https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=oDAfMeX_vuw
Doing good, it’s good to see you. It’s great to see you. I’m nervous and anticipating disappointment that we won’t get to meet in Thunder Bay in September. No word yet, but. No, I also don’t think that it’s going to be, because the problem with Thunder Bay too is that it’s far away from everybody. And so it means that in order for them to even make it happen, they probably will need people to travel. And so I don’t, yeah, I don’t see it. I don’t see, it’s frustrating, but. Yeah. And what a year you’ve had. I saw your comments of Easter, 2019 flood, 2020 pandemic. Yeah, local flood and global flood. And I just watched this morning, I just watched your Donkey Kong video and I thought it was, it was tremendous. It was tremendous. Jonathan, I don’t, when people first told me about you and I watched some of your first videos, I’m like, what is this guy talking about? But you’ve seriously colonized parts of me that I can’t talk to people. And some of your ideas just haven’t gotten so deep in my head that, so I owe you a tremendous debt of gratitude for everything that I’ve learned from you. And so I just wanna say that. Well, thank you. That really, the Donkey Kong thing, it was really, just because things have gotten so grim in the past few months and understandably so, but I just felt like I just needed to do something that was extremely light and extremely, that was showing the pattern, but it didn’t have that many ramifications. And so people have been asking me to make a video game, video game symbolism for years. And I’ve always refused because there is something about video games that I, or video game culture, which I find not super productive, but I don’t have anything against video games. Like I play video games once in a while too. But anyway, so I finally gave in and I’m like, okay, I’m gonna make something that’s just fun and light and anyways. Well, I thought I really enjoyed it because I’m old enough to remember when you had to go to an arcade or a- Yeah, with the quarters. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I pumped a lot of quarters of machines at certain times in my life. What is your life looking like now for you? Well- Are you spending a lot of time working on your stuff, making videos? I mean, because your life, I mean, what do I want to talk to you today is kind of a, you know, go back over the last few years. I mean, your life got turned upside down. Definitely, no, definitely. And, you know, last year was probably one of the most intense years, I guess, in my life. You know, I’ve had pretty intense years, but last year was really intense. Also because I had all planned to do a lot of traveling and I did, but I was also dealing with the flood and all of this. And actually, right now, I feel like the lack of traveling actually feels kind of nice. I’m realizing that it actually feels kind of nice to, you know, just like everybody, there’s something about this pandemic, which there are a lot of negative aspects to it, for sure, but there’s a positive aspect in the sense that it’s forcing everybody to stop. And I think that it’s acting almost like a little Sabbath or like a little jubilee. And so it’s forcing people to stop. And so it can be positive because you have to kind of take some distance and see what’s going on. You also end up spending, you know, I spend way more time with my kids, way more time with my family, and I’m loving that part of it. I just love it. So I hope we can take some of that into the next, like if when it starts, so when it starts again, I hope we can take some of that into the next iteration of our society. You know, they shut down the stores here on Sundays. All the stores, all the grocery stores, all the grocery stores are closed on Sundays. And it’s like, and they did it for purely secular reasons, but I’ve talked to a few people, just regular people that aren’t even necessarily Christians. They said, oh, we love that the stores are closed on Sundays because we don’t have the self-discipline not to go to the store on Sundays, but if it’s closed, then you don’t go, and then you end up spending more time with your family, and it just happens. And so I was like, interesting. Well, so I grew up in Patterson, New Jersey, and these Jersey Blue Laws, as they were called, you know, they lasted into the 60s and 70s when shopping malls were closed on Sundays. And this is the New York metropolitan area where, you know, one of the more secular places in the country, these laws endured on the East Coast, and then of course, I grew up in the Christian Reformed Church, which was very sabbatarian. So even if things were open, you didn’t go because that was, your community didn’t do these things on Sunday. And unfortunately, you know, in the 70s and 80s, the Christian Reformed Church sort of began to dismiss these things, and the theological justification for that was, this is liberalism, or this is, you know, this is legalism, that we’re not swimming on Sunday or playing ball on Sunday, or, you know, in our house, we couldn’t turn the TV on until after the second service on Sunday, that was kind of the break. And I wonder if this was some latent thing from my Jewish ancestors on my father’s side. It was sundown on Sunday after that, you could, it’s kind of a weird mix. But, you know, I think, so I’ve been, so my wife is a school teacher, and before she was a public school teacher, we were homeschoolers. And so she kind of got cast into creating what essentially is homeschool material for her public school students, because she had all this homeschool experience, and wanted, very much wanted her students in her classroom to be able, and the families to do some of that, most of whom don’t really necessarily have a lot of interest in that, because it’s very demanding of the parents. But, you know, watching the disruption happen in people’s lives, people are, I think, we’ve had enough months of this lockdown, where people, and the emerging is gonna be slow, where people are going to have learned something, and at least aspirationally are going to say, I want to take some of these new learnings and blessings into my future. But we’ll see how long that lasts. We’ll see how long that lasts. But how about you, how, I mean, what’s life like for a pastor in a world where there’s no church, I guess, like where there’s no physical meeting? How’s it been? It’s, you know, it is important that this thing happened during Lent. And I, emotionally, this hit me a lot harder than I thought it would, just losing the rhythm of being with the people. And so then, you know, I do these little videos now for church, for the members, the members of my church that can actually figure out how to get on YouTube. And I had to, you know, I got a, one of my elders said, you know, you’re gonna have to, you’re gonna have to cheer things up a little bit. I was like, I’m a little depressed myself. But especially when we then turned the page into Easter, and the Easter, and because Easter is, of course, a season, it’s not just a day. Yeah, it’s not just a day, yeah, until Pentecost. And so then I sort of had to lean into even though we couldn’t meet, and Jubilee is what I think about all the time, because I walk here to church, and I do this stuff in the building, the empty building, where we have not had services since mid-March. And I think the, it’s a little non-Protestant of me, but you know, the sanctuary is getting a Sabbath rest, and it’s getting a Jubilee, in a sense, where it’ll be put to work again soon, but it’s fallow right now, and there’s, that’s not altogether a bad thing. Yeah, and you can see what, like you can see kind of what the purpose of these little deaths are, because you realize that, well, we actually have to restart, because things have broken down, now we have to restart, and so for people who are keen, it’s actually an opportunity to fix a bunch of stuff. Yeah. Right, it’s an opportunity to start on the right foot, as we say, to start on the right path, but you can’t, it’s hard to do that unless there’s a breakdown. You know, when things are, when the gears are turning, and the wheel, the machine is running, it’s really difficult to change things, because there’s almost a logic, there’s a pattern that’s running its course, and you know, it’s very difficult to stop it, but when these kind of things happen, then you know, if you’re attentive, it’s an opportunity to make some changes. You know, and Jonathan, one of the things that I think I have to, again, continue to credit you with is, it was probably a gap in my Protestantism, and I think, you know, Charles Taylor brings this out in his work, A Secular Age. Protestantism tends definitely towards the instrumental, towards the agentic, towards the driving, you know, part of what happens in going from, let’s say, two speed, where you have the holy persons, and then the laity, to the one speed, when John Calvin wants to make all of Geneva, in a sense, the city of God. One of the things that you, I think, have really helped me with is showing, again, you have the center, and you have the periphery, and in God’s creation, they both have their place. And I was, I watched, also this morning, I watched, you know, the little clip that your people, I think it’s absolutely perfect that it’s your people who are selecting the clips, because people sometimes, so Paul, your videos are so terribly long, why don’t you just do clips? I don’t know what clips are actually the good ones. Yeah, exactly, I do feel very fortunate, because I can see what people pick out of the Q&As, and what people pick out of the videos that they find interesting, and so I’m like, okay, yeah, interesting, interesting. Well, and I saw the little clip on Lilith, and I’m a Protestant, you know, we don’t read those old books. Let’s talk about that stuff, especially not Lilith. Yeah, but you’ve, I think, shown very well, kind of the place and the created order for these different elements that sort of get pushed out of the way in the agentic Protestant mind, and you know, you’ve really helped me with that. Well, yeah, thanks, I appreciate it. And how, have you been, have you been still doing videos every day? Is that, because I see once in a while, but are you still, still have the same rhythm? I do videos six days a week on the seventh, you have to go to the church channel for the video. It’s amazing, it’s amazing. It’s, you know, it’s become part of my rhythm, and I, you know, I often feel, I often feel like a bad YouTuber, because when I watch your videos, I think, boy, Jonathan knows what he’s doing, and Jonathan’s doing it the right way, and I, but I just kind of use it for what I use it for, which is, I’ve found that it’s a good way to engage in conversations and to try out ideas with a really, a far broader audience than Little Living Stones, most of whom, I’ll say things and they look at me like, what are you talking about? What are you even talking about? But I think you’re doing, I think it’s just your style, I think you’re doing more like a Joe Rogan type discussion, you know, this constant discussion, and it has a great advantage, like I, sometimes now I feel like I’m kind of out of the discussion, like I’ve kind of moved out of the discussion, just because I’ve been busy, I’ve been doing all these different things, and so I’m not following the flow, whereas you’re right in there, I’m seeing you’re doing videos about, you know, about the portal and like the John Breveke and all this stuff that’s going on, and it’s actually been seeing that you’re doing videos, that you’re doing videos about that kind of stuff. Now I’ve contacted a few people, like I’m gonna do, I wanna do a discussion, go on the, you know that group, the Stoa, that Jordan Peterson, yeah, so I’m gonna try to participate in that, like, no, I need to get back into the conversation, I can’t just be the guy talking, or else I’m gonna start talking in circles, so I really appreciate this ongoing conversation, I need to actually need to be more a part of it, but I have kind of pulled away a little bit, especially from the whole dark web, like intellectual dark web thing, I never completely identified with that name from the beginning, and so I’ve also, since Jordan has kind of moved out of it, I’ve also moved, I think I feel like I pulled out more, just because the things they’re talking about, I don’t think they, I don’t think a lot of the people, like the Weinsteins, I don’t think they really understand the stakes of what interests me, and so because of that, I just, it feels like there’s no conversation to be had. With John though, John Breveke, I think he totally gets it, I think, like I wish that, I wish John could talk to someone like the Weinsteins, because I think that he could have a really good discussion with them, but for me, I just feel like the stakes, I just don’t, I’m not communicating the stakes of what I’m talking about in a way that, for a certain type of atheist, it’s not clicking, like they don’t know what I’m talking about, like for example, like rationality rule, you kind of engage him, I’m like, I’m not engaging that person, I mean, I don’t think he even knows what I’m talking about, like I think that he would listen to my videos and think it’s just gibberish, nonstop gibberish. That’s probably true, but I’ll tell you, I mean, we’re all sort of, and I see this as just part of the economy of the kingdom of God, that here in his body, he has many members, and the hand and the ear and the eye and the nose, they’re not all the same, and in fact, it’s God’s good purpose that they’re not, but I see the tremendous impact of your work on people that I’m talking to, and what you have done is, I think, in a deep way, really, and I think this is part of your mission, and the mission that you’ve intentionally embraced too, you have really helped to rewire people to see and understand and engage at levels that very little in modernity would afford them to. Well, thanks, I appreciate it. I think that’s vitally important, especially as we are in a period where, I mean, these things take a long time to work through chronologically in history, but we are, the intensification of the breaking down of modernity, this is, I mean, it’s happening quicker than we think, and something like a pandemic, well, it kind of works on both ends of it, but it speeds up the process. Oh, for sure, and it’s opening up spaces that we thought were impossible. I was talking to a friend of mine today who’s not at all a Christian, just regular liberal North American, and he sees, and he’s not even a conservative, he’s a left leaning, but he says, I never thought that I would see the government reach so much in my life. He said, I didn’t think it was possible. I didn’t think it was possible for the government to reach so deep in our private lives, and he said, all of a sudden, within a few weeks, we have people denouncing their neighbors, calling the police, and he thought, wow, this is crazy. How can things change so fast? Yeah, it’s breaking, it’s accelerating, and this 2020 election for you guys is going to be another major marker. It’s not gonna get any easier. Look at the pause that, again, the pandemic has given us. Trump can’t go out and fill a stadium with cheering fans. Biden can’t go out and press the flesh. In a sense, we have two people that are probably gonna be running for check. I can’t believe you said that. That’s the flesh. Exactly, anyways. Anyway. Yeah. So I frankly look at, I look at what a feeding frenzy 2016 was, and I just, I mean, 2020 would have been another layer up, but this pandemic is, in that aspect perhaps, part of the grace of God to say, we’re gonna put a blanket on this sucker because the world doesn’t need, and Canada doesn’t need the United States flying apart anytime soon. Yeah, well, we’ll see because it’s not, it’s gonna ramp up near the election because people are gonna, because they’re gonna get desperate. The candidates are gonna get desperate to try to get the attention, because now, like you said, the attention is not on the election at all, but it’s kind of there seething in the background, and it’s motivating actually a lot of moves in terms of media, the way the media is framing things, a lot of it is based on the upcoming election, but it’s gonna ramp up, we’ll see, I hope it doesn’t. Here, there’s no discussion, like here, it’s all Justin Trudeau globalism, it’s wild, like how much everybody just agrees with what’s going on here. In Quebec, I think it’s gonna be, in Quebec, I think French Canadians have a weird, they’re kind of sheep, we’re kind of like sheep, we kind of follow, we all kind of, all just follow in one direction, but there’s also like a low level resistance, and I think I’m starting to see it right now. Everybody’s like, yeah, yeah, shut down, shut down, but then everybody’s outside, and now, even this weekend, I saw a few restaurants that were kind of, they had the door open, and they had tables outside, and I was like, okay, everybody’s kind of pushing, everybody’s pushing, and I think people are just gonna start just doing their own thing at some point, it’s gonna happen, it’s probably gonna happen more like that than coming from a top-down decree, people are just gonna say, okay, you know what, this is not, we’re just tired, and we just need to see people. Yeah, and that’s what’s happening in California right now, the governor had laid down, well, these are the things, and then some of the counties sort of broke, and then the governor very quickly realized he didn’t really have the power, didn’t want to, so he kind of readjusted the criteria so more counties could be in, and it’s, you know, there’s a Spanish saying, la carga se arregla en el camino, which is that the load adjusts itself on the road, and that’s exactly what’s happening right now. But, you know, I really wanted to talk to you about what you and I have been doing over the last two and a half years, and because your channel started a little ahead of mine, and I think it fits into, I mean, it’s interesting now that we have this pandemic that that’s happening now, but before, you know, I got my undergrad degree in history, and so I’ve always sort of got a historical mindset to me, and so before too much history goes by, I at least wanted to do some talking and documenting about, you know, what I call the Jordan, at least wave one of, you know, Jordan’s wave in terms of, you know, in Canada, it was C-16, in the United States, it was the Trump election, C-16 was sort of October 2016, of course, Donald Trump was elected in November 2016, and then, of course, Jordan, you know, there’s no way to separate it from Jordan, and now you’re a personal friend of his, so you have to be more careful than I do, but, you know, what happened, Jordan had been talking about this stuff for a very long time, and that evidence is out on YouTube, and of course, you caught wind of him early before he took his status rocket ride, and, you know, you could just send him an email, and he could respond to you, and, oh, wow, here’s this artist who’s doing stuff, and you develop a relationship with him, but that moment that, just like you said, things, what caught my attention in this was that Jordan, in the Jordan Peterson wave, things happened I didn’t anticipate seeing. Yeah. Conversations could be had that I couldn’t have before. Yeah. And I, you know, I was fortunate enough if a Protestant, if a Calvinist can use that word, to have sort of been at the right time and gathered around me additional conversation partners, and for me, that’s been the real takeaway from this thing, but I wanted to talk to you about this, before this history gets too old behind us, and start with some of, because, of course, you had already started building a relationship with Jordan, and then whoosh, and then, of course, you start a YouTube channel, and while you’re an artist, and you, you know, we’ve talked about your life before this, now suddenly you’re an artist who also makes videos, and of course, there’s been a flood and a pandemic and all of that, so what, now thinking back two, three, four years on this, what comes to the top of your mental salience hierarchy? I think that one of the things we’re seeing is, as we watch kind of the breakdown of the West, let’s say, you could say it that way, the breakdown of what has held the West together, and we see the breakdown of Christianity, the surprising thing about a breakdown is that it also affords opportunities, and I think that that’s something that the people who would wanted, let’s say, religion to go away didn’t realize, you know, as narratives break down, there’s also spaces that open, and those open spaces are the reason why all of a sudden conversations that we didn’t think were possible are happening, you know, because there’s more connect, there’s more connectivity, there’s more like, lateral connectivity, you could say it that way. And I think that, so I think that it’s actually a very exciting time, because there’s a possibility for, there’s really a possibility for a flip, and I think that that’s really what Jordan did, is he flipped the discourse, he turned it, and what he did, I mean, it was already kind of preparing, there were people who were kind of talking about it, and it’s not like he came out completely out of the blue with his idea, but there’s something about him, about his personality, about the way that he was also kind of like a father figure, there’s all these things that kind of came together, and the fact also that he resisted, he talks about, Jordan talked about this quite a few times, where he said, he took it out of the abstract, and chose a place, right, said, this thing here is where I’m not going to move, and that’s what the C16 thing was, and he’s often said that it was near arbitrary, in the sense that there are other things happened before that were in the same vein, and other things have happened since, but it’s like he said, this one is the one I guess I’m gonna stay, no, like I’m stopping here, and so there’s something about that, where he kind of flipped the discourse, in terms of religion, let’s say, because he did it in a lot of things, but in terms of religion, he brought the, he brings the evolutionary thinking to its inevitable conclusion, and the inevitable conclusion is, you know that thing that you marginalized all this time, this religion thing, you marginalized it, well, if you’re in the evolution mindset, it has to participate in the pattern, and this is the same thing with consciousness, it’s the whole problem of consciousness too, it’s like people just stood in consciousness, and were describing the world, and then you come to the end, where it’s like the last thing to analyze, is the thing you’ve been not talking about, and then when it turns back on itself, then it creates this weird flip, and that’s what I think Jordan did, a lot of the things that I think, the most powerful things that he talked about, were the things that lead into the notion of attention, and the relevant realization that now John has been kind of taking up, I think that that’s the most powerful thing that Jordan brought to the floor, in terms of shattering the categories that people have been using, and forcing the scientific mind to think, to see differently, and I think no one has gotten over that yet, people are still processing that, and it’s, but in a way, it’s the moment he’s gone in a way, because now, at least for now, because Jordan has kind of, he’s vanished, and the effect of Jordan vanishing has been huge, it’s been huge in the sense that, like I know that it’s part of why my views have gone down, I know that it’s part of why the discussions have slowed down, why there’s less of this interconnectivity, it’s as if without him, there is no intellectual dark web, really. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s just Ben Shapiro and the Weinsteins, and they can kind of talk to each other, but they don’t, there isn’t this problem that’s there, this kind of weird thing that we have to solve, that Jordan was kind of bringing to the table somehow. Well, I like the way you put it, I like the way you put it, because he sort of brought, they connected via him, and without him right there, the Weinstein sort of go back to the things they talk about, and Ben Shapiro does his stuff on politics, and of course, why would Ben Shapiro and the Weinsteins, why would these two talk if Jordan doesn’t sort of connect them? Why did you? Yeah, there’s very few little, few reasons, yeah. Why did you start doing YouTubes? I started because of Jordan, I mean, we did that video, we did a video, we did two videos, one was called, Tradition and Things That Don’t Fit, and then, The Metaphysics of Pepe, and then what happened is I got invited to do an event with him in Toronto, and so I did that event, and he put that up, and he put up those other videos, and so it was like I had a few, I appeared on his channel a few times, and people started writing me, and I started getting flooded with emails of people saying, could you interpret this, like this symbolism of this and symbolism of that, and I realized, okay, well, I can’t, I’m not gonna answer all these emails, so I have to, I guess I have to do something, and since it was happening on YouTube, I figured then I’ll make YouTube videos, it was really as silly as that. It’s interesting to me how you and your brother, because your brother’s, with his book, I mean, he’s very much a part of this story, even though he’s not on your channel, and I also, when earlier we talked about the fact that you’ve sort of taken a step back because I wrestle with this as a pastor, yeah, I put out a lot of videos, and I do a lot of conversation, but in some ways, and I think this is true of John Vervecky too, in some ways, sort of the space that a pastor holds is different from the space that an icon carver holds, because an icon carver, in a sense, in a sense, I would imagine, and please correct me if I’m wrong, in a sense, I would imagine you’re sort of an artistic monk. I guess. That’s sort of your vocation. Yeah. And a YouTube celebrity, I remember you talking about your kid describing you, my father makes YouTube videos. A YouTuber, my dad’s a YouTuber. I’ve been reduced to that. That’s a nice joke in my family, yeah. And again, I think here too, in this way, Jordan’s absence sort of means the circuit isn’t running like it was. It’s not necessarily bad. There’s some positive aspects to that. It’s like different waves, and so right now, what I’ve been doing, I would say in the past, I guess it actually is, since Jordan kind of vanished, I’ve been consolidating the things that I’ve been given to me. You could say it that way. And so I’ve been focusing a lot more on getting the conversation to run within the people that have been following my videos. And now we just started a blog where people that have been watching my videos for a few years, that are on this Facebook group that discusses the symbolism and have read my brother’s book, now I’ve kind of, JP, you met JP Marceau, so he’s editing the blog, and people can submit articles that are doing symbolic interpretation or that talk about symbolism for the blog. And so that has been, I put a lot of interest on that in the past few months, kind of getting that started. I don’t think there’s gonna be a massive public for it, but I think that it’s gonna be a good training ground for a lot of people, and it’ll be a resource for those who want to go further into symbolism. And so that’s kind of been my, that’s been my focus in the past few months, has been to try to see, to make this into a team effort, so that it’s not just me talking about symbolism, but that there’s a few dozen people that really understand what I’m talking about and can understand some facets of it that I don’t, and can use the lens of symbolism to look at things that I don’t have the energy or the interest to look at. And so that’s been exciting to put together, and I’m looking forward to, already the articles that have been going up, we’ve been live for about two weeks, or three weeks maybe, and the articles that have been going up have been great, just wonderful, really, really good stuff, so. You know, this last weekend I used, you probably know the YouTube channel, Like Stories of Old. Yeah. It’s a movie interpretation channel, a Dutchman, another Dutchman. And you know, when I was working on, when I was working on, he’d done a couple of videos, he’s gonna do a third one in this series about story versus reality, and of course that immediately caught my attention. And, you know, and I- They did a video on story versus reality? He’s got a series, he’s got two out, and a third one is coming. Very, very interesting, and as a preacher, I just kinda jumped on it right away, and because it sort of fit in, I’ve been working through First Peter in during the Easter season. And what was, what, you know, one of the things that, and I think about this a lot actually with your work, where there’s an interesting tension involved in both being the artist and the explainer. Yeah. In a sense, your videos are about bringing up to consciousness that which is already forming and shaping and molding beneath. Now, there’s a prophetic mode in that of, you know, oh, my people, you are absorbing, you are absorbing the worship of Baal, and you don’t even know it, and so allow me to bring up to your conscious, you know, the part of you that is conscious, the formation that is happening beneath the surface, and of course, for all of us, we have a certain, we have the pleasure of insight, the emotional, psychological pleasure of insight in that process, which I think is part of the joy I have in watching you take an arcade game, and once you say it, it’s, oh, gosh, this is the most obvious thing in the world. I never, you know, I never recognized how this ties into the rest of creation, but just in the first few minutes, it’s like, you know, why was I too dumb to see? But then there’s this other moment of realizing that, oh, my, I have been deeply formed, and the little conscious self of me that managing, manages these things is in very many ways, weak, helpless, has been subject to programming far beyond, and now Jonathan Peugeot comes up and makes me think differently about masculine and feminine, right hand, left hand, center and periphery, but yet as an artist, in a sense, you’re both the former as the artist, in some ways, you’re like the magician who goes on YouTube and shows how the tricks work. Exactly. The only reason why you have to do that is because there’s been a lot of really evil magicians in the past few generations who had a few really bad wizards that have been distorting reality and using, one of the problems that we’ve had in the past few centuries is that a lot of Christians took the science pill, like they just took it completely and they went down the critical, historical, scientific path, and those that took up the storytelling mode and who intuitively understood the patterns were those that really just wanted to destroy Christianity, and so you have, and so all the people who are really good at storytelling were those that were using these symbolic patterns to undermine the Christian narrative, and Christians were too busy answering with this or that like statue that or bowl that they found in the sand in Palestine, and they lost the story, and you can see because who are the Christians right now, like it’s all, it’s C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, right? It’s like that’s our only, is that it? Like that’s our only two storytellers? It’s those two. In the whole 20th century, we’ve got those two, whereas those that have been wanting to undermine have every other story, and so, maybe not every other story, but a huge amount of the storytelling, and so it feels like one of the things that I want to do is I want to give back the power of storytelling to the people who could do it, because the thing is that the Tolkien story is one of the most powerful stories that has been told in the 20th century, bar none, like not even Christian or not, it’s one of the most influential stories that has surfaced in the past few hundred years, and it’s because it has totally infiltrated culture in a way that people don’t even realize it. All your video games have Tolkien behind them. All your, so much of your science fiction, all the world building that you see in science fiction, that you see in fantasy stories, it’s all Tolkien. He’s the one who gave you that, and so, that’s how powerful, if you tell the right story, that’s how powerful it is, right? The right story, taking a story, let’s say, like a Disney story that’s somewhat twisted, like a Moana or whatever, there’s enough of it for it to be true, but there’s enough of it for it to be twisted, but if you were able to take it and just give it back in its pristine form, then it’s gonna win, because it’s truer, and so that’s what I, I would say one of my main goals has been to give back to Christians or to people who don’t want to undermine everything, to give them back the pattern so that they can use them, because it’s not enough to interpret these movies. This is, I mean, this is really, hopefully, it’s just groundwork for people then to be able to tell better stories. You know, it strikes me, again, as I was watching, like stories of old, as I was watching him basically deconstruct, as I was watching him deconstruct, I just had the sense that that effort will always fail. And so that’s what he was doing. He was saying reality is what, like meaningless and just random? Well, he’s saying, well, here, so story, well, he was in a sense saying, well, here’s the trick of story. You know the end, and therefore, you selectively construct the bits, and that’s how psychologically you create story. That’s unlike reality, of course, I, okay, tell me what reality is. Well, he doesn’t say it out loud, but the assumption is, well, reality is just one random, chaotic, purposeless event after another. That’s what reality is. And so now we have these stories, and so I’m waiting on his third episode where I suspect he will make the move that the freedom from religion people make every time they put up a bullboard in Sacramento, which is say, I can bring the meaning myself. And I think, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, I definitely have to watch the video because that’s hilarious. It’s so funny because let’s think of a very short story in terms of human interaction. All your actions are based on an end. There’s no action that you make, every action in the world is based on an end. Now, whether or not the end resolves itself one way or the other, that’s a different story because there are stories that don’t end well, even in a movie, but the purpose is there. So we always act for ends. There’s no action without an end. So it’s just funny to think that it’s like you know the end. Well, when I’m pouring a glass of juice from the fridge, I also know the end. Like, that’s why I’m doing it, or else I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t know what the end was. Well, and I think I just finished a very interesting conversation with Brett Sockel. Brett is the author, he’s a Roman Catholic from Regina, Saskatchewan, who’s the the theologian for the diocese in Regina. And he wrote this, what to me was a tremendous book on transubstantiation. And where basically, I think in many ways, he began helping Protestants, Lutherans, Calvinists and Catholics understand each other by showing some of the ways that Luther and Calvin were trying to recapture Aquinas and didn’t understand what they were doing. It’s a fascinating book. And how did I get at him? Well, so these ends, because we’re talking about conspiracy theories. Oh yeah, okay. And again, I think some of your work on this has been really tremendous and has deeply influenced me. And Mary Cohen has been really helpful for me too, because she’s Roman Catholic, she listens to all of us and she does her own little commentaries. But how you lay these things out. And so here, like stories of old, I think it’s basically going to say, he’s going to make the move. Well, this is such telling language. We don’t really have purpose, because this is of course what Sam Harris says about us. When you’re pouring the glass of orange juice, there’s no such thing as purpose, it only looks like purpose. And you experiences that as purpose. So what the Freedom From Religion Foundation says is that, well, we can enjoy the experience of purpose and we can live as if there’s purpose, but there really isn’t any. And it’s like, why are you working so hard on this? And in fact, because you can’t tell the story that there is no purpose, unless you use all of the tools of purpose to tell the story. And in that sense, the tools themselves betray the purpose for which they were given. And no matter how much you use that hammer to deconstruct, the hammer is more real than the pile of rubble you leave on the floor. That’s right, yeah. Every move you use to tell me that there’s no purpose is based on, you’re using all your purpose driven mechanisms to tell me that there’s no purpose. Like what exactly is your purpose in telling me there’s no purpose? Because you’ve got to have one, you definitely have one. It’s a very dark, cynical purpose that you’ve got in trying to do that. And so when I was, so I first started, I made just a pastor looks at Jordan Peterson. And then of course, people started coming to me, which was an unusual experience for me in ministry because they usually have people avoiding me. And so people start coming to me and they start telling me. And of course, we seldom quite know what’s really going on. And so we just experience things and make up reasons that sort of seem to fit, maybe are 20% right. And then I’m talking to all of these people and realizing a good percentage of the people I’m talking to were depressed. And then they tell me, I watched hours of Jordan’s video and I’m not depressed anymore. And what’s more, I kind of think I want to go to church. And then the crazy thing, especially as a Protestant, not necessarily making Protestants terribly happy. I’ll talk to you because you’re easier to find and talk to than Jordan, but what I really want to do is be Orthodox. And as a Protestant, I sit here and I think, oh, you’d better count the cost of this endeavor, my friend, because the Orthodox don’t just let anybody saunter in on one Sunday and say, I believe, walk down, get baptized and now you’re in. Yeah, it usually takes a year before they baptize you, that’s for sure. So again, I mean, my entire video project, at least the part that connects with Jordan has been to try to figure out what he’s doing. And I’m not always so sure, well, none of us ever know all that we’re doing, but sometimes I watch Jordan and I think, I wonder if he knows all the levels he’s working on because we can see them by the effects. And that’s exactly why I don’t want to do little clips of me because we who are even doing the work only know the effects by watching what comes back to us. Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think he’s probably, he might be more aware than what you think though. He’s actually, I think he’s quite aware. He’s also aware, he’s even aware at the level in which he speaks, because I even, one time I had a conversation with him and I won’t say who I was criticizing, but I was kind of commenting on someone on YouTube and I said, I don’t think he’s that smart, that person. And Jordan said, yeah, but he’s a stand-in for the common person. And he was like, that’s who I want to talk to. Like I don’t want to talk to, because a lot of people have criticized Jordan because his stuff isn’t formulated in complicated technical words and all of this. And it sounds very everyday and it’s because that’s what he wanted to do. He really did want to connect, to connect right to the people and be able to speak at different levels. But if he’s talking to Ian McGillchrist, he’s able to re-go up and talk about that stuff too. But he doesn’t feel like he has to prove to people that he’s smart and use complicated words all the time to kind of show people that he’s smart. And so I think that he’s more aware than we think sometimes of what he’s trying to accomplish and trying to gather the levels together to have this weird effect. He probably also knows that he was playing a kind of father, a dad figure as well. I’m sure he understood that. But it’s hard because again, it’s hard to have access to him now. Oh, I mean people, you should be left alone. That’s right. You know, it was so funny because I saw, he was coming through California and, okay, you’re in Oregon and then you’re gonna be in Sacramento, then you’re gonna be in the Bay Area, then you’re gonna be in Southern California. And he’s on Rogan when he’s doing that. I’m just kind of looking between the lines and I’m thinking, yo dude, a schedule like this? As a pastor, if you were in my church, I wouldn’t recommend it. Yeah, I would say slow down. That’s, there’s a lot that goes into that in terms of the churn and the people and all of that. And as, I shouldn’t say I didn’t ask for it, but I guess when I made a video, I asked for it. So part of what I’ve done, people sometimes ask me what I do and I say, well, I’m a pastor. I’m just sort of pastoring in a different way right now. And so I, with the Discord server and with the conversations, a lot of it is, and with the meetups, which we can’t do right now, a lot of it is, to me, to me, the focus is on the community that I leave behind me and the power of that community. And so obviously, I just pastor a tiny little segment of this community. I think that’s great. I think in a way with the kind of these Discord discussions and everything, I think that’s probably the best thing to do right now. Like I talked about the idea of consolidating what’s happened in a way and trying to now gather up the pieces of things that have been transformed and try to make them more solid, just more coherent. So I think that’s great. If you’ve got this Discord discussion and you’ve got people talking to each other and everything, kind of an extension of the meetups, because it’s hard, you can’t do meetups with everybody, but to have a Discord discussion can create something of that, you know, continual discussion. Well, and to me, I look for people’s motivation, not just to, let’s say, have a little conversation, whether it’s by text or voice chat or even Zoom, but their desire to begin to build something. And so it was members of my local meetup who built the Bridges of Meaning Discord server. And they’ve kind of coalesced around a bunch of people that I had Zoom conversations with and posted on the channel. And it’s sort of built since there and that sort of becomes an estuary for me if people wanna talk to me. Well, it’s even hard to get a rando slot right now because I only have a certain number each week. But I wanna keep them open because, you know, this is some of what you’ve taught me too and Jordan, there’s a real value in leaving a space for that which I won’t filter into my life. And it can’t be everything, but you can’t have none. There needs to be a space because in through that space comes, you know. Yeah, surprise comes all kinds of things that you hadn’t thought about, things you hadn’t considered for sure, yeah. So, well, I guess two thoughts come to mind. Number one, you know, is there, will, gosh, is there gonna be a second wave and if so, what? I mean, Jordan’s got, you know, he had a couple tweets yesterday and I thought, yeah, he’s, you know, some of this pattern is Jordan and you can kind of see what’s publicity and what, you know, they’re just putting out to keep the social media machines running and then what comes out? No, there’s some Jordan behind this. And so he’s- Well, it’s possible. He’s working and mostly working on his book. I think that’s what he’s doing. Well, exactly. And so it’s going to be very interesting to me because he, okay, so we had C-16, we had the election of Trumps at Trump and we had, you know, everything that we’ve had in clown world, we’ve had Joker, now we had a pandemic, now we’re having a pandemic. And so, you know, a big part of that wave, Jordan’s wave was also, I mean, the man and the moment found each other. And then, you know, you’re right. He, C-16, the more I think about it, was in so many ways exactly the right inflection point to hit something if you’re gonna create a wave. But the world that the sequel, and it’ll be interesting to see to what degree it is a sequel, the world that the sequel comes into is a different world. Oh yeah, it’s a different world for sure. And for me, you know, as a pastor, you know, people come to me and, okay, so you listen to Jordan and you got red-pilled or bread-pilled or any other pill you wanna conceive it as, and you wanna remake your life and you wanna do things differently and you’re gonna listen to Jonathan Pigeot, you’re going to need to, there’s going to need to be patterns, habits, disciplines, institutions, community. If that shining moment of revelation that you experienced is going to bear any fruit at all, it’s going to have to, and I really do, I put that comment on Twitter, but your video of the seeds, I thought, if I had to show people one, someone who at least knew something, one video to say what Jonathan Pigeot, what I think his message is, boy, that video was, I thought, well, there’s the seed of the Jonathan Pigeot plan. Well, I don’t even know what video is this, I don’t even know what video it is. The video of the soils, the parable of the soils. Oh, the soil, yeah, the parable of Christ as the sower, that’s right, that’s right. Oh, yeah, I think so. I think you’re right that, well, also because it has the meta pattern inside of it, it has the pattern, it has the meta pattern, and it’s Christian. Yeah, I’m curious to see how, I feel like, maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like there isn’t gonna be a second wave. I think there’s gonna be something else. I mean, I think Jordan will have his place in discourse, like he’ll have his place in the world, but I don’t see his second book having as big an effect, and I don’t see, unless there’s another controversy, unless there’s some controversy, I don’t see, I think there’s gonna be something else. He’ll say something in that book, you know it, that’ll touch people. Maybe, but it seems like there might be something else, that there might be another, I don’t know what it’s gonna be, because you never know what it is until it happens. I think we just have to be ready to take advantage of whatever flashpoint is there, which can create another level, where it can bring people to the next level, or to create insight, the right type of insight that needs to happen. And that’s why I talked about consolidating, because if you consolidate the people that you’ve been talking to, then, you know, for example, like, let’s say you and myself, the reason why it sparked us, let’s say, is because the soil was already prepared. It was stuff that we were already thinking about, or that we already had something in our lives prepared to kind of, to take that and to move with it, you know? And so I think that maybe that’s how I see it now. I think now is the time to plow the soil, or to get people ready, people who have already, were already in the discussion, already thinking, who have had some insights, too, for the next moment where it’s gonna jump again. But I don’t know what that’s gonna be, I have no idea. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it could be, because anything can happen right now. I mean, people don’t, when things start to accelerate in these weird, chaotic moments, there is no telling what’s gonna happen. Because if you had known, if you could have known that, let’s say, I don’t know, maybe, what, six years ago, I would have told you, Trump, Brexit, pandemic. And then Jordan Peterson, and, you know, people who are hardcore atheists, all of a sudden have stopped being so aggressive when they, they still hate religion, but they feel like they can’t be as aggressive as they were. You know, even people like Sam Harris isn’t as cocky as he was anymore. Yeah. And I don’t think, maybe he wouldn’t even acknowledge it, but that’s what it seems like. Yeah. You know, this, so I’ve been reading, Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone, and so Eric had Ross, no, he had JD Vance on his podcast. And JD Vance, have you read Hillbilly Elegy? Okay. You know who JD Vance is? Okay. And JD Vance mentioned, I mean, it was just something very interesting to me. So JD Vance writes about his grandmother, he grew up out in Appalachia, and his grandmother was, she believed in God, didn’t go to church because the pastors were all, you know, hucksters and grifters, but she, you know, she believed in God and she trusted that God would make things right and so on and so forth. And so of course for Vance, that caught his interest. Now he eventually, I don’t know if he’s, I think he’s in a Roman Catholic church now, I’m not sure. I mean, every, you know, in terms of the big line, and I think you get this writer than most, you know, we’re back to sacraments and we’re back to icons and we’re back to the imagination that, imagination, that’s an interesting, why’d I say that word? We’re back, you know, I saw this coming with Protestants that seeker movement was sort of, you know, back to stripped out churches, smoke machines, using proverbs to gain wisdom to get a little bit of credibility, to sneak in, the four spiritual laws and the center’s prayer. And then I watched in the response to that, everybody suddenly wanting, well, I want one of these old church buildings with architectural features and I want chanting and we’re gonna get a canter. And these are Dutch Reformed churches doing this and I’m watching this thinking, what’s going on there? What’s going on there? And so you’re getting again, and you talked about this before I saw anybody else talking about it, kind of this inversion, this return. And, you know, then I drummed up Chesterton’s, the last chapter before the conclusion of The Everlasting Man, he talks about, you know, the seven deaths of Christianity. And you talk about, you know, basically Chesterton says, Christianity has many times died and then it keeps coming around again. And I’ve heard you talk about this a number of times. It’s a process, I kind of call it the double inversions. So a good example is that example that you said where the church decides that in order to reach out to the world, it has to be more like the world, right? It has to be more like the people you’re reaching towards. And so it keeps, but in order to do that, it has to dilute itself. It has to dilute itself in order to reach out, you know, and it’s a form of kinosis. You could see it that way if you want to. It’s like an emptying of yourself to move out. But at some point, there’s a point where you reach a limit where it’s like, if I go one step further, I’m not myself, like it’s over, like there’s nothing. And so the church, the evangelical church is like, oh, we could use advertising techniques. We could use movie making techniques. We could have dance, we can have this, we can have smoke machines, we can have rock bands. And then you get to the end where it’s like, okay, you’re still not as good as a rock band. You’re still not as good as a dance troupe. You’re still not as good as an advertising firm. But you’ve come all this way and so now you’re at the edge and the only place to go is now it’s like, well, I actually forget where, I’ve forgotten where I’ve come from. And so the move to remember is a normal move. It’s like, it just kind of happens on its own. I have to now remember where I came from. It’s almost, it’s even, there’s even something in that, in the idea of transgression itself, where you can only be a rebel if there’s authority. And so rebellion ultimately ends up reinstating authority, necessarily, because the rebellion makes no sense if authority breaks down. Right, and that’s the whole idea of the clown too, where at the end it’s like the clown flips it back because it’s like when you’ve made fun of everything and the whole world is a joke, then the only thing left to make fun of is the joke itself. You make fun of the joke and then it turns back and you come back to the king, you know? And people play that out in their lives. I’ve often noted that in conservative Christian reformed, when conservative Christian reformatee still existed and still does in some rural places, it was the rebellious youth who became the authoritarians when they were, when they were older. Yeah. When they were older. Yeah. And you just watched them. I’ve seen that too, I’ve seen that happen too. Teenagers who were so rebellious and then they become pastors and they’re like, whoosh, that’s how they are. They’re like the most hardcore. And even you see that people who convert to Islam too, you see that too. A lot of people who convert to Islam are people who are like completely out there and then, you know, and then whoosh, I need something solid. Like I want something solid now. Yeah, yeah. And they become hardcore because Islam gives them those bright lines and the traditions and it’s all there. Well, I’ve peppered you enough, Jonathan, and you’ve been gracious. Anything you wanted to bring into this conversation or any questions? So where, like, where do you feel you’re at in terms, because I’ve now, because you used to comment mostly what Dorn was doing. Yeah. And so now he’s been gone for like, you know, for six, eight months, even more. And so what has been your driving force? Like what has been the thing that keeps you discussing right now? Well, I’ve been, yeah, Jordan sort of, well, when he went on his book tour, so I’ve been, I read Ross Douthat’s book on decadence and I found that really helpful to try and get a sense of what’s really happened in the culture since the 70s. You know, I watched the Joker movie and I felt like I was watching my growing up and then I realized, yeah, he filmed that in Newark, New Jersey. I thought I was watching my growing up years. And so trying to get us, so Ross Douthat, Peter Thiel has had some interesting ideas about lack of progress. And so I’ve been trying to get a handle on, and again, increasingly lately, everything I think I’m looking for, I start finding in Chesterton. And as a Protestant who is very dismissive of Calvinists, that can be unnerving in some places. Because Chesterton made the point in, I think it was the second chapter in his book entitled Heretics, that this world can’t find the good, can only sort of find the good in terms of opposite of the negative. Because they can only see the negative and they can’t see the thing that the negative is moving against. They’re only seeing things in its shadow. And so I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the last 60 years of history, the 60s to the 70s to the 80s to the 90s, and then now, and how, okay, everybody wants to be progressive. What exactly are you progressing towards? Oh yeah, my goodness. Because then I’ll hear, I’ll watch the, and I think the pandemic has taken some of the wind out of the progressivist sails right now. Hard to know where that will actually go. But, okay, so what exactly is your telos? What exactly, what beyond the heat death of the universe do you actually want? Yeah. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about that and also continuing on my godness, god number one and god number two, because thinking, and this is where I wind up with a bunch of Roman Catholics, which again, what do I do with that, with my Dutch Calvinism? No, I’m not converting all you people that have been cheering for that in the comment section. But what do we mean when we use this word god? And again, your work has been tremendously helpful for me to understand that in some weird way God is everywhere and nowhere, and the whole earth is full of his glory, but all of creation does not exhaust him by any means. And noting in, it’s been very interesting watching television shows like The Good Place and Upload, watching humanity’s crisis of confidence that even if we had everything our way, we are finally a shallow cup that is too shallow to actually contain the desires, the universe that we desire. And that sort of backs me into CS Lewis’s argument from desire that deep in our hearts, we know we were made for more than even what our imaginations now cast on screens with zeros and ones that we think we can make anything in the virtual space. And then we discover, no, we’re bumping into our own limitations again. And so that to me then leads back to the nihilistic despair of humanity that if we are finally, there’s finally no agent above us or beyond us, then we are locked in a prison of our own despair. And this to me just opens up Christianity and what the whole story is about. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. And so are you seeing in the discussion that’s remaining, let’s say glimmers of that? Because I saw you were kind of listening to the portal and you were breaking down some of the things that we’re talking about, trying to find some moments that express more, let’s say a desire for more, like you said. Do you see, because I’m curious, like what is the solution? Like what is the solution that is, for example, like on the portal, like what is the, I was listening to one of the videos you did where he was, I forget who he was talking to, and he was talking about telling people that they should have kids or something. Like if you have kids, then that’ll give you meaning and everything. And I kept, there was something so fragmentary about that type of thing where it’s like, yeah, okay, but I don’t think that that’s enough. I mean, I don’t think that people will feel like that that’s enough. And also why? Like is it just to follow some biological drive to reproduce? And if so, then what’s all this other stuff? All this whole other thing that’s going on, this whole civilization thing, this whole art thing, this whole, what is that? Like what is going on? If we find meaning in reproducing the species because we’re programmed to do that, there’s more. I know you obviously agree with me, but. So he was talking to Ryan Holiday, who Ryan Holiday is doing YouTube videos on Stoicism. And again, when I was first learning who Stoics were, if you had told me that in 2020, there would be a Stoicism movement on YouTube, and you’re gonna talk to the Stoa, I mean, so you’re gonna talk to some of these people. And the funny thing about Stoicism is they have, so here’s all this wisdom about, and I listen to their wisdom, and I think, yeah, that’s wisdom. This is stuff that you can hear Jordan Peterson tell you that you can get from Marcus Aurelius, they can get from all of these people. But where Stoicism finally sort of bottoms out is that, yeah, if you have a kid, and if you love that kid, don’t forget that proviso, because I think part of the hang, hangover in post Christendom is that Christianity shamed us into a certain level of love that society continues to maintain. That yeah, to abandon your kids, you’re still a schmuck, and we all know that. So suddenly the having of that child and parenting of that child begins to have a sacramental effect, because, and one of the first people I talked to after I made my first video was someone who lives near and I had lunch with him. And he said, you know, this was a guy who was studying for the ministry. And then he got to a point in reading all of the Protestant theology. And he said, I don’t believe any of it. And then he listened to Sam Harris and he went through the whole thing. Oh, really, okay. And then he met a woman, had a kid, and began to realize in himself, I’m, and I’ve had talked to a lot of people like this. What if something happens to my kid? I love my kid. That kid isn’t just a bunch of atoms. And something in the relationship with my child suggests that it’s not merely a psychological trick or an evolutionary product that I am bounded to this child, but there’s something in this moment that connects heaven and earth. And I am deeply disturbed by that realization, and it’s not going to leave me alone until I get an answer that is satisfying. And so here’s, so I listened to Eric talk to Ryan Holiday about what these people need to do is have kids. And I think, yeah, huh, I’ve got five of them. They’re, you know, it’s sort of like the like stories of old. You keep using those tools. Yeah, there you go. At some point, you know, the tool that at some point, the stones start talking to you. Yeah, no, that’s a great way to put it. And there’s a reason why stoicism failed. Like it failed in the sense that it failed to make civilization. It has used to it, but stoicism only really succeeded when it was bound within Christianity. Because a lot of people will tell you that Christianity is actually largely akin to stoicism. That’s the best word, akin. Yeah, it’s akin to stoicism. There are aspects of stoicism within Christianity, but stoicism doesn’t offer you a story to live in. It doesn’t offer you a story to exist in. And the same thing with the Neoplatonists. Like the Neoplatonists just couldn’t, they just couldn’t break through because it was a theory and it was a bunch of, you know, it was a theory about reality, but it wasn’t an enacted story. It wasn’t an enacted something that you entered into and it didn’t create the type of communion that would bind people together. And so you have Marcus Aurelius being a stoic, you know, on his own and whining that everybody is, and complaining that everybody is a degenerate, but like we wouldn’t say it that way. But, you know, like just being this, like, you know, taking the world on his shoulders and doing his thing, you know, taking it all on himself, but it doesn’t come together. Which is exactly, I’ve watched enough Christians deconstruct, which is what I find exactly what happens to people who deconstruct from Christianity. So they sort of become stoics and they take the world on their shoulders and they’re really frustrated with everyone who’s not pulling their share and not doing, you know, not carrying the load with them. And it’s like, and so then I get to Augustine and so yeah, Manichaeanism, and when you, people always use Manichaean as kind of an illustration of dualism, go and look what the Manichaeans believe. It’s wild stuff. And then of course, Neoplatonism, and I think you said it’s, so wow, here’s this incredibly brilliant, thought through Neoplatonist image of the world, but if you read Confessions, talk about a book dripping with pathos and relation. And, you know, so John Verbeke and I just had a conversation last week and I think the conversation went very well. And so where John and I sort of, you know, come up against each other is exactly this question of personhood. And in your conversation with John, which was quite esoteric, but I thought I really enjoyed it. And I thought you nailed it right on the head when you said, you know, it’s person, person, person, you get past a certain point, it’s gonna be person up and person down. You know, if you wanna say it’s impersonal beyond this point, well, you can say that, but you can’t know it anyway, because you’re just a human being. And, you know, in my conversation, I just finished with Brett Sockel. I have to figure out if we’re gonna post yours tomorrow or Brett’s tomorrow. But, you know, I think the thing that we finally come down to it, we never really get past Genesis 3, that in a sense, the Genesis 3 story is about a conspiracy theory. And all that the snake does is say, you know, just makes a few suggestions and frame it in a certain way. And can we finally trust our maker? Can we finally trust, can we as tiny little scared creatures finally surrender our hearts and say, this is what I am. This is, and I, no matter how much money and power and technology and all the stuff that this world has to offer, of course, Jesus said all this. Yeah. This is what I am. And what my heart desires is to love and be loved. And, you know, Neoplatonism, Augustine didn’t end there for a reason. And I, so I watched the Stoics and I think, I’d rather have my neighbor be a Stoic than a Hedonist. Yeah. I’d still rather they be a good Christian who gives, lays down their life for their neighbor all the way up to it, including their enemy. Yeah. No, I agree. And I think that like, I think that it just, that’s one of the reasons why it happened the way it did. One of the reasons why Neoplatonism and Stoicism were taken into Christianity, because it offered the, it offered the story, it offered the pathos, and it offered the personalism, like if you wanna say it that way, it offered the fact that the world actually manifests itself through personal categories. You could say it that way, which is that, and it really is the idea, you could say of intelligences, you know, that’s how we talk about, when we talk about principalities and angels, that the world actually manifests itself through intelligences. It’s not concepts, like the way that the kind of, let’s say the kind of basic platonic way of understanding it, that there are these like forms that are something like concepts, that are kind of like these, but no, they’re intelligences. The world manifests itself by, through intelligences. And once you kind of get that, then all of a sudden you realize, well, there’s a reason why, because a Stoic doesn’t have to worship, and they don’t worship, but it also means if you don’t celebrate, then you don’t come together. It’s just very simple, the world is, celebration is the beginning of reality. It’s the way that reality, it’s the relevance realization. Worship is relevance realization. Oh, that’s what worship is. It is celebrating the disclosure of the source of how things come together and are one, and exist in love, like you could say it that way. And so I think that that’s why worship, even that, and that’s one of the things in my conversation with John that I was trying to kind of pull out of him, which maybe is a bit tricky on my part, but I was trying to pull out of him that even non-theistic religions, like certain strands of Buddhism or Taoism, that if they posit the highest in terms of non-being, it still manifests itself as beings all the way down. And so it’s like, okay, so you say that ultimate reality in terms of Buddhism is a form of annihilation. Okay, but then there are all these bodhisattvas that start right at the door of annihilation all the way down to hell. You have this hierarchy of beings that come down. And it’s the same in Taoism, and it’s the same in Hinduism, and it’s the same in every religion understands the world as a hierarchy of beings and a hierarchy of intelligences. And that means that it has to do with celebration and love and devotion also. It’s not just that, it’s not only that, but it’s also part of it, right? It’s not just story, but you can’t get rid of story. It’s not just devotion, but you can’t get rid of devotion. Right. And I think folk religion, one of the things that always interested me about when I first started watching friends and neighbors start getting all excited about American style Buddhism was I thought, no, wait a minute. You go over there and you take a look at those Buddhists. And I remember when there was a jetliner that was broken down on a runway and the Buddhist monks came out and sacrificed a goat to get that sucker moving again. And I thought, no, wait a minute, wait a minute. All my Western secular friends are going to these places and meditating and do all that because this religiosity, that’s all the problematic stuff. But those are Buddhists sacrificing a goat on an airstrip. Yeah. Why is that happening? Well, I always say that my Catholic grandmother was more a Buddhist than all these California Buddhists. For sure. For sure. Well, and that gets into the idea of folk religion where, so JD Vance’s Mimal was a Protestant folk religionist in many ways, but there’s a, even though she didn’t go to church, there was at least still a haunting of an inclination of what you just described. That she was not going to, in some ways the entire artifice of what we’ve seen as new atheism is so fragile because it can sort of only be maintained as a grudge. I’m serious about that. No, you’re right. You’re totally right. It can only be maintained as, I’m not going to worship. Yeah. And all your videos are debunking. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Let’s see. It’s kind of like dealing with a two-year-old that says, I’m not going to eat anymore. All right. And go for it. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. I’ll take your dinner away. Yeah. You’ll be fine. But do you see that, yeah, you see that in the end, you end up having the atheists today, they have to end up saying things like, was it Dawkins who said I’m a culturally Christian atheist and then Zizek who says he’s a Christian atheist and you’re going to end up having that or who’s the other guy, the crowd guy. I’m horrible with names. The problem with the one who wrote the Strange Death of Europe, what’s his name? Oh, Douglas. Yeah, so Douglas Murray, he’s the same. He’s like, I’m a Christian atheist. You’re going to get a lot more of that. But then it also, but then it, and hopefully it plays itself out right because there’s, at some point when you say, at some point when you say it’s like, there’s this real reality, a great meme that has appeared online. I think it was like Mike Cernovich who posted it that I saw at least. And it was, you know that exploding mind meme where it’s like the mind keeps getting bigger and more bright and then it’s like, you keep getting more and more intelligent or whatever. And it was basically about God. The first one was I believe in God and it’s like a little brain. And then it says, I don’t believe in God and it was like a bigger brain. Then it says, I believe that God is a useful construct for keeping societies together and is a bigger brain. And then the other one is that without God, society breaks down and everything falls to hell. And then the last one’s like, well, I believe in God because, what do you mean? So that’s not real? That’s not real that if you don’t have God or you don’t have some religion, then everything falls apart. That’s not a real thing. That’s a real thing. That’s a real thing in the world and it actually happens. Just like symbolism. Oh yeah, symbolism happens. There you go. No, so that’s what I’ve been, I just keep itching at some of this stuff because I can’t get enough of it. And people like you and others indulge my itch by making me no longer be able to watch Donkey Kong with any kind of the innocence I had before. Yeah, well, I have a lot, just today I was talking with some people that my kind of top patrons and one of the guys, Kyle, I think he was on your channel. And so I think he watches you and he was talking about, and he was actually giving me a frame that I might wanna bring up with you right now because one of the problems that I’ve been trying to understand in terms of symbolism, it gets just hard because we’re in it right now, is to understand the flip that happened during the pandemic because it’s very odd, right? It’s very odd. You had a moment in March where all the left leaning, all the liberal types were saying, it’s evil to shut the border, it’s racist, it’s xenophobic, it’s all this, blah, blah, blah, blah, and the people who were conservative were saying, no, this is a serious pandemic, we gotta shut it down. And then it flipped completely upside down. Like the whole thing, the whole discourse completely changed and then all of a sudden, it was the people who were on the left who were saying, we need to shut down forever, two years, like this is never gonna come back, it’s never gonna change. And then the others are saying, it’s free, I need to be free, like you can’t shut us down, this is government tyranny, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I thought, wow, it’s crazy how it totally flipped. And then he said that you were talking about the strength and compassion, right? Yeah. Go ahead. So the Republicans, watch the 2016, you don’t actually watch it, you just look at a picture because you know exactly what’s gonna happen. Watch the 2016 Republican candidates debate each other about who should be at the head of the party and then look at the 2020 Democrats, that big field, debate each other. The Republicans always sort of manifest strength. We are about strength and so Donald Trump wants to manifest strength and the Democrats kindness, compassion. And so, Republicans, we’re going to fund, we can’t put enough money towards national security. We can’t spend enough money on keeping ourselves safe, even though the United States spends more than the next six countries combined. The Democrats, we can’t spend enough money throwing it at suffering people because if they’re suffering, we’re sure that some amount of money will fix it. And I think part of what happens in a pandemic is that both get exposed. And so, the shutdown, well, for a while, when Trump was running for office, one of the things he was gonna end is the national deficit because there’s gonna be so much money coming in and yeah, yeah, yeah. And so now, of course, then the Dems are all worried about the deficit and now, well, we just, $4 trillion in one fell swoop and now the Dems are back and wanting to do another 3 trillion. And so, everything’s all inverted. You’re exactly right because, well, what are you afraid of? And in a sense, at least the Republicans are afraid of their loss of liberty and the Dems are afraid of losing their life because it’s been very interesting. Again, this gets into, so in 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the Democratic Senator from Massachusetts ran for President of the United States and the dominant concern was, can we elect a Roman Catholic? Right. In 2004, another JFK, John Kerry, the Democratic Senator from Massachusetts who was also a celebrated war veteran ran for President on the Democratic ticket and most Catholics didn’t vote for him. In 2020, we’re going to have a Frisian, so that’s my mother’s side, Frisians, they’re Germans and Dutch. We’re going to have a Frisian who his most abiding church connection was the Reformed Church in America. So Donald Trump religiously is my cousin. Okay, yeah, very decent cousin. He’s Frisian, Dutch Reformed, the Norman Vincent Peale prosperity gospel running against Joe Biden who of course is a Roman Catholic and Joe Biden goes to church more than Donald Trump, I would bet. Okay, really? Now, all of these church labels, what on earth do they mean? They don’t mean anything anymore, yeah. And well, here’s the question and so then Tom Holland’s work comes through, his book Dominion, which is a very interesting book. He basically comes through and says, which really annoys the secularists, do you know how deeply Christian our entire society is? You know, we can’t, Christianity runs through everything that we’re doing. All of our fights are in a sense within Christianity. That’s an equal opportunity offender because the secularists say, no, it’s the enlightenment and somehow our culture is a clean room artifact of the Greeks and Tom Holland says, hey, I’ve spent my life writing stuff about the Greeks. We’re nothing like the Greeks. Oh yeah, my goodness, no. And on the other side, the Christians are saying, no, we’ve, you know, Christian people are, this is how you define Christian people, by their religiosity and it’s like, well, you know, there’s a lot of stuff about religiosity that it isn’t merely religiosity either and so we have inversions all over the place right now. No, you’re right and it’s, but that’s the topsy-turvy. Like I guess that’s the problem with the topsy-turvy world is things just keep flipping and you don’t know, you know, it’s like juggling. You know, you don’t know what’s going on. And things, some things are up, things are down and so it’ll be interesting to see how it’s going to play out. But there was still like, it was interesting the way that he had framed it based on your categories. I thought it was a good idea. He said, when at the beginning, the Republicans were acting out of strength by saying, we’re gonna shut our borders, right? And the Democrats were acting out of compassion by saying, no, no, we need to let people in. And then when it flipped, they’re still using the same reason. Like so the person, the Republican is saying, you know, oh no, I’m gonna be strength. I can’t let someone control me. I need to go outside and not wear a mask and do that. And the other is saying, no, you need to protect others and save lives and isolate yourself to save lives. And so it ends up being the same motivation, which is creating the opposite reaction. Yep. And so it’s fascinating to watch it. It’s really fascinating to watch it. And it’ll, you know, it’s crazy. It’s crazy. When you said it’ll have like, it’ll what? What do you think is gonna happen? But you know, even. Who knows what’s gonna happen? But you know, and I think in some ways, you know, cause I think a fair amount about, the rising of the Orthodox church within the church landscape in America is fascinating to me. And you know, especially in the light of this, because I think about Rod Dreher, how, you know, Rod Dreher goes to his priest and says, you know, we want to practice, you know, Roman Catholic family planning. And his priest rolls his eyes and says, oh, you’re one of those. And you know, within not too long, Rod Dreher will be Orthodox. So, you know, so in a sense, what we’ve seen is that we used to have these labels like Roman Catholic, John Kennedy is Roman Catholic, and that label stood for something. There was a witness there that by the time of John Kerry, the witness is completely diluted. And now the Orthodox. I think Rod Dreher’s analysis of this situation is the best. I think that, I mean, his vision is that to a certain extent, right now, what’s really happening is that there are Christians who take it seriously and there are Christians who don’t, who base their motivation on their faith. And there are Christians who base their motivation on other factors, they base it on other factors. And those Christians that base their motivation on their faith, they end up seeing each other across denominations. And so it’s like, I feel more akin, and a lot of Orthodox might be annoyed that I’ll say that, but I feel way more akin, even with evangelical, who wants to get rid of the sins in his life and wants to be faithful to his wife and wants to worship God the way he thinks he’s capable of doing, who wants his culture to be coherent. I feel more akin to that person than I do to some Greek Orthodox, nominal Orthodox, who goes to church three times a year. And it’s like, yeah, so I can see you across the lane and I’m like, well, we disagree on things, but I can see you and the other person is just like, meh. But we’re getting, so now we’re working relevance realization because we’re trying to figure out what it is. What’s the pattern? Like what is the thing that’s making this disappear as a pattern? Right, because- Who are these first things people, who are these, yeah, who are these American conservative, Rod Dreyer types, like where, how is it that they’re in a weird communion, but they don’t go to church together? They wouldn’t take the chalice together, but they still feel a sense of weird, and a lot of these types of people are non-ecumenalists actually. Like we don’t believe in ecumenism, but we actually see each other across the lines and say, one of the reasons why I feel akin to you is because you take your difference with me seriously. Right. And you’re willing to, we’d actually have to like talk it out and take it seriously instead of saying, hey, it doesn’t matter, it’s all good, like whatever, let’s all have a big party and just forget about our differences, as if that does anything. And I think some of that, so Chuck, you know who Chuck Colson is? He was one of Richard Nixon’s hatchet men. He wrote this book, Born Again. Yeah, I remember that book, yeah. So in Born Again, Chuck Colson comes to his wife and says, I’m a Christian, and his wife looks at him and is like, you’re Episcopalian. No, no, now really. So, and I think in a lot of ways, what we’ve been working on for the last 60 years, now in an ecumenical frame is, what is it? What is that thing? What is that thing that binds an Eastern Orthodox icon carver with a Dutch reformed from an iconoclastic background, because of course, they smashed half the monasteries. That’s right, why am I laughing? And my denomination is conservative enough that there are some quarters where Vanderklei is talking to an icon carver. Doesn’t Jonathan Peugeot make idols? And, oh, now we’re having this conversation. But that’s part of exactly what we’re in right now. And it’s manifest in the strange ecumenism that is happening at this level. Because a lot of what’s been passed off as ecumenical conversations, we look at and say, man, I’m not really interested in that. Yeah, because it’s like a weird fluffy pretend. It’s like you’re pretending. I think there’s an honesty about, maybe at this level that we’re trying to identify, there’s an honesty, right? There’s an honesty about actual differences and actual resemblances, instead of just trying to cast it all aside. I remember having a discussion when I was young. I was an Orthodox, I was evangelical, and I remember meeting a Catholic guy, and he was like, oh, Christians, we just all need to come together. We just all need to be together and to be together. And I was like, well, I said, I know some Christians who think that when you pray to Mary, you’re praying to the devil. And so what do you do with that? And he said, oh, well, they just have to put that aside. I’m like, well, I don’t know what to tell you, because that doesn’t work that way. Like you can’t just throw everything out. Let’s deal with it. Let’s talk about it. We might disagree. But if you just say, let’s pretend like it’s not there, it’ll look really nice for a little while, and then it’ll be all passive aggressive from then on. Ha ha ha ha! That’s true. That’s so true. Ha ha ha! Well, and to me, this gets back to one of the earlier things that I saw in Jordan, where he says, first you act it out. And I think that gets into worship, what we talked about, and sacramentality, because, okay, let’s all be together. So let’s go worship at your house today. And you come in and, oh, there’s the statue, and Jesus is up on the cross. And all of, start to get a little bit nervous, and people are dipping in the holy water, and at what point will something inside of me say, okay, there’s the line? I can’t cross that line, yeah, exactly. But at least there is a line. That’s right, yeah. Because in a sense, what we sort of began wandering into, because this inversion seems very much to have something kicked off in the 60s that got us going in here. So where exactly is the line, and what is the line, and what is that line really connected to? And how far up and down does that line really go? And will you actually live by that line? And none of it’s arbitrary. It has to do with, I think a lot of it has to do with honesty. I think a lot of it has to do with honesty, and that’s what makes, like I said, that’s what makes us able to see each other across the line, is that you’re not pretending, that this is, for example, if I brought you to an Orthodox church, you wouldn’t pretend that it’s all fine. You’d be like, okay, this is my line, so we can actually talk about it. Like I went to, this year I went to a Christmas service, one of the Christmas services in a major kind of Pentecostal type evangelical church, and it was more like a big play, but it was still in the church. And it was like, the whole time, I was like, I’m gonna, you know, and then it was like, it kept happening. And then when the acrobats came out, I was like, that’s it, this is my line. This is the line where I’m like, nope, nope. When I’ve got the girls dropping from the cloth and leotards in the church, I’m like, that’s it. I just can’t, I just can’t, I’m not here anymore. I’m just not here anymore. So I can imagine, like you said, but then if I saw the pastor of that church, who’s someone who has extreme integrity and is extremely impressive in terms of his life and in terms of his devotion, I can still see him across the line, but I’m not gonna pretend like it’s fine that I think it’s fine he has acrobats in his church. I am not. I. Well, and to me as, you know, so when I listen to people talk about me in other things, they’ll say, well, he’s this pastor who’s high in openness. And it’s like, I’m not sure that’s always a good thing. But I’ve always, as a Protestant wondered, so why is it okay to have a pastor who’s high in openness? And a Protestant wondered, so why is it okay to bring the donkey into the building and have the Christmas pageant, but it’s idolatry to have a picture of a donkey in stained glass? You know, and so, oh, you’re so right. You’re so right. But I really, like, yeah, I really do think that one of the reasons, if you are honest about what you believe and you’re honest about what your limits are and you don’t pretend and you know what it is, then I think that that permits a lot of openness. It permits indefinite openness because you’re open to a certain level. You know, like I can have a discussion. I think like I could have a discussion with anybody, but it doesn’t mean that I have to concede the things that are important to me just because I’m having the discussion, you know? And so I think that that’s it. Like if you’re honest and you know what you believe and you know what you are, then you actually have a lot of room to talk to other people. Yeah, yeah. And again, people sometimes ask me, because they’re surprised that I’m a pastor and I’m like this, and I think that’s gonna be surprising. But you know, I learned so much of this from my father because I learned from him exactly what you just said. If you know who you are and you know what you believe, then the other person’s, whatever it is they are and are saying and doing, it doesn’t really threaten you because that’s them and you’re you. And you actually know the difference between them and you. A lot of people don’t. But it ends up manifesting itself in all kinds of ways where, for example, you know, let’s say people who just want to accept tradition from other cultures, it’s like you’re deluding yourself. It’d be way better for you to say, well, you know what, like that, like the sacrificing of the goats, no, I don’t want that. Like I don’t want that. I don’t think that’s okay. I want a mechanic, not a goat sacrifice that’s on my plane. Once you at least say, no, that I think is, then you can have an actual discussion. But if you pretend like it’s all okay, like you have no idea how weird other people’s way of doing things is, right? You have no idea. Like there are cultures where people still beat their wives and so you would have to at some point say, well, no, no, that’s not acceptable, right? And so it’s better to just know. But then I could talk to a guy who beats his wife. Like I could have a discussion with him, you know? And I wouldn’t agree with his behavior, but I can talk with the murderer. I could talk with people who live in a way that I disagree with, you know? I don’t feel like I need to keep myself pure from anything that’s not like me. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, yeah, no, I agree, I agree. Well, we’ve done almost two hours. Almost two hours. You really pull me like to, because I usually, I never have like two hour conversations. It’s like after an hour, I start being like, okay, you know, we’ve gone through everything, but you got me going for two hours, that’s awesome. And laughing the whole time. Joe Rogan, watch yourself, baby, I’m coming for you. We’re coming for you, Joe. Well, Jonathan, so we should give you a, not that my, you can of course post this on your blog too. On your channel too, I’ll send you the file. But you know, you’ve got your blog going. And is that on your regular domain? You can get there from your regular domain? Yeah, so the symbolic, now it’s gonna be my, things are gonna start to focus on my website. So the symbolicworld.com, I’m gonna start to have more things there, you know, articles, and also if I appear on other channels, and so I’m gonna start to consolidate that in that, and on that website. So it’s gonna become the place. You still think they’re gonna clamp down and take YouTube away from us? I think they’re going to do it very slowly. And I think it’s already happened. I think it’s already happening. I’ve seen it happen. I saw, I did, you know, it’s like, obviously they can, their algorithm can probably identify me with Jordan Peterson. They identify me with more conservatives. And I saw, I did a video, it was called, is Christianity a cult called religion, right? And the video was really trying to explain a pattern. But I think the fact that I used that word, and I’m already kind of associated probably with more right leaning stuff and everything, I saw it happen in real time. The video took off in like, I had like 20,000 views in one day, and then it stopped. And then it just went flat. And I thought, oh, okay, what’s going on? And then from then on, I’ve seen my views, like kind of hold at a certain amount of views. And part of it is the fact that Jordan Peterson’s gone, that’s for sure. But part of it is also, I think, you know, I don’t think it’s a human decision. I think it’s just their algorithm just starts, just marginalizes people who are not in line with what they want. So I think it’s already happening. And it’s better for them, if they’re strategic, it’s better for them to keep you on their platform, but make you as marginal as possible, because that way you’re not putting the effort into finding other platforms. Yeah, yeah. So that’s what I think is going on. There really isn’t a, because there really isn’t a platform competitor. Nope. Like YouTube, there really isn’t. Like I upload all my stuff on BitChute, but BitChute is crap. It’s just not well done. It’s not well programmed. The search is not good. There’s no recommendation the way that YouTube recommends videos, so it’s hard to get more reach outside of your reach. And so there is no competitor. So I don’t really know. And ThinkSpot is just not panning out. It’s just, I respect what they’re doing, and I respect the fact that they’re putting in all this effort. But if you go on there, you know, even the most famous person has very few reactions to their posts. And so it’s too bad. Oh well, well we’ll be great. We’ll just draw it along. We’ll just, that’s what we’ll do. Well again. By the grace of God. That’s right. It’s, being a Christian helps me not worry too much about these things, because here we are right now. But thank you, Jonathan. Thank you for your time. And most of all, again, thank you for the work that you do, because I think it’s really important, and I think it’s excellent work, and you really do help me see the world in a different way. You inform my Bible reading. You inform my culture watching. And you’ve just opened up whole new vistas for me that apart from you, I don’t know that I’d see. So thank you. Well thanks. And thanks for all the insane work you put into these discussions. And I hope that we will meet in person. We were supposed to, and now it might not happen, but let’s hope that we get to meet. Lord willing, one way or another, I believe it will happen, and I look forward to that day. All right. All right, bye Paul. Thank you, Jonathan. Bye bye.