right, so Jacob Russell asks, I used to see hierarchy in the past. I’m not sure if I’m going to see it again. I’m not sure if I’m going to see it again. I’m not sure if I’m going to see it again. He asks, I used to see hierarchy like a pyramid, but now I’m seeing it more like fractals. This makes much more sense when you say Christ fills the hierarchy because you literally see the same pattern through the fractal. Am I onto something? Then he says, edit, I just watch your encountering God and stories talk and I see you’ve been saying this all along. For some reason, I’ve been separating the patterns you’ve been describing. You’ve been talking about with the hierarchies JB has referenced. Now, so here’s the thing. The thing is that we can look at patterns and the hierarchies in different manners because obviously they’re spiritual, they’re spiritual patterns. So when you represent them visually or mentally, you know, we have to. We have to give them a form. And so it is OK to represent hierarchies sometimes as strict hierarchies like a pyramid. Sometimes that makes sense because you can understand the way in which the one moves to the many, the way in which, you know, identity gives essence to a multiplicity. All of that you can understand by seeing the notion of the hierarchy in terms of the pyramid. But it’s also helpful to understand the patterns as fractals in the sense that the hierarchical structure will reappear at every level of reality. And so for anything to exist, it has to have a certain amount of hierarchy because it has to be something rather than everything else. And so that point of something is already a different differentiation of quality amongst all the potential that could be. And so just that differentiation of potential is already setting up a hierarchy. So just because you say just naming something, saying this, pulling something out of the potentiality is always a hierarchy. So if you have something like a, let’s say, a microphone, because I have a microphone in front of me. Let’s say a microphone has a structure, a hierarchical structure, it brings things together. There are certain elements of the microphone which are essential. Some things are secondary. And so there’s this hierarchy of manifestation. But then each element in the microphone has also its own hierarchy. You know, each physical element and also each, let’s say, functional element. No matter how you put it, there has to be everything will lay itself out into this hierarchy. All right. Hope that happened. The hope that answers the question. By the way, Jacob, I have not forgotten the video about hair. I’m going to do it. I promise. I’ve just, it’s just been trying to get back here and get everything organized. It’s coming. It’s coming. All right. I can’t see the chat, which is annoying me. All right. I think this is better. All right. So in, okay. So what is the symbolism of a river? So the thing about symbolism is most symbols don’t function as alone. And so most symbols exist within a relational symbolism. So for something to have meaning, it has to be compared to other different things. It has to be in a story. It has to be in a pattern. And so a river can have different meanings. A river can mean, can represent, let’s say, flowing water or water coming from heaven. Like water coming from above. A river is always water coming from above. Flowing river, flowing water, water of life. Okay. Compared to, let’s say, the sea or, you know, the bitter waters, let’s say. The idea of this water that’s underneath. And so you have water that comes down and then you have water that’s below that’s still. So the water that comes down can represent a kind of vivifying aspect. It gives life. It’s like, it’s a spiritual influence, let’s say. It’s someone, something like rain. And so, but a river can also represent the same kind of intermediary chaotic structure that, let’s say, the sea represents, depending on what story. For example, this notion of crossing the Jordan in the scripture. And that, in that story, the Jordan represents more the same thing as crossing the Red Sea or crossing the flood. Whereas in other aspects, if we talk about, let’s say, Christ talks about, you know, the difference between the well and the living water which comes from above. And so the river can also represent that living water that comes from above. All right. That was Marco Popovic who asked that question. Sorry, I need to always remember to name the people who asked the question. All right. So, Lori Letiago, I hope I’m pronouncing that right, asks about the video game Mist and Riven by the brothers Rand and Robin Miller. I have not, I’ve never played those games. So sadly, I cannot interpret those games for you. I’m not really, I have played video games, you know, and it’s still once in a while. I’ll play video games today, but I’ve never really been a gamer. So my video game experience is rather limited. All right. Vladimir Batsiu asks, would you be interested in having a talk with Father John Bear from the UK? He’s a brilliant orthodox theologian and has some very interesting talking points, especially on the mutation of the attitude towards death in Western culture. Yeah, sure. I would be happy to talk to Father John Bear. He was at St. Vladimir’s for a while. I don’t know if he’s still around. I know there’s been a lot of changes at St. Vladimir’s seminary. I would be very happy to talk to him. The way that I choose my guests is on my channel is really a mix of happenstance and let’s say because I want to talk about a specific thing. So sometimes it’s someone who contacts me who’s interesting and then I kind of get them on the channel and other times it’s people who I know will address certain subject like when I talk to John Vervecky or when I talk to Father Stephen Freeman. Those are people that I knew had certain things to say, which I thought would be interesting within the frame of what I had been talking about. And so Father John, I haven’t read that much from him and so I don’t know. I would have to figure out what I would talk to, what we would talk about. Alright, so Laura Gilles asks, my question is about the continuing rise of chaos. Catholic Church, Orthodox Church, our worldwide political system being pulled into reactionary far right and far left ideologies. I think JVP does a great job of identifying issues on the left less intuitive when it comes to what is happening in Brazil and other nationalist movements. Alright, I’m not sure that’s a question. Let’s see. She asks another question. How do you see as the best way to steer through this disintegration? Okay, okay. To steer through this disintegration, there’s a second question. Sorry guys. To through this disintegration, I have become friends with Benedictine monk, although Catholic he has deeply Eastern Orthodox bent and has been extremely happy to see me. Catholic he has deeply Eastern Orthodox bent and has been extremely helpful. As Abba Paul says, stay close to Jesus. I also went to the Marian Pilgrimage site in Tinos. I don’t really know how to completely steer through the disintegration. The way that I can just tell you the way that I’ve been trying to do it and it has to do with what you see in my videos. It has been to first of all, try to help people understand both sides of the extreme to understand the left and the right hand to understand heaven and earth and to understand that what it looks like when one side starts to win over the other when there isn’t a balance between the two. Okay, and so doing that, in my hope in doing that is that people will be able to perceive the balance and then try to inhabit that balance as much as they can. I think that for sure in terms of practical manner, the way I think to steer through the disintegration is to remember your communities, to focus on people that are next to you, focus on your family, learn to love your neighbor, learn to love your family, and then also try to be connected to a community. Try to be connected to especially a, I think the best is of course a church community and there are reasons for that. It’s because these communities online for example, like let’s say this little community that we have, this little symbolic world community, there’s a Facebook group, there’s a bit on Reddit and then there’s these different talks. It’s great to encounter people that think in similar ways and are kind of exploring similar subjects as you are and I think that’s wonderful and it’s very helpful. But this is also where we, this is in these spaces is where we can create these so-called echo chambers. And so these are important, I think they’re important when we want to learn and we want to push this further but then we always need to go back to our actual communities where then you have to face the person who is annoying and you have to face the person who disagrees with you politically or whatever because in a church you have all kinds of people and so living within a community is a good way to foresee, you can see the different aspects of reality in different people and how people emphasize different parts of the, let’s say of the cosmic story and so it makes us less sensitive when people aren’t in line with the way we think. Alright, so Matthew Nagel asks, just wondering if there’s anything you might want to say regarding the incident with Jay Dyer. I totally understand if not. There’s not much I want to say about that. You know, so those who don’t know, Jay Dyer is a YouTuber, he’s a writer, he wrote a book. He’s an extremely smart person. He has a very, very sharp mind and I think he has a very good, he has a very profound theoretical understanding of theology and the Church Fathers. He also is able to connect the Church Fathers to, let’s say, a way of seeing the world and a kind of metaphysical, join a kind of metaphysical thinking with the church. He’s able to connect the Church Fathers to a way of thinking with theological and more practical thinking. And so he’s a very smart guy and I had been, because he’s on YouTube and because we talk about similar subjects in different ways, I thought that we could maybe at some point have a discussion. But you know, there were a few things about him I wasn’t sure about. Some people told me, oh, he’s all right. Other people were telling me different things about him and so we had some private discussions talking with him, trying to figure him out and he was also trying to figure me out to see, you know, because what I wanted, I didn’t want to have a debate with him. I wanted that if we’re going to do a video together that we would do something that we were kind of on the same side and talking about things together. And I don’t totally agree with the way he does things. In some ways, I think that he, we need people like that in the church because he’s kind of a firebrand and he’s criticizing and he’s, you know, he’s pointing the finger at people who are kind of off the rails. And you know, there’s a lot of saints that are like that in our history. And so I think that people like that, we need people like that. I’m not like that. That’s not the way that I do things. I’m more conciliatory. I tend to want to see the positive aspects and try to build something. Not to say that he doesn’t, I don’t know, but I saw him being more aggressive and criticized different priests and different organizations in Orthodoxy. And so we were discussing, you know, totally in private. You know, I don’t like talking about people usually in public. But then I think he saw it as, I think he took it as an insult. And then he started going after me on Twitter and he finally blocked me. And so that’s what happened. So I’m kind of sad. I’m kind of sad about that because although I disagree with some of the ways he does things, I think that he’s a very, very smart person. And I think that he also has a lot of people that have, you know, found Christianity and found traditional thinking through his analyses. So, I don’t know, I think it’s too bad that it happened that way. I kind of wish that we would have been able to work through it. And so, you know, that’s life. You know, you can’t, that’s right. I mean, just keep going. All right. So, okay. So that was Matthew Nagel, I think I said. All right. So Nolan Watson asks, I don’t remember where I heard this, but Jordan Peterson once spoke about religion in terms of spirit and dogma. In essence, he applied his chaos in order lands to religion. He said that it has a constant balance of the two dogmas necessary to hold things together, but it must be revivified by the spirit. It seems to me that the actions of a religion don’t really change, although the deeper implications of these axioms may be better understood after time has passed, which could be considered as a renewal. Perhaps this is what he meant. Additionally, I wonder if this way of describing religion fosters notions of continual progression. The idea of continual progression is attractive. The more I think about it, the more I think it’s dangerous, but I can’t fully articulate why. Seems like there needs to be a point where things can come to an end. What do you think about this? Well, it’s a, there’s a lot of stuff in what you said. I think I’ll try to deal with the basic idea, which is this notion of what he calls dogma and spirit. I don’t know if that’s the right way to say it, but I do think that there are definitely in Christianity, there is what you would call the official hierarchy of the church, the actual, let’s say structural part of the church, which has the canons and also the bishops and the priests and the way that you become a priest and a bishop and the order of things. And we also have, let’s say, a more, we could call it a prophetic part, although I don’t know if that’s the right way, but we have saints and we have aesthetics. We have sometimes extreme aesthetics and those saints and aesthetics, they tend to to act as a bulwark towards the ossification of the church and toward the danger of the church becoming a, you know, just this tyrannical, hypocritical thing. It’s mostly the hypocritical part. That’s the thing that Christ criticizes the most is usually not the structural part. It’s not the fact that there are laws and that there are, that there is, let’s say, a strict form. Christ doesn’t actually criticize that very much. What he does criticize is hypocrisy, which is you have this form, but it’s corrupt because the people who actually are supposed to inhabit the hierarchy, who have roles in the hierarchy, are actually undermining it by their actions. And so it becomes a kind of law without body. It becomes a, you know, it becomes spirit without matter, right? It becomes the spiritual part without the matter part. And so Christ is continuously asking us to renew that, not renew it in the sense of progress or in the sense of this kind of weird social progress idea that we have today, but renew it in the sense of making it live again, you know? A good example of this is, for example, even in ancient times, the Jews, they had the Torah, and the Torah was written without vowels. And so it was just consonants, and there was no separation between the words and no separation between the paragraphs. It was just this line, this stream of vowels, right, of consonants. And so that’s the structure, right? And then the person would take the text and then by reading it, by vocalizing it, would be infusing, let’s say, spirit into the text. And it’s mostly in that way. We have to be able to live the canons and the rules and the liturgies and, you know, the hierarchy of the church. We have to live it in a manner which is in tune with its purpose, which is the healing of the body, which is the joining of the church with God in worship, but also in communion. All these things, that’s the purpose of the hierarchy, you know? And once it derogates from that purpose, then it has become dead letter. And so we have to revivify it in that manner, which was bringing it back to its original purpose. But not so much in the terms of kind of progressive social agendas and all that stuff. That is really a red herring, in my opinion. All right. So Jacob Russell asks, could you talk about how an icon makes material sacred? Or is all material essentially sacred or has sacredness to it? Where does this sacredness begin and end? Would a tattoo of the Theotokos be an icon? And should it be venerated? Man, should it be a screen print on a t-shirt? When you carve an icon, when does it become an icon worthy of veneration? And what if the piece is carved away? I think an image on a computer could not be argued as sacred because the manner in which it is being presented to you is imaginary in a sense. It is an idea form. It’s technically ones and zeros, a non-material image made by material components. It almost seems the reverse of an icon. This is a complicated question. For those who want a little bit of an answer to that, you can watch my latest video that I just put up. You can find the link. It’s not public yet, but you can find the link on Patreon or on the Facebook group where I talk about icons and this problem of mass production and reproduction and how it affects the iconicity of an icon. I’m not going to go into it right now. I would say check out that talk. It’s towards the end. It’s in the question period. If you don’t want to listen to the whole talk, you’ll find a question that talks exactly about that. All right, so Jacob Russell asked, that was Jacob Russell. And Jacob Russell asked again, last one, how would you describe beauty? The notion of in the eye of the beholder is a very modern terms as its foundation is in relativism. There has to be a benchmark, doesn’t there? A hierarchy of beauty. Yes, it’s a bit complicated. I think that beauty would be when things fit together. And so, you know that sense, let’s say that you look at something, you look at a tree or you look at a, just as an adesine or if you look at something and it’s just right in the sense that the way the things are put together are in a ordered proportion, that there’s a sense of hierarchy, there’s a sense of purposefulness. But also of, I would say that, I would say a sense of proportionality. Things are in their place. And so, that is, let’s say the higher aspect of beauty, but there’s also, I would say, I think there’s a lower aspect of beauty, which is a kind of particularization as well. And so, there can be, we see it now, actually, if we see it today more than at any time in the history of the world, where things can be too perfect. So, you can have something which is perfectly structured, perfectly geometric, perfectly hierarchical, like a geometric shape, but you can find images like that, you can find objects like that, and there’s something lacking in that perfection, like the perfection of a mass-produced object. Whereas, there’s also an aspect of beauty which is found in the relationship between the hierarchy of form and the accidental. And so, when I talk about a church, and I talk about how the church goes from the altar, and there’s this hierarchy all the way to the outside where you have the gargoyles, I think that that’s the total picture, let’s say, of the beautiful. And so, Aiden Hart, who’s an iconographer that I admire very much, he lived in Mount Athos for several years, and I think he was at Simon Petra Monastery. Anyways, his elder there, I forget the name of the elder that he was referring to, but he said that something about that there is such a thing as perfect imperfection and imperfect perfection, in the sense that when you look at an art object and you see the humanity in it, because there is something that’s slightly off in its peripheries, something that’s not totally perfect, then it also participates in the beauty. Just like, let’s say, a tree, no maple is the same. All maples have both something which makes them a maple, and you can see the beauty of the maple, but there’s also something in the maple which makes it its own particular maple, and that also participates in the beauty. And I mentioned this in the last Q&A, I think, talking about the difference between Christian architecture and Islamic architecture, where Christian architecture has a underlying pattern, which is very strict, let’s say, but then allows for this particularization. So it won’t be just a square and a dome with four corners, let’s say, like four minarets, like a mosque. It has that structure underneath, but then you’ll also have different, the transients will be different, and there’ll be different variations on this kind of basic geometric pattern. All right, I think enough on that. All right, let me just want to mention, because some of when we talk about J. Dyer, Kanga Rude Media says he can connect the church fathers to mass conspiracy in a fallacious way, and he says, unfortunately, J. Dyer turned me away from going any further in orthodoxy for now, at least. Yeah, I don’t know what to say about that. I’m not a big conspiracy guy, not that I don’t think, I think there are conspiracies, but I feel like, because these conspiracies are often so big and so beyond us, that I feel like it’s much better to pay attention to what’s next to you and to your immediate surroundings. You know, it’s like, let’s say the entire church is corrupt because it’s run by Freemasons. I don’t even know if that’s true, if it’s possible, but that question doesn’t really ask, you’re not asked to deal with that question. What you’re asked to deal with is your priest, your bishop, your priest who you go to confession to, and who will give you penance, and who will help you on your journey. Now, if you encounter in that priest a heretic, if you encounter in that, in your bishop who’s directly engaging with you, if you encounter in that person a heretic or a, you know, a pedophile or something like that, then that definitely is your problem, and it’s something that you have to pray fervently about, and that you have to look at ways, at how to be able to deal with this, confront this in a manner which will be, which will not be a desire to just kind of out of resentment or out of the desire to just blow everything up. And so, but so I think these mass kind of conspiracy questions in terms of orthodoxy, I think that when we look at them for too much, what happens is we are, we become incapable of being engaged in our actual community. We become incapable of being orthodox in a small real way, which is going to church, taking communion, you know, loving your neighbor, helping the poor in your parish, looking around you. That’s what being a Christian is. So, yeah. All right. Okay, so Frank Rowley asks, what do you see as the defining characteristics of individuals who are willing to travel far from the center as opposed to those who did feel the need to stay close to the center and everyone in between? I’m interested in the symbolic representation as they have appeared in Christian literature as opposed to modern day psychological interpretations, although the comparison might be interesting. It’s very difficult to answer that question because because you have characters, usually the characters, the characters who actually have a story, usually are characters who travel away from the center and come back in some manner or travel away from the center in some ways. The characters who just are in the center, usually they don’t have a story, which is fine. Sometimes you don’t need a story. You know, all the priests in the Old Testament that are named, you know, that’s what they were. They were the center. The high priest, all the high priests that don’t have stories, you know, that they just stayed the course and they were fine, you know. But usually, most of the stories in the Bible represent the basic story of the Bible. Like we talked about how the Bible is a fractal structure. And so it is the fall and moving away from the garden and then a kind of return in some manner to a stable order, you know. So you have the fall, then you have Cain and Abel, and then Seth restores, let’s say, a semblance of a center. Then you have a fall, fall, fall, fall, then you have Noah who goes all the way to the end and then restores a kind of semblance of a center. So you kind of have this story that goes over and over. But the different aspects, the different characters have different aspects. A good example, a good, two good examples are, you know, the difference between Joseph and King David, you know, Joseph is the exile of the center itself. That’s what Joseph is. And so Joseph is the just and he is cast out from Israel and goes to Egypt and carries with him, let’s say, the seed, carries with him his existence as the seed, which holds the world together, and then brings it to Egypt, where he then acts as the savior of Egypt and then he then acts as the savior of his people when they finally come back to him as the center. So maybe that’s an example of someone who remains in the center but kind of at the same time will travel because it’s like the seed being cast out. Whereas King David is really this, the story of this kind of wild outsider who is, he’s a shepherd, he’s the lowest of the low, he’s also, he acts crazy, he does all this crazy stuff. You know, he marries other people’s wives, he pretends to be an enemy, he dances naked in front of the art, he does all this crazy stuff, but then he kind of brings things back, you know, and then, you know, founds Jerusalem and founds the holy city. And so this kind of going to the edge and bringing back, okay? I don’t know how else to say it, like every character is a different play on the same, kind of the same story of this, you know, this move away and this coming back. And in the terms of Joseph, you kind of follow the center out and then you see the coming back of Israel. Whereas David, he goes all the way, he’s a wild, wild character and then he comes and founds the holy city. All right. So Nick De La Cruz asks, I’m new, so sorry if this has been already asked already. Where did George R.R. Martin get his idea of the overall theme of Game of Thrones? I have not seen it. I have not seen or read Game of Thrones. There’s something about it that really doesn’t interest me. It’s really hard for me to answer this question because I haven’t seen it. The one thing that I’ve been told about Nick De La Cruz, about Game of Thrones and that I, by what I’ve seen, by what I’ve grasped, I tend to think that’s true, that it is a kind of nihilistic answer to someone like Tolkien. It’s like a postmodern deconstruction of the kind of world of fantasy which Tolkien built and which has laid itself out in different forms. This idea of these different types of people and these different, these archetypes, the mage and the paladin or the barbarian and all these different types that we find in fantasy, which are actually quite coherent and a kind of very little, a good way to understand some traditional symbolism that Game of Thrones, of what I understand, tends to deconstruct all that. All right, so Rys Oliver asks, as a follow-up to my lore resolution question about the place of disagreeable people in the church, oh yeah, last month, that was last month, what is the center that we might defend given the diverse history of Christian interpretation? We propose we join church only to attempt to argue with everyone and Saint Christopher’s to flip the church’s foundational assumption from the inside, by which I mean any heretical to a scientific naturalism fundamentalism, mostly. I think I speak for other disagreeable people in asserting that I don’t defend defunct institutions. Okay, wow. All right, I would definitely say that don’t do that, like really don’t do that. It’s very, it’s really, really not, would not be helpful for you to do that. If you join a church, if you convert, if you’re a chrismated, if you’re baptized, if you join a church, the first thing you need to do is shut up and listen. That’s the first thing you need to do. I’m not saying turn off your, I’m not saying turn off your brain. I’m not saying turn off your critical ability. None of that, none of that. But the first thing you need to do is just shut up and learn to play the game before you start to criticize the rules. Learn to play the game, learn to learn what this is all about, find your place in the community. And then I know you’re gonna hate me for saying this, but then after several years, then you can start to have influence in that community. And hopefully by then you will have gained the wisdom to have influence in that community in a manner that will be helpful to that community. And when I say helpful to that community, I don’t mean, I don’t mean in helping people become scientific naturalists. That’s not what I mean. How can I say this? Okay, I know this might be hard for some people to think, to understand, but this stuff that I’m talking about, this symbolism stuff, I never talk about this with anybody. I don’t talk about this. I talk about this with you guys. I put these on YouTube for people who are interested in discovering this, and I figure the subject is difficult enough and it’s strange enough and it’s kind of obtuse enough that only people who are really interested in this will even have the capacity to pay attention and watch my videos. But if I go to church and I meet the little old lady, who’s there, who, I don’t know, came from Russia five years ago, I have no interest in questioning her assumptions at all because those things, in everyday life, they don’t matter. What really matters is how we are with each other. What really matters is how we’re able to engage in the life and be transformed as people and transform others, not in the sense of transforming the way they think, first of all, but transforming each other in the way we act towards each other and the way that we engage with each other. Now, once you’re there for several years and once you’re there for a long time in that church, you will have deciphered the people in the parish, in your actual church, who have the interest and the capacity to talk about symbolism, who have the interest and the capacity to understand things at a more deeper level to go further. Then you can engage those people in discussion and you can hash it out with them as much as you want. But it’s really, really okay for the little old lady and for most people in churches to not have an intellectually deep understanding of this stuff. They don’t have to. They need to understand it to the extent that it changes their life and to the extent that it helps them get closer to other people in their community and makes them want to pray and want to engage in the spiritual life. But that’s what matters, guys. All right, Riz says, sorry if it’s a hard question, I like getting my money’s worth. Like I said, don’t turn off your brain. If you do go to a church, don’t turn off your brain and you might go to a church and be in that church and realize that you just can’t do it. You can’t. There are some churches that exist around me. There are some churches that I’ve been to in my life that I could never go there ever. I couldn’t. I can respect the people. I can admire their faith. I can admire the way that they take care of the poor, that they help each other. But I just couldn’t. And one of the reasons why I go to an Orthodox church is because the effect that single individuals can have on the very shape of the church is rather limited. The way that the liturgy lays itself out, the art, the architecture, the history, the tradition is so strong that there’s very little that some idiotic pastor who doesn’t understand anything could do to change that. And you do get priests that are horrible, horrible priests, monstrous priests that are idiots, that are stupid, that have bad intentions, that are subversive. All of that exists in the Orthodox church. But the capacity they have to affect the actual functioning of the parish is limited because of the tradition. So that’s why. All right. Jeffrey Muter asked, the Bible being a story composed of many stories, what exactly is a story? What is the purpose of a story? Whoa. Why can’t we replace moral story with scientific facts such as the story that porcupines for other quills has truth in it, but it is functionally a lie? And should it be replaced by a fact about porcupine? Why shouldn’t we do this about the Bible? Well, first of all, the Bible is a story that is not a story. Well, first of all, I’ve been wanting to go after this question for a long time. First of all, this story, this whole Bret Weinstein thing, it’s just Bret Weinstein, he’s a very smart person. And when he talks about the little Finch and this strange behavior and certain animals and whatnot, I think that he’s rather genius and he’s very interesting. But when he talks about human structures and hierarchies and stories and morality and especially religion, I think that he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand what’s going on. I’m sorry. So the purpose of a story is to is okay. See it this way. Stories are ways to fine tune and to give you a taste of the pattern of reality. And so think of a story as a reduced, you know, think of the pattern of reality as as so big and so encompassing that and so overwhelming that it’s very difficult to access it, you know, and only saints, only people who reach spiritual illumination will access that. So think of a story as a condensed version of something which gives you a flavor, a taste of a certain pattern. Okay. That sounds very esoteric, but not necessarily. So think of a joke that you’ve heard. Think of any little story that you tell. It’s there to kind of condense some. And so it doesn’t. So the thing is that stories don’t necessarily have to be moral. They don’t necessarily have to have a moral. And that’s, I think, one of the problems with the reducing of the Bible to ethics because there are stories in the Bible that don’t have a moral directly in the sense that, you know, they kind of embody, they show you a certain pattern and the consequences of certain behavior and certain interactions and they show that to you. But it’s not necessarily that always that it’s trying to tell you what’s right and wrong, whatever. And so it’s the same for all kinds of stories. Stories don’t necessarily have to have morals. The reason why you can’t replace a story with just scientific facts is that what scientific facts? And so in the case of the porcupines who throw their quills, that’s not a story. Porcupines, the idea of porcupines throw their quills is not a story. Porcupines throw their quills is a statement of a fact. And it’s a fact which it’s a way of describing, it’s just a description of reality, which is important because it’s there to protect you. Description of reality, which has a certain effect, which is to make people stop touching porcupines. Okay. Now, that’s not a story. And I think that it shows us that Brett Weinstein doesn’t understand what stories are. He also doesn’t understand what the Bible is when he teaches, he uses this silly example about porcupines and their quills to talk about religious stories. What does this have to do with Christ talking about Christ going to see John the Baptist and then being baptized in the Jordan and coming out and the bird landing on his head? What does that have to do? What does this have to do with porcupines throwing their quills and how it’s a heuristic way of talking about some factual thing that is not totally factual in a scientific way? It just doesn’t help me. You can tell stories today that would use only scientifically proven facts and you could tell stories that would fit the patterns that traditional stories have. You could do that totally if you wanted to. That’d be fine. But because the stories are not meant to be scientific descriptions of reality, then I don’t really see why we would do that. I don’t see what use it would have. All right. Tony Solorzano asks, would you ever do a video series about a saint story, patronage, sacramental, medal, etc.? Yeah, sure. I would be happy at some point to do that. I feel like there’s so many things that I want to talk about that I just kind of have to get through them slowly, slowly, slowly. I’m hoping, I mean, we’ll see how it goes, but I’m hoping that this year I’m going to figure out, I’m already doing it. I’m figuring out a way to, I’ve hired someone to help me with my carving. A lot of the patronage that everybody has been supporting me with has been so helpful because for a while I thought that I’d have to cut down on my carving and I really didn’t want to do that because I’m one of the only icon carvers, so I thought it’s important that I keep doing that. And so now the fact that people are supporting me on Patreon, I’ve been able to hire a person to help me with my carving, which will kind of speed up my carving. And I’m also hiring Thomas from Storytellers to edit at least my movie videos for now, but just next week we’re having a meeting to talk about how he might be able to take more responsibility. So what I’m hoping to do is that as if my patronage keeps going up to a certain extent to a certain extent and I’m able to hire people to do the different aspects of what I want to do, then I’ll be able to also put out more content. And so then at that point we might be able to have series going on at the same time. So I have like series criticizing culture, I could have a series on stories of the saints, stories of I want to do like, love to do series on fairy tales, I’d love to do, you know, so maybe even a series of more on social commentary. And so kind of do these. And so maybe instead of having two, three videos a month, have maybe five, six videos a month or maybe more, depending on how much time I’m able to and how much resource I’m able to put into getting other people also to help me with the videos. My question is time right now. It’s like, how can I use the resources that all of you guys have been providing me to give myself more time to be able to do all the things that I think are important to do? So yes, at some point I would be very happy to do some saint stories. I like to do some kind of like more traditional stories, a lot of legends do kind of… I love explaining like the wild legends. You might have noticed that I like taking like the craziest thing that someone, that everybody thinks is so stupid and so silly about traditional thought and then explain it to people. That’s something that gives me a lot of joy. All right. Okay, so Anjo Tarapstra says, Einstein stated that he believed in the God of Spinoza, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists. He did not believe in a personal God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings, a view which he describes as naive. Does your perception of God fit into any of these definitions? Would you say that your God is a personal God and in what matter? Now, this problem stems from the problem that I’ve been trying to help you guys understand from the beginning. It is the problem of ignoring the reality of consciousness, of acting as if consciousness has no bearing in the world, acting as if personhood either didn’t exist or isn’t important or is just taken for granted, that’s probably the best way to see it. To think as if personhood and the point of self-consciousness is taken for granted. So then we look out and we try to imagine the infinite and somehow we find it naive to think that the manner in which I look at the infinite, the manner in which I am the only creature that we know of on earth who is able to even ponder the question of the infinite, that the capacity that I have to ponder the infinite, which somehow it is naive to think that that would somehow mirror the infinite. It’s like to me that’s just, I don’t understand how people can get to that. I don’t understand why it bothers people that God is mine, that God is person, that God is infinite consciousness. I don’t understand why that bothers people. And so the question of, and the problem is that we’re so scientific. We only think in quantitative manners. And so we don’t understand how, we don’t understand how qualitative things work. And so when we think of God who answers your prayers, the only reason why it bothers us is because we have to imagine a God that is in space and in time somewhere. And he’s there like tabulating a calculator and he’s answering your prayers. Like that’s not, why does it have to be that way? Why, if you participate, if you are a, if you come from the infinite divine mind, if you, that is your origin, why does it bother you that you can interact with that, your origin and that origin can interact with you? To me, maybe it’s like I don’t, maybe it’s because to me it’s, I find that people are not, like I said, people just take consciousness for granted. And I think that that’s the problem. Once you start to understand, when you start, once you start to put consciousness back into the chains of causalities, which is what I’m always saying, then all of a sudden, the infinite, you know, the infinite God has to, that aspect of you has to also reflect the infinite. And that’s all, I guess that’s all I can say. And so I don’t have a problem with God answering prayers at all. I don’t have a problem with that at all. And I know that it happens to people all the time. And I don’t have a problem with miracles. I don’t have a problem with, you know, yeah, I don’t have a problem with that in any way. All right. So Lori Litiajo asked, regarding the principles and power discussion with Paul VanderKlaay, do you feel like interpreting things in that vein opens the specter of where exactly would the more non-symbolic interpretation stop? I see many very deep advantages in symbolic interpretation, but can it become a slippery slope where the resurrection itself is only reduced to symbolism? I like the way Peterson has approached it so far. He seems to try his best to not reduce it to just the symbolic and psychological. And so I think this is probably a really good opportunity for me to address this question, because it’s been a question that has just been going, I think that has been coming back over and over. People write me, people ask me if I believe in the resurrection. And I’ve watched my video where I talk about the resurrection again. And I don’t know how it is that people get come to that conclusion. When I use the word symbolism, it does not mean that there’s an absence of manifestation. It does not mean that at all. The word symbolism, if you want to know more about that, watch the video that I did with my brother called, What is Symbolism? Where we talk about how symbolism is this bringing together, the bringing together of meaning and multiplicity or potentiality. It’s the way in which things come together to have meaning. That is simple. The word symbol means to bring things together. And so symbolism does not exclude manifestation. And so it’s not that the resurrection is just symbolic. It’s that the resurrection is the ultimate symbol in the sense that the resurrection brings everything together and manifests, brings all the whole history of the entire world together into one event. And part of that is that it had to be an event. It had to be an actual event that happened in the first century. Because if you don’t have the particular, then it’s missing something. It’s missing the particular. And so for Christ to be who Christ is, he could, cannot have been just a mythical figure. He cannot have been just, have been just a figment of someone’s imagination. Christ has to have had an actual physical manifestation for him to be what he is. For Christ to be what Christ is, that has to have happened. And so the events in the Bible, the events in the Gospels are describing events. The narrative in the Gospel are describing events that happened in the world. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t mystery in those events. There’s definitely mystery. Even in the resurrection of Christ, there’s definitely mystery. And maybe that’s why people have been always wondering because I want to slap people around when they think they’ve figured out the resurrection. I just want to slap them and say, no, no, no, don’t think you figured out the resurrection, my friend. Don’t think that you’ve captured it. Don’t think that you framed it. That story is a lot bigger than you think. And so I’m not denying that it happened. I’m just saying, be careful when people just have this mental image in their mind of a dead body just kind of sitting up and walking out of the grave. That’s not how the story is told. The story is told in a very strange and mysterious way because it’s trying to point to you that the resurrection is mysterious. It is something that keeps its mystery within its own telling. So yeah, so I think that’s something that I’ve been wanting to say for a little while. Okay, so all right. Michael Parsons asks, what is the difference between Coptic Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy? Yeah, so the cops are the cops. This is technical. The cops are what we call non-Caledonian Christians, which means that they don’t accept the Council of Caledon. It’s not my decision to whether or not we are in communion with the cops, but I have a lot of sympathy for the cops and I also have a lot of sympathy for the mess. Although I totally agree with Caledon and I am totally in line with the Council of Caledon, I think that the way that it happened, the details of the way in which it laid itself out, I think a lot of it is very messy. The way that the fathers of the council changed the terms that St. Cyril of Alexandria used. Anyway, it’s complicated, but in theory, you would say that most people would say something like that the orthodox Christians say that Christ has two natures. The cops say that Christ has one nature, but they do believe in a kind of duality in Christ, but they don’t formulate it in the same way. It’s big enough a deal that the two churches have been out of communion forever. I have a lot of admiration for Coptic Christianity and Coptic Christians as well. They live in very difficult situations. They’ve been living in a difficult situation for a very long time and they know what it means to, you go to church on a Sunday and you don’t know if there’s going to be a bomb. It’s like, would I go to church on a Sunday if I thought there might be a bomb? I don’t know. Erin Lektenberger asks, I’ve been reading Camille Paglia’s Sexual Persona. She frames much art as the endless struggle for mastery by the masculine over the feminine, but also as the inevitable defeat of the masculine by the feminine. I don’t see these themes in religious art in part because I’m not an artist, but also because the union of both seems to be a heavy emphasis in her view. How did it happen that the religious symbols of union both give way to art depicting struggle? That’s a really huge question. I’ve mentioned this. If you listen to the last Q&A, I talk a little bit about this. I talk about how the modern age is, you could see it as a de-incarnation. That is, you see a pendulum swing in art. You can see it in art between something you could call a classical, I’m using words, you could use other words, but let’s say a classical tendency and a baroque tendency, which is a kind of order, perfection, everything tied up in a nice little bow, and then a kind of loose, let’s say more expressive, more sublime vision. You see it go back and forth. You have this kind of renaissance, which at first is super strict, then it goes into the baroque, then it goes into neoclassicism, then it goes into the romanticism, then you get social realist, crazy fascist art, then you also have modernism and this decadent, with the Nazis called degenerate art. They had the hyper crazy order, hyper classicism, the Nazis had, but there was also this crazy degenerate art on the other side. It’s like you see this pendulum swing back and forth. I think that’s what it is. I think it’s just the move, the slow move away from the incarnation and all that it entailed. Kevin Martin asks, in your conception, in what ways is the Antichrist most usefully symbolized and where does it lay hierarchically relative to Christ, presumably at the same strata? And what is the most practical relationship for each of us to have? With Antichrist, presumably one of informed responsibility. Wow. Yeah, that’s really, it’s very tough. That’s very tough. In what ways is it most usefully symbolized? A good way to see, here’s a way that I could say, it doesn’t encompass everything, but here’s an interesting way that I could say that maybe a lot of people hadn’t thought about, which is something like Christianity without Christ could be a way to see Antichrist. There are other ways, but if we look at the first Antichrist, if we look at Judas, we look at the way the Judas acted in relation to Christ. It’s very interesting because Judas betrayed Christ, but there’s a scene, for example, where Judas, where a sinful woman comes to wash Christ’s feet and then Judas criticizes Christ for doing that and he says, what does he say? He says, how could you accept this? We should have given the perfume, this very expensive perfume, sold it and given the money to the poor. I think that that’s a nice image of the spirit of Antichrist, a kind of Christian values without Christ. You see that right now, I think, in the kind of extreme, what you call mainline Protestant churches. You kind of see this move towards an obsession with social justice and an obsession with social questions, but a turn away from the essential aspect of the church, which is to come into communion in worship before God and also be transformed personally by our experience of communion and our interaction within the life of church. It’s rather turned towards, now I’m not saying of course Christians shouldn’t help the poor. Of course they should. Christ told us we should help the poor, but this is the trick of Antichrist, which is to kind of give us something, a kind of Christianity without Christ. What is our most, how can we be responsible towards that? Now, okay, let’s say this way. Antichrist is, you know, I talk about the double inversion. Everybody has heard me talk about that. If you’re listening to this tonight, you’ve probably heard this, heard me talk about the double inversion. I think that that’s something that can be done with the spirit of Antichrist. I think that when we encounter people who talk about Christianity without Christ, I think we can flip it back and bring it back to Christ. And so if you’ve noticed, that’s what I’ve been doing. Hopefully people can, I can only say it’s for those who have ears to hear. All right, okay, so Kevin Martin asks, what relationship do you see between psychological reality and the high hypothesized objective material reality? Or do you not assume that both of these exist? Okay, so I think the problem is psychological reality and objective material reality. I think that we have to see the psychological as an intermediary aspect, but there is the Church Fathers talk about a higher aspect of the human being, which we call the noetic aspect. You could call the spiritual aspect of the human being, and that noetic aspect is our capacity to grasp reality for what it is. It is our capacity to intuitively see. And so when I talk about how we engage the world and how the human being participates in the manner in which the world lays itself out, I’m not talking about psychological reality. I’m not talking about what we think. I’m not saying that we can make the world into whatever we want. I’m not a sorcerer. But what I’m talking about is this noetic capacity, which is before thought, before rationalization. It’s this intuitive capacity. And so we don’t actually often have access to it because we’re blind. We just see the world. But with practice, at some point you can start to, with prayer and with practice, with meditation, you can start to see this interaction. You can see how the logi of the world are kind of gathered into us. St. Maximus talks about how we are the laboratory for all of this world to come kind of be joined together in us. And then essentially that is what God created us for, is to kind of join all of this together. And sometimes you can see hints of it in the psychological, which is I do use sometimes arguments that refer to more psychological aspects and how we can get a hint sometimes, because we can see people twist reality with kind of psychological arguments. We’re seeing that right now. We see it in the media a lot, is how using psychological tactics, using persuasion tactics, people are trying to magically shape the world so that you only see the world only exists in a certain frame for certain people. They’re in the matrix, you could say, something like that. And so once we start to understand this, we can see also how how through the psychological it can be misused, but also through the psychological, sometimes you can break through someone and kind of open up their perception, I think, so they can see things connect together and you can create these kind of surprises. And so, okay, so do I assume that both of these exist? Like I don’t know, objective material reality. So are you asking me if things exist without nous, you would say, without spirit? I don’t think things exist without spirit. I think that the existence of the world is a joining of heaven and earth, the joining of the spirit of God and the potentiality of the lower waters or whatever. And I think that that’s how the world exists and that’s what it’s like in Genesis and that’s what it’s like when God creates Adam and that’s what it’s like when, it’s like that’s just how the world exists. But that doesn’t depend on individual people. Let’s say the noetic aspect or the logos in you or the logos is, it ultimately all of this points to the divine logos. Ultimately all this whole process points to the divine logos, but without the divine word, without the essence which is spoken by God and then at a lower level through Christ and through us, through Christ, through Christ, I think that the whole idea of whether exists, it just becomes irrelevant. I don’t even know what that would mean without that. I hope this makes sense. I hope I’m not, I feel like those questions are a little bit difficult. So, all right, so Michael Parsons asks, hey Jonathan, I just finished the AFL talk. That’s the Ancient Faith live talk that I gave on Sunday. It’s called Faith Encouraged. If you guys want to check it out, you can find it on the Ancient Faith website. He said, wondering if you would do a video on the sacraments and the Eucharist in the future. Also, I remember you mentioning you would be giving a talk in Dallas. Yes, I might be giving a talk in Dallas. It’s not totally confirmed when, might probably in February. Hopefully that’ll work out. I will keep you guys posted. You know, just follow me on Twitter and Facebook and my website. I’ll be, I’m putting up the dates on all of my talks on my website now. So, keep an eye on that. If I would do a video on the sacraments and the Eucharist, yeah, of course, I definitely, that’s one of the things I want to do for sure. One of my many subjects that I’d like to talk about. All right, so Daniel Brew asks, I don’t really know how to ask this question. I grew up in a Protestant church which had a very strong emphasis on heaven and hell and not much of any focus on heaven and earth. This seems to result in time on earth being seen as simply a waiting room. Yes, I know exactly what you mean. Do you have any thoughts on how this might be related to having a more materialistic interpretation of Christianity? It’s strange because heaven and hell cannot be material things and yet are the core foundations of so many creationist, fundamentalist type Christians. Yes. Is this a problem solved by the multiple levels of interpretation as Metru writes about in his book, Cosmic Individual Communal Intercommunal? What is a healthy view of heaven and hell? Okay. Okay. How can I talk about this? Well, first of all, for sure, I think that the idea of the idea of the earth as being a simple, this weird waiting room is definitely something that is problematic. It is problematic and it does come from a materialistic interpretation of Christianity and it definitely comes from a lack of believing that there’s a ontological reality of how the world exists and how Christ is the source of that and how we are meant to participate in that and that our life in the world is there for us to be united with Christ, is there for us to be joined with Christ and manifest Christ in the world, be free from sin, be free from our thoughts, be free from our passions, or at least transform, not free, but transform our passions so that there’s burning divine fire in us. That’s what we’re called to. You read the lives of the saints and you see that they’re transformed beings. That’s the purpose of this life is to live as much as we can in the life of Christ. The idea that you just believe in Jesus and that you’re saved and then you’re just basically here to evangelize other people until you die and then you go to heaven, that is just such a mechanistic, it’s like it is this kind of here I believe in these arbitrary things which actually aren’t descriptions of reality and I just believe them on faith and it’s like no Christianity is a description of the reality. I keep telling people that. It’s a description of how things work. It’s different from the scientific description but it’s coherent and it’s describing how we’re meant to be, how the world lays itself out. How to talk about heaven and hell. Now there’s so many problems. Hell is death. That’s what hell is. At the outset, hell is let’s say it’s Hades. Death is the breaking apart of the cohesion. That’s what death is. It’s fragmentation. It’s a breaking apart of, of, it’s a separation of heaven and earth. Creation is a joining of heaven and earth and then when heaven and earth starts to separate then that creates this breaking apart decomposition of the lower, of the lower part of manifestation. That’s death. That’s decomposing. That’s being exiled from the garden. That’s living, becoming animalistic. You know, being torn apart from the passions. All of that is, that’s it. That’s hell. That’s death. And so there is a difference, let’s say, between death and Gehenna or the fire at the end of time. The eternal fire you could say. There’s a difference between those two. But death, that’s what death is. It’s this, this kind of, this, this breaking apart. And so in a way it is, you could see it as in a way the opposite of heaven in the sense that it is when we lose our purpose. When we lose, when we miss the mark, right? When we talk about this, that sin is missing the mark. It’s missing the, those bullseye. Going towards the edge. Kind of falling apart. And that’s what it is. And so that’s, that’s the relationship between, let’s say, heaven and hell or heaven and death. Now as for the idea of Gehenna or the eternal fire, if you want to know about that, watch the video that I did on the icon of the last judgment. I go into that at length in that discussion and talk about, you know, what are some possible interpretations of the last judgment and of Gehenna. All right, okay. So, Raid Petrich, Petrish, Petrish, I think. Sorry if I mispronounced your name, Raid. Hi Jonathan, can you talk about the hierarchy of sin and passions and how this connects to the idea of the different levels of hell? Thank God and thanks and God bless. Yes, the, you see that, especially in Dante, but I think Dante does a really good job at expressing this idea of this, you could call it an upside down hierarchy of sin. And so the world, you know, for there to be an order, there to be something, there has to be a kind of hierarchy. And so the best that death, best that sin can do is be an upside down hierarchy. And so we have this idea of, in Dante, you have these different levels of hell and the lower the closer the higher the the devil himself and the closer you get towards the middle of the earth, then the more the sins are, the bigger the sins are. And so the sins of the passions are usually actually not that low, they’re not that high on the sins of hierarchy because they’re kind of sins of volition, they’re sins of distraction, they’re sins of fear, they’re sins of fear of the devil, because they’re kind of sins of volition, they’re sins of distraction, they’re sins of losing control of yourself. And so a way to understand it, for example, is that the highest sin in the hierarchy is a sin of pride. And so why is it the sin of pride? Because like anything that’s at the top of a hierarchy, it is the cause, it is the source, it is the essence, it’s like an upside down essence of all the other sins. That is, you could get rid of all the sins and you could all do it through pride, you could still have pride. And pride is the cause of all the other sins, that all the other sins can kind of be taken up into being an example of pride, because it is always a self-sufficiency that makes us sin. It’s always a wanting to be alone, wanting to be self-sufficient in ourselves, be self-causing. That’s what always brings about the other sins. You lie because you stop considering the other, you just think about your own desires, you think that your desires have priority over the desires of the others. You kill someone for the same reason. All the sins can be kind of brought up into pride. And so that’s why pride is at the top of the sin hierarchy. Now in Dante, he doesn’t put pride at the top of the sin hierarchy. He puts betrayal at the top of the sin hierarchy. And I think he does it, I think he does it because of what happened to him, I think, in part because he was betrayed, and because he was betrayed by his fellow citizens in Florence. Was he from Florence? I think so. And he does it too because I think that in a way, betrayal, there’s also pride in betrayal. You could see that as well. That if you betray, it’s like you do it on purpose, like you plan it. Not only do you hurt someone, but you really do it out of spite and guile and everything. But at least to take the idea that there is this hierarchy of sins, I think is important. And to understand that if you give out, if you give yourselves to different sins, then those have different consequences. All right. All right. Hey, we got through all the questions on the Patreon Q&A. So let me go into the chat and see if we got some interesting questions here. So, Gerb Father asks, Hi Jonathan Pajot, I wanted to ask you if you had any thoughts about people like Milo and Owen Benjamin criticizing JVP recently. They both insinuate JVP doesn’t stop and point to the talent agency JVP signed up to as evidence of JVP selling out. There are a few things about that. It’s like one of the problems I think that someone like Owen Benjamin has is that he just idealized Jordan too much. It’s like I like a lot of things that Jordan is doing. And I think that I think, well, first of all, I think he’s the real deal. I tell people he’s not any different in private than he is in public. He’s extremely attentive. He cares for people that he encounters and he wants to help people. He desperately wants to help people. And he goes out of his way to help people when he can. A good example that just happened recently, Paul Van der Kley’s sister died suddenly. She had small children. She died of a heart attack. She was in her early 40s, I think, and she had young children. And so it’s like Jordan barely knows who Paul Van der Kley is. He probably knows that there’s this pastor making videos about him somehow or somewhat. And so I just wrote him and I said, oh, Paul Van der Kley’s sister died. She was quite young. And it’s not like his wife died or his child died. It was his sister who died. And so I wrote him and I said that. And yeah, Jordan reached out to Paul and wrote him a little email of condolences. And it’s like, that’s Jordan. That’s what Jordan is. And so I think that in the case of Owen Benjamin, I think that the things that he points out, like the kind of weird stuff, like how Jordan lied because he said that he didn’t sleep for 30 days. And so how can someone say that it’s a lie or that Jordan lied because he said that he wrote each sentence in his book 15 times or whatever. And it’s like, dude, man, can’t you see the difference between hyperbole and lying? I mean, obviously, has anybody just, it’s like when you say, I haven’t slept all night, that usually that doesn’t necessarily mean that you didn’t sleep here and there 15 minutes, five, you don’t even know because a sleepless night drives you crazy. So when he said I didn’t sleep for 30 days, it’s like, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he actually didn’t sleep for little amounts of time, even that he was sleepless for 30 days. And so you could kind of nitpick at silly things like that and say that he’s a liar. Like, I don’t think, I think Jordan obviously lies just like anybody. I think he lies. And I think that like everybody, he sometimes might act in a way to protect himself just like we all do. And that, you know, that he might have said some things at some point. He might have, you know, like, for example, people talk about the Faith Goldie thing and, and how he threw Faith Goldie under the bus. And it’s like, he really struggled with that. He did. It wasn’t easy for him. I remember he even talked to me, like he was went out of the way to say, like, you know, we talked, we thought about it and, and we didn’t know. And it was the time was coming. And it was like the day was happening and we didn’t know what to do because we didn’t, we didn’t have all the facts and we weren’t sure. And so we decided to do it this way. And he said, well, we’ll stick by what we decided. But at the same time, it’s not like it was just this easy thing that he did like that. And you can criticize them. You can say you shouldn’t have done that or you should have. But to say that it’s just like this big manipulation and there’s just like big, horrible plot of him to be a globalist and whatever. It’s like, it’s just silly that that stuff is silly. And I think Milo, I think it’s really too bad. I think Milo, I think it’s too bad what he did. If you read the, if you read the article that Milo wrote about Jordan, it’s all about himself. It’s all about Milo and it, and how Jordan didn’t stand up for Milo and how Jordan had called Milo. Jordan had called Milo and you know, you know what, you know what, the reason why Jordan even paid any attention to Milo is because of me. I brought Milo up right away. The first time I met with him, I was at his house when Jordan called, talked to Milo on the phone. It’s like I was telling Jordan he should pay attention to Milo because I thought he was an important character. And Jordan asked Milo, when the whole scandal around Milo erupted, Jordan said, Milo, why don’t you come on my channel? We’ll talk about it. You know, we’ll do, we’ll dissect it. We’ll go through it and maybe it can help to, you know, to kind of help people understand what happened and what you said and everything. And Milo didn’t do it. He didn’t want to do it. And so, and then Jordan just went on his life. And when Jordan said, that he hadn’t been paying attention to Milo, it was true that he hadn’t been paying attention to Milo. He was busy doing his own thing and Milo had dropped off the map. And so, I just find that, I just find it annoying. I just find that, that, that, that I think it’s kind of sad. I think it’s kind of sad that Milo went that way. And when he says things like that Jordan is only spouting gibberish and that he’s only, that his, he’s not, what he’s saying doesn’t make sense. It’s like, you’re just putting a huge gigantic foot in your mouth, Milo. Like I respect Milo. He’s smart and he said some, he said some things that are very important, done some things that are very important. But like, when you say that, it’s like, I understand everything Jordan says. I’ve never heard anything Jordan has ever said that I don’t understand. And so, you can call me an idiot and you can call everybody who actually understands what Jordan says an idiot, but it’s, that’s not helpful. It’s not helpful. And, and, and like I’ve told you guys and I’ve, I’ve said it publicly and I’ve said it to Jordan, there are plenty of things that we can criticize about Jordan Peterson. You know, he is not a, he is not a Christian. He, he, he has strange ideas about Christianity. He, he has, I think he, he misunderstands some aspects of postmodernism. I think that he misunderstands all kinds of things. The problem happens when we idealize people way too much. And then we all the sudden are surprised when they don’t, they don’t, they’re not in line with how we idealize them. It’s like Jordan is an important voice and we should pay attention to him and we should help him out when he’s doing the right things. But it’s like, don’t, don’t base your life on Jordan Peterson guys. It’s just, it’s not, that’s not going to help you. All right. And, and in terms of the talent agency, it’s one of those things again, it’s like, it’s one of those things again, this idea that somehow everybody should be aware of every, of all the conspiracy theories. It’s like Jordan’s probably signed with CAA because it’s the biggest talent agency out there and they could offer him what he wanted. And so he said, okay, sure. I’ll sign with CAA. If you can get me the gigs, if you can sign up the places, then I’ll go and I’ll say what I want to say. And it’s like, that’s probably why he signed with CAA because he needed, he wanted to do this world tour and who else can organize a world tour? It’s like, it’s very difficult to do that. And so, so the idea that somehow he’s in line with globalism and that because CAA is a dark organization, that that’s why he’s, it’s like all of that is just, and it’s the same with the UN. It’s like he went to the UN because they probably invited him and said they would, they, they would let him speak to the UN. He’s like, okay, well I’ll speak to the UN. Hey, why not? If the, if the president of, of, if Justin Trudeau invites him to his office and says, I’d like to talk with you, Jordan, we like, yeah, okay. Like, you know what? Mark Zuckerberg wanted to call Jordan and Jordan’s like, okay, I’ll talk to Mark Zuckerberg. Like Jordan just will talk to anybody. He’s, so just because he talks to Mark Zuckerberg or just because he goes to the UN doesn’t mean that he agrees with them. And this is the problem with people are so crazy today. It’s like just because you talk with someone, even if you, even if you’re friends with someone, doesn’t mean that you agree with everything they say. It’s like I, I am friends with Jordan Peterson. I am way more conservative than he is. I am way more, I’m even more right leaning than he is. I’m more, I’m more, I’m definitely more a Christian than he is. I’m, I’m not, I don’t, I’m not a fan of the enlightenment. I’m a more a medievalist. It’s like all of these things can exist and I can still talk to him and I can still find some of the best stuff that, that, that he does and see it as something that’s good. It’s like people just have to be more subtle. Anyways, sorry. I just feel like today I’m going into a lot of rant type conversations. Sorry about that guys. All right. Hamilton Provencha. Hamilton, good to see you, man. Can you comment on the nationalistic icon in the Ukraine where it’s saying George is vanquishing the two-headed eagle. So Hamilton, I saw Hamilton a few months ago and he was the one to show me this icon. So he wants me to now give my opinion on that. I think it’s very disturbing. Anybody who’s seen it, you can look it up. It’s very, very disturbing. I’m not sure exactly what it means. You know, it’s like, because the two-headed eagle just represents kind of Christian civilization and represent Constantinople. It represents the Holy Roman Empire. I remember that it was like, what is St. George doing exactly? It’s like he’s destroying, he’s destroying the Christian Imperium. He’s destroying, you know, I don’t know. I don’t know what that means. So it’s very disturbing. Yeah. All right, guys. All right. So I think, so Kangaroo Media asked a bunch of questions, which I don’t really have an answer. Have you seen John Wick? I think I did see it, but I didn’t, I think I was barely paying attention to it. It was just like this kind of action movie. Have you read Ernst Kastler and his philosophy of symbolic forms? Jason, I can call you Jason. No, I have not read it. So I would not have anything to say to that. All right, guys, we’ve been going for an hour and a half. So sorry if I can feel like I’ve been, a lot of the answers, I was kind of ranty today. So sorry about that, if I was kind of annoying. But yeah, I’ve been tired these days. It’s like the sun is so low. It’s like the solstice needs to happen pretty soon so we can get some more sunlight. And also snow. There’s no snow usually in November. And now it’s just there’s snow all the time. It’s not, it’s just, yeah, just in a weird mood. So guys, thanks for hanging out and yeah, pay attention. Like I said, I think I told everybody my next video is going to be on the gremlin. So I’m looking forward to that. I already did a podcast about that last year. And so I was really happy the way it went. So I’m going to, I want to make a video based on that. And so when you saw that I put up some, a lot of people have been asking me for like merchandise and stuff. So I put up some merch on Teespring. And so, and other people criticize it because it’s kind of not high quality. It’s like, yeah, I know, I know. It’s just, just standard stuff. Just for people who wanted, you know, to have a bit of fun and identify with what we’re doing. But I am working on better stuff soon. I want to, I want to, to, I’m going to expand. I told you guys that I hired an assistant. And so I’m going to expand my artistic production to have more general, more general imagery, let’s say, kind of maybe do a few medieval monsters, a few images of, of, you know, like maybe some cherubs or something like, you know, just, just stuff that is more general. And, and hopefully it’ll be more accessible for a lot of people watching the videos as well. So, so guys, thanks for, thanks for, for coming out and yeah, thanks for all your support. And yeah, we keep on keeping on. So I’ll see you guys in December. Bye bye.