So, Jay Dyer, how are you doing.
I'm doing great, Glad to be in Vegas, having a lot of fun. We did multiple podcasts, but this is the one I'm looking forward to for sure. I enjoyed the hotch Ones too, but yeah, it is.
A phenomenal honor to have you on. I can't thank you enough for coming on.
Thank you.
How was it with the Hodge Twes?
It was great. You never really know what to expect because they are kind of uh wild cards. You don't know what they're going to talk about, but I know they're going to talk about a Ran, Israel and Epstein files. So we spent I think about an hour and a half just kind of going wild. But they also like race jokes, so I impersonate them, which they actually love. They laughed harder at that than anything else. Hard twin,
you don't think Islam is based? You don't think Islam based And I was like, you guys sound like fat Albert. They thought that was funny.
Oh well, we have to link it in the video description it went.
It was. It was very serious though, like it's like we're joking around, but we also got really deep into like why we do anything that Bbie wants you know pretty much.
So unfortunate. So you are King of the ortho Ros, you do geopolitical you have written scripts for television programs, you are a published author, you do comedy. What am I missing here?
Debates? I guess was the other thing that we actually accidentally fell into doing, and that was something that wasn't planned. There was an offer ten years ago, hey would you debate this atheist libertarian guy, Adam Kokish, And I was like, yeah, sure, why not? And then it was hey, will you debate this other atheist guy, Jfgary Eppie? Yeah, sure, why not? So that kind of just kicked off a snowball of offers and I was always like, well I don't want to say no. Yeah sure, So.
How okay, so how did you first end up coming into the Orthodox Church or coming across it? If we just get the summary of that.
So I remember I was raised Baptist, wasn't super serious about it as a kid, but when I was in high school get more interested in going to Bible studies and visiting with various denominations of friends. When someone of the Church of Christ, Charismatic churches, and even I think I went to the Callacters one time in high school. But I would say right around nineteen ninety eight ninety nine, I started noticing challenges on the Internet to Protestantism and
Calvinism from Catholics. And I would go into like Yahoo chat and Instant Messenger rooms and do you remember those rooms? And I would debate with the Roman Catholics in there, like, aha,
I'm going to own you Catholics. And I know that, like they weren't known apologists, but they would oftentimes put quotes from the Church fathers that I was like, wow, he really said that, Because as a Calvinist, you think, oh, Augustine, he's one of us, Like he teaches Calvinism and here he is talking about baptismal regeneration, here he is talking about the Eucharus. He's a bishop, relics all this kind
of stuff. So I was really challenged early on in about nineteen ninety nine two thousand by a lot of Roman Catholics. And I wasn't ready to leave Protestantism yet, but that prompted me to get into debates. And so I listened to doctor Greg bonceon debating a Roman Catholic named Jerry Madatis and That was a huge pivotal debate for me because I had all my faith in bonds and demolishing Mattatics in this debate, and turns out Mattatics
did pretty good. He actually brought up some issues about tradition that I'd never heard, and so that kind of got me wondering about Catholic Church history. And I remember I bought Roman Catholic Catechism because I was curious what they actually say. And then I realized, I'm gonna have to buy the Church Fathers because I need that set. It was only a thousand dollars back in two thousand and one.
It's a lot more.
I think it's two or three thousand now, But I bought the Philip Schaft set for my he's my Christmas and Birthday money to buy it back into think two thousand and one. So I just started plowing through the Latin Church Fathers because I thought, well, I don't know anything about Eastern Fathers, but I know about Jerome, I know about Sant Augustine, Saint Ambrose Spy, and I'm gonna
start with those guys. So I started plowing through it, and I was taking some correspondence classes at the time from Monson's hit his own sort of study center, Southern California Center for Christian Studies is what it was called. So I was studying like pre subdisitional apologetics, transcendent argument, all that kind of stuff. And I'm noticing, like, man, all of these Latin church fathers that I held in high regard, they're straight up teaching Catholic stuff.
Yeah.
So it's a real crisis of faith at the time, and ended up becoming Roman Calthogue. In two thousand and three, entered into the novs Orto, went to the Nosorto consistently for about a year, and then somebody left a Latin Mass magazine on a pew one time and I started reading it. I was like, what's this Latin Mass. That's crazy. So then I realized, oh, there's a whole traditional movement
within the Roman Catholic world. And that introduced me to the FSSP and the SSPX, and so I found a Latin Mass, bought a missile, and started going to the Latin Mass pretty consistently for seven or eight years.
Wow.
And I would have to drive to Memphis or Nashville from where I lived. It was about two hours on Sunday to go to Latin Mass, and after a while it was just like I was super devoted to Tomism, super devoted to I didn't want to be a monk, but I was like, I really wanted to take this this seriously. And I did inquire one time about monastic life and the dude was so gay that I was. He was like, what, what has you interested in my life?
I think he was hitting on me and I was like, now I'm straight, dude, and he's, oh, this is probably not for you. It was the dios, the diocese and spiritual advisor for Memphis, super totally gay, and so that really turned me off. I was like, dude, this is this is not what I want. And the trad world is very chaotic. There's not a lot of monastic options in the trusal Gathic world. So I just kind of put all that aside. And about two thousand and seven
I was introduced to Orthodoxy online through Facebook debates. I'd heard of Perry Robinson, I'd read some of the blog, but there was a guy named Jonathan that was on john the Componic was a body of mine on Facebook, and I think he had converted from Calvinism. To Orthodoxy.
Uh.
And I had gone from Calvinism to Rome, and so we were having all these debates and discussions, and these guys started bringing up good questions, you know, good things I'd never considered. I'd not actually read Eastern Fathers because I think when you go from Protestant to Catholic, as most people do nowadays, when they do that, they just think, oh, well, those Eastern Fathers are cool. But it's all about Augustine.
It's about Anselm, it's about Aquinas. The a's, right, the three a's, And you know, we don't really need to worry about those Eastern dudes. But I will wait a minute. Aren't all the councils Eastern?
Yeah?
I mean maybe I should read these guys who are doing the theology.
Of the original language.
For the most part, well, I don't know the language. I mean, they're doing it in Greed, yeah, and Greek, not Latin.
They're not working from translations of the Bible, They're working from the actual actually exactly.
And and I remember I read a lot of Augustine. I was super devoted when I became Roman Catholic. I took his name in chrismation. He's one reception. But what what I had done was just sort of defaulted, as many Protestants do, even the Reformation guys, like they all just defaulted to the Augustinian views on trinity or anything
created grace. So I just again, after reading anti Donuts and all the Antidonus works, read all the City of God, read all the anti Pallagian works, a lot of the you know, Incrite and all that kind of stuff, and I never I read it, most of on the Trinity. It's massive. I read most of it as a Protestant or as a Catholic, and I just defaulted to thinking that, well, this is this is it, this is how you explained
the Trinity. But it was only when I got into Orthodox critiques that it even ever occurred to me that he might have gotten something's wrong. So I grappled with that for a couple of years. That was a really difficult thing to let go of, because I think my personality, especially my twenties, have a tendency to really have hero figures and you don't want to see you don't want to see any flaws in your hero figures. But over time, the more I read the Caba Doocians, the more I read,
I say Maximus Confessor. Kind of gradually here and there, I started realizing this is a different model to Trinity, It's a different model of grace, and that was huge for me. I was kind of left aimless for a little while. A few years in two thousand and seven, I actually went through the Orthodox CD ofcum in it and I didn't join. I was like, I'm not ready. I'm still super Tomistics, super Augustinian, not ready to make
that leap yet. And I actually think that was the right choice, because if you still have all that baggage of Western theology, you're you're going to want to try to make Orthodoxy Latin, Yes, and you need to. It takes time to kind of cleanse a lot of that, a lot of presuppositions. Yeah, And so anyway, long story short, I didn't end up marrying the girl. We were both going to become Orthodox and we went through the Catechumen and we're gonna get married, and we ended up not
doing that. And I just kind of wasn't sure for several years, so I didn't go back to the Novisordo. I was just kind of like, well, I'm not going to be Protestant. I'm not ready for Orthodoxy. I'm not going to roam or trid stuff anymore. So I just was kind of in limbo. And that was about I don't know, five or six years. And then around twenty fourteen thirteen fourteen, I started gradually reading more Orthodox stuff again.
I started talking to some Orthodox friends again on Twitter or on Facebook and stuff, and I got really sick. Actually had two bad cases of pneumonia, and I mean, I wasn't dying, but it was like sick enough that I felt like a taste of death. And that was a huge kind of like spank. I guess you could say, chastise me to make me think maybe I need to actually get my life in order, I mean, And so I quit drinking. I wasn't an alcoholic, but I think I could have been, because I drank a lot and
I felt like ruining my gut. You know, I'm super sick. I just need to make some changes.
And how old are you at this point?
Roughly this was twenty twelve thirteen, so I would have This is twelve years ago, so I would have been in my mid thirties, so mid thirties. Started going visiting some Mortark churches. Locally. Had an old friend actually that used to go to my Calvinist church whould become an Antiokin priest. Oh, and he ended up actually being at the local Antiokin church. That was an hour for me, an old friend of mine that I was high school with because an Antiokin priest. So props to Father Matthew Snowden.
And so I went and met with him, and we talked and we had you know, some good inquiry discussions, and I was like, yeah, maybe I should revisit this, you know, catechumen situation. And so I redid all of that and stop smoking too, because I think the I think the pneumonia came from vaping. Actually, so I quit vaping,
I quit drinking. Not that orthodoxy is about you know, puritanical morals, but for me, those things were you know, like obviously affecting my health and drinking it was really messing with my gut.
But you know what the hardest part about vaping is what your parents should get.
The reason we vaped was to quit smoking. Oh really, So it was it was an attempt to try to get away from cigarettes, and it worked for a little while. But I actually, I think the best medicine for smoking and vaping was pneumonia. If you get pneumonia, that's actually a great way to quit smoking. So I got it twice and the woman was like, if you keep smoking or vaping, you're probably gonna get pnemonia. The third time, I was like, you know what, I'm done because it
was awful. I mean, I've been sick, but pneumonia was one of the worst. But anyway, so that was a good chastisement that came my way. That got me kind of thinking about mortality and those things can be good enticements to repentance. And so in twenty fifteen sixteen, I just kept reading Orthoxology like NonStop. Twenty seventeen, I think I met with Feather Snowden and we talked about inquiring catechumen and all that. So I did that through twenty seventeen.
Then came in I think in twenty eighteen. My wife had actually came in a little earlier. We weren't married at the time, but she was at a different church in South Carolina, so she came in in the OCA a year before me. Anyway, So that's the long route story to where I kind of got back into But it was also by the way, a lot of biblical theology that got me back into Orthoxy because in Roman
Catholicism they will give credence to the Bible. And I don't mean this as like a low tier Protestant critique that Roma College don't read their Bible. In Rome, it's so focused on papal documents in the traditional world and to devotions to this or that, Adam or whatever, that I do actually think that the Bible is not given primary importance in Rome.
It's not. I mean, it's everything's about you know, like, are you doing the devotion to our Lady of the brown scapular, of the of the feast day of Fatoma of lords?
Yep. And what I liked about Orthodoxy was that going back to the liturgy and realizing, well, this is actually just scripture come to life here in the liturgy. And even though Rome kind of is that or at least gives verbal greedence to that, it was just different. And I was just burnt out on all the Roman just the whole system. So I think really for me, there was a lot of like system breaking that had to occur.
Does that make sense, Yeah, it is, And it's for people who have been in Catholicism. I think they they will understand exactly what you mean. It's very It's also just you go to talk to your parish priests and you realize these I mean, these seminaries have more fruit than an orchard. It's it's and it's like, as a straight guy, I mean, how do you how do you relate?
It's a challenge. Yeah.
And then and then on top of if you want to be married, you know, how are you relating to this guy who has to be completely you know, cell of it and live around women. It's very Yeah, I mean how do you how do you advise people on marriages when you're not married?
Yeah, there's all those practical issues, and I think you're right to go back to like a lot of times for most of us, it's it's not ultimately a lot of these intellectual ideas that plays a part, but like there's all these other things going on in your life too that are are, like I said, enticements to repenting and seeing things in a different way. So yeah, So eventually I just kind of read my way back through the Book of Daniel particularly was a huge influence on them.
So I took Daniel's name when it became Orthodox. Wonderful the Prophetdaniel, because so much of Daniel I think really just confirmed for me that the Messianic era began, you know, in the first Advent Daniel nine, et cetera. So Daniel was a huge empathus to return to the earlier investigation ten years prior in Orthodoxy. So so that was the long route to Orthodoxy.
What's phenomenal to have you here. It's amazing.
It's been a wild journey.
It's not how you run the race, it's how you finished. You are known as like the king of the ortho Ros and every parish I go to three eighths of the guys or more. How did you come to Orthoxy? Well? I was watching internet videos who jade higher? Again and again and again. You've become this person who's effectively I mean, well just straight out you're missionary for the church, you know, just sort of unintentional missionary. You're making videos about what
you think will need to hear. Okay, we have this vision of you know, missionaries to go into foreign lands. It's as so dangerous they don't realize it. I mean, people can ruin your reputation, They can come after your employment. It's just as dangerous, if not more so, to be on the internet than in real life. And people know you for theology. They know you were talking about essence, energies, we're talking about Vatican two, we're talking about you know,
the papacy, et cetera. But we want to get to know Jay outside of that. Okay, So you've written three books, one of which is right there, and you very kindly gifted me Esoteric Hollywood three excellent book. What is the story of how you ended up writing these books? Did you, I mean, when you wrote the first one, did you think, Okay, this will turn into a second, this will be a trilogy. Did you just think, I mean, did you intend to write a book? Did it start out as something else
and move into a book? What happened?
So I was in undergrad and then grad schools philosophy, lit history, and then in grad school I studied English and lit and I focused on how James Bond was
used in the Cold War for psychological warfare. And so the British intelligence establishment, particularly through Ian Fleming, had really come up with this kind of ingenious idea to take fiction and British spy fiction had actually done this earlier than that, but to use that as a form of propaganda, because the British had a pretty tight lipped policy of an Official Secrets Act, where anybody was in intelligence couldn't
talk about anything. So what they would typically do is write fiction stories about their exploits, and Ian Fleming famously is one of the most well known for that with the Bond character. Obviously, not everything in James Bond is real, it's a lot of fiction, but it became this iconic, you know, symbol archetype throughout the Cold War for Western power and interest against the Soviets, and I just thought that was fascinating and it kind of brought together disparate
interests that I had between movies. I was always interested in theater and film and performing arts and stuff like that back to high school. But it brings in intelligence agencies in that history, and it brings in cults and how Hollywood has cult So all of those things were an interest that I had, and I was basically just kind of working part time and taking all the college classes I wanted. For like ten years, I worked as a paint mixer, so I was for ten years manager
of a Pittsburgh paint store. So I just basically, you bring me a swatch of paint right, and I match it.
I would imagine that you have lots and lots of work in the morning and then most of the rest exactly.
I read all day at a job where for ten years I could read, and so that's how I read all the Church, not all the Church Fathers, but many many years of Church fathers theology. Most of that time in my twenties, when I was a paint store manager, I was reading theological stuff wonderful. But then that allowed me to work part time and take all these college class is, and then I did grad school the same way where I was doing it part time, so it took me a lot longer than most people. But I
wasn't married. I was singled throughout that whole time. And the Internet was obviously getting more and more prevalent on the present, and I was kind of stayed away from
the Internet for a long time. But I started blogging maybe two thousand and seven, and back then I was beginning to Ron Paul, but I was interested in Orthodoxy and Catholicism, so I was kind of blogging about all that kind of stuff, and I even blogged a little bit about Zionism and that peaud a lot of people's interests, and I got some threats even back then, as somebody saying that they're going to be fired for talking about Zionism.
Oh and it was it was actually a Christian Zionist that was threatening to who's a Calvinist, by the way, a Calvinist Christians Zionist was threatening to get me fired for talking about that on a blog. Which, man, things have changed from two thousand and seven to twenty twenty six because anyway, so long story short, that was all the academic stuff that I was doing blogging just kind
of on the side for fun. But then I noticed, you know, as the Internet became more on the present, people were not just blogging but doing podcasts, right, so podcast pops on the scene. That'd be cool to do. So I started experimenting with just doing talks and audios in two thousand and ten or eleven, I think it was the first time I played around with that. It was all terrible quality, but I mean half my stuff
is still terrible quality. So twenty six so I mean, you guys are doing good here, Like I'm still like ghetto boomer tech with my.
I don't like it, I watch it, I enjoy it.
It's a challenge, there's always some new tech thingle It's actually getting a lot easier though, Like in twenty twelve thirteen, like what was out there for tech and all that, it was a lot more challenging than stuff like now it's a lot easier to do. But long story short, I keep saying that phrase.
But.
Yeah, So the book came up because there was a huge fallout with my graduate advisor and he was a super lib like a maga socialist green, just crazy lib guy, and he absolutely hated me.
This is effectively hippy.
Absolutely. In fact, he was one of the world authorities on the Luddites because lud Heites were anti type, right. So he sees the whole modern world as kind of like you know, capitalists, pigs that have taken over and the world needs to return to some sort of like you know, pre modern lud Eye.
Situation Utopians in his views, some utopian pots.
He's a big United Nations type of guys.
And everything free, no consequences, and.
He didn't like that. I was going to write the thesis on James Bond, and I wasn't like saying everything about James Bond's great I was just writing it as an analysis of propaganda Nicole war. That he thought that
was too misogynistic, too toxic, mascots. It was all that kind of stuff, right, So we had a He was falling out because after I'd worked for an entire semester, maybe two semester, forget on the thesis, and I had the first say thirty pages written, not a PhD, just a master's thesis, and he was like, oh, You're gonna have to start over. And he was doing that as a big middle finger to me because my previous advisor was really good. She got promoted to a different job.
So I either had to start all over or fight the guy. So I was like that I wanted to fight him, and I realized like, I'm either going to punch this guy, jump over his desk and punch him, or I just have to leave. So I just walked off and I never went back to grad school. And so I finished two years of grad school. I was the thesis. All I had to do was finish the thesis, and but he was like, what, You're you gonna have to start all over. I was like, no, I'm out
of here, and that was a pivot. Probably one of the best things that happened to me though, because like I would not have enjoyed academia. It's a very controlled setting. They don't want heterosexual white males there that are Christians. They don't want that at all, and they even make that clear like I had it in my undergrad phase. I had a history advisor who said, it's gonna be straight with you, Jay, if you're a straight white male, they don't want you in academia.
Yeah. He told me that it's another more fruit than an orchard.
Very similar to the Vatican.
It seems to be racing one another that's trying to be fruit vendors. I mean, I can't tell you how many people I know who have told me dropping out of their master's program or their bachelor's program their patient was the best thing that ever happened in them, because I mean, it just they realize what an artificial world it is. And you know, okay, you just get that now, you just get the reading.
Listen to the reading, yes exactly.
I mean, you want to learn languages, you go to language institute. You don't go to university. By the way for anyone watching, We're teaching Greek and Latin on Patreon Ancient Greek and Latin. Just started a new cohort for Latin Greek. We have a second one going Contact me if you're interested in My contact information is in the video description. What got you Okay? So from there, I mean the first book. You have all this material for the first book, not realizing you're about to write a book.
What happens from there?
So the best thing about college was there's a couple things that are good about college and grad school. One of them is they will force you to read and write about people that you would never read and that you totally disagree with. Yeah, that was a good thing. So I had to read all these philosophy figures that I would have never read, like David Hume and Bertrand Russell and all those characters. But if you're consistently for many years, you know, hammering out ten twenty thirty page
turn papers, you're going to get good at writing. So that was the best part of college for me, was actually kind of getting, you know, a decent hand on writing. I'm not saying I'm a writer, but I think I'm okay. And so that was I think the best honing of the skill set out of all that. And I, just for fun on the side, was doing all these film analyzes because I've always liked film separate from writing theology
papers and philosophy papers and religion papers. And then I thought, well, if I got all this material, I mean, it could conceivably be a book. But I didn't really think it would ever come about. I remember I got invited on a podcast by Oliver Stone's son, Sean Stone, and he's kind of a conspiracy guy, kind of like his dad's a famous director that build the conspiracy movies. And I was like, this would be cool. This is a this is early on one of the earliest podcasts that I
was on. And the publisher of my book, who also publishes Whitney Webb's Epstein books, so he's known for that. He was like, hey, do you have a book? And I'm like, yeah, sure, which I did it and I
have a manuscript. But I had a lot of essays and I thought, well, yeah, I could just take all these essays and just combine them into a book, and that became essar called one, which I'd written probably I don't know three or four hundred pages already on film analysis, never thinking it would be a book, and it came together in twenty sixteen as a book, and that opened a lot of doors for We did a full production TV show in twenty seventeen on the one season based
on the first book and another guy, Jay Wiedener, who's a big film buff guy, and you can still watch that show. It's It's at Gaya TV. It's kind of a new ag network. But how that guy g A I A guy g A I a Gaya dot TV. I think it's been honked. This is almost ten years ago, but you can see the fat version of me they're
sitting in the directors. We did like a Ciskel and Eberts style, but we do more of a philosophical breakdown of the films rather than like, you know, Ciskel and ebers was like, well this is good, no, it's bad, but we go deeper into like the meaning and the symbols of the films and the history.
I could never figure out which one was Ciskel and which one was Ebert.
Ebert was a fat guy. Oh okay, Ciscal's any ball guy. But it was that style in with like a theater setting, so it's a it's a nice show, it's a neat show. In fact, a lot of a lot of later offers for stuff came from people watching the show and they're like, Hey, that was actually a really good, really good show. Would you want to come do this? I'd like the Tucker thing actually happened because the Tucker Tucker's producer, Scooter, who became orthodox, he had watched Hollywood coded the TV show.
So so how did you what you expanded it on that? How you ended up on Tucker Carlson.
So when the book came out, I got the idea to just kind of mail it out to a lot of different radio shows and podcasts and stuff like that. And right twenty sixteen, podcasts were still kind of they weren't as video oriented. They were more audio oriented. I remember that you have to download them exactly. So I remember going on a lot of radio shows that were just beginning to put the radio shows on podcast like Clyde Lewis's show. I went on that. I went on
Coast to Coast with George Norrie. It was all audio back then. And then how did I let's see, what was the first big kind of offer was. I got an email I think in twenty nineteen and somebody said, hey, do you want to come on Alex Jones? And I was like, yeah, sure, because I had actually been on Alex Jones one time as a guest in two thousand and eight.
How did that happen too?
Because I just called in and Alex was talking about the history of the Rockefeller family and their influence in America back in two thousand and seven or eight, and I called in super nervous or sweat running down my brow when I called in because I'd never been on radio before. And we talked for a little bit and he was like, I have you on as a guest. You know we're talking about because I'd actually read the book that he was referencing. I was like, I've actually
read this Rockefeller book. We could talk about that. And so I called back in Monday and he was like it was like a thirty minute spot where we had a conversation. He's like, you need to write for us, write some essays. So I wrote three or four articles for Info Wars back in two thousand and seven or eight.
But that put me on the radar, I guess right, And then I don't think Alex thought about me or heard about me again until by the book came out and I remember mailing it out, that mailed it to Alex and all the radio people I could think of. And then in twenty nineteen, again this is after the TV show had come out, Alex's producer reached out and was like, Hey, do you want to come on for hour interview?
Yeah?
Sure, and the interview went really well. We did the first book as an analysis of Hollywood and all that, and then they were like, we're really impressed. Would you want to host the fourth hour? So that led to hosting for the last six years, not every Friday, but most Fridays. I hosted the fourth hour of Box shows, so hosted many of the main show too.
So it's a four hour show and needed the fourth hour and.
The fourth hour for many years, and then I did many shows, so then doing not just Alex's show, but then doing Harrison's show, Owen Schroyer Show, and that opened up a lot more doors. So that led to eventually, when Scooter became orthodox, he reached out. It's like, Hey, we're going to be in Austin. We're gonna shoot an episode of Tucker Show, would you like to do a sketch?
He's like, have any ideas. I was like, this is right when Klaus Schwab in the world are going before him and the COVID stuff was happening, and I was like, what if I said it as a joke to Scooder and I actually think we'd go for it. I was like, what if I put on like a crappy bald map ball cap and I dressed up with Klaus Schwab and I went around Austin in the park interviewing like dudes in Austin and this actually he was like, let's do it.
And so he comes and he brings the film crew and everybody from Fox, and then we go out and I'm interviewing all these idiots in Austin in the park because they're all just like, you know, hippie dippy us. And it's a great clip. I'll send it to you. We never saw it, but you can still find it. It's all over Twitter and YouTube. But so that ended up being a ten minute segment of Tucker's last show before when he got fired. I was on the very last show on Fox where Tucker got fire. We always
joked that I got Tucker fired. That was Klaus Schwab in the skit. But so that kind of kicked off, like I think openings for comedy stuff because I've always been into comedy and you're a funny guy. Thank you. So I would send that out to comedians and people, and I kind of talked a little bit to Sam Hide and DMS. I'd you know, I would always been I've been a fan of his stuff from a million dollar extreme when he was doing YouTube and well.
Now he's huge. I mean you couldn't get into d I mean an average person could not get his DMS out. So this is way back.
This is twenty eighteen. When I first kind of I saw Sam stuff in twenty sixteen seventeen, And when I first saw I didn't really get it because I didn't know what they were trying to do. I think with a million dollars stream and that stuff, Like a lot of times, it's a little bit of a learning curve where you've kind of oh, I get it now.
Was this before or after his whole Like Joe Rocks.
This was right when they got canceled? Yeah, yeah, canled for that one because like a super activist journalist had messaged Sam and was like, from bust I think it was a BuzzFeed and he was like, I'm gonna get you fired for that. I'm going to reach out to the producer of Adult Swim or whatever, and he did. He was like, you know, if you don't cancel Sam show, you know, we're gonna we're gonna take you down or
whatever whatever. The yeah, the threat was to this, I don't remember the exact details of it, there's something like that. And so they folded obviously, and that kind of made uh, you know, because that was like one of their their top shows, an Adult Swim was was a world peace and then it gets the media gets canceled. So Sam always had this desire to like do season two, even with his own money, and so he just put that out. Like last year, they redid all of the season two
on their own. But in the meantime, Sam kind of expanded into doing other TV shows. He did a weird kind of reality show called fish Tank that took on a life of its own. And then Sam started doing stand up, which he wasn't really a stand up before, is more sketch comedy. He did great at that. He's been doing stand up for the last couple of years pretty consistently, but I was always just kind of like off and on dming and being like, hey, what do you think about this? As an idea for a sketch.
I would just kind of pitch ideas, and I think when he saw it there was I did a skit making fun of megachurch pastors that he thought was really funny, and then I did a skit right he saw the Tucker skit and he thought that was funny. So that kind of opened up the possibility of like I would just say, hey, if you ever do a show, I'd love to be involved. And then I think last year he said, Hey, I'm going to start a separate show called the Sam Hide Show where I just kind of
sit and do monologues or interview people. And the first one was a collaborative effort of me and several people, Ryan Rivera, Pat Dixon, Brendan Wilds. Shout out to those guys kind of writing and throwing in ideas, and we put together this Dear Elon. It went super viral. I couldn't believe how like between acts, YouTube and all the outlets, I mean, it's like twenty million views.
Yeah, it's it was hilarious.
I could believe how popular it got. And then the next one did really well, not as good as that one, but it was five ten million views. Dear Vivek, where we're making fun of like h one B Visas and all that kind of stuff, making fun of Vivac. I mean that one, that one did really well. And then you know, there's been several that we were really super funny, and Ryan and all those guys are super super funny.
So the line from Dearry Alan that I remember most clearly is Vvek is a nerd who just needs to go back that I fell apart when I heard that one.
Yeah, well what was what was funny is that, like every one of us has kind of a different sense of humor. So like Ryan has a really he's really good impressions, and he has his own sense of humor. Pat and Brendan have their own. Pat's kind of like a Bill Burr sassy kind of guy. Brendan's kind of a he does stand up. They all do stand up except for me and Ryan and then uh and then Sam brings his own just kind of vibe and in
two we kind of throw out all these ideas. Sam takes the print out and just runs with whatever he likes and it it gels I think really well. So we've done basically a sea one season of that Sam Hyde show and a lot of weirdos on like he Sam had I don't know if Sam and Ryan had the idea to get one of these guys that drinks thrown pea, like these Hindu minded people that and so
that one was crazy. So basically for that show, we were all just like sitting there coming up with P jokes for like two days, Like, think of every joke you think of for P jokes for like two or three days.
Okay, Sam Hyde, he's like six.
Foot six basically.
Yeah, he's gigantic.
Yeah, he's like build like a linebacker. Yeah, And people think, like when I went on Pgo, both him and Nick are really tall, and everybody thinks like I'm a midget because standing next to like two, you know, multiple six foot six guys, it's like, no, I'm not a midget. These dudes are massive. So yeah, no, he's huged. But the Dodgemins are huge too. They're big dudes six three or four yea guys.
Yeah, they're also super buff.
So yeah, yeah, but uh yeah, So I mean that whole experience was Again, I mean, I'm just super thankful because I always wanted to do comedy. Where we live, there's no like avenues or venues for stand up, so it's like I'd have to move to do stand up. And I'm a huge fan of stand up itself. I like some stand ups and I like doing it, but I don't like having to try to make boomers laugh because Boomer humor is very different from like sam Hide humor. Yeah,
and it's age groups. They laugh at very different things, and so if you're doing stand up, you're going to have to try to mold what you're doing to some random audience of frat bros. Or you know, people that are not necessarily gonna like what you do. So this ended up being just a perfect venue for the weird, kind of eccentric, silly style of comedy that I'm into. And I like to do a lot of impress so that plays well on podcasts, but I think it's very
limiting when it comes to like doing stand up. So writing for Sam ended up being a really good venue for doing that. We had a blast for this first first season. So so yeah, however would have thought of be doing that?
How did you end up meeting the Hodge Twins and ended up on their pod? E've been on there what two? Three times?
This was the second time a couple of days ago.
How did this time go?
So it turns out their producer. There's a lot of getting on podcasts has to do with producers and like schedulers and whether they like you. So it's not even necessarily like the podcast people like. They might not even like you, but if the scheduler person is a fan of your content and turns out the guy who produces their show was a guy who did a conspiracy podcast
many years ago who liked what I talked about. So he ended up down the road producing for the Houde Winds and he was like, oh, I need to get Jay on here, and so reached out to them. And then Andrew Wilson was a huge connect because he he got me on the Crowder Show. He set up me going on whatever podcast to debate that crazy feminist chick, and then I'm about we're about to go back to la right now. To be that trick was we're gonna do round two with a different feminist girl. Uh here
in a couple of weeks and uh so. So basically, yeah, it tends to be if the producer or schedule or likes what you do, they will try to promote you and get you on. But also one thing that's fascinating is a lot of these people have become Orthodox and then they will try to get you know, orthodox content, you know, on a big outlet like Joe Rogan. So you have Rachel Andrew and Joe Rogan and yeah, and so Andrew has been a huge help with that.
And hopefully we'll see you on Rogan.
That would be great. Yeah, I would love to do that.
I have confidence she'll be on.
I feel like, uh, you know, sam Hyde deserves to be on a little earlier because he's had such a no but he's had you know, obviously much bigger impact. So if I do end up going there, definitely, I'll definitely try to to say, hey, you should have Samui.
What what is I mean? We watched sam Hi's videos and in them he comes off as manic is not the right word, but yeah, yeah in like a fun way, right, fun way, maybe a little scary once in a while, but like I mean, Sometimes he's very thoughtful, deep, you know, like that.
When he was the Deil.
Yeah, well that as well, but it's when he did the thing on Kirk. Other times he's just all over the place. What is he like in person when you're just having a conversation with him?
In my experience, like with Sam, most people, I mean lost, Sam's playing a stupid character like Officer Maggot or something like. That's not the real Sam High. But I mean in person, pretty much everybody I met has been the same off camera, So like he's just a kind of super chill, very contemplative, faughtful kind of person. Like when we went up there to do the PGL podcast, when I was on his his perfect guy life I spent we went to dinner with Nick and then the next day, Sam's like, you
ready to go to the gym. I thought he meant to work out, and I'm like, yeah, sure, he meant to box. So I'm in there boxing at like eight in the morning before I fly back to Florida. It's like I'm boxing his trainer, like this eight foot black dude trainer, and I'm like boxing because I'm not a boxer guy. Yeah, So Sam's just like over there, like analyzing, like he's a boxing coach. No, you need to do this, get you get your you know, do this, or you swing like this. So he's just a he's like a
super focused, contemplative but art guy. So he's one of these people that's very left brain and right brain, which is not a lot of people. A lot of people are either one right Like if you're artistic, usually you're not left brain. But Sam's super analytical but also super creative, which is a fascinating mix. I think I have a little bit of that because my mom is super creative. My dad's super analytical, engineering type of guy. So I
think it's a weird combination when you get that. I think Sam is definitely that kind of a person and very versatile, like he can do I don't know if you saw him do that YouTube fight where he went.
And fought that the boxing match, but yeah, he did.
That boxing match and did really good. Yeah four years ago.
Yeah that was he did very well.
Yeah he won, he beat that dude and then but he can also do stand up very well, like he did. He does a great, you know, forty five minute hour set of sand up. We went to see him in Tampa and he was it was hilarious.
And does he smoke a pipe privately or is that just for the show?
Cigars? As soon as I got there, there you want a cigar? Yeah, sure, I don't. Maybe I said no. I can't remember because I don't.
I try to smile.
I try not to, but like you also don't want to say no. You're like being, you know, invited to. If Joe rogan off form me a cigar, I'm sure, but yeah, I know he had cigars. I don't know if there was a pipe, but but no, he's just he's he's pretty much. I think he's more of a serious conversation kind of person than you would expect because people think of Sam as a comedian and sketch guy. But he would be super serious talking about like philosophy or history or impression.
I get that impression because you know, many people who have really high IQs and who are very serious, thoughtful people, they feel very alone and they have a hard time being They have a hard time relating to other people, so they try to like mimic this personality that's sometimes vulgar, sometimes rude, thinking that that's like, you know what, what other people want when in reality it's this person really just enjoys really deep, really serious conversations.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean he's We've had a few conversations about Christianity, Orthodoxy. He's working on he's been working on for many years creating a video game and he wants to incorporate Christian themes and sci fi and so we had several one or two long conversations about like Christian theology in this video game or and it might turn into a board game or I'm nice ser exactly where
he wants to go with it. But but yeah, so I think I think he's definitely like today he's just saying basically, Christ is king, when Ted Cruz says, if you say Christ is king, you're against is Christ is King? Right? So so I think he has this recent in the last two or three years interest definitely in Christianity, and we've had a couple of conversations. But I know that
he got tired. He got so many people asking him at his shows when are you going to become Orthodox that he actually said stop asking me when of Orthodox? So a lot of the Ortho bros Are also you know, a million dollar Streme sam Id fans.
So yeah, well, I mean several people in my parish big fans of Sam Hyde. What about I mean, you debated Nick Fantis back on the day before Nick was big. I mean have you had any contact with him since then?
We've had a little bit of drama, uh in the last year, only because what happened was somebody said, would you debate Nick quent this again? I remember, and I said, yeah, sure I would. I said, yeah, I would. And then people don't realize that I have multiple people that run clips channels that I don't run. I run a couple of clip channels that people have given me that they don't want anymore. Like Kyle used to do my clip channels that he started, Oh, and he just gave it
to me. You want dire clod, yes, sure, and then I have my clip channel called dire live Streams or whatever absurdities. But all those other clips channels, I don't even know who runs those. Oh they just clipped myself. And I told people because I got the idea from seeing other people doing this model, where if you just tell other people to run free with it, like it's
a better mark approach. I'm not even a big marketing dude, but like, it just seemed more common sense to me that if I just let people clip the crop out of it, then that's less work that I have to do clipping because I hate doing clipping.
So it also leads back to your.
Make eventually leads back. So I just told everybody in the last year clip like crazy to go do whatever you want. And it's several of those clip channels have grown pretty good. And two of the clip channels reposted the Nick debate after I said I would debate him again, and that got back to Nick, who took offense to that because he thought I was trying to ankle bite and get attention, and he said, oh, Diere's a coward and I'm not ever going to debate him on theology
again or whatever. I forget what all he said, but it was basically somewhat of misunderstanding because I said I would debate him again. I didn't say I'm going to debate him again, so he took it like I was talking smack when I was just saying I would ye.
But also, like the only area that I've consistently been critical because I don't go into people's personal lives online typically unless there's some big voice of a voice of reason schedule, like, yeah, I don't usually talk about that kind of stuff unless we're making a joke, So I don't know or follow Nick's personal drama or anything like that. I just consistently have said I disagree with the papacy, the same position ten years ago when we had that
debate where I disagree with the papacy. So when we talked about that happening, I said, I would just debate you on the papers because it's word the area I disagree and Nick said, I don't debate theology. It's I'm a politics guy. So really there was It was a
lot of kind of smoke over nothing, basically. So I reached out to Ryan Rivera, who's friends with Nick, because right in the midst of all that, Sam had Nick on so they did a podcast and I said, hey, Ryan, would you reach out to Nick and say, Look, I wasn't trying to ankle bite or grab, you know, because I don't think your followers are going to like the fact that I would debate you on the papacy anyway, So like, I'm not I wouldn't really benefit from that
anyway unless we debated something political because most of Nick's audience is into politics anyway, so they're not really going to care about my critique of the Vatican. So anyway, I think it's a lot of smoke over nothing. Really.
What are some areas where just short summary of areas where you and Nick would differ on political geopolitical issues in a big way, or it would be more so matters of say nuance, What are you would differ.
I mean I see clips of Nicks. I don't see this the full show on a day to day basis, and most of the clips that I hear is just typically the same this same stuff I talk about, and I think a lot of the audience that does like both of our stuff. They almost always say, you guys are pretty much on the same page.
Yeah, I watched I've been watching a series with troll Webin. It's very good. It's very good. I mean, when he lays out what he wants, it's like, yeah, this is this is what I want too. I haven't listened to much of his stuff, just one on one, you know, and it's un rumbled hardly anything. I do listen to your stuff. I like your stuff. What about Steven Crowder, You've worked with Crowder before. How did how did you come across?
I actually Andrew just set up a debate, or not a debate, a discussion with Crowder's co host Gerald. So Gerald is, I guess, the CEO or the co host of Crowder's operation. So Gerald does a show called something Apologetics, So he just basically has like he had Tim Gordon on to talk Catholicism and Evangelicalism, and before that he had had Andrew on to talk about feminism, and then he had me on to talk about Orthodoxy and Christian Zionism.
So we had a we had a pretty extensive hour long conversation about like what's wrong with John Hagey and Ted Cruz and how is that not orthodox? And you know, what's the orthodox view of Israel and Zionism and all that. So that just came about because Andrew suggested me, and then I interacted with Gerald on Twitter. So we're supposed to do another one of these, a part two, because we had a really pretty pretty expansive It wasn't a heated disagreement. It was like we actually talked about topics
that I didn't expect we would talk about. Well, I mean, I don't I mean, we got deeper into Christian Zionism than I expected to get into so and that you know, he was pretty receptive. I think of all the criticisms that we would have as Orthodox so and I know I've not met Crowder. I think Andrew has but Crowder had an interest in Orthodoxy. But I'm supposed to go back on there and have a discussion again with Gerald
round two. I don't know what he wants to talk about, but they have expressed some degree of interest in Orthodox ideas.
So wonderful. Why do you think it is so many guys gen Z guys really like your stuff.
I I think the Internet has made it easy for intelligent people to quickly assess issues that Gen X and Boomers took a decade to assess. So, for example, Christian Zionism, Boomers and Gen X, many of them are still stuck in just some sort of default. Well, of course, we got sport Israel America Israel in the Bible, Yeah exactly.
BB and Yahoo was prophesied by John Hagen exactly.
And what was that we were playing?
This made Muslims. If one of them is good, that that makes the other one. Yeah, if one's bad. The other. One's good, right.
The run is only two weeks away from a nucletar bum.
Yeah, for the record, my neighbor bad, it was only two weeks from a nuclear bomb. So yeah, down the street, Bob is only two weeks from a nuclear bomb. Speaking of which, I'm only two weeks from another podcast.
Who's next?
I don't know. I can't say. I can't say. Yeah, I'll go before, I'll go before Congress, and I'll make sure they'll all wear suits. My showman, they'll all stand up. Danny is only two weeks from another podcast.
By region, is only two weeks away from a nuclear bomb.
No one wants to be associated with that guy right now, not after.
What he's a nuclear bomb now.
Being around that guy is like having cat poop smeared on you. It's not It's not something you want to associate with anyway. Sorry, So where do you? I mean? Yeah? Why is it that they really get into you?
I think that we were. I'm at a weird age group where I'm at the cosp of gen X and millennial, so I can kind of bridge that gap, and usually gen Z are going to be kind of looking at people that are a little bit older. Millennial that have been kind of doing Internet stuff. That's what they're going
to see. And I think we ended up hitting on key problems in society that they can assess a lot quicker than boomers or gen X can, such as the problems of like evangelical Zionism, or basic questions about you know, well, Protestantism has all of these huge systemic level flaws. The Vatican has huge systemic level flaws for people that are entrenched in boomer gen X mindsets that are not open to questioning. You're always when you're younger, you're a lot
more open to questioning than when you get older. So I think those guys are seeing a lot of good questions being raised. Even if I don't have all the right answers or whatever, I think we do a good job highlighting key issues that are problems, and they have enough discernment and can at least usually discern information decent enough to say, Okay, look, the Catholics are not addressing these huge issues. Protestants are not addressing these huge issues.
And now we've at reached the stage where and I think you could vibe with this, like a lot of the Protestants and Catholics are kind of moving away from debating. Trent Horne has said I'm not going to debate anymore because Andrew and Jay have made it toxic. Yeah, that's what he said. Recently, he says I'm done debating is toxic now, I mean he may still do a debate. But that was something like that in the video, because I'm sure now that I've said that, the Darter's line
about Trent's video it was something like that. And then in the Protestant world it was like Cleave and Galvin Ortland were like the last couple of dudes at debate and then then basically they've quit Cleaves or the Dox. So Galvin's not really going to do any more debates.
He's come to the to the divine light side.
West Hoff debated one dumb grifter Billy Corson, and now he won't debate anybody because multiple I mean, I've asked Wes multiple times for Ruslam, even reached out to west Up to debate me, and now he won't do anyone'll do it. So I think they basically the whole in the religious sphere, like those guys that basically quit, nobody really wants to have serious debate with Worthox people, because you performed very well, I think in the debates that
you did with the Catholics. I think I've done well with Protestants and Muslims, and even even the Muslims have kind of like.
The coverage of the Islamic dilemma was phenomenal.
Thank you, phenomenal, And even the Muslims have kind of like died down. They're not as aggressive online as they were. So I think a lot of people are seeing, like you know, when it comes to the actual intellectual issues, who did the best. Really, there's just a couple of atheists did an atheists debate a couple of days ago. That was the first time I've done atheist debate in probably three or four years.
So people, I mean, like I hear this all the time. Like one cleric I was talking to a clergyman, Orthox clergyman. He was, you know, he's a boomer and he's a very nice man. I love him very much, And he said, I don't like debates at all. I think they're a waste of time. And you know, I'm thinking, like there's three people at my parish now simply because of that debate with Voice of Reason. There's three people at my perish because of that.
Debates. I think this is a lost art form one because you know, this is part of classical pedagogy. You learned to do debate and writing rhetoric as well. That's all part of the classical education scheme. So it's odd to me that anybody who's educated, in no offense to your to your priests, that they would think that that's somehow bad or something. I think it's typically kind of a maybe an American evangelical mindset to think that that stuff is mean and it's it's too intellectual or whatever.
It's also a boomer thing.
It's a boomer thing.
They grew up in a world that was extremely homogenous, and so the idea of confrontation is very like, we're civilized people, we don't do this. We can agree to disagree, meeting in the middle, put in a cyber what I want, what you want to meet. You know, that's a strength.
Whereas for gen Z and for millennials, especially for gen Z, though they've seen like, look, there's no meeting in the middle with the barbarian hordes that are flooding across the board right there's no there's no meeting in the middle of these these he b barbarians. It's not going to happen.
Totally different type of people. Yeah, and many of those people don't share the same appreciation for debate and intellectually they'd rather just punch you or you know, you know you're talking about to say, ad iq Arab Muslim populations. They're not going to debate you. They don't care about the virtues of the you know, federalist papers or we're going to get the you know, these feble to read the federalist papers and understand the Constitution.
You're not hash tuns to be you know. Yeah, the I mean, and that's the other things you hear people say, like well in the debates, it's so rude, and you go, hey, what about the church fathers. I mean, you have vitriolic language, I mean vitriolic language. Oh yeah, especially you know St. Cyril repeatedly calling mysterious names. You know, I mean, if you read Saint Cyril's somewhere around here, Saint Cyril's Glefira, it's commentary on the Torah. Uh. The editor has to
give a disclaimer on the anti Jewish, anti Judaism. I should say anti Judaism, not anti Jewish, because we were. We don't hate Jews, right, it's not that we love them. We want to save them. We want them, We want them to be regrafted onto the body of Christ and to the chosen people. The Church Church is a chosen but we want to regrapt them. On right, the religion has become a cult. We we love Jews, that's why
we want to save them. We don't have to save them from burning in hell for all eternity, because that's that's where it's going. I mean, without Christ, there's there's no salvation. That's what it is. And I hear this, you know, well, actually if I just we can't judge it. No, we can't. We can't. Christ is very very clear on this. I'm the Alpha of the Omega. There's one way.
At can't reject Christ. Which is why it was so kind of shocking to me when we were having that last phase of the attempt at the Catholic Apologist to defend this idea that the God of Christianity is identical to the God of Islam, because Vatican too says that, and it's like, well, John saysn't one John two that if you reject the son, you reject the father, you
can't have the son without the father, et cetera. So this idea that, you know, oh, will appeal to more people if we just you know, pretend that the Abrahamic faith is this common generic monotheism. It's not. So yeah, that's that's that's the you know, hard truth of John fourteen. Right, I'm the way that d'red in life. Nobody comes to father without me.
So yeah, it's very straightforward. Yeah, but it's and it's you know, we're told constantly, well you're mean this. That's like, look, you leave these patristic works. They're really quite abrasive, and you go, well, that was a culture back then. Okay, that's now the culture. What are you going to do? Well, it was a culture then, it was, okay, but now it's not. But well no it is now it is
now again. If you base your arguments and relativism and how the culture is, you've completely lost, right that objection.
Well, Americanism is also premised on pluralism, and so people just assume, especially a lot of boomers, the presupposition is that pluralism is a virtue, is it. I mean, maybe it's not right. So you know, if we're committed and believe our positions, then you can't. And by the way, like you're pointed out earlier, these other cultures, they're not pluralistic,
especially like Islam. Islam doesn't care about your tall rents and you're they're not going to return the favor of your you know, they they.
Think that you seeding points and trying to meddle. Yeah, they don't. Yeah, they don't view it as a strength to be reciprocated. They viewed as a weakness to be exploited exactly.
So that's a kind of a naivety. I think that a lot of the boomer mindset is susceptible too, But yeah, I think that also the gen z is in millennials as well, Like a lot of people are just realizing that Protestantism and modern you know, gay Catholicism, it's just who wants that? So what's left? I mean, there's not a whole lot of other options. And there is, you know, a growing Orthodox Church, which you know, when you go there, you at least don't see hip hop mass. You don't
see a clown mass. You don't see you know, some crazy Protestant past or I don't know, pouring angemima syrup on the Bible like some of the megachurch. Yeah, there was a megachurch pastor that was like, I think it was an analogy to like eating the Word, and he was.
Like, I don't pour some hot some hot syrup on his bible.
Ryo. Yeah, it went viral, it was.
It was.
But I'm saying, like, that's just clown church, you know what I mean? Exactly who wants to go to clown church?
Right?
I think people see, well, at least Orthodox church visibly is esthetically pleasing, it's ordered, it's rational, it's sensible, and so I think just those kinds of basic things resonate with people who are looking for some idea of what a historic traditional religion would look like.
I'm the one of the well actually that I know, the only person I know who's not surprised at the amount of conversions going on. And the reason is I could just tell with society going down the toilet and culture going down the toilet, people would come flooding in conversion because they want something stable, and like you said, okay, so getting back to that, point about when you go into an Orthox church, it looks ancient, it smells ancient,
it sounds ancient, it feels ancient. Ancient is stable. It's endured, right, It's endured through the ages. But when you go into say, you know, your standard Roman Catholic church, you know, it's sort of stripped down, it looks like a Lutheran church. You know, the Latin Mass movement is effectively dead. I predicted years ago when I was on your show that within our lifetimes the Latin Mass would effectively be like the most Arabic, right, you know, handful parish. Yeah, it's
it's a tourist attraction. Now you're going to see more Latin Mass parishes surviving outside of papal control than inside of it. They really just want to get rid of it. And so you're left with what was what's effectively just you know, a you know, friendly community of boomers as opposed to something that really nourishes you. And that's not to say there aren't good people there. I remember, good people are Romans, Catholics, very good, you know, but it is it is not what it was. And you notice
that whenever these Catholic YouTubers try to advertise Catholicism. It's always Byzantine icons. It's images of this traditional Latin Mass. When I lived in Seattle, it was one hundred and ninety two parishes in the Archdiocese of Seattle. One of them was a Latin Mass. And they talk about how people drove from so far.
I drove two hours throughout my twenties to go to Latin Mass.
Yeah, and they drive so far, but so okay, and this is still all you can get. I mean, people are just they're not really into it. It's it's the audience is not there for it, you know. I mean the audience for the Latin Mass is not there in Catholicism, just like the audience for Western right Orthodox he is not really present in the Orthodox Church. That's not to slam the Western right stuff, but it's just it's a reality.
How would you say that you've grown or changed as a person since entering the church?
Good question.
I mean, how many years has it been?
Now?
Seven?
If you count catechumen, it in eight or nine. OK. But I think you know, Father Turbo Calls said it best when he said, when you're before your Orthodox you kind of think all these things out there, I'm going to fix all these problems out there you need to change. And then when you become orthodox and after a few years, start to realize all the problems that vices that you
haven't fixed. Right. So I think that was the biggest revelation over the last several years, was rather than worrying so much about everybody else's problems in the politics and the geopolitics and all that stuff and fixing the world, it really changes the focus about beating the passions. So I would say that hopefully, by God's grace, I made some progress in terms of beating some passions. I don't think that I had as much patience nowadays as I
did six seven years ago. So this year, for example, especially, I wanted to focus on, you know, due to my spiritual father's guidance and whatnot, just trying to be dispassionate about what people are doing in debates, because I had a tendency to just immediately react to whatever person in debates doing to me. If they're getting vicious, I get vicious, right, And so last two big debates we've had, I focused on just being dispassionate and letting them kind of go crazy.
I don't have to be as crazy back, and you can still be effective, you know, without being super equally aggressive. So I just let the past two atheists go coat wild and I just kind of sit there and chill out, hopefully, and not just with that debate public setting, but also with my wife and other settings like being patient. Wives are great for learning patients like you have to you know, figure out how to nap gate that whole world. As
you said, women have a civilizing effect on dudes. So hopefully my wife has also contributed to some spiritual growth. I mean, obviously have other passions that I've not still get impatients still get you know, have lustful thoughts, still have temptation to other vices. But I think from a practical perspective, like learning to be patient with people has been the first big lesson and overcoming a lot of anger,
I know, like like one thing that will happen. And maybe other people have discussed this new Orthodox world and when you become Orthodox, you you especially during land like you get tempted with certain types of things that are intent on ruining you. And I know that like a couple easters back, we had some really bad things happen and even my priest got really kind of in my face rebuking me, and he needed to. It was a good rebuke, but when the rebukes are happening, it's not pleasant.
It's very unpleasant when you're getting reviewed. But looking back on that, I'm like, I'm actually glad that that happened. So the point being there is just that, like when you're in the Orthodox world for a while, you will begin to it's almost like there's a it's like a doctor assessing the main problems that you have, and your first inclination is to say I don't have those problems, but then over time you realize, oh, actually I do.
So that has been I think the biggest revelation, hopefully for the first you know, eight years of Orthodoxy is that kind of stuff. And then we had a good discussion with Father Turbo the other day, and I think a lot of people say he's spiritually gifted with being able to kind of immediately assess what your problem is. But he doesn't tell you your problem in an overt way. He kind of just talks to you and lets you
realize what your problems are. So he's very he's very skilled and gifted at that and we did a good podcast something that highlighted this issue. And so I'm just giving a shout out to Father Turbo. But yeah, I hopefully I think that. But the other thing I learned too is like you're gonna be battling the passions your whole life. Yeah, and so you can't get like super down because you don't defeat all the passions within a
couple of years. I think a lot of people have a mindset of, oh, I mean I'm orthodox now, like you know, it's over, it's cool. I one, Well, no, now you have to fight the passions and then you're gonna You're not gonna beat those overnight. So that's another thing you have to grapple with, you know what I mean. I mean, we're always going to be battling these things. It's not like oh yeah, I mean, for example, I don't have it. I'm not I'm not tempted to steal stuff.
That's not a vice for me. But other things are a temptation. So are those temptations going to go away? Probably not as long as I'm alive.
Right, It's like St. Anthony the Great says, expect temptation till the last bru exactly.
Yeah.
I mean when you enter the church, you're really entering the gym. So to say that you're entering the training center, you're being trained to be a fighter. And you know those periods are fasting, those are your sparring sessions. Those periods of non fasting, you're building up muscle, you're learning the moves. You go into Lent. That is your that's your tournament, that's your you know, that's your live tournament. You know your Wednesdays, your Friday is your sparing sessions.
And yeah, you're gonna get beaten up during Lent. So to say you're going to be you know, despondent, depressed. We had a priest years ago who told me, years and years and years ago, Father Thomas Davis of Blessed Memory, and he said that you can tell that it's Lent simply from the confessions, because the rates of despondency and depression go up because demons don't like it when you're fasting.
The hate it, right, it's it's I mean, you can tell that there's a devil that they're saying that there's demons simply from what happens when you start to draw close to God, they'll do anything to pull you back. They're losing someone. They hate that, and you see it, you know. I mean I was actually went with someone to accompany them for an exorcism at Saint Anthony's monastery years appro two decades ago. And the priest starts to
read the prayers over this person. And if you think you know who this person is, please don't say their name. But I remember that the.
Priest sneaking and I saw him.
The priest. It was a female. Actually, the priest was sitting here and I was sitting here, and the woman was sitting here, and the priest goes, okay, kneel down, and so she kneels, and I'm sitting here, okay, and the priest is here, and he lifted up his his stole right, which is what the you know, the priest stole there, and he lifted and moved it towards her head. And you know how like when you when a cat is sitting there and you reach your hand out and
the cat kind of does that. That stole got close to her face and she went like that, and I put my hand behind her back, pushed her forward. He set the stole on her head and it slammed her into the ground and the pleading started in different voices. No Rue, She's squirming around, moving, and the priest has this book open. He's saying like this. He has this
book of prayers of exorcism. It's in Greek, and I'm like sitting there, I'm kind of looking over it, and I'm like, you know, like she's trying to move, and I'm like, God, what's she going to do? And she's laying on the floor like writhing. And I noticed as he's going through this book and the words are very large. Every time he said the name Jesus or Jesus Christ, her body would drool like it was being electrocuted. And finally, what felt like ten minutes. I have no clue how long.
It was probably about ten minutes, simply because the prayers for excorsism are fairly long. But she goes totally silent, and the priest looks up at me and he goes breathe. She doesn't move. He pulls out some relics moves them above her head. What she had done before during the exorcism with her eyes closed, He'd bring the relics of Saint George above her. That was another point where her body would like jolt all of a sudden is being
electrocuted in I'll never forget that pleading sound. You know, they're losing someone. The demons are. They don't like that. They don't like it at all. They're punished horribly when they lose someone. Right, But it's you know, we have to remember that our actions are leading people to Jesus or pushing them away from Jesus. You know, even being too nice, you know, being a dish rag iss just as much pushing people away, telling people they don't need
to convert. Yeah, yeah, oh, you're just fine where you are. No, you aren't. You're outside the training gym.
Yeah. I think one of the elders said something like, sometimes tolerance and being nice is just a cloak for cowardice.
Oh most of the time, yeah, most of the time. You know. It's why libertarianism is the movement of losers. It's just people that they just think it's like noble to be like resigned to failure. It's a sort of noble trail. I don't care about anything. They're far more enlightened. It's like you don't care about anything, therefore you're a loser.
Well, you know, it's funny because also I think something that changed in me. And I'm not anti intellectual or anti book knowledge, but I do think that, especially in my twenties and thirties, like that was kind of an idol. And I care a lot less about the book academic stuff as I did in my twenties and thirties. So that's something else that's that's changed. And to me, it's interesting because it's a lot more freeing. I mean, I'm still very interested in intellectual pursuits. I do intend to,
you know, enjoyable. Yeah, it's fun, but it's not the main thing as it was for me my twenties and thirties. So that's another I think freeing aspect of orthodoxy to where you know, in the Roman Catholic or even the Protestant world, it's all really just ideas, and it's all about the system. It's all about you know, who's got the more coherent, you know, set of systemic you know, theological presentation.
The magisterium obsession.
And I don't care about that anymore more.
About transformation exactly perfect, and we're we're about transforming the human and that's the real miracle that you see as a human transform.
Yeah, and just having much of ideas doesn't transform you. It just changes your ideas. Yeah, just changing out Calvinism, Urtonism.
So ideas that don't turn into cha ines in life are just simply they're they're waste of time. And that's why, Like, and I'm sure you get unbelievable amounts of requests for reading material and whatnot, and you probably have lots of people going, well, how do I understand essence energies?
And it's like there's more basic stuff than that.
Like are you praying in the morning.
Well, you mentioned earlier you wanted to actually recommend because and for people that are watching this, when you guys, you know you guys, email me DM me all the time. Ubi's been Orthodox lot longer than I have, so he would be a great person to recommend some places to start.
These are great books if you want to read Patristic literature. Saint Vladimir's Seminary Press, Produce Disease. You have Saint Cyril on the Unity of Christ, Saint germaineus have Constantinople.
Yeah, when I was Roman Catholic, actually, oh.
It's great, it's in it's in facing English, and Greek, so it's actually about half the length. I mean, look at how little that is. It's actually half the length. Saint John Crasso also marriage and family life. Saint John Crassos some six books on the priesthood Isaac of Ninevah, hon Astatical Life, amazing work. Right. We have ONU Mystical Life.
That's really good, really wonderful volume one. There's a few more volumes if you want really great homilies on the on the Bible, short homilies, you know Saint Peter chrysal Logos who writes, you know, homies are five minutes long. You can get them online. They're amazing. He talks about Old Testament typology and the New Testament. You learn theology, and that's really what people need to be doing, is
reading church fathers, you know, not doom scrolling. And they go, well, I don't know where to start, and it's like there you go, here you go. And then as far as really great material for catechism, there's this great book, The Divine Services of the Orthodox Church. It's written by three scholars who are clergy. It's meant to be used sort of like a missile, so you can take it with you to church, and it gives explanations of the services,
so you're not totally lost. I mean beautiful, beautiful illustrations in this book, beautiful iconography. You will you will know all of the things that most people don't know as you go through each service, regardless of what it is. So I know that you guys have really short attention spans. We all do because you know social media. But this is a great book simply because you don't have to read it all the way through you're in the service.
I had a guy who messaged me a couple of days ago on Twitter and he said, Hey, I just walked into Orthodox Church for the first time. I was totally lost. What do I do? Well, there you go.
There you got great book. You can find on Amazon dot com. The link is in the video description also for your books video description.
So you go to my website Jasonelsis dot com. I have a shop there you can get They're all signed copies. So the advantage of getting it from me is that we do, you know, sign them. That's because Jeff Bezos offers it and I don't make anything from whatever Bezos cells on Amazon. So if you get it from me, they're all signed, and I do have also a philosophy book as well. You can get the website. So there's three Hollywood books and then one philosophy book.
What is your philosophy book on? We haven't touched on that yet.
So a lot of the grad papers I wrote I thought were pretty good, kind of introductory issues relating to like the philosophy of uh, the logi, the logos, kind of analyzing that stuff from a philosophical perspective. There's an essay, a couple of essays on Plato symbolism in Homer. Yeah, we did a big analysis. I did a big grad paper on Achilles' shield and all the symbolism in the shield. There's a there's an essay on Live Netz. There's an
essay on critiquing Aquinas in there. It's just a lot, it's kind of a variety of things, but it's really written for people with kind of a mid level knowledge of philosophy if they want to to just read some of my essays and my ideas on some of some random topics. But there's also an essay on Machiavelli. He wrote a book called book Art of War, not sun Zoo's Art of War. But Machiavelli's Art of War. There's a lot of really fascinating like nuggets and tidbits in that.
So it's kind of all over the place. And then there's another book. It's not really a book, but it's just somebody online collected together all of my blog posts and put it into a big, giant red book.
It was very flattering.
I didn't know they were going to do it. They did it, which I don't mind now, but originally when they did it kind of made me mad because I had no idea who it was they were selling it. Oh, so I tried to I kept trying to take it down from Lulu. They were publishing and selling it without my permission, and I kept trying to take it down. I was like, they just kept going back up. So like, well, I guess I'll just sell it. It's my stuff and
they did put it together for me. But anyway people can get that that they want, but it's it's just old blog posts and there's a lot of philosophy, a lot of geopolitical stuff in there, some apologetic stuff critiquing the papacies in that book. But yeah, so, but the Hollywood books, they're not even if you don't like movies. The reason that the books are good is that I thought ten years ago a way to kind of wake people up to a lot of the real conspiracy stuff.
Not crazy UFOs crap like that, but real stuff like who's controlling our government? Like why is their propaganda in movies? Right? That's kind of what I was going for, And I know that most people are not going to read a boring geopolitical book, so I thought, why not tie that into film and movies and that kind of stuff. So this one deals with Marvel. I'm not a Marvel fan, not into comic book stuff, but I had so many people saying, hey, how come you didn't deal with you know,
Marvel movies in the first two volumes. That's like the biggest blockbuster stuff the last thirty years twenty years. Okay, fine, I'll do that. For the first fifty sixty pages, we Marvel stuff. I get into some of the occult satanic
stuff in Hollywood. In volume three we get into some b movies that are kind of weird, and then we get into a lot of like weird early historical stuff with some of the first movies that were actually ever made, were actually based on Alistair Crowley, the Satanist, so The Mysteries of Myra, which was a weird serial in the nineteen tens or twenties, again one of the first movies ever made, which back then it was just kind of silent serials based on the most famous Satanist of the
twentieth century. So Hollywood's kind of born out of the Satanic ironically.
Oh, I was blown away when I listened to Rachel Wilson's show on Joe Rogan when she went on, I had no idea about the history of feminist It's not an area that that I'm interested in, and I thought, oh my gosh, you know. And then my brother listened to it as well, and he bought two copies of the book. He's like, you know, and really fascinating. I mean, wow, I mean, I'm I'm really like a history and language is kind of guy. I'm you know, it's like the doubt.
I mean, I like, my language is like like my stake, you know, dad, you know, but uh it hearing that connection between between like you know, Alisair Cowley and Satanism and all these horrifying early in early Hollywood, the CIA is in there. You have you know, the tribe whoa Okayan. We really are controlled by a couple that There's no doubt about it. The things that you were saying ten years ago are beyond undeniable now.
Yeah. And and credit to my publisher because he also published a couple of years ago, Whitney Webb's book One Nation Under Blackmail, which the second volume deals with Epstein, and she put that out four or five years ago, so it came out maybe twenty. But what's interesting about that is that all of the Epstein stuff in her book particularly, I mean, she's very very well sourced, but she went into a lot of connections with the roth child that kind of stuff that's all been born out
come out. And my first chapter in Estar Collywood one dealt with the roth Childs in Hollywood. So the first book also touched on that theme ten years ago. And I feel vindicated as well. So, you know, again, shout out to the publisher because not not a lot of publishers are willing to put this kind of stuff out.
Oh yeah, I mean shout out.
To Chris for doing that. He's he's always been a good a good publisher, So I appreciate that. And yeah, so like you said with feminism, I mean you, Rachel was spot on with that and and the history of it, going back into like Witchcraft, and you know, you have these weird, hideous women in the Middle Ages that were outcasts, and they kind of become the seed for where feminism would go. There's a direct direct connect between Witchcraft and feminism.
But also Hollywood has been a massive evangelist for feminism, and I didn't cover that in the first two books, and so I spent about sixty pages or so in this book about just how self conscious I think Hollywood is in pushing the feminist gnostic archetype to reverse and invert the roles of men and women to where no, now it's the women that are the heroes. They're the saviors. And to be a hero woman you must also emasculate
the man. Yeah, that's part of the whole ethos. So anyway, yeah, I deal with that in there, and then the last couple chapters deal with how Hollywood misappropriates the Antichrist, because ultimately Hollywood itself is Antichrist, but they have a lot of films that are presented in Antichrist in very bizarre anti Christian ways. So it's kind of a it's like they're taking Antichrist but making Antichrist something that it's not, to almost sell anti cas Christ.
Do that makes sense, repackaging the evil putting, putting that well, not just putting lipstick on a pig.
But inverting it. So basically, I mean, what Hollywood thinks is anti Christ is Christ, and what Hollywood thinks is Christ is anti Christ.
That's obviously the oppress of white, straight, white male trope.
And then there's also a couple of chapters on intelligence agencies. I mean, most of Part one and Part two were about that in Hollywood, but here I actually highlighted quite a few A List actors that people may or may not know were actually spies, quite a few, which is people most people don't know that, So there's a chapter on that. And even the last few years, the US National Archives have actually declassified several documents relating to some
of the A listers who were spies. Sterling Hayden, for example, was an OSS operative. Jimmy Stewart was an informant for the FBI. Cary Grant worked for the OSS. John Forward was a director working with the OSS. A lot of the OSS people but then since especially during the Cold War, he had a lot of a listers that were recruited into being spies for the CIA.
Wasn't Julia Childs the yessues in.
The OSS, Yeah exactly. Yeah, a lot of British intelligence people for sure. But and then of course Massad too, and I do touch on some of that.
I mean, do you think like with CIA Massad I six like it's all just one mega.
I think the I mean, the five eyes nations all coordinate, absolutely sure.
Where do you see the situation in the golf going right now? Now keep in mind this is being recorded on Saturday, March twelfth, today thirteenth, March fourteenth. Okay, this is being recorded on Saturday March fourteenth. Where do you see the situation going in the golf? Because right now, pretty much everyone I talked to it's just like, we don't know, this could go anywhere. This is cool down, heat up in a bit, this could it's it's you.
Know, well, I think Donald thought that because he had advisers telling him that, you know what, two weeks, yeah, wait, two weeks to flatten the Iran only don't worry, it's going to be four probably four or five days. I don't know, probably the best war ever. I don't think it's going to be two weeks to flatten the Iran. I think it's going to be a protracted situation. It's going to take a lot longer than Syria took fifteen
years to top le Saud. I would imagine, giving the fact that it ran so much more powerful, military capable nation over Syria, that's going to take longer. I think a lot of people have been surprised that they were able to achieve what they did with the failure of the Iron Dome exactly. I don't know if you saw the news today. I don't know if this is confirmed,
because it was just on Twitter today. People not seeing that in Yahoo, so their speculation that he might for several days, so he might have also not made it. I don't. I don't know. So I suspect that it will be a protracted conflict. Of course, there's always the concern that this could bring China and Iran in as well.
I mean, I should be trying to rush it on the side of run as a larger conflict as well, So that could I mean, it could be World War four if you count the Cold War as world War three. So I don't know where it's going to go, but I did not believe that it would be a few days or even two weeks or whatever Trump has said. So massive mistake in my opinion on the part of the Trump administration. I think Warpsee was a huge mistake.
I think this is a huge mistake. Trump suppressing Epstein falls was a huge mistake.
He's been a huge disappointment of the last six months. Six months un your a believable disappointment.
I totally agree. But you know you you would know a lot more about the malice than I would. I just I just know about it from books, So from a book perspective, I would just say that to me, this is a repeat of the older Likud clean break strategy, the Odon plan. This is what Nat Yahoo and Lakuda wanted for a long time for the region, the great Azual project.
Can you explain for the lessers with the greater, the Greater Israel project than the clean break.
Are so in the I think early eighties, Ariel Sharon's advisor was a guy named Odd Yonnon, and it became known as the Odyonon Plan, which is kind of basically the same thing as the Greater Israel project, which was Israel wanted to move beyond being a limited power in the region to having dominant power in the region, and that meant that they would take you know, significant pieces and portions of land beyond what they had at that time.
Fast forward to the nineteen nineties, for the exact year ninety eight or something like that, Net and Yahoo and the Likud at that time put out of people called the Clean Break strategy, where they wanted to break free from old older Israeli labor political leftist ideas of having you know, Camp David Accord, deal with the PLO, that kind of stuff. They wanted to again move in the direction of right wing Israeli dominant in the region. They wanted to have a more of a capitalist model versus
the labor model that they had. That's all in the Clean Bake strategy. But they met. They list, which is interesting, several nations that they I don't remember, it's seven or eight something like that, but it's like, it's a Raq, it's a Ran, it's Syria, Egypt, I think Lebanon probably, yeah, anything near the basically all or whatever basically surrounds I don't remember it could be.
It's been a long time since I read the paper.
I read it recently because I had a debate, a pseudo debate with David Wood and a postive prophet, Ridmon. Oh yeah, yeah, So I read that was about a year ago when we had that halfway debate on the
David Woods channel. So I don't remember if top we had it every specific nation, but I do remember that one of them lists, they're basically the same list, but they update what the strategy is from nineteen eighty two to ninety eight, and it's roughly kind of the same as what General was the Clark famously talked about with the Seven Nations playing to the Pentagon had that he saw after nine to eleven that we're gonna go into
these countries. So in other words, nine eleven becomes a very useful tool in this toolkit of why we need to do what Israel wants in that region. So I would imagine probably Afghanistan is in there because it does factor into the Pentagon strategy during that time period after
nine eleven for sure. So anyway, that is basically just that Israel needs a much larger and it also includes micronations or breaking up all these other countries into micro states, and that could include and has included, according to Victor of Strawsky, the former MASSAD guy actually arming people like ISIS and al Qaeda or Jolani in Syria. Right, So that's why you would see Israel supporting something like that.
The main backer of Kurdish nationalisms or one of the main backers.
The former head of MASSADE was in an interview a couple of years ago on her last year on Al Jazeira, and the guy says, would you aid and give military assistance and hospital assistants to Isis and al Qaeda? He says absolutely, And he says, would you do that for Hesbla? Of course not. It's like, well, wait a minute, So Isis and al Kaeda are allies of Israel, according to the former head of Massode, has belabbing Shia Ran obviously being in So that's kind of telling you right there, right.
And then of course there have been many omissions that you know, Israel helped create an ormmas as a destabilizing factor against the PLO.
So they took sche you've seen just some unknown guy. And then Gaza used to be known for its night life. Yeah, exactly, so I used to, I mean like before Hamas.
For Hamas, right, and so in other words, people I don't think they think about it like they might actually want destabilization these places. People think these rules debocrasy, they won't freedom, and they want America over there. You know, they want different things at different place. In fact, one of the I think it's clean break oddly enough, said that they wanted a Coptic Christian Egypt. I thought that was really.
Weird until it becomes stable, in which case, I.
Mean then they would want it. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean that's what people don't give it for. The israelis a stable nation anywhere as a threat everywhere exactly, Yeah, a stable for the israelis a stable nation anywhere in the world is a threat everywhere to Israel.
And when there's unstable Islamic rivals or terrorists, that's also an excuse for we must have all of the support from America because we're surrounded by our enemies. Well, you want decabilization, so that's what an excuse. So anyway, Yeah, so that's the Greater is Or project, and you know that's what we've seen apparently, you know, BB essentially telling Trump what to do.
As I'm watching this whole situation. You know, I'm in my early forty two, and you know, growing up, you're you're effectively taught by the news at Israel is just invincible, and watching these bombs fall in Tel Aviv is surreal. Watching these just streams of missiles landing and they can't stop them either, absolutely hiding the death toll. You get on Israeli Twitter with the auto translate from Hebrews.
And they act like nothing's happening.
No, some of the people I found, I was like, yeah, building next to me, that head.
Oh you mean the people that are like not the news, you know, normal acting like nothing's happened.
Oh, the normal people are going like building next week. I hit, oh, well, you know, twenty one people dead. Yeah, it's like, oh okay, I mean yeah, I mean you're watching these burlage just coming in, you know, videos from like sailors out in the Mediterranean, and it's like, okay, there's no way this is landing and people are being killed.
Well, it's very different from the eighties because my dad the only time he was deployed, he was deployed to the Gulf to sync to Iranian oil platforms. Under Reagan. It's called Operation Mantis, you can look it up. My dad was on the USS Bagley, which is one of the ships kind of in the upper part of that operation, and that at that time Reagan was very intent on beefing up the military and turning it into this kind
of big neocon you know, global force. But I don't know that we're the same after ten years of like trans military, you know what I mean, Like, I don't know if we're the same capable country as we were in the nineteen eighties. Maybe it is. I don't know. I'm not a military expert, but I did do it pretty pretty significant interview a couple of years ago with the Colonel Douglas McGregor, who was Trump's choice for National
Security Director. D and I although the Congress didn't approve him because he was too conservative, he wasn't lib enough. But chromcgregor, I think has been pretty spot on with a lot of the criticisms of these these operations and Trump and pointing out that, you know, we're not the military that we were in the nineteen eighties. It's a lot different, so we may not be as effective in these operations. Like boomers want to believe.
Well, it's also that it's not just that we're less effective and we're doing less well in these operations, is that there's there's very real repercussions for US going in and all of a sudden, okay, was it three or fourth AD sites were wiped out almost right away? Okay, So now we have to pull them from Korea, South Korea in order to do it. So now our ally in South Korea is not protected. Okay, So these golf nations sided with the US. They sided with us because
they said, Okay, you can protect us from Iran. You can keep the straits of hormones open, which is how we get our life blood or oil out of here, and we can make our money. They thought, Okay, the US can keep Israel safe, is what we've always thought. And then on top of it, if we can keep Israel safe, we can keep the region stable. All of a sudden, you're watching as Iran, this country that we were told was give you toppled right away, takes out
the THAD sites. They're bombing Israel with impunity. They're effectively trolling the Israelis by sending in missiles every few hours, so no one can sleep they're making people go crazy. Our allies are now learned. Okay, we can't keep them safe in the Gulf.
We can't.
We can't keep the straits of hormones open. We can't keep we cannot keep Israel safe. If we can't keep Israel safe, can we keep Jordan safe or Egypt? No, which means that now we have to spend more money buying these countries off to keep peace. That's what we effectively did. We buy off Egypt, we buy off tra Okay, then you have China watching. Okay, what are the countries in East Asia that depend on the US? You have South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines to a very real extent,
Australia less or so. But all those can't wom right, and so those countries are watching. And Okay, the US can't keep Israel safe, how's it gonna keep us safe?
So it's a huge blow to American soft power and international you.
Know, sway absolutely. I mean, we're not creating enough of these What are the missiles use for the bad sites? The we're not the missiles for outsite see uh iron domb missiles. What we can produce, like what seven of them a month. Iran can produce sixty seventy missiles in a month. Takes at least two of those those iron dumb missiles to go up and take something out. Okay, now that Iranians are pulling out super sonic missiles, this
can really accelerate quickly. This can get really ugly. Yes, And people look at it, they go, well, you know this Israeli is being killed, real smalls being killed. These are potential Christians. Yeah, these are people being killed without chance to repent. There, these are human beings are being buried under buildings.
I saw. I just saw the headline is shay and get a chance to look at it. But did Trump just okay, ground troops? Is that accurate?
Do you know? I heard something about that. Yeah, I didn't follow.
So now we're gonna have troops. I think it was in like five thousand troops, but I made I didn't confirm that, so I don't know.
And this is really spiraling out of control quickly. And I remember Peter Zion. You know Peter Zion. Yeah, it does a lot of nice stuff with demographics and economics, but I remember years ago He's like, yeah, this Gaza thing, that's it's going nowhere. It's not going to spread.
We also said that they be at zero.
But I remember when he said this Gaza war is going nowhere. And I'm thinking, you do not know the Middle East.
Not many Americans do as you. I'm sure you know you know the area. Yeah, when many Americans do not.
Yeah, when they're saber rattling, that's when you know you're okay. When they're quiet, that's when things happening. Oh. Yeah, the saber rattling is to make up for the fact that they can't do anything about it.
Let me ask you a question, because you you have knowledge of this region. One thing I've never really understood, and I've read some books about Iran and some of these kinds of operations, but I'm so unclear on what do you think. It seems like Israel does engage in a lot of cover actions in Iran to disable the capabilities of Iran to have nuclear technology or whatever. So there's some reality to you know, killing nuclear scientists that
Israel engages in. What do you think, in your opinion is the reality in terms of the capabilities of Iran versus the Israeli propaganda of two weeks away from a nuclear bom.
I think if I had to place my money on it, I bet they already have one.
And and why do you think net and y'all, who wouldn't just say they already of it?
Because if he admits that they have one of the Israeli public, who's going to freak out? Okay, I mean you imagine that, Like, I mean, Jews are pretty skittish people.
Wouldn't they be freaking out already? They're like in terms of what's happening, or maybe they are with the failure of Iron Dome.
And well they are. I mean you go on like average people in Israeli Twitter and you read through the I'm so happy they brought back the auto translate of Hebrew on Twitter, but they yeah, they're freaking out. I mean, there's this is awful. I mean, this is absolutely I mean, this is this is for them, like Turkish people getting DNA results like that earth shattering. Yeah, I mean this
is really scary for them. I think the Iranians have lived under I think they've lived under sanctions, They've lived under the brutality of the Iatolis for so long that they're just like another you know, sure whatever for the Israelis. I mean this is like, I mean, their military is not equipped for the US right.
In fact, their.
Military is equipped for mowing down civilians exactly.
If there was a great interview a year and a half or two years ago with Larry Johnson, the CIA guy who now just come does podcast kind of like John Kiyaku. Oh yeah, he did an interview before right around October seventh, whenever that popped off, and Patrick Hansen did this great interview and they said he's hit. He said, if this goes into a full on conflict and Iran gets involved, he says, you will see that Israel's military is not as capable as people think. So he was
actually he was correct. It looks like so I'm curious, like, what do you think this leads to? Because you know this region war three? You do? Yeah?
Or four? Yeah, I mean it's kind of soft. But it's just he continually spread, Okay, the Iranians have been hunkered down and they're ready to fight. The US does not have the wherewithal because we're fat, dumb and happy. Right, We're fat, dumb and happy because that the hard work of previous generations have made such a luxurious, easy enjoyable life that I mean, we just we don't have the wherewithal the public opinion is not there. I mean, what
does this war approval pulling out? I mean primarily most older generations, among the younger generations is probably you know, you know, single digits. And then even if you are for the war, the amount of money going into a surreal it's I think that the problem is that there's just not enough money to buy these people off, and we're just printing off money. And who's gonna.
The future generations pay this infinite debt.
Well, well they're going to pay the debt figuratively because yeah, the dollar will collapse, so they're going to pay for it in terms of the horrible I mean.
Not horrible, ironic too, because remember remember Trump's campaign with here, you'll get world war three. If you go with Hillary, you'll get world.
War three, not with me under peace candidate.
You know what I mean. I've been working I've been working on with Trump.
So I think it's a very good Trump.
I like that. Yeah, it's just and I actually shared I reshared his old campaign tweets like you'll get world War three with these people.
Yeah, I mean we've basically gotten. I mean, how is he now seventy nine?
I don't know.
Yeah, I mean we've basically I mean, we voted for Donald Trump, we voted, we voted for what the left thought Donald Trump was. That's a Donald Trump I want, okay, and instead we got a seventy nine year old, six foot two Kamala Harris. It is unbelievably disappointing. It's heartbreaking.
Yeah, the first administration was full of neo cons and supposedly, oh well he didn't you know, Trump was not swift enough to understand DC politics and he shouldn't have put John Bolton all these people on his on his staff. And then now we get this time around. Oh it's going to be different. This time it's going to ruin the swamp. And it looked like, for you know, the first year, pretty pretty awesome actions, right, it was like all up on the up and off stuff was great.
That was great, and then just the last six months is just complete derail.
So have you I'm sure, well, I'm sure you have seen that video of the lawyers talking to the Doge kid and he just does not care. I have that's fantastic, And they're like, well, do you have any background in
pant writing. And he's like no. And the thing is is that all these people with like you know, all these like sort of like slightly above IQ people, you know, the one of five of the one tens, the kind of people that really lead the left intellectually, they simply cannot comprehend someone with an IQ of one thirty one forty one fifty genius level, right, so one they can't
compound us. Someone with an IQ one thirty one forty one fifty can handle things relatively with these that someone with a one five, one ten IQ with master's degrees is struggling with. I mean, like you know, IQ is based on pattern recognition. The higher IQ is, the better you aren't recognizing patterns. It's one of the one of the hallmarks of high IQ. It does not take a genius to do grant writing and just be like well, okay,
like standards say no DEI okay, well says Dum. And they're talking to this kid and he's like, well, says Deu in the title, and you realize is like I grew up in Seattle, very very very far left place. All the all the left really has is elitism and being smug. That's all I have. It's it's just say, oh, you believe in the It's like, yes, I do, and in the presuppositions I have. Like in your debate, you asked, why is racism wrong? Yeah, And the guy had no, like intellectual framework.
Because it means you're an asshole? That was his argument. Okay, okay, Well what's wrong with being an asshole? In your world view?
Maybe that's God?
So what's wrong with being an asshole?
Right? And there's no, there's no I mean, maybe that's a survival technique.
Being that one funny because in the debate he says, I actually hold you liable dire because you freely chose religion, which is a sickness for mankind. And he says, and yet you castigate gay people who don't make a choice to be gay. And I'm like, so, wait a minute, wait a minute, win it. Why could I not just be conditioned to believe my religion as a survival mechanism in the same way that you're giving a pass to homosexuals who don't make a choice. And he just sat
there and was like, is this different? Well, why there's no God? We're all just conditioned just because of free will, Like you understand that in philosophy, most of today's atheists philosophers, they don't believe in free will because free will is just as much a metaphysical commitment as God. Yeah, and if God doesn't exist, and as a fairy tale as Brian, the opponent in the debate said, why is free will
not a fiction? Can you observe free will in the microscope? Okay, well then how do you know that there's free will? It's not in molecules, it's not matter, So what is it. It's a philosophical, metaphysical commitment that you can't empirically prove with a microscope. Same argument's making against God.
So he just couldn't fall.
Uh No, he actually got that that was a challenge, and then he often went off into Trump. Let's get into Trump. So yeah, every time in the debate when there's a real significant sort of challenge, it shifts into let's talk about immigration.
So unbelievable, unbelievable. Yeah, I really admire how you're able to debate people because I'm just not I mean, I'm a very bookish person who you know, I you know, I like, you know, just reading and studying and I'm not terribly articulate, and so I very much admire I'm very wild a boy, how you can just debate and ride away like break down these arguments. I just kind of have to stare out and be like, how would I phrase? You know? Howould I I mean? How did you?
How have you always been that way? Is this training? Oh?
It's a good question. I don't when you look back.
On your early debates, so you're like, uh, or are you like, oh, it's been pretty well, or how have you developed? Have you developed as a debater any?
If anything? I think the development would just be in being able to be way more concise, in nailing down with precision the mistake that is being made because I think early on it would take me probably longer and then have to think longer and have to talk longer. But if you talk a lot in ten years, which I think a lot of podcasts and a lot of of yapping in ten years, you actually get I think better at quick formulating the thoughts and just going of
boiling it down. But also to say, with atheists or perhaps even with Muslims, and maybe even Catholics and Protestants as well, like the arguments that you hear are rarely anything new.
Yeah, it's the same stuff.
So when I was nineteen and twenty, it was the first time it started debating, and I listened to a lot of Bonds and debates and he would debate atheists and these people, and I would just listen to him and Gordon Stein debating over and over and over, because that's a really formative, excellent debaate. Anybody who is interested in that. That's a classic atheist theist debate, the Bons
and Steining debate. You can find it on YouTube. I remember I listened to that probably ten or twenty times, and I just realized, Okay, this is a pretty you know, amazing strategy of debating is to just call in to question people's assumptions. And really that's the history of what philosophy is. When when Socrates is going out in the Apology and he's just sort of randomly asking people all throughout Athens, like, how do I know what the meaning of life is?
Right?
And he goes to the you know, the artisan and he says, oh, well, doing a craft is the meaning of life. And then he asked the politician of Poulticisans say politics is the real source of meaning of life, and basically no one has a clear answer. And then he goes to the oracle of Delphi and he says, well,
who's the real wise man? And that oracle says you are because you don't know, and a lot low I keep people think that that means that we're all relativists and we should just have no He's just basically it's an apathatic approach to saying I have to kind of go through a questioning process of figuring out, Okay, well they don't have a consistent answer. They don't know. This
isn't consistent. They don't know, And so debate is kind of the same type of thing for me, which is most people don't think about why their arguments are coherent or consistent. They just spout them out. And even people who are philosophers or professors, even most of them don't really think out their positions. And so a lot of people are just very arbitrary. I would say ninety percent of people when they argue, it's just arbitrary. It's just assertions. Okay,
but why ought we believe? What's the good reasons for that belief? So yeah, just kind of those basic principles. In knowing basic logical fallacies, you're going to be able to beat ninety ninety five percent of people. Really only when you encounter like a studied professor who knows you know those topics really well, would you perhaps not do that? Great? But as you know, like I've not heard an atheist present any new or different argument than I heard when I was twenty.
It's all just a problem of evil.
It's that question, or yeah, or just repeating relativism and subductivism. Everything is relative. Okay, Well is that relative? I mean it's the same basic stuff, and it's I think it's the same with Catholic apologetics.
I mean, what would you say just overall those like the top five logical fallacies you encounter in debates.
Obviously number one would be people rely on at hominem. I mean, well, that can't be true because you're bad, You're mean, uh, you know, none of that has anything. Let's okay, fine, I'm Judas, But how is the argument wrong? Right? Because I mean, Judas Jewish can say something true, right, right, So his character doesn't have anything necessarily to do with the problem that he's that he's that he's addressing, unless
the topic happens to be his character. In that case, it wouldn't be an ad hominem, but next would be probably just non sequiturs. This is really common where people make leaps to things that don't logically follow from what they argued. Right, So, for example, I don't know something like.
So Iran is bad, there.
There for good? Right, Well, that's a non sequentor exactly genetic fallacy would be another classic one that the origin or the source of something really has nothing to do with whether it's true, false, or good.
So fallacy.
Three probably psychological report, which is not technically a fallacy. But a lot of times when you say this is very common with Matt dill Hunt. He does this all the time where he says, you know, I just find
your argument is to be extremely unconvincing. And I've heard this argument for many times, twenty times in my last twenty debates, and I really just find this, Well, that has nothing to do It's you're giving us a psychological report of how you feel about the arguments, But that's not an argument.
Is that the same as bagging the question? Maybe that's another.
Word basically the same thing. Yeah. Also, people do parts whole fallacies all the time where they assume that's something that's true of part of an issue or part of a topic or something like that you can then attribute that to the whole thing, or correlation causation type fallacy. Those are common.
What would be a good example of a correlation causation.
Fallacy, Well, Brian too this where he said religion is bad because religion has caused millions of people that have psychological problems in many people to die in the last century, so religion is bad. Well, the fact that a lot of people died in the twentieth century is not necessarily distributed to religion necessarily, and you could make the same
argument that atheism killed millions of people. Which again, if you're going to say that there's a connection between the cause of the thing and some other thing that might be correlated with it, that could lead you to you
can conclude all kinds of things. But also something that came up in the branch s pirit debate, and this is that further degagon Anis highlights a lot, which is that when people people don't realize that in a debate, when you argue something, you're necessarily allowing the opponent to also have the same type of argument because of the rules of debate. You argue, for example, that well it's true because truth is relative and I can just assert
whatever I feel to be true. Well, then the other person can assert the opposite, and so basically you can see the debate because no one can get anywhere because you've basically given up the laws of logic and critical thinking. So essentially, you know, flipping this is not a too quoqui fallacy, but flipping it that's another one. What about ism where you you know, that's a common one where
people say when you say. I said to Brian, well, Brian, can you tell me on you know, we got into immigration, and I said, what do you think sensible immigration would look like if it's open borders in other countries? Should Japan have infinity migrants? And he said, yes, it's a universal rule that everyone should have a kind of open border's policy. And I said, how is that a universal
rule if you're a moral subjectivist relativist. Yeah, and then he went back and forth on well, it's my personal preference, but I want that for everybody. I was like, okay, but how are you arguing that we ought to follow that if you're a reletist anyway.
Point being is that how did you stay home with this guy?
Because it was it was actually very similar to the Tim Fold debate, where it was kind of funny. Oh, it actually I was actually having fun with it. And so when, for example, he would get into there was a great point about racism where he said, and you you white people, don't you White Christian males don't give proper place to bipoc people and to Muslim erab peoples, whom I know very And he was like pounding, like they are good people. And I'm like, so you're dividing
people up by the races. He's like yeah. I was like, wouldn't that be kind of aren't you doing a racism?
This is Brian Shapiro And he's like, no, it's different. What's just a surname etymology on Shapiro here?
Well, and then he talked about he disagree with this aspect like the synagogue of men and women being separated by genders and race. And I'm like, but Brian, you just said that you don't like white Christian males, So you're being racist, aren't you? On your own grounds?
It's unbelievable to me because, like you know, I was received into the church by a priest as a convert from Judaism. And I've known many, many converts from Judaism, and I find that when when when they convert to Christianity, they almost always become very empathetic, very you know it, really like, they become very empathetic people. They're very caring. You know, they're very good at networking. So they go, Okay, let's you know, get and finances, let's get the church's
finances worked out. But when they go down the atheistic route, it's just like nihilism on steroids. It's like, how nihilistic? How obnoxious can I get about this? It's very sad. It's very sad because you know, these are all humans who who need need to be saved. They're desperate need of of Christ, absolutely desperate need. And so no matter how much you know one likes or does not like certain ethnic or cultural groups, none of us can deny
that these groups are better off outside the church. None of us can say that, like, you know, for all the for all the faults of say, you know, I don't like say you know, whatever culture name one, that culture is not better off unconverted. Yeah, they're better off converted.
Which is interesting because the majority of that debate the day with that guy was all really just about practical effects. Religion hurts society. You as a white male who wants to have a wife at home. That hurts society, hurts women, it hurts BIPOC people, by the way. I was like, by the way, I am a BIPOC person. I identify as one, and can't tell me I can't identify as one because then you'll be being a bigot.
Right.
He didn't really know what to do with that one.
But they hear that and they just they don't have the thought process to be like, oh wait, this does put me in a conundrum because they're very absolute about their absolutes. It's it's absolutism for them, relativism.
For you for you, Yeah exactly, so yeah, I mean, you know again, it's just like whether you're debating with a sort of you know, rabbit atheist or a leftist or whatever materialist person, like, it's always the same line of argumentations and it never changes. It'll be interesting to actually see an atheist or somebody offer some kind of new type of Like it's basically just a repeat of the stuff that the Didn't Hawkins, Sam Harris people were
saying twenty years ago. Doesn't really change very much. So again you know that though with I mean, the papacy debate's always the same, debate has changed, but yeah, I mean, anyway.
Well, anyone is watching. If you want to come on, if you're willing to come out in person to Las Vegas, write to meet my contact infos in the video description. You want to tell your story, you have a book to promote, you have a film or what not that you'd like to promote. Let me know and you can be sitting where Jay is in you know, matter of weeks. Jay. If they want to reach you, how do they contact you?
Find me on YouTube, find me on Twitter, find me on all the normal social media outlets, just under my name. Website. I don't know if I have a contact on there anymore, but you can subscribe with the website for the archives books in the shop. But I think there is an email on the website. They do want to reach me, okay, on the email on the website.
Okay, And where are you going from here? After you leave, we get.
Directly to La and then we have a couple of podcasts dealing with debates and Coolly, who's a black dude that does a YouTube channel year towards debates, going to be He's trying to set up a debate with the black yepri is Alie dude, which we had one of those guys. I think the guy that I'm going to debate actually did call in a year or two ago and it was a really funny exchange. So that's gonna be interesting. We've got Jamie Kennedy, the comedian will Be.
We've done a bunch of shows with him. We're going on his podcast, Sam Tripley's podcast whatever podcast to debate another feminist jesse Lee Peterson podcast, another interview with Steffan Malinu, and then we're doing uh doctor Drew podcast.
Oh wow, Doctor Drew. Okay, right one, I remember Doctor's Your Back when from high.
School exactly love line when the nineties.
Yeah, the radio show I remember, I regularly called the radio show.
He's kind of been having some conspiracy oriented people of late, so yeah, that was That's gonna be fun. And of course jesse Lee Peterson is a character.
What is your wife working on? Terms of projects? Podcasts?
So she and I do.
We do.
We're going to do a Lord of the Rings Hobbit. I did a part one of the Hobbit analysis, and she and I are going to do Orthodox appraise in the middle of Earth. Okay, so we're gonna do that in the next few days. We'll probably have another Orthodox conference down at our church in Florida this year, probably around November, and so she will be doing some Tolkien
Hobbit stuff with me on the channel upcoming. She's done some literary and also she just did a deep dive with a friend of ours who's newly attending an Orthodox church based lit analyzer. So shout out to Bla. They did a podcast breaking down Gothic literature, so they did Frankenstein and some other Gothic texts. So she does that kind of stuff of late. So we're doing more lit stuff.
Wonderful, wonderful. She's a very very lovely person, very nice, very polite, very well spoken. Is there anyone else you want to give a shout out.
To, you know, shout out to David real Medwise, shout out to all the guys in the in the Discord Autocratic, shout out to Kai and Lewis at Orthodox SHO wonderful people. I hope I'm not forgetting anybody, but anyway, yeah, so uh shout out to you know, Sam Hid and all those guys.
Wonderful Jay. It has been phenomenal having you on. I cannot thank you enough for coming out and thank you so much. Esoteric Hollywood. Buy it on Jay's website. It's gonna be linked in the video description. Jay, until next time, Thank you so much. I love