00:02:39.860We don't care about that Christian stuff.
00:02:41.640So, yeah, I think there's probably a little bit of an intentional desire to suppress that for, I mean, American education, I think it's pretty much brainwashing.0.50
00:02:50.180So, but one sentence, this might take between Constantine in the 4th century and the Renaissance, you had Christian civilization.
00:03:02.440The most successful empire in history is the Byzantine Empire, from Constantine all the way up until the fall of Byzantium to the Muslims.
00:03:13.140Why do you say it's the most successful?
00:03:15.740It's a common sort of academic assessment just in terms of they flourished on a gold standard for a really long time.
00:03:22.720They started clipping the gold, money clipping, like the Roman Empire in the West had done before them and other empires.
00:04:07.660And I think, again, I'm not trying to measure Christianity just on worldly success, but I do think it does play out in that way at times, right?
00:04:15.960If you're really based around Christ, if your theology or civilization is logocentric, then it's going to play out that way.
00:04:23.380You're just going to prosper because you're aligned with what's true.
00:04:27.100You're aligned with that transcendent source.
00:04:29.260So anyway, for me, that journey ended up being eventually Orthodox Christianity.
00:04:35.740So, but just real quick back to the Byzantine Empire, did you know it existed before?
00:04:41.600How many people are aware that there was a Byzantine Empire and know anything about its outlines?
00:04:47.820Again, there is a very clear, especially if you take humanities courses, you know, the way they're constructed in college and maybe even younger private type schools.
00:04:58.220Like you go from, you do the pre-Socratics, you do Plato and Aristotle, and then you do Augustine, maybe a Stoic or two, and then you jump to Descartes.
00:10:09.280It's not a personal devotional book primarily.
00:10:12.240So to divorce it from that context, divorce it from the community that produced it, is what produces sort of aberrant, truncated versions of the religion that make it susceptible to princes, foreign governments, NGOs, think tanks, foundations.
00:10:27.520They become essentially tools of soft power, which is what I think much of the evangelical Protestant world today, not indicting the individuals, but the groups, the denominations, they're very easily bought off.
00:10:41.100For example, very wealthy families in the West, about 100 years ago, were able to buy off many of the mainline Protestant denominations and turn them into, effectually, NGOs.
00:10:51.940Just one example, the Rockefellers, and they're not the only family, but they're one of the families that invested very heavily in not just the UN, but also the World Council churches to create a sort of a supra-international version of the UN that would be for religions.
00:11:07.080And they were very explicit in their biographies about how this was to basically make it kind of an NGO. So make Christianity into kind of a form of soft power for American interests, really oligarchical interests. And that's one of the weak points, I would say, of Protestant theology, evangelical theology, is that it's very susceptible to that.
00:11:29.020not to say that the Roman Catholic Church
00:20:29.340And so, he also goes up against this idea of universals,
00:20:32.620that there's no such thing as a universal class or essence of a thing.
00:20:37.100And that had been kind of the norm since Plato and Aristotle as well.
00:20:40.520But so you get a denial of essentialism and essences, and then you get another guy named Gabriel Bile, and he's very influential on Martin Luther.
00:20:51.640And so when the Reformation kicks off, there's this debate about how could you be called righteous if you're not, in fact, righteous?0.59
00:21:00.380So if as a human being you are, you know, menstrual rags, as Isaiah says, as the Reformers said, then how could God call you righteous without being a liar?
00:21:09.480What enter in nominalism, and nominalism is able to say, ah, because things don't actually have essences, they just have names.
00:21:17.260And so if God calls you that, you are that legally, even though in actual fact you're wicked.
00:21:23.760So that was, yeah, that was, and Luther was very happy to utilize that nominalistic approach.
00:21:30.080And by the way, this is not just my theory.
00:21:33.460There's a book called Harvest of Medieval Theology by Heiko Obermann.
00:21:35.980And the whole thesis of that book by a Lutheran is that, yeah, Luther had to use nominalism.
00:21:41.360So we're also, though, moving away not just from theological squabbles, but the idea that things have natures.
00:21:50.320And this is how we get to David Hume and Kant and these Enlightenment figures, which give us the scientific revolution, supposedly.
00:22:00.020This is how we get to there's no male and female.
00:22:03.460So you can see kind of the logical train here.
00:22:05.480If things don't have essences, well, then they don't actually have genders, right, objectively, because everything is just a name.0.79
00:22:12.940So I can just name myself E-Him-Zer-Z-It, right?
00:22:17.640I'm not trying to go too fast or too far in the sense of, like, theology, but I'm saying there is an ideological sort of progression that you can get from nominalism to where we are now with postmodernism and then with essentially, you know.
00:22:30.900It's interesting that an adult could believe in something like that.
00:28:57.360And so Jesus is equating grace with divine glory.
00:29:00.280So unless you think God has created parts, which would be polytheism or some form of idolatry, uncreated grace has to be a reality that's a participable thing.
00:29:13.440Well, Jesus promises that the Holy Spirit will flow into people and change them.
00:29:20.140Spirit's not a creature, because then you would be anti-Trinitarian.
00:29:22.700So absolutely, this is why Peter says in his epistle, right, that we become partakers of the divine nature.
00:29:27.420So, very strong language in the New Testament and the epistles for what we call theosis in the Orthodox Church.
00:29:34.680Paul says, for example, in Thessalonians that it is the dunamis or the power of God that is at work in him.
00:29:40.920So, the actual power of God, which can't be a created thing or a created grace, which unfortunately, even a Latin Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, created grace becomes a normative thing where what you're getting is just another form of created.
00:29:54.500the orthodox church saying no no the incarnation itself tells us that the uncreated united itself
00:30:02.240to human nature and incarnation and that jesus deified the human nature that he assumed with
00:30:09.140his own immortality grace and uncreated energy the role of the bible um in the protestant world
00:30:18.800versus the orthodox world you described it this way i think you said in protestant christianity
00:30:26.340the bible is seen as like a a tool as a what's a guide of course the guide the only guide really
00:30:31.920and it is a devotional yeah but in the orthodox uh church it's a liturgical document correct what
00:30:42.680does that what does that mean the tour ghost has to do with uh the the greek word of offering or
00:30:48.860offering of thanks offering of praise but it's also in the hebrew tradition we think that that
00:30:55.160was proto-christianity the ancient hebrew text uh it was part of for example david's psalms those
00:31:01.680were psalms that david wrote to be sung at the temple liturgy right so liturgy is a sort of
00:31:07.240structured form of worship that Orthodox, you know, Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Episcopalians,
00:31:15.460they have a very structured form of worship that is called liturgy. But originally it just means
00:31:21.100sort of offering. And even in Pauline epistles, like the book of Hebrews, you know, towards the
00:31:26.000end of it in chapter 13, Paul talks about Christians have an altar that they eat from
00:31:31.260that the Jews that serve at the tabernacle have no right to eat from because our altar is the
00:31:36.280true altar, which is thus a liturgical altar. That very chapter he discusses the liturgical
00:31:41.700thanks and offering at that altar. So from the earliest days, Christianity had this sort of
00:31:46.540altar-based form of worship. Again, another Reformation distinctive is that they begin to
00:31:52.660move away from the idea of an altar towards a table, right? So you have sort of a desacralizing
00:31:58.140of the worship space to not be a Eucharistic offering, but a shared meal, which, and we're
00:32:05.180not totally opposed to the idea of it being a shared meal, but it's first and foremost
00:32:45.240Well, Luther was not in that category, though, no?
00:32:48.220He was not interested in rabbinic theology, but he was influenced by what's a text called the Theologia Germanica, which was a Neoplatonic text.
00:32:56.300And so there's also some evidence that scholars have pulled up that suggests that Luther might have had an interest in Hermeticism.
00:33:05.800I'm not saying that that dominates his idea, but more so with Calvin and some of the Swiss reformers.
00:33:13.120They were a little more directly influenced by rabbinic theology and Talmudism, but not so much Luther, no.
00:33:18.220Luther was very anti—I mean, he didn't even like Moses.
00:33:20.880He said, I'd like to punch Moses' teeth out.
00:33:23.200So Luther didn't even like the Old Testament at times.
00:33:25.780But again, he's a boisterous sort of satirical character at times.
00:38:52.220So, if you're not in the liturgy all the time, like those people are, the best substitute is the little church, which Chrysostom calls the house.
00:39:01.640So, the household is, in the Orthodox idea, kind of a little mini church.
00:39:05.300So, absolutely, we've got to be in the Bible all the time.
00:39:08.300And that shows that we're not anti-Bible, like a lot of sort of Protestant evangelicals think.
00:39:13.160So one of the reasons there was a Reformation in the first place is because the Catholic Church, over time, began to hide the Bible from Christians, and it was not published in the local language in Europe.
00:39:34.940Yes. In fact, this is one of the differences between the pre-Vatican II Roman Church and the Orthodox Church is that the Orthodox always put it in the vernacular. Everything. The liturgy, homilies, they're supposed to be in the vernacular of the people.
00:39:49.020In fact, the Vulgate itself was originally the vulgar Bible.0.51
00:39:56.020And so, yeah, I think there was an element to where the Latin church, the Roman church, had just sort of solidified into a kind of a tradition that—and it's not inherently wrong to maintain that linguistic heritage, but it's also possible to put it in the vernacular for the people.
00:40:12.620uh i mean that's the whole idea behind translating the bible into you know the languages of the
00:40:18.340people so that they can understand it uh but that is one of the differences pre-vatican two but
00:40:23.320interestingly after vatican two there were both protestant and orthodox influences on the reforms
00:40:28.600of the roman catholic church and thus rome then became emphasizing they began to emphasize the
00:40:35.700vernacular after vatican two what is you said you were an iconoclast a smasher of idols
00:40:40.460Orthodoxy famously incorporates icons, paintings on wood into its worship.
00:41:36.020They were against idols, but not all imagery.
00:41:38.580In fact, and this is something that really changed my mind when I was Calvinist, if you think about it, the Bible is a book, but words are just iconographic versions of images.
00:41:50.980And so the more I thought about that, the more I thought about that, it's like, well, you can't actually say all images are bad because capital F-A-T-H-E-R, that's a type of an image.
00:42:03.840In the Orthodox Church, we don't typically image God the Father.
00:42:06.960We think that, as Jesus says in the book of John to the Pharisees, he says, no one has seen the Father at any time.
00:42:12.220And he's quizzing the Pharisees there because he's saying, so who do you think Moses was interacting with on Mount Sinai if no one saw the Father?
00:42:21.460Because it says Moses saw God face to face.
00:42:24.400Jesus is basically saying, I was talking to Moses.
00:43:20.400It's lined with images, paintings of Old Testament scenes and imagery.
00:43:25.780So the Orthodox Church, if you look at the Dorota Europa Synagogue, is the most natural development of, if Christianity was going to open up to the Gentiles, and it was coming out of the temple and synagogue liturgical system, is exactly what it would look like.0.77
00:43:42.900It would look like an Orthodox Church, and lo and behold, that's what Orthodox Churches look like.
00:43:46.680And by the way, I remember 2023, my priest, who's a great Russian Orthodox priest, Father Vladimir, he took us on a pilgrimage to Italy.0.94
00:43:58.000And I was like, why are we going to Italy?
00:44:01.580Well, there's a thousand years of Christianity, you know, prior to the rise of the medieval papacy in Italy.
00:44:07.820There's tons of Orthodox places that you could go to, right, in Italy.
00:44:12.100And so we went to the catacombs in Rome.
00:44:14.380And lo and behold, when the Christians were persecuted in their underground in the catacombs in the first, second, third century, by the way, you can never see all the catacombs.
00:44:22.500Like we spent a whole day just in one of the catacombs in Rome.
00:44:25.580There's altars, there's images that they painted in the first, second, third century.
00:44:29.780So even the catacomb church had liturgy, had imagery.
00:44:35.860The church fathers also write about it as well.
00:44:37.860So those are huge, I would say, differences between.
00:44:41.200And remember, people couldn't read back then.
00:44:43.960Most of the Roman Empire was illiterate.
00:44:46.680So when they would go to these services in the catacombs or wherever, they would be hearing the Word of God.
00:44:52.580That's why Peter says, this is the Word of God which was preached to you.
00:44:57.040Paul says to Timothy, pass on all the things that you heard from me in the presence of many witnesses.
00:45:01.520So that oral teaching, that oral hearing of the liturgical worship was the norm.
00:45:08.520And then one of the things that really cracked it for me as a Protestant when I left Protestantism was when I learned that,
00:45:12.660By the way, I learned this from evangelical scholars.
00:45:16.760One of the things that developed the canon of the scripture itself in terms of how the church decided what books go in and which ones don't was what's called the lectionaries.
00:45:27.600Lectionaries are the daily liturgical readings in the churches.
00:45:31.380So when the church fathers were having these councils and they were meeting, and the canon of scripture doesn't actually get solidified, at least for the Orthodox Church, until the 6th and 7th century,
00:45:40.180they would say uh okay which ones do we have a tradition that says paul wrote or matthew wrote
00:45:46.540which ones are in the daily lectionaries and if you're a protestant you believe in sola scriptura
00:45:51.480the idea that liturgy and liturgical tradition play this huge role in the determination of the
00:45:57.840canon make it very difficult to say that you know we're based on scripture alone
00:46:02.920So Orthodoxy is not based on just the Bible.
00:46:09.600No, we would say the Orthodox Church is based on the idea of apostolic succession, that the apostles appointed successors in various bishoprics and c's throughout the Roman Empire.
00:46:23.960It's based on the tradition, which could include the lives of the saints.
00:46:37.740So all of those elements go into what the basis of the Orthodox Church is.
00:46:43.140Whereas in the Protestant world, you have elected elders or something like that, but
00:46:47.840you don't have this sort of three-tiered stool of apostolic succession tradition and bible
00:46:53.660altogether what are the practical differences as as a weekly communicant in an orthodox church
00:47:00.720how is that different from being a catholic or protestant um well certainly we would have more
00:47:06.640similarities to a roman catholic than most protestants or evangelicals you know there
00:47:12.100might be a high church protestant or anglican communion that would have some similarities
00:47:17.020with orthodox church but i think uh you know for the orthodox world um
00:47:24.540fasting is a lot more integrated into what we do than most fasting yeah there's a lot of fasting
00:47:33.660days in the orthodox church calendar what does that mean for you just abstaining from certain
00:47:38.860foods lent is a little more rigorous for the orthodox than it is for why fasting uh well we
00:47:45.500think that Jesus and the apostles and people like John the Baptist kind of set the tone for
00:47:53.860retaining an element of asceticism in the church. So obviously some people could take that to the
00:47:59.360extreme. We're not Hindu yogis, you know, sitting out under a tree trying to roll around and poop
00:48:04.580or whatever. But we do think there is virtue in training the body to be subject to the will so
00:48:13.900that the body's desires and passions don't control us so that's why fasting has an important role
00:48:20.620um basically learning to control the passions is what that's part of how often do you fast
00:48:27.760i am not the best at fasting because i have a really weird uh gut biome issues so i don't
00:48:36.280fast as much as i should uh it's very it's very challenging but there's also people that
00:48:40.380There's nuances for medical issues, but the Orthodox Church fasts quite a bit, usually from various meats and stuff like that, but it's not just fasting that's different.
00:48:56.220I think for the Orthodox Church, it's not just about food. Fasting is also almsgiving because it's self-denial that's not just about diet.
00:49:07.480It's also, for example, during Lent, it would be appropriate to confess more.
00:49:14.660It would be appropriate to give more than you normally would.
00:49:18.700So we make a pretty big deal about things like almsgiving, whereas, and I'm not saying that other groups don't give,
00:49:24.380but I think that's stressed a lot more in the Orthodox Church than it is perhaps in Protestant churches or other domains.
00:49:32.100But I mean, these are just kind of, there's immense differences, I would say, between just the, I mean, communion is a lot more serious in the Orthodox Church.
00:49:43.280You don't commune unless you're Orthodox.
00:49:45.460You can't, like, we don't have what's called open communion.0.86
00:49:48.380So, Roman Catholic can't come or Protestant can't come and just commune.
00:49:52.840Most churches are way more open about that.
00:49:56.180It's very strict in the Orthodox Church in terms of communion.
00:49:58.600And usually within the liturgy, the priest says, you know, all who are baptized Christians who have prepared themselves through confession may approach the table.
00:50:10.140We think it is actually, you know, the body, blood, soul, and uncreated energy of Christ.
00:50:14.260So we don't want to treat that lightly.
00:50:17.480And I'm not saying that Protestants don't have a reverence for their version of the sacrament, but it's just a lot more serious, I think, in the Orthodox Church than it is elsewhere.
00:50:25.700um but we do have some of the sacramental principles like confession to a priest that
00:50:34.020protestants don't have so again there's there's a whole milieu of wide scope of differences between
00:50:40.880everybody wants your attention think about all the apps the shows the podcasts the websites that
00:50:45.700compete for your attention everybody you can't keep up with it you're probably wasting a lot
00:50:49.460of your life. Hallow is not a waste of your life. The Hallow app can make your life. Hallow is the
00:50:56.660world's number one prayer app and a constant topic of conversation in my family, literally
00:51:00.980every day at dinner. We should come over. This July, Hallow is releasing a study on saints,
00:51:06.920figures like St. Paul, Ruth, Joan of Arc, real people, real struggles who wound up turning their
00:51:14.160lives toward Jesus in a way that saved them forever. Paul's story is amazing. It's an amazing
00:51:22.100story. Probably the most effective persecutor of Christians in the ancient world murdered them.0.60
00:51:27.260And then one day, famously on the road to Damascus, Syria, he met Jesus and everything
00:51:31.160changed. You can't read that story enough. Each of these stories will help listeners unlock what
00:51:36.520God sees in their lives. Now that summer is here today is the perfect time to take a step back
00:51:40.360with Hallow. It really will change you. Of all the things we advertise, we know this works.
00:51:45.680Hallow app at Hallow.com slash Tucker, three free months. Again, that's Hallow.com slash Tucker
00:51:52.480and get three months completely free. Well, you probably have heard about the Van Man Company's
00:51:56.980amazing toothpaste. By the thousands, Americans are ditching traditional toothpaste in favor of
00:52:02.120Van Man. The switch is like pivoting your diet from candy packed with red dye number 42 organic
00:52:08.840strawberries it is always better to stick with real ingredients today's big news is that van
00:52:13.780man makes more than healthy toothpaste this launched a body wash made from the finest oils
00:52:18.060available in vanilla grapefruit and no scent at all van man's body wash can optimize your shower
00:52:24.520experience without all the sketchy chemicals that well who knows what they're doing to you
00:52:28.760other body washes cannot say the same their ingredient labels would shock you if you could
00:52:33.220pronounce them you can't some of this stuff is very bad for you one of them is a carcinogen
00:52:38.380and it's appeared in tons of body washes,
00:54:00.700How is it, since the religion you described was originally tethered to a government, an empire, how has becoming Orthodox changed your view of government and its role?
00:54:15.900You know, I was, when I was a Calvinist, I was more like a sort of a libertarian, you know, get the state out of everything.
00:54:22.860It is the religion of libertarianism, isn't it?
00:54:24.860um but as i got more into historic christianity i started to realize that well maybe republicanism
00:54:31.960isn't like the highest form of of government like maybe it's not necessarily the best so
00:54:35.900and i'd never read any critiques of you know republican governance and whatnot but it turns
00:54:41.720out there have been you know quite a few people especially after uh scientific revolution there
00:54:48.320were conservatives and right-wingers who were writing pretty i would say substantial critiques
00:54:53.740of republicanism i think even members of royal families were writing pretty good critiques of
00:54:58.800um well naturally yeah they have a vested interest probably but i mean no but there were um liberal
00:55:07.520in the best sense minded people people who believed in inalienable rights who argued that
00:55:12.720a republican form of government self-government democracy would um devolve into tyranny true i
00:55:19.880Plato wrote even back in his day that, and he was, of course, a proponent of republicanism, but he wrote that the more decentralized in the sense of democracy, he didn't like democracy at all.
00:55:33.500He thought that that would eventually lead to mobocracy and the rule of the passions, because the oligarch in that type of a democratic setting has the incentive to appeal to the biggest number at the lowest basis, lowest common denominator.
00:55:50.320And then it becomes incumbent upon him to really play on the passions of the mob.
00:55:54.880So why not debase the people because they're easier to control the mob?
00:55:58.760So there's an incentive that even Plato noticed back then.
00:56:02.520I think he writes in The Republic, if this happens, they're going to legalize weed.
00:56:07.900They're going to legalize everything to do with butt stuff.
00:56:15.900So he sought, I think, in various ways, even as a pagan philosopher, to try to figure out some way to have a society based on sort of objective, almost mathematical principles.0.99
00:56:27.120By the end of the Republic, it's sort of like you get the impression that he thinks that you need to go study mathematics on the top of a mountain for 20 years.
00:56:34.860And then you come back and then you sort of instantiate mathematical forms into the society.
00:56:39.600And it's interesting because later on, by the end of his life, he seems to progress towards more of like a secret society type of governance because he has this, I guess I'm going from memory, maybe the symposium or the other one.
00:56:50.560but he argues that there's this Council of Night in IGHT,
00:56:54.940which is a governance board of, like, spy chiefs.
00:58:36.220So I think one thing that ties into this idea
00:58:38.980of a de-Christianizing of the state,0.77
00:58:41.620which is part and parcel with that sort of tendency
00:58:45.320see in the Calvinist, you know, libertarian type of tradition, the classical liberal ethos,
00:58:51.420is there was a famous Russian statesman, Pobinatia, he wrote a book, Reflections of a Russian
00:58:56.120Statesman, around 1890s. And he said, when you de-Christianize the state, you don't get liberty,
00:59:02.220you get another cult that runs the state. Exactly. And he noticed that when- I have too.0.92
00:59:08.480Before the Bolsheviks, right? Really? Yeah, he had looked at the French Revolution
00:59:12.600and prior examples and he said you just get another cult that steps in and and runs things
00:59:17.940um and you're always going to be governed by religious fanatics yes so the question is
00:59:23.100which religion want some good ones or at least some nicer ones or yeah i've noticed that just
00:59:28.300from knowing people who run countries like they're all deeply religious people most won't admit it
00:59:33.440yeah macron is not religious oh he's very religious it's just not your religion some
00:59:37.940other luciferia yeah exactly i don't know what um yeah so yeah i think the the reformation whether
00:59:44.600it intended to or not ultimately kind of severed the relationship that the church had already sort
00:59:52.420of normalized between church and state that symphonia that we talked about and then you get
00:59:58.060and it's a confluence of interest it's not just ideologues like martin luther or whatever in fact
01:00:03.180I mean, the reformers had very powerful—like, for example, Luther's Reformation wouldn't have succeeded without the German princes being behind it.
01:00:36.240By the way, there's also a Jewish influence on the Reformation as well.
01:00:38.860In fact, there were, according to Carol Quigley, even Protestant and Jewish banking interests funded the French Revolution massively.
01:00:48.740And he's got a great chapter on the rise of the Paribas system in France, which is the Rothschild banking system.
01:00:55.320And then I just read in the Rothschild's biography the fact that they had a long-term vendetta with the czarist attitudes towards Russians, towards Russian Jews.
01:01:09.200And Lord Rothschild wired one million rupels to B.I. Lenin.
01:01:15.660I knew about other, like the Warburgs and the shifts.0.52
01:15:34.980that it was religious propaganda yeah i didn't realize this was our religion i mean maybe not
01:15:39.340overt but it's there right it's it's a subtle way to indoctrinate people into various types of
01:15:47.700basically just anti-christian ideology i mean the book is not just like a low tier thing saying that
01:15:53.640hollywood's evil and it's anti-christian everybody knows that it's this is more of an
01:15:58.540analysis of analysis of like you know was eyes wide shut perhaps a window into something like
01:16:07.560epstein before we knew about epstein that kind of stuff i think that that's fascinating to me
01:16:12.140i'm not saying that that was kubrick's intention um but sometimes the arts this is really really
01:16:19.540crucial with like dostoevsky like the arts can predict things even ahead of time i'm not with
01:16:24.820such recurring frequency that you think is this what is this this is almost a kind of a prophetic
01:16:29.940spirit almost um yes or it you know it suggests that like we're just acting in a drama whose
01:16:36.480script has been written i don't i don't know i i mean i've literally no idea but well it's outside
01:16:42.580just a statistical matter it's outside the realm of chance for example how many times the simpsons
01:16:46.840predicted coming events like what is that i have known writers on the symptoms simpsons they're not
01:16:52.700yogis they're not mystical figure i mean i don't i have no idea what that is but i just noticed that
01:16:59.380it's it's happened it does happen two different phenomena that for one like if you read dostoevsky
01:17:04.460and some of his novels he would write almost with precision i think not because he was in on it but
01:17:10.460because he was actually kind of a genius like he would write about he was a genius he would write
01:17:17.080about years before what the bullshit revolution would do and what the socialists would do in0.73
01:17:21.480russia and almost with accuracy in terms of like the number of skulls that would be mounted up0.66
01:17:26.100um that i think is prophetic in the case of a lot of what went on in hollywood in the last
01:17:31.160you know several decades that's more so propaganda that's intentionally
01:17:34.620conditioning us um especially with a lot of like tech gadgetry you know the bond films actually
01:17:43.320introduced a lot of people to sort of spy world gadgetry that would then become day-to-day normal
01:17:50.240american living right i mean even cell phones like the internet itself is just old school
01:17:55.000cold war cryptography that turned into everybody's form of communication um you know a lot of the
01:18:01.280spy surveillance gadgetry or whatever you see going on in james bond this begins to be a thing
01:18:06.320that conditions people to getting used to you know being surveilled getting used to having all their
01:18:11.600lives on the internet live stream i'm saying that there's broader components to these types of
01:18:18.900stories that do condition us i don't mean to go full schizo here i'm not saying that like everything
01:18:23.620all i would just plan i'm just saying that the deeper that you go into it you do realize for
01:18:28.420example that uh the cia is consulted on movies forever forever like all the way back to even
01:18:34.980before uh you had famous actors and actresses that were spies i mean a lot of people don't
01:18:40.100know this stuff that's just kind of level one of this stuff but it even gets more sophisticated
01:18:44.260into like studying the effects of early slasher films that it had on people. It would put people
01:18:49.320in like a catatonic state to make them more suggestible. Everybody's probably heard about
01:18:53.900subliminals. Like all of that is related to or adjacent to the type of things that we're
01:18:58.900discussing here. Like this is, it's a very niche, but well-studied branch of how to use fiction
01:19:06.700to condition people. And one element that might be a little more accessible to people is that
01:19:12.620But if you go back to the turn of the century, last century in the UK, especially as they eventually had the Official Secrets Act, you couldn't say what you did when you worked for British intelligence or whatever.
01:19:26.140But you could write fiction novels that kind of loosely told those stories.
01:19:30.500And so a lot of British authors that are now famous, you know, formerly wrote or formerly worked in British intelligence.
01:19:38.240And then like William Somerset, Maugham and these different characters.
01:20:06.700but his is sort of the most well-known, the secret agent.
01:20:09.220and you've got like the states using anarchists there's a false flag event like you've got these
01:20:15.420principles in these fiction stories which seem to match up to reality so i just found that
01:20:20.880fascinating that that you would have all this in fiction and then that sort of that sort of
01:20:24.980blurs the line between reality and fiction sometimes intentionally because audiences
01:20:31.200will watch things and it will sort of embed in the subconscious and i'm not trying to be again
01:20:38.220I'm not being schizo about it, like you're getting programmed whether you know it or not, but I don't think all plays in fiction are bad.0.63
01:20:46.480I'm just saying people don't go to Argo to realize they're watching propaganda, but they're watching propaganda.
01:20:53.840Of course, and that's why it's effective.
01:20:56.200So one question that appears in fiction and raises speculation in real life, and it's a very specific question and you may know the answer.
01:21:06.100is there evidence that intelligence agencies of any country have used or criminal organizations
01:21:12.760in any country have ever successfully carried out assassinations using crazy or suggestible
01:21:18.680people who don't know they're participating in it which is to say like lone gunman shoots public
01:21:25.080figure lone gunman is actually a tool of some other organization doesn't know he's a tool of
01:21:29.520the organization he committed the murder but he did so maybe unbeknownst to him at the urging of
01:21:34.400some other groups, Sirhan Sirhan, for example.
01:21:38.160Is there any evidence, do we know that's actually happened ever?
01:21:43.580I think it's very obvious that it has happened.
01:21:47.540I don't know what the standard of evidences would be to say with absolute certainty in
01:22:00.020People talk about, as you said, Sirhan.
01:22:02.360I mean, you could say Oswald, perhaps, was—there is such a thing as false flag recruitment, which is where people are recruited into thinking that they're working for this group, but they're actually working for this other group, right?
01:22:12.660So that does occur, and I think that if you study assassinations and how they're conducted, they don't happen often, but they do tend to use crazy people or people that are very suggestible.
01:22:27.980so i think that's definitely probably 100 goes on i mean we had what was shinzo abe was one of
01:22:35.520the most recent uh other than charlie kirk obviously you know assassinations that there
01:22:40.420were some weird weird things with that in terms of usually political ideologues or religious
01:22:45.760ideologues are very useful for these types of of operations um so yeah i think i think especially
01:22:53.820with jfk even you've got significant evidence if you look at the person of engleton if you look at
01:23:00.880what came out the jfk files like he was literally just passing all kinds of information to the massad
01:23:05.740it's in the jfk files there's like four four pages were about his secret relationship with
01:23:11.040the massad uh i think there was a confluence of interests as you said with organized crime
01:23:15.320cia and israeli interests all sort of had the motive uh in regard to jfk but i think that's a
01:23:22.020recurring patterns to absolutely contract it out to either organized crime. I mean, Murder, Inc.
01:23:28.440began as a Jewish assassination squad that was used by not just Sicilian mafia, but also at times0.56
01:23:35.940the U.S. would contract out and use these people for operating. If you want to get rid of somebody,0.72
01:23:40.220just use the gangsters. You're not going to do it yourself. So yeah, that's well known, I think,
01:23:44.540if you look at Operation Underworld, where the CIA was using organized crime for many years.
01:23:49.740How much evidence is there that the CIA do you think has an active role in American politics now?
01:23:59.760My research has mostly been past decades of that relationship, so I'm not the most up to date on president.
01:24:10.840How certain are we that the United States, U.S. politics has been influenced by intelligence?
01:24:16.760I mean, I think when people talk about the deep state, we're talking about a sort of breakaway national security apparatus that has a tremendous amount of influence and control on domestic and foreign policy.
01:24:39.660I think it's very clearly when you get up into that level, even above intelligence and CIA, when you get up into that level of like steering committees and the CFR, the trilaterals, like it's not accidental that Epstein was literally David Rockefeller's legate on the trilateral commission.
01:25:06.460And so for Epstein to essentially be at that level, which is, no, I don't think we knew that until that, you know, Bannon interview came out and Jeffrey Epstein.
01:25:17.460Yeah, I was on the Trout. I don't know. I was up there with David Rockefeller.
01:25:19.740yeah that's one of those details that's i mean do you ever suspect that the sex the sexual
01:25:31.160components of the epstein story which i don't want to minimize because they're awful but do
01:25:35.980you ever suspect that maybe they're also a distraction from bigger it's much bigger than
01:25:39.780that yeah i mean in a lot of those emails and text messages and things that came out you've got like
01:25:46.240there's so many crazy examples like you've got i mean you got high level finance money laundering
01:25:52.860is part of that you've got weapons trafficking is a huge part of that um because if you read
01:25:57.320whitney webb's book right like it's the adnan khashoggi uh operation which also included like
01:26:02.480filming people on that yacht uh that becomes kind of a pattern for also the way that epstein would
01:26:08.480do uh his stuff so you've got weapons trafficking you've got the high level blackmail you've got
01:26:14.060human trafficking you've got um money and finance and you've also got uh planned chaos in certain
01:26:23.860areas that you move money to prior to the chaos to benefit from the destruction which is something
01:26:30.200that ian fleming had specter doing all the time so i i suspect ian fleming was talking about the
01:26:37.160sort of Epstein-level, Rothschild-level gaming of different markets
01:26:43.360because that's a huge part of what they were doing
01:26:45.420where he's basically emailing Ariana to Rothschild
01:26:48.360and he's saying there's going to be a huge conflict over here,
01:26:52.200move in early, buy up resources, et cetera,
01:26:55.680because the conflicts, the chaos is coming.
01:26:57.880They did it about Kenya, or excuse me, Somalia.
01:30:31.860But he was also like one of the chief propagandists for the sort of Rothschild, Milner, Fabian circles that were promoting socialism and technocracy back, you know, in the 1800s, late 1800s, early 1900s.
01:30:44.900What are the consistent lies that this propaganda tells?
01:30:47.640like what connects all of the one of them i'll just start by saying one of them one of the main
01:30:52.380lies that they're committed to convincing you of is that all this is secular it's all science-based
01:30:58.060it's it's materialism yeah like nothing there's no spooky supernatural like i noticed that yeah
01:31:05.180one of the things i've done on my my youtube channel last 10 years is uh what i call the
01:31:10.660global elite book series and all we do in the last 10 years is like we pick various
01:31:15.040Brzezinski, H.G. Wells, Jacques Attali, Carol Quigley. I mean, you just go down the line
01:31:22.060and we read through the texts and then I do a talk on them. And what we've noticed,
01:31:26.940we've done dozens of these, is there's a consistent pattern of, I say, there's like,
01:31:31.740you know, five or six commandments of the elite that you have to be on board with. And there
01:31:37.600seems to be a recurring pattern of, because humanity is overpopulated, we must have
01:31:44.440global governance we must have a a united world religion eventually we must have uh full spectrum
01:31:51.120dominance control of area of life everything's surveilled all the way up to we did even did uh
01:31:56.400remember klaus schwab's uh fourth industrial revolution book that whole book that came out
01:32:01.060right before covid was about how the coming crises will bring about this sort of globalized one world
01:32:09.180order ruled over by internet of things you know skynet type stuff and that leads to rationing
01:32:16.220and uh you know austerity all that kind of stuff that we've seen pushed by these people for so long
01:32:20.820but i think you know some of the most telling books are like jacques atelier's book brief
01:32:26.180history of the future that book was written in 2006 and he was the sort of kissender to you know
01:32:31.720uh the presidents of france macron and people like that maybe even mitran i forget who who he
01:32:37.660was consultant to but he was the kissinger of france huge neocon type person and in that book
01:32:46.320he says towards the end of it he says we've progressed to the point where we're going to
01:32:50.780have a global brain it's the golem because of the golem we're all going to be linked in uh you'll
01:32:58.260lose your individuality when you're linked into the global brain he says at the spearhead of all
01:33:02.440of this is the transhumanist. Transhumanism is, as Julian Huxley coined the term, the future that
01:33:08.520we're going into. And so those are the elements, one world religion, one world currency, one world
01:33:14.920brain, everything's sort of unified. And if you read Huxley, I read a bunch of Huxley's books. He
01:33:21.840says, not just in Brave New World, but he wrote another book people don't know about called The
01:33:25.240Perennial Philosophy. And he says, people don't realize that any theology or ideology that allows
01:33:31.780you to have a significant degree of individuality has to be erased so that we can create the blob
01:33:37.720the big amorphous blob where we're all sort of blended into one giant thing that's controlled
01:33:43.560exact same thing that 100 years later almost jacques atelier says in his books about the
01:33:51.160global golem like that's the goal is to create this sort of homogenized control and the goal
01:33:58.140And of course, and that's the point of, you know, mass migration, you know, eliminate distinctions.
01:34:05.520But the goal of all of that is what?0.53
01:34:10.620I do think that there's a pretty consistent pattern of belief amongst a lot of these people who are technocrats and transhumanists.
01:34:19.480They think that technology will, even to go back to Arthur C. Clarke, everybody remembers 2001 Space Odyssey.
01:34:25.380And he co-wrote that and helped that come to the big screen.
01:34:31.500But he also wrote another book that was also a movie, which is very enlightening, called 2010.
01:34:37.280It's not as good of a movie, but in 2010, it becomes more explicit that the Cold War was about producing a dialectical synthesis where the scientific elite from the Soviets and the West come together.
01:34:49.100And they create the technocratic scientific priest class that rules us, that allows us to achieve apotheosis.
01:34:59.580And then in 3001, that apotheosis happens through union with AI and tech.
01:35:08.120So basically, the idea is presented, I think, in those books that we become God through technology.
01:35:13.880Ray Kurzweil, he's even said this kind of stuff.
01:35:15.920So the singularity, all that kind of ideology, which is not new to Kurzweil, actually, Hegel had a version of this that he called the Omega Point, where all the dialectical oppositions eventually synthesize into everything, in his view, becoming spirit, which is everything becoming some sort of transcendent, unified reality.
01:35:36.040it's Huxley's blob it's uh you know I think who's that crazy Teilhard de Chardin the excommunicated
01:35:43.680Jesuit guy he talked about the uh everything becoming the newosphere and that actually
01:35:50.600influenced some of the early developers of the internet they talked about creating this
01:35:54.300hybridized merged idea where everything becomes essentially the net basically so I think that
01:36:39.560And now, some of those writers will actually revise and reinterpret Christianity, and you mentioned earlier Rosicrucians.
01:36:48.200And some of those hermetic groups actually had this idea that Christianity is just sort of an allegory for immortality and resurrection through some sort of gnosis or knowledge or technology.
01:37:04.820Crowley's a great example of this because he's a figure who, by the way, was also working for British intelligence.
01:37:09.000Because Alistair Crowley was a huge proponent of this idea of man achieving apotheosis through not just tech, but through a sort of magical view of tech, which Isaac Asimov expresses in his three laws of magic or whatever, magic and technology.
01:50:41.320But if you hear for decades people's confessions, you're going to be a very good psychologist if you're good at it, right?
01:50:50.820So you're going to understand, you know, not just human weaknesses and stuff like that, but you're going to understand these other influences.
01:50:58.160and hopefully have the discernment to know when the influences might be from the divine
01:51:04.260or when they might be from something else.
01:51:07.080You know, one of the things that Father St. Sarah from Rose talked about in his book,
01:51:11.720Orthodoxy in the Religion of the Future, is that he warned about coming mass delusions
01:51:16.760and what would sort of dupe large amounts of people.
01:51:21.820And one of the things that he tied into Hinduism and New Age type stuff was also not just yoga,
01:51:27.640but the charismatic movement, and he was very insistent that this charismatic movement will
01:51:34.580continue to grow because it stresses the direct existential ecstatic experience as if that's
01:51:42.800necessarily from God when it could very easily be from the demonic. I think when you look at
01:51:50.020the manifestations in the domain of charismaticism and how that's now crept into the Roman Catholic
01:51:55.960church. It's crept all into the Protestant evangelical world. And it ties it very closely
01:52:01.520into ancient sort of Hindu practices. That's the type of Christianity that's growing in Africa,
01:52:10.080Latin, South America. It's rampant. It's a massively powerful delusion because it replaces0.98
01:52:16.140traditional Christianity with the idea that it's something akin to voodoo, basically.
01:52:21.520If you study voodoo, it's very, very similar to charismaticism in the way that anything that you experience trumps what's in divine revelation or what's in church tradition.
01:52:33.820Like, it's all about the direct sort of ecstatic experience.
01:52:37.620And so it doesn't matter what happened or came before, then that might sound like it's not that big of a deal.
01:52:43.500But take, for example, Ann Lee, the founder of the Quakers.
01:52:48.620Ann Lee thought that her ecstatic experiences
01:52:51.220were God telling her that women should be pastors,
01:57:29.720as Christ says many times in the gospel,
01:57:31.960the kingdom is here, the kingdom is in your midst,
01:57:33.800the kingdom is the presence of the Holy Spirit.
01:57:35.220This generation will not pass away before I come back.
01:57:38.040And we believe in what's called partial preterism
01:57:40.400and the church father, especially Christosom,
01:57:42.160emphasized in his sermons on Matthew 24 and Luke 21
01:57:45.420that the destruction of the temple in 70 AD
01:57:49.020was the finalizing of the reality of the kingdom coming into fruition.
01:57:55.580So in other words, it's appropriate that the temple would pass away
01:57:59.780now that what the temple was a type of, which is the church, is here.
01:58:04.280So now that the church, which is the true temple, has come,
01:58:07.960that is the surpassing from type to anti-type, right?
01:58:13.580So you wouldn't go back to types now that the reality has come.
01:58:17.180So much of what's in the Old Testament, whether it's the temple administration with the showbread and the lampstand and all that, those things are fulfilled in, in our view, what the Orthodox Church is.
01:58:30.180The Orthodox Church possesses those things in the here and now.
01:58:34.200So sometimes in theology, it's called the already-not-yet principle.
01:58:37.160So the kingdom of God, the end times are here now.