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Dec. 2, 2024 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:22:53
Symbolism, Faith, and Media Manipulation: Jack Posobiec and Jonathan Pageau – SF505
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Thank you.
In this video, you're going to see the future.
Hello there, you awakening wonders.
Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
For the first 15 minutes we'll be on YouTube, then we'll be exclusively streaming on Rumble.
And for those of you that are Awakened Wonders, you will get every single week additional content as I conduct Christian conversations that seem more and more relevant as it becomes utterly apparent, unavoidable and unignorable that we've entered into the domain of spiritual warfare.
How do you know that?
Because There's been an erosion and collapse of all moral and spiritual principles.
That's how you can have someone say, this is Joe Biden by the way, no one is above the law, then elevate in their own son to a position where they are above the law.
I suppose I would do the same thing for my son.
Would you do the same thing for your children?
But that is not a reliable system of government and governance.
That's why you need sacred principles To undergird systems of government.
That's just what I think.
Let me know what you think in the comments and chat.
We'll be talking about Hunter Biden in more detail as well as Kash Patel.
But that will be when we're exclusively on Rumble.
We've got Jack Posobiec coming up on the show and Jonathan Pagiel.
So we get both a political and spiritual perspective on the issues that will determine the trajectory of your nation and therefore the world.
Do you think we've reached a fissure and canyon that has now been crossed by the elevation and election of Donald Trump?
Or do you think that we still have worldly operatives in control of America and therefore the planet?
Do you think we're any closer to God than we were five months ago?
Do you sense that there's an air of optimism, a glimmer of hope and awakening?
Let me know in the comments and chat if you agree with that.
Hunter Biden was pardoned last night from a bunch of potential crimes, near felonies, tax evasion, his extraordinary relationship with Ukraine and Burisma, gun ownership violations, and a laptop's worth of mad maladies.
Let me know if you think this is evidence of deep and entrenched corruption.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump has...
Nominated Kash Patel to be the head of the FBI. Likely this will be confirmed by the Republican Senate majority pretty soon.
And let me know if you believe that the Hunter Biden pardon is further evidence of deep and intransigent corruption.
Because we've seen no pardon, have we, for Edward Snowden?
We've seen no No pardon for the various whistleblowers who have shown us evidence of state corruption, but when it comes to family members, nepotism is not...
A fit system for government.
That's just what I think.
Let me know what you think in the comments and chat, though.
We've got Jack Posobiec coming on the show now.
If you don't know who he is, he's a political activist, author and media personality.
I'm sure you follow him, don't you?
He's also written books like, for example, Antifa, Stories from Inside the Black Block and Citizens for Trump.
Have a look at this conversation now.
Just the first few minutes will be available on YouTube.
Then we'll be exclusively streaming on Rumble, the home of free speech.
I sense, Jack, that you are experiencing some sort of weariness and fatigue and frustration.
What's going on, mate?
Hey, well, thanks for having me on, man.
And I have to tell you that it's, you know, it's been an interesting couple of weeks.
So we come through November 5th.
You know, there was this huge campaign and the election and everyone is working hard and everyone's fighting to To win, you want to win, and you have to urge everyone to come on board in all these states, and so just traveling, traveling, traveling, and go, go, go, and spending every weekend on the road or on the plane or doing this event to that event.
And then, obviously, things go our way.
Things did very well on November 5th, but there's an interesting thing that happens that When you win, it's in many ways actually harder than losing.
Because when you lose, you just go home.
But when you win, you actually have to do the work.
You actually have to put together a government, and you have to have various people vying for different offices and orifices.
And you have people getting into these different positions, and suddenly you have all these people who We're friends, but now the friends all have differences of opinion, or you have two people that want the same job, or all of these various ideas about which way to go with things, or, oh, don't do that, that's a bad idea, that's a good idea, that's a terrible idea.
And so it actually creates more work from the perspective of victory, because it's sort of like...
It's sort of like you've been asking dad for the keys to the car.
You've been asking dad for the keys to the car.
Now all of a sudden he gives you the keys to the car, but then he gives you this whole list of things that you've got to do to take care of the car and prepare the car and keep the car ready.
And then you actually, of course, have to drive the car and decide what to do.
And so it's a good feeling.
But yeah, it has been a couple of months of just long, arduous work.
Do you feel it as well?
You said like the...
I'm aware of it.
When I was in Hollywood, for want of a better synecdoche, there are the same sort of games that go on, the same sort of tribes and institutions and powerful figures.
Like, are you close enough to the heat?
Are you close enough to the person that's hot at the moment?
In this election, you've sort of seen how, like, Mar-a-Lago has become a kind of Camelot.
It's a different feeling from 2016 because of the addition of Elon and Vivek and Bobby Kennedy and Tulsi.
And it's interesting to hear you describe the feeling of being around their former allies, maybe jostling for position, vying for supremacy with one another.
That's an interesting aspect of this.
I wonder if, you know, because I remember being affected by those things.
I'm still affected by those things.
I think myself, oh, you know, when I hear that you're at Mar-a-Lago, I'm like, oh, should I be at Mar-a-Lago?
Shouldn't I be there as well?
Like, Jack's there.
You know, we're kind of obviously different in a hundred different ways, but, like, the other thing is, like, that I'm not, like, a...
I'm actively campaigning for Trump in the way that you or Charlie Kirk are.
I'm just like, hey, I don't trust these globalist corporatists, man, and they're lying to you, that Democratic Party.
But I've never been sort of like, I'm here to make sure that the Dominion machines are not rigged and I'm here to fact check and make sure the way you guys are.
But I still am a human being.
I still feel like, you know, like I can get caught up in worldly power and start thinking, oh, this is what it's all about.
Now, as a Christian and a recent Christian, I'm continually trying to check myself with like, oh, are you starting to worship these systems of power now, having been shown that Hollywood was phony and false and empty?
Are you now going to just transfer those same drives and desires to wanting to succeed and achieve in this new space and want to be close to this human or worldly power?
Like, what about you?
You've been through, like, the Navy and the military and everything, which is pretty, obviously, hierarchical in ways that are formal.
And I wonder if when you're in the military, like, oh, I hope that commanding officer likes me.
I hope I get chosen for this mission.
Oh, this person's on the up and has been chosen and anointed.
Like, how does it affect you, those feelings of being near power?
And how does your Christian faith prevent you from being overwhelmed by it, Jack?
Well, no, that's a really great way of putting it.
And by the way, I wanted to, you know, I'll just say it's great.
It's been great being here and it's great getting all the different inputs from various people.
And it's work, you know, to be sure.
It is work, but it's a wonderful situation to have and a wonderful situation to be in.
And I've loved being here with Elon and I got to spend some time with Elon and Obviously with President Trump, Tulsi Gabbard, she's been in and out.
I think she's fantastic.
I think she's someone who's a truth teller.
And I think that's what everyone sort of centers around is that idea of truth.
So here we are, you know, we're in this situation where it's now the worldly power.
As you say, it's that worldly power that's been handed over.
And from all of the people to say, okay, we want...
To give our trust to you, right?
And I think that's probably the biggest piece of it for me is people have put their trust in this movement and people have put their trust in this idea.
And through faith, through faith to say, we believe that you can have the ability to help lead us forward into a great place and to be a great leader and to have a great team.
And I'm certainly...
That's all been put together.
For me, as a Christian, it's that question of, okay, I might be locked in some discussion on some aspect of policy or locked in some idea of which way to go forward.
Is this the right move?
Is that the right move?
You've got to pray.
You've got to find time for prayer every single day.
I know I told you the last time I was on with you that I do the rosary every single day.
I still do the rosary every single day.
I've got my rosary right here.
I've got my St. Michael the Archangel rosary, by the way.
He's right there.
It is, for me, a way of centering and a way of being able to cut through all the chaos that's running around and the pressure.
It really is intense pressure, but you have to understand that while...
It's something that Thomas Aquinas talks about because Aquinas in Summa Theologica, he gets into this idea that because we are humans, so we are spiritual beings, but we're human beings as well.
And so as humans, we are social by nature.
So you live in society, you live in a community, and as Christians, you are encouraged to participate in those societal duties and governance and economic activities.
But at the same time, That when you participate in them, you have to be guided by the virtues, justice, charity, prudence.
And this is what we learn from the Bible.
This is what we can be in touch with when we're praying.
So then as pertains to these various things that I might be dealing with here or that any one of us might be dealing with throughout our day or even when I'm with my children or something, it's still that idea of We have to carry through our principles so that we have to understand that we're being true to them and reflect back on them when we're faced with so much pressure and so much potential adversity to the point where,
I mean, my goodness, it's like the entire world has just focused on this very spot and the people that are going through it.
And certainly President Trump is there.
And I think it's something, too, I'll say it to him as well, that This is the first time and really since I think he survived his brush with death earlier this year when Trump was at that field in Butler, Pennsylvania.
We saw not only did he immediately for the first time and he doesn't usually talk like this.
He doesn't usually use religious language or theological language.
The very first thing he said was it was God alone and he gave thanks to God for saving him and then this huge Public embrace of God and Christianity from Trump that we've never seen before, I think in his entire life.
And he's posting the St. Michael prayer.
He actually did that, by the way, a couple of weeks ago.
He prayed for the Feast of All Saints Day, for the Nativity of Mary, for so many of these aspects.
It's like he's actually...
He's actually invoking Christianity in a public way, and I think that really does put it front and center in a way that sticks with the entire movement, but it also animates the millions of people that came out on November 5th the way that they did.
And so I have to imagine, and I believe, I just believe personally, that what's going on is actually a spiritual contest.
The rest of the conversation will be exclusively available on YouTube.
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Join us on Rumble.
We last met on St. Michael's Day.
It was that Rescue the West event that Brett Weinstein put on.
You were there and Tulsi Gabbard was there.
Bobby Kennedy was there.
That was St. Michael's Day, right?
The feast of St. Michael's Day.
When I did the prayer with Jordan Peterson on stage, I saw some YouTubers obviously attacking that and criticizing it, and I started by saying, I think maybe I got given someone, my friend Mike gave me...
St. Michael's Prayer Coin.
You gave me a card of St. Michael's on that day.
So it was on my mind that it was a special day.
So at the beginning of the prayer, I'm like, oh, on this auspicious day.
Later, when I was getting pissed by them YouTubers, they were saying, look at the beginning.
He says it's a special sacred day.
It's not a sacred day.
You know, like, this is like, we're living at a point where people are not...
Tuned into or acknowledging the significance of Christianity, except, I suppose, where Christianity can be useful materially as a kind of, you know, there are some people that say, I like Christian culture, but I don't believe in Jesus.
That's sort of like a new position in conversations people are having.
So, like, to explicitly believe in Jesus Christ, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, returned to earth, died for our sins, rose again, that we may know eternal life, is still an interesting position.
I was very happy when at the RNC you gave me them, same as you, the Marine's Rosary, and I prayed with them every day until I gave them to my mate, Joe, because I love him, because I was coming to America for a while.
I goes, you keep hold of these, mate.
I knew he would appreciate them.
I've missed having that.
This idea that sanctity is...
That sanctity, and in particular Christian sanctity, is moving back into the political conversation down to the point where Trump is referencing it, and I get the idea that you think it's somehow been significant, not only in his personal journey, but maybe in his success, appears like something that...
Ain't happened in American or Anglophonic culture for a while.
A lot more people are becoming Christian.
A lot more people are waking up to the idea that the message is true.
I wonder what you think is going to flow out of that, Jack.
And I wonder how you're handling it.
And I wonder if it changes.
The way that you're creating your content and interacting.
You'd be called a right-wing commentator.
That's what people would describe you as, mate.
And how your Christianity and the resurgence of Christianity is changing what you're going to do.
And even changing what you're doing right now.
Being at Mar-a-Lago, having those chats, being around all that.
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You know, it's actually interesting because, you know, it's something where it's so easy, right, on a regular day-to-day basis where you can be caught up in Some debate over whatever the law is going to be or should America get involved in this issue around the world or not or do I want to get into an argument with someone online and I want to get my points across and I always want to have my
talking points and I always want to get the argument, win the argument and this is the best way forward and I'm the best debater at it.
You also, something that I've learned to do as well more, and I didn't do this at first, is just talk more about being Christian.
And I realized that when you do that, when you talk more about being Christian, and you talk more about your faith, and you talk more about where you are coming from, or in my sense, where I'm coming from, as someone who's Christian, and of course someone who, I'd always describe it as someone who's trying to be a good Christian, right?
So that's someone where I've always said that if someone tells you they're a good Christian, they never are, right?
Because, oh, I'm a good Christian.
I'm a good Christian.
No, you're trying to be a good Christian.
So you're trying to be a good Christian.
That means you've got it worked out because Christ sets his standard and sets his bar so high because his standard is perfection.
He is perfection.
None of us are perfection.
Any of us, not one, is going to have that level of perfection.
Perfection.
So he knows.
He also knows this.
He knows that we're never going to achieve that perfection.
But the point is, it's not a, you know, it's not like a series of talking points that you're supposed to memorize or just going to church on Sunday for an hour and, you know, you sit, you stand, you do everything you're supposed to do.
I'm Catholic, so we have a lot of sitting and standing.
It's the gymnastics.
And, you know, sit, stand, kneel, etc.
It's not that.
It's a lifestyle.
It is a way of life that you are called to live every single day.
And that doesn't mean just when I'm on camera.
That doesn't mean just when I'm on stage or I'm going around Mar-a-Lago or whatever it is.
What it means is that even in private, even when it's just myself in a room with no one else, that God's still there, that Jesus is still there and I'm still called To try to live by those standards.
And so by talking about it more and being more public about it, which I really feel like this year and certainly with the rosary.
So by the way, you were the first person I gave a rosary to and I've got to get you a new one.
So we'll make sure to fix that out.
But I ended up I gave one to you.
I gave one to Tucker Carlson.
I gave one to Alex Jones.
I gave one to Robert F. Kennedy.
And I'm working on, I was going to do it today, but I guess the SpaceX launch is going on, but I want to get one to Elon Musk as well.
And just show the power of the rosary, show the power of prayer, and to share that with people as an understanding that, look, What we're fighting for isn't just a government.
It's not just one person in one office somewhere as if that's going to defeat the evil or defeat everything that's going on.
It's not about making one person president and I'm going to be the leader.
No, it's about actually winning hearts.
And then through winning hearts, you can win souls.
And through winning souls, you're doing service to God.
And that's the overall goal with this.
It's not just about winning some election.
And sure, if you can do that, obviously things are going to go better, hopefully, if you do the right thing.
But if you're constantly working towards winning souls and trying to do the same service to God, I think, then you actually have the ability to hopefully, hopefully, come close to the precipice of perhaps actually Changing something in society.
And I talked about this when I was on with you before, but you really go back to the 1960s and 1970s, and what was the first thing that when this sort of cultural shift happened in Western societies, it was the removal of God from the public square.
Total removal.
God, oh, that's just something from an old book, and the nuns will wrap you on the knuckles if you do something wrong in class.
And that has no bearing on our modern society.
So we've got to get rid of God.
And we have the atomic age now.
We don't need him anymore.
So we took God out and we said, all right, well, we're just going to be people now.
We're just going to be humans.
And we'll try to live by those same ethics.
And it's been a complete disaster.
It's just been an utter and complete disaster.
And suddenly we're realizing that, and even Elon Musk, who, this is very interesting, so He travels.
I'll tell you this story.
My brother was at one of these town halls that he was holding in Pennsylvania across the election.
And this is in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which is Amish country.
So everyone knows the Amish and Amish country in PA. And so Elon goes to these town halls across the state, my state of Pennsylvania.
And he's asking people questions.
They're asking about SpaceX, asking about Tesla.
Electric cars and all this.
And they go to Lancaster, and you would have loved this, Russell, that he goes to Lancaster, PA, and this is Amish country.
And they know that Elon isn't a Christian, even though he was raised Christian, but he's not Christian now, and they want to open him up.
So instead of asking him questions at this town hall in the Q&A, They just start opening the Bible and they're just reading verses from the Bible to Elon and say, hey Elon, what do you think about this from Corinthians?
And they just open Corinthians and they start to read it or, you know, here's something from Acts and what do you think of this?
Oh, this is Galatians, here's Ephesians.
And they spend about, it was one of the most wonderful things I've ever seen because they spend two hours just reading the Bible to Elon Musk because when you go to that Bible Belt of Pennsylvania, They're not interested in, you know, yeah, there's an election, sure, but they want to win his soul.
And it was beautiful, it was incredible, and it was a message, and I think an example to the rest of us, that's how we should be.
I love that.
I love that.
They've got Elon Musk.
They're not like, can you make us a Tesla out of wood with cork buttons and toggles?
No.
They don't want anything from it except to bring him to Christ.
That's like, then people are serious.
That's what it's like to put the spiritual world before The material world, and it's like, I think, certainly it's my continual challenge, and I get the idea that it's the challenge that everyone is facing on a daily basis.
Jack, part of Break Bread is that we literally take communion together.
I've pulled an appropriate passage from the book from Matthew in this instance.
Are you happy to talk us through it?
Alright, well, I've got my bread here.
It's not consecrated, but I've got my bread here.
It's not consecrated, I know that.
That's one of our, like, differences, that I've not yet converted to Catholicism.
Part of the reason being that I like going around baptizing people and breaking bread and taking wine and getting on a full-on mission.
Because, I tell you, since I've been...
What has happened to me, since I've been baptized...
And since I've come to the way of faith, it's sort of, I've felt like I've been being moved and carried.
I still have the same challenges I've always had.
Selfishness, wanting glory for myself rather than glory for Christ.
But there's like a brighter light, brighter than the light that usually governs me, the light of self-interest.
I love the Catholic branch of Christianity.
I went to a mass this Sunday, and it's beautiful.
I love it.
It was a church called St. Agnes in Miami.
It was a lovely service, and they were celebrating St. Fatima and stuff.
And I love the saints.
I love your faith.
I love their prayer.
I pray the rosary every single day.
But one of the reasons that I've not yet...
I like going around and doing stuff with people informal, but I never want it to be in any way certainly not blasphemous and even disrespectful.
So the relevant passage in the book is one of them, because when I did this last week with J. John, he read something from Corinthians that talked through the Last Supper.
When I did it with Tucker, I just read it.
So this time...
While they were eating, it says, this is Matthew 26, 26. While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, take and eat.
This is my body.
Now, I know as a Catholic, you're going to say, yeah, he didn't say it's a symbol.
He says, this is my body.
And as he broke his body for us, as his body was broken, through the various sorrowful mysteries, the scourge, the bleeding in the garden prior to that, and the humiliation, we break this bread.
It is his body.
this is Christ body then he took a cup Thank you.
And when he'd given thanks...
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Jesus.
Thank you.
Thank you, Father.
He gave it to them, saying, Drink from it, all of you.
This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.
I tell you, I will not drink from the fruit of the vine from now on until the day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom.
Thank you, Father.
Amen.
Like, when, like, we're doing that, and I see you looked up at me and you sort of offered, like, the bread.
Like, a minute ago you were saying we stripped God out of life.
When we do something ceremonial and ritualistic, in that moment, I feel the reality of Jesus.
I feel the reality of Jesus Christ's sacrifice.
And I feel like...
When it comes to it, however I might be different from Jack, there is something fundamental that connects us that's relational.
You said the word social earlier, that human beings are social creatures, and I wanted to offer you this.
Social means relational.
We relate to one another like the triune God, like the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in perpetual existence prior to the birth of reality as we understand reality here on this plane.
One of the things since coming to Christ has been this appreciation, not understanding.
Understanding is impossible, but appreciation of the idea of Christ as eternal, that Christ is there in the garden.
I've heard C.S. Lewis write that when...
At the beginning of the universe in Genesis, the moment when Christ is on the cross with the flies about his back, with the lashes on his back from the scourge, all this is anticipated.
All this is understood.
Sometimes my reality, Jack, seems so diffuse and vast and filled and fused with self-interest.
I need something as big as God came to earth and died for me, because otherwise my own pettiness would My own vastness, my own suffering, my own self-interest overwhelms me.
When you're doing the rosary or when you're taking communion, how strongly he comes to you, how strongly you see his face.
And I wonder when you're all around Mar-a-Lago there and hanging out with Trump or Elon Musk, how you can feel his presence and not be overwhelmed.
So how do you feel Christ when you're interfacing directly?
And then how do you feel Christ when you're amidst distraction?
Well, you know, it's actually amazing because this last Friday we had the ability to be at Mar-a-Lago with Father Ripperger actually came in and he was able to do, not at Mar-a-Lago, but just down from Mar-a-Lago, Father Chad Ripperger came in.
He's a Catholic priest and he's out of Denver.
And he's also known as a pretty well-known, pretty renowned, I would say at this point, You might even say famous as an exorcist.
And he was teaching us about exorcisms.
And he gave us a Latin blessing when we were at Mar-a-Lago at this dinner.
And at this dinner, yes, that Elon was there and Trump was there.
And so here you have this Latin rite traditional priest who's there.
And this was at the CPAC was coming in and done a...
I had done a summit gala.
And so there we are in the midst of everything.
And you have this...
And he's such a small...
He's a small little guy.
And yet he has so much faith and so much spirit.
And he was teaching us about how what we have to understand is that in his world, the way he views the world as constantly on a spiritual...
This is something that...
Okay, I'll tell you this, that he told us.
He said that if you go back to the 1960s, when he would perform an exorcism or when exorcists would perform an exorcism, the typical amount of time that it would take for a possession to be undone was about one to two days.
So about one to two days for someone who was possessed by a demon, and after they determined that it was indeed a possession, about one to two days an exorcism could be finished.
Do you know how, Russell, give me, just as a guess, how long do you think it takes right now for a successful exorcism?
What's the range?
I'm trying to work out whether everything's sped up so God has sped up or whether now people are so demonically charged that it takes longer.
I don't even know whether it's going to be longer or less time.
Like, we're living in the quickening now.
God is coming back so people can be cleansed in an hour.
Or Satan has taken hold so powerfully that now you have to exercise people over a month.
But I'm going to go with that God's kingdom is coming and it's, like, quicker.
Two hours.
Well, okay.
So...
Yes and no.
So prior to recently, we saw the time extending because you're right, that people were becoming more demonically charged.
And he told us up to about a year ago, it would take eight months to a year to successfully exercise somebody.
Eight months to a year, up from one to two days.
But now, you're right, that time is is starting to get slower and slower.
It's getting faster and faster.
Now it might only be a month.
We're getting back to a point where they don't have as much control anymore.
So here we are in the midst of all of this and now he's talking about exorcisms and he's talking about blessings and he's giving the blessings and he's blessing Trump and he's blessing the invocation for the dinner and hopefully for the new administration.
I certainly want to get him back to the White House.
If and when he's able to come in, because I know there's some exorcism that needs to go on there.
And my wife and I, Tanya, he was able to give us a special blessing, and there's an image of that that's gone pretty viral on the internet now.
And what's so incredible is that when you bring in people like that who are these incredible leaders, these incredible priests like Father Chad Ripperger, that their connection is so strong.
And what he says is, You know, People ask me all the time, people, are you afraid when you encounter a demon?
Are you afraid when you encounter Satan?
Are you scared?
He said, no!
You got it all backwards.
They're terrified when they see me.
When they see me, they're terrified.
Why?
Because I start beating them.
I start beating them with prayer.
I start beating them with Christ.
I start beating them with openness to God.
And one thing that he says he prays for, he said, I pray that That God opens up a portal to hell itself so that they can see me beating this demon who's trying to take over one of God's creatures.
And I want them to see the lashing that I'm giving to him on a spiritual level.
That this is what's going on.
This is the real fight that's going on.
And so I asked him, I said, Father, you know, why do demons do that?
Why do they possess people?
And it seems random.
It could be a child.
It could be What's the point of possession?
What is the goal?
If you're a demon, what's the goal?
What he said was very interesting.
Obviously, influence.
Spreading demonic influence throughout the world.
Also, when you get people who are possessed and get them together, their power actually grows.
I said, okay, but still, what's the point?
Are they really able to affect our world and through demonic psychology?
He said, demonic psychology, which is a A phrase that I've been thinking about all week now, that he said, you can see demonic psychology throughout the entire world.
This idea that, you know, you have something, so I must have that thing.
Therefore, you know, I want something.
I should have whatever I want.
It's all demonic.
It's all demonic psychology.
But he said, it's as simple as this.
When, and at least this is the way I understand it, is that when the demons first, when the angels first rebelled against God, And they charged the throne, and Lucifer, of course, was the angel of light and the morning star, and he charged the throne.
God and Saint Michael cast them out, defeated them, and sent them straight to hell because you can't wage war on the throne.
But is there another way that you could wage war at God?
And you were talking about the Trinity, and you were talking about society, and you were talking about being social.
Not socialism, but being social.
And he said, it's very simple.
What the demons work to do is break down society, to make society dysfunctional, and then to attack God by severing his connection in the hearts of humanity with him.
So they can't attack God directly, but it's an indirect attack on his people so that they weaken it down and they can ruin humanity.
The experiment, the great experiment that is our world.
So they can't attack God.
They've tried to do that.
They've tried to rebel against heaven.
So what do they do?
They attack the world.
And that is the fight that we're currently in, is this idea that in order to disorder society, create disorder, disorder as a verb, in order to do that, that is why they're constantly spreading fear and doubt and uncertainty Because it is ultimately demonic, whereas God, as you say, God is order.
God was order before there was order.
God created order.
God is the perfect holy trinity.
This is order.
So to order versus to disorder is divinity versus demonic.
And it was an incredible way that he was able to put it all together.
And so while we're here trying to put together some kind of order that In our society, we also have to first identify and diagnose the disorder in order to come out of that and determine which way to go forward.
And so it was an incredible, just an incredible day that I spent with Father Ripperger and being able to, I could probably talk to him for hours upon hours about all of that.
Jonathan Pejot is regarded as one of the most important Christian intellectuals working today.
Jordan Peterson absolutely adores him.
He's an intellectual known for his work in symbolic thinking.
He's raised in Quebec.
He's deeply influenced by the Eastern Orthodox Church.
He is an Eastern Orthodox Christian, is what he is.
It's a fantastic conversation.
Join us for that now.
Jonathan, thanks so much for joining us today.
It's so lovely to see you.
It's good to see you.
It's been a little while.
Yeah, I think we talked to each other formally before Christmas last year, so it's getting close to about a year.
Yeah, and I've been thinking about you because I spoke to Jordan Peterson for two hours, I think, at the weekend because I was at a, um, I was hanging out with a lot of people in the midst of, I was staying in West Palm Beach and there was a lot going on.
And I think unconsciously I reached out to Jordan Peterson for a bit of sort of Personal validation and to feel somehow anchored and like I had a world outside of the world that was in front of me, you know, and we we talked about you and he talks a bit like I said, hey you you he brought you up and said I'm speaking to Jonathan I'm speaking to Jonathan on that you know next week.
I said what shall I ask about?
He said He said this and this is how he said it as well The deep meaning of signs.
The deep meaning of signs and icons.
He'll explain to you the deep power of icons.
I was like, right, I'm going to do that.
But like...
Not bad.
Not bad.
But like, what?
You know, since...
It's interesting, because before we do break bread...
We always have to ask the guests, because a lot of, you know, we're speaking to people that are Catholic priests or even bishops, and I know that you're Eastern Orthodox, or at least that's my understanding.
So sometimes there are sort of sectarian or scriptural reasons why there can't be a participation in one of the central motifs of that, of what we're doing, like the communion.
I've already thought about why there's scripture around praying in public and praying on street corners.
I'm aware of that.
Can you tell me about the Eucharist and how it has to be taken in your tradition and about prayer and public prayer too, please?
Yeah, well, I would say the question of Eucharist mostly has to do with communion, because communion has many meanings.
One, of course, is we're communing to the blood and body of Christ, but we're also communing to the body of Christ together.
And so, sadly, our history has many schisms in it, and has many conflicts, and some conflicts that have not been resolved.
And so because of that, You know, we are not in communion with each other in some ways, you know?
So, for example, I cannot take communion in a Protestant church or in a Catholic church because there's a conflict that hasn't been resolved.
And so it's not of my resort.
It's not something that I can cry about or that I can pray on, that I can ask God to help heal, but I can't go against the The reality of the conflict.
And so that's why...
So it's true.
Like, if I would take communion, like in an informal situation, or a Protestant church or something, I would be excommunicated from my church.
That's a real thing.
So...
Yeah, it's a lot.
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People have been asking me what kind of Christian you are, and I go, me, Russell.
I'm the kind of Christian where Bear Grylls comes around your house and baptizes you in the river in your garden.
That's the kind I am.
Like, you know, but I've been...
I don't know if you've heard...
...of Paul Kingsnorth.
He's a brilliant, yeah, Eastern Orthodox former activist Christian.
I like him as well.
But I'm fascinated by the iconography of Catholicism and indeed the pageantry.
But...
At the moment, in this early part of my journey into Christianity, Jonathan, I'll tell you what I'm enraptured by is the Book of Acts and the feeling I got when reading Eugene Peterson's interpretation of the Book of Acts.
The feeling I got is, this is happening now.
This is happening now, that we are in a new time where there is potentially, you know, I don't know if there's a new time, you know, when you're dealing with beings that are outside of time, you know, I don't know, but it feels like culturally there could be a revivification and a very urgent and immediate Christianity that's actually people like breaking bread In the middle of a street or in McDonald's and drinking wine, taking communion in McDonald's and people getting executed and having to fight.
It feels like that to me, but I've always been a bit of a drama queen.
What do you think about that?
Well, so look, I understand what you mean in terms of the urgency.
I think that you're right that we are in a moment and there's something happening and we definitely have to be able to participate as much as we can.
But there is a difference for sure between a tradition that doesn't have A hierarchy, you know, and so let's say it seems like the Christianity that you're involved in doesn't have a sense of hierarchy of participation.
It's more kind of an anarchist kind of Christianity, which fits your personality, you know, to some extent.
But I definitely belong to a tradition that has a structure and it has responsibilities and authorities, you know, because I guess one of the things about being a Christian is learning also to submit to authority, something that's very hard to do, like real human authority,
not just abstract kind of God Bible authority, but actually someone who is responsible for you and Yes, I reckon I'm beginning to see where the challenges are.
Because, like, when I, like, within sort of months of my own baptism, I was baptizing under some stewardship, I will point out.
Friends of mine, like, friends of mine were asking me, will you baptize me?
And I'm like, yes.
Of course I will.
So, like, we're down, like, I live near the river.
They're friends of mine from recovery, you know.
And, like, I eventually, not at the time, but eventually posted some of the images.
And, of course, I was wearing underpants, like, white underpants, like, little underpants, because that's what I wear under my clothes.
It wasn't like a photo shoot, right?
So I took off my clothes because I was getting in the river.
But it wasn't helped by the fact that my mate was wearing sort of a demi-wetsuit, so it looked like he was kind of prepared.
So I was in just underpants and stuff, and people were like, this is vanity.
Then other people are like, well, what about did not King David celebrate naked?
People having a lovely theological chat about my underpants.
That's the kind of stuff that I need in the world.
By the way, you know that people used to be baptized naked.
That's how it used to be.
Yeah, so we don't do it that way anymore.
But in the first centuries, the Christians would be baptized naked, which is why we had deaconesses.
We had women deacons that would baptize women, and then the men would baptize men.
Because it was important to, you would go into death, basically, go into the water, and then you would come out and put on a white robe, and that that was kind of entering into the kingdom.
And so we still, in our church, we still have like wearing, people will like get undressed, but they'll wear like a bathing suit or something when they get baptized.
But they, it's not, yeah, yeah, especially guys, like sometimes they end up in like just like their bathing suit.
Yeah.
I suppose, in a way, if we're sketching out a territory for our conversation, Jonathan, it's practical Christianity.
Now, how can anything be practical in the realm of the spiritual and ineffable unless it is util?
How then, I wonder, might we interpret as absolute truth that which requires faith?
I guess we're in one of the bigger terrains of inquiry now.
Personally, what happened to me is I went from a rather diffuse plastic and amorphous new ageism into this sort of sudden We felt at points sudden abrupt confrontation with Christ, which I'm still experiencing whenever I close my eyes, which is in particular and specifically about the corporeal and human Christ in addition to his Divine, fully divine endowment.
And there's been something in particular, Jonathan, about surrendering to a man as well as surrendering to God that cracked open my own egotism where I sort of previously would have said prior to baptism and conversion that I believed in Jesus Christ being some weird, hysterical, narcissistic A ghetto of my neurology also felt that I should be him.
Now, I've been recently disavowed and relieved of that, and I wonder what you think is the significance of Christ the man, Christ the God, and what is particular and important about the surrendering to him.
I mean, I think that Christ is the key, you know, he's the key to creation.
He kind of helps us understand what creation is for.
In fact, you know, in the Orthodox tradition, we believe that Christ is the purpose of creation, that the reason why God created the world was to be united with his own creation through man, that it was in fact Adam's destiny, but that Adam...
You know, broke away from his own purpose, his own destiny, and that that was all restored in Christ.
And so to submit to Christ is in some ways to submit to your own nature, like in the terms of his humanity, because he is the culmination of what a man, a human being is.
You know, and so it's not an external submission.
In some ways, it's a submission that makes you more who you are, makes you more human, makes you More who you can be.
So that's why Christ says, my yoke is light.
It's not that Christ doesn't demand things of us, but that when we engage in that direction, we realize that it's actually revealing to us who we really are.
So that's why I think it's important, because it's not just...
We don't have this idea of just God as...
It's a divine figure that sends down commandments or sends down rules or sends down the ways of being, which in some ways he does, but we also believe that God joined himself with his own creation and that has set the path for us.
We even talk about deification.
We talk about how God became man so that man would become God.
That's the purpose of creation.
That's the purpose of it.
What kind of wrestling did you undertake to submit yourself to the proposition of Christianity?
As with marriage, as you open the door to marriage, a thousand doors close.
What happens to the intellectual karooming?
And inquiry prior to Christianity, like by saying I'm a follower of Christ, I'm no longer gonna, you know, like, read Rumi in the same way, although I may revere and enjoy the Sufis.
I'm not gonna, in the same way, look at Buddhism or the Vedas or the Gitas.
I'm still obviously...
Forgive the word academically interested I'm still curious but like I follow Jesus and I surrender Jesus and I'm acting like I was real scholastic but I weren't I was autodidactic and peripatetic and like pick and mix grabbing things and that was the problem because I was still at the middle of it and I can't be at the middle of it when Jesus is at the middle of it even if as you have just explained it is an internal Christ That is alchemizing the Adamic man into the
man-god by cleansing away sin, which can only really happen in the present, I suppose.
I wonder what it's done to you as a very clever person.
How has it got into you as a clever person to surrender that Well, it's funny because I don't feel like I've had to surrender anything.
What I feel is that it rather organizes things.
And so, you know, I see all things through Christ.
And therefore, I'm fine reading Rumi and I'm fine reading Buddhist texts.
I don't have a problem with looking at ideas from other traditions, but I always see them through the light of Christ and submitted in some ways to the revelation of Christ.
You know, St. Basil the Great had his wonderful prescription to his own young people.
He would even tell the young people that they shouldn't read the Bible until they read the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Because he thought that the Bible was too profound and you had to prepare your mind through poetry before you would be able to actually understand some of the things that the Bible is addressing.
And so even in the Christian tradition, there isn't this sense in which we have to give up the richness of other cultures or the richness of the past, but rather see it in the light of Christ.
You know, what do you do when people say to you stuff like, well, the motif of the virgin birth is found throughout culture?
What do you do with perennial arguments like Osiris was, you know, the crucifix and the Celtic cross and the cross preceded Christianity?
What do you do with both semiotic and mythic ideas iterated in the Gospels that Have either ancillary, parallel, tangential, or even precursive resonance?
Well, I don't do anything with them.
I think it's amazing.
I think it's wonderful.
What do you want me to do?
I think it's wonderful.
Organize them!
It shows to what extent the revelation of Christ is in tune with reality.
It's not a...
You know, this weird idea that in some way originality is the vector for truth is a really ridiculous idea.
You know, truth is truth.
And so the notion that they would be inklings, that they would be like little scratching or little, you know, glowing things before Christ that would intimidate him, you know, it's true in the Old Testament and it's true in all pagan cultures.
And that's the way that the ancients understood it.
If you read the Divine Comedy, you'll see that Dante is seeing, you know, the glimmers of Christ in all the ancient myths and doesn't see a problem with that at all.
Rather sees it as something that's moving towards a final revelation.
But in Christ, what we have is the fullness of those stories.
And so, you know, I like to give a little example.
It's not a very, it's not, it's very simple.
So, for example, the notion of Karabasis, the idea of the descent into the underworld, right?
So, You know, people will say, well, that's an old myth.
It's an old pattern.
You see it in every single epic, in every culture, pretty much.
You have this idea of someone who goes down into death, down into the underworld, and then comes out with some kind of wisdom.
You see it in the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Aeneid and all kinds of stories.
What does Christ do with that story?
Christ definitely has that in his story.
He goes down into death and he comes out.
But the difference with him is that when he comes out of death, death has been defeated.
There is no one else who has that story.
There is no version of that story in other cultures.
When Christ comes out of death, we say on Pascha, on Easter Day, we read this homily by St. John Chrysostom where he says, death is no more.
Death is empty.
Death has been defeated.
And so, if Christ goes down into death, and when He comes out, He's emptied it of all its power and all its sting, what other story are you going to tell now?
What's the next story?
What's the story that is more than that?
And there isn't.
Christ's story always fools the mythological to the brim.
It just pushes it to its extremes.
Does Christ have Dionysus in him?
Yes, he does have Dionysus in him.
Does he have all these aspects of the different gods?
I would say most of the time he does, but he pulls it together in ways that are really surprising.
Christ thinks Dionysus and joins him You know, with regular bread and wine, like regular bread and wine, and he turns it into basically eating flesh and blood.
So is that Dionysian?
Yeah.
But also, no, it's not.
It transforms Dionysus into something that's life-affording, and not just the kind of destructive passion that you see in the Baki or in the early Dionysian rituals.
Those passions are absolved and absorbed by him and in him.
In that conversation with Jordan Peterson, which I now recognize was research.
See, I do do research.
He brought up the passage in Exodus where, and I think he was referring to a conversation he had with you potentially, Jonathan, where Moses goes on behalf of the Israelites to petition God the Father and asks for some solution to the problem that he's poisoned the snakes and he ends up with this sort of snake artifact having to be constructed.
And elevated on a staff, which sort of remains a symbol of medicine to this day, and that Jesus, our Lord and Savior, says, like, later in the, you know, I don't know which one, you'll know, of course, like, you know, I've got to be raised up like the serpent.
And Jordan Peterson said, well, that's an indication of a level of genius that almost has to be divine, like the most likely explanation for such extraordinary sort of plotting, paralleling, and sort of symbolic resonance, a deep resonance that seems to sort of precede consciousness, is that it's true, that it's actually true, that it actually happened, it actually happened.
The challenge I suppose I have, right, is say when you talk about like them aspects of Christ that can be found in other deities, I'm like, you know, I can't unthink, sort of say, what's his name, Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell saying,
in agricultural societies, the necessity for the God to enter into the dirt and come back again is a rational prerequisite if you want your crops to To go into the ground and come up again, i.e.
the secularization and rationalization of these sort of arcane motifs and symbols, sometimes it makes me think, oh right, yeah, it's not as simple as it actually happened.
Now, what reconciliation or conversation needs to take place there, Jonathan?
Well, it's the same issue.
So, you know, is there...
Does Christ use that example himself?
Like, to talk...
He talks about the seed.
He says the seed has to die, you know, before it comes back to life.
And so Christ uses an agricultural theme in terms...
You know, to talk about what he's going to accomplish.
But, you know, and I've seen this before.
The idea that you want to limit that to agricultural symbolism is completely...
You'll be blind if you do that, because there are many aspects in Christ's story and in Christ's sacrifice which escape the agricultural motif.
And so, for example, the manner in which Christ is an animal that is sacrificed as well, the idea that Christ replaces the propitiatory sacrifices from the Old Testament, that has nothing to do with this type of agricultural symbolism.
There are many other aspects of his symbolism.
For example, the fact that he also becomes the scapegoat in his sacrifice.
He is both the pure sacrifice and the scapegoat.
He is the seed that goes into the ground and comes back again.
They're right.
There are intimations of what Christ does in ancient symbolism, but if you try to see it through that, then you won't see Jesus, because Jesus blows it all up.
He just basically takes all of that, crashes it together, and gives you an image that is very difficult to meditate on, because He collapses all of the types of sacrifices In his sacrifice.
And he...
How can I say this?
He also collapses symbolism of the nomadic people with the agriculturalists.
In his own offering of his...
His bread and wine and the blood and the flesh, he joins Cain's sacrifice with Abel's sacrifice, you know, and so he really, like, he just crashes it together.
I mean, I could keep going, but the idea that, you know, that Jesus is just another agricultural god is just pure nonsense by the very fact of his story, you know, and so you have, like I said, you have to ignore aspects of his story if you want to make a proclamation like that.
Yes, I see.
There are so many synthesized image systems at play that it starts to appear like a symphonic indication of the same ulterior reality that makes mathematics and fractal correlatives as well as the golden scale themselves make sense that there's a kind of perfect and enshrined,
enshrining living Monument pulling together sets of potentialities to the degree that it might be regarded as emblematic of a super state of potentiality and I noticed how frequently you use the word collapse and it's impossible not to notice that that's the term you would use for the wave particle collapsing into an absolute and that what we might have is a referent to a sort of a triune relational reality playing itself out across Time
and space.
But what do we do with that, Jonathan?
What do we do with that?
I think that we just need to have humility in front of the story of Jesus because...
There has been about a hundred years of people trying to demolish it, trying to reduce it to a simple pastiche of ancient myths or, you know, a misunderstanding of the early Christians or a lie or whatever.
Like, there's just been all these tacks where people have tried to destroy the Christian story through all kinds of means, whether it's materialist, whether it's mythological.
And I think that what we need to do is just have humility in front of the story and actually observe it, read it, And look at it for what it's actually presenting to us.
And when we do that, then we're blown away by what's in the story.
Because it's also the thing about Jesus' story and the Gospels that's difficult is that they're so non-literary.
And people like literary.
They're very matter-of-fact, very simple.
All the Bible stories are like that.
They don't describe interstates.
They don't describe...
You know, the yearnings of people's hearts, you know, like if you read some ancient poem, they just say what happened.
And because of that, people can, in some ways, it's almost too simple for people's minds.
But if they take the time to unpack what's in the story, Then they realize that all their epic poems are gathered into that one story.
Everything that they care about, all the interstates that they are attached to, are kind of folded into the story of Jesus, but they're not made explicit, and so people can read it and not notice what's actually happening.
But when you see, when you just look at the elements, and we could go through any part if you want, but you can see just how much is folded into that story.
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I'm reading the New International Version, Jonathan, and I noticed that the account when it comes to him on the cross is, and I don't know if this is the translation I'm reading, is where the four Gospels Seem to unify in particular King of the Jews above his head Maybe even the sort of drawing a lot.
I only did it the other day.
I'm like really early I've only been Christian six months, but like I wondered if that was like as a result of like sort of interpretive or translation problems or like is it Has it deliberately that bit been collapsed into?
Because, you know, if there are several sources and elsewhere there are sort of grammatical and vocabulary distinctions, I wondered why for that bit all four of them go very similar.
I think I'm very close.
Yeah, I've never really thought about it.
It's possible because it's the most intense and most important part of the story.
They come close to each other.
I've never really analyzed the different Gospels to see.
But the fact that the Gospels are different is not a...
It's actually a testimony, because there was a move in the early church to unify the gospel.
Like, there was a push to make a one gospel.
Let's just take the four, you know, get all the kinks out, just give us a nice gospel.
But the church resisted that.
And in some ways I think it's because there's an immediacy in the gospels that is...
You can feel like the people that are talking about it don't completely understand what it is that they're talking about.
Or that they don't completely understand what it is that they're dealing with.
And so because of that, it comes off a little different in the different accounts.
And there's this, like I said, there's this immediacy.
And I love that about the Gospel.
It makes them quite human and quite real.
And the revelation of Christ is not...
So you talked about, for example, you know, the sign above his head and the casting of lots, right, at the bottom of the, you know, with the Romans casting lots.
So that's a good way of understanding how Revelation functions and why we have the four Gospels and why they're different is that The unity is in the name.
The unity is in the title.
It's above the head.
And then down below, there's chaos.
There's ambiguity.
That's what casting of lots is.
It's chance.
It's not reasonable.
It's not rational.
It's actually the structure of Genesis 1. It's the structure of the world.
Where you have chaos at the bottom, you have heaven above, and then those two.
So, in the cross, you have that repeated.
There are several images like that, but one of them is the name above and the casting of lots below.
But that's also how we need to understand Revelation, is that when we look into the details too much, when we try to find exactitude in Scripture, We're going to run into, and we think that that's how we get revelation.
We're going to run into problems, because manuscripts have differences between them.
And there are little differences in the manuscripts.
If you get attached to that, people just lose their mind.
And you have these stupid Bibles that have, like in manuscript A and B, there's this word, and in manuscript A, there's this one, and different manuscripts.
And it just loses the story.
I think that we have to understand that The fact that there's ambiguity on the edge of the revelation is not a problem.
It's actually part of the shape of the world itself, you know?
Just like Christ had fingernails, right?
And Christ had cut his hair just like all of us.
I love that.
There's a few questions from the chat, right?
Pride Faults, which says, stop doing the convincing and focus on the teachings.
And I'm like, okay, fair enough.
And then Kay Kotwas in the chat says, can you ask Jonathan his thoughts on transhumanism and the idolatry of technology?
So, I have now done that, Jonathan.
All right, what do I think of?
Yeah, I think for sure, people need religion.
You know, people are hungry for a uniting narrative.
And so for sure, transhumanism seems to be at least one of the ones that is peeking over the edge, you could say.
You know, we got rid of God and now we're building one.
It's very odd.
So for sure, AI and transhumanism and this kind of this Gnostic idea that humans are going to transcend themselves into a digital space or all these types of ideas.
Also, the idea that your body is indefinitely malleable and that your personality or that your being is somehow removed from your body and that you have to conform your body to your identity, whether it's furries or, you know, robotic ideas or whether it's avatars online.
All of these are They're heresies for all intents and purposes in the sense that they don't really have the right anthropology.
They don't have the right vision of what a human is, of what the human relationship to God is, of what our relationship to these non-human intelligences are.
But it is going to grow because people need religion and a scientific techno-religion Is, you know, a kind of psychedelic, techno-scientific religion is one which seems to be at least, seems to be taking shape in front of us, I think.
That's very interesting.
I was talking to some people at the weekend about the significance of Jung's work Ion, in which there was an indication that individualism was going to begat some kind of new faith.
And I was saying, surely a revivification, the ongoing and never-ending revivification and resurrection of the Christian message in itself is sufficient, containing as it does an individual and personal This deification,
reification of technology, it seems to me that when we imbue material and rationalism with sublime and divine reverence, if not qualities, even if they are providing some of the solutions we would have looked to the sublime and divine for, We are doing something that seems to me sort of fundamentally Luciferian.
I'd love to lay this down before you, Jonathan.
One of the first passages that really hit me hard was Luke 10.18 when he says after they return the 72 all high on their own supply, having been doing a bunch of healing, he says, Our Lord...
I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning.
You'll do many great deeds because your names are written in the heaven.
You'll walk among serpents and scorpions.
Here's how it struck me.
I'm sort of satanic myself.
I always want my own domain like Satan.
I always want credit.
I always want to be on my own little cross in charge of my own little universe.
I see myself as a god now.
This false Luciferian light, which I believe it was Father Julian of the Trinity Church in Brompton, said to me that he regarded that the enlightenment potentially is the amplification of a false and bleaching light that sort of allowed us to place again at the apex of our hierarchies human intelligence and therefore Human systems and in the same way I would say that globalism is the politics of Luciferianism,
one sort of central deity that lays claim to the powers of the God that is desecrated and destroyed.
Perhaps technology also has the threads of Satan in it.
Now, of course, I know that any talk is ambivalent and could be used for good or evil.
I get that idea.
But with this particular telos, do you see like technology potentially, Jonathan, as the sort of I'm not going to get all Luddite about it, but do you feel that in conjunction with globalism it's sort of like part of a Luciferian fugue, if I may say?
Yeah, I mean, we can't completely discount technology.
Here we are, you know, on Zoom, you know, streaming a video online.
But, you know, this has happened before, by the way.
This idea that there's a relationship between technification and demons or kind of fallen angels is something which is deeply in the Christian tradition.
There's a whole slew of texts, we call them the Enochian texts, the Enochian tradition, that discuss how, before the flood, The humans made partnerships with these entities, these demons, and these demons taught them all these skills.
And the skills brought about corruption and that these skills brought about a kind of arrogance, this kind of pride that brought about the end of the world.
So the end of the world before the flood was caused by this This humans making some kind of deals with demons and then receiving technical skills and creating a society that fell apart.
These texts are not known that well, but they are quoted in Scripture.
So, for example, in the Bible, St. Paul quotes the Book of Enoch, and in the Book of Jude, there's also a quote of the Book of Enoch.
They're mostly useful to help us understand that in some ways this has happened before.
The idea is when we reach into the idea space with a desire for increasing our own power, you know, we run a very big risk of unleashing onto the world giants that we can't control anymore, right?
So that's the story, for example, the golem, you know, you see that in that story as well.
There are many stories that kind of embody that.
And so that's the way to understand it.
It's the genie's lamp for all intents and purposes.
A genie's lamp is a good way of understanding it, right?
So you have this demonic, ambiguous spirit, and it presents with you technology, right?
A lamp is technology.
It's a way to have light when it's dark.
It's like, that's what technology always does.
It always increases your power, you know, increases your reach and your power.
And then it says, what do you wish?
What do you want?
And I'll give you what you want with infinite power, right?
Right?
And so that's the problem of technology, is that it gives you what you want with infinite power, with increasing power.
But the problem is what you want is if it's perverted, then all the side effects of what you want you didn't notice.
You hadn't thought about it.
You hadn't realized that there are side effects to what you want because you're not aiming in the right direction.
So now all the side effects start to manifest themselves and you're like, well...
Well, I didn't know.
Like, I didn't know that if I started, you know, like, you know, I love Elon for all intents of, you know, but Elon is hilarious because he's like, I'm going to start open AI and I'm going to create the most powerful AI company in the world, but it'd be open source and it'd be great because we'll be open source.
And then he creates open AI and it's the most powerful thing in the world.
Then he says it's the biggest single threat to human existence.
And it's like, that's technology.
Technology is increasing power.
And if you don't ask for...
The only thing you could ask for if you had the genie's lamp would be something like, I asked that I could love God and love my neighbor.
That's the only thing you could ask for.
Anything else that you ask for will turn against you, right?
Will create these side effects.
Like the car is a good example.
It's like, what's a car?
What does a car do?
A car makes you go fast.
Oh, okay.
Downstream from a car is the replanning of every single city in the world.
The transformation of communities, the transformation of the specialization of large spaces in the world.
So now you don't have villages with communities, you have shopping centers and suburbs.
And that's what the car did.
But did anybody realize that that's what the car had in it?
No one.
And so that's why you understand it as a kind of fallen angel is a good way of understanding it.
It's like, it's a principality that if it falls into the world, it runs the course and you can't, you don't even know what it wants really.
It's kind of acting, it's acting, how can I say this?
It's acting beyond our individual control.
Or you see that with AI right now.
Nobody knows what AI really wants.
We're all rushing to implement it for Mammon's sake, but it's like everybody knows it's dangerous, but they're still doing it.
Why?
Because they're not in control.
There's something else in control.
Well, thank you very much for joining me for the show today.
We will be back live streaming tomorrow with more insights and conversations about recent events, including the Hunter Biden laptop.
If you're not on Awaken Wonder yet, become an Awaken Wonder to join us for conversations such as the ones you have just seen.
See you tomorrow, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
Until then, if you can, stay free.
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Switch on.
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