Propaganda IS Progress! w/Guest Kruptos

None the hi group dos. Hey, how's it going, Jason? Good man. It's it's the start of a new month essentially, which means we are scheduled to have a conversation. Yeah, there's always something that comes up and we need to talk. It's a good, it's a good ritual. I think it's a good way to. Start the month and I enjoy these conversations too. So do I, obviously. And there we go. So I brought you on here to talk about propaganda primarily.

There's also, it'd be interesting if we can get to maybe in the second-half of the show, talk about technology. We might have to save that for next month because I feel like you and I can have a polite disagreement about some things. But I was thinking about this in the shower this morning.

It's like one of the things I feel that that my show does that's a little bit different than others in our space is I'm, I, I, I don't shy away from, let's say, having a disagreement, but, but everyone I bring on the show, generally speaking, are friendlies in one way or another. So it's not really about arguing it out and position like this.

You know, I'm right, you're wrong, whatever kind of kind of positioning, it's more like I, I'm more interested in building bridges and going, all right, You're, you're coming out of this from one perspective. I'm coming in from a different perspective. Why is that? You know, 'cause I respect you. You're a smart guy, you know,

we, we agree on 99.9% of things. So if there is a disagreement or if there is sort of like a moment, I want to want, almost want to figure that out 'cause here's the other thing too, it's, it does happen occasionally that I'm wrong. You know, I was wrong about God for 32 years. So, you know, just just 'cause my batting average has improved quite a bit in the last few years, doesn't mean I'm, I'm, I'm perfect, just close to it. So, you know, keep. That there we go. But we'll see.

We'll see if we get to that. If not, it's not a big deal. I think. I think the propaganda conversation is big enough anyways. But it's. More than big enough. It's yeah, what the Pete and I, Pete Quinones and I were talking about this, this topic too, when last time I was on his, his pod and the, this notion of like first and 2nd order disagreements that in some sense to have a real conversation, you have to have a, a shared framework in which you can

resolve the disagreement. Like an understanding of like how we are going to resolve it, which sources we're going to appeal to it, the mechanisms we're going to use to resolve it. Or at least enough of a shared world view that we're in a sense we're, we're not arguing over fundamentals. We're we're filling in. How do we fill in the picture property given that we all share the same basic fundamental principles?

And you know, a second order disagreement is one in which you have no shared foundation and no mechanism for resolving your disputes. And that's the and and this is the argument that the, the culture war is in essence, the second order disagreement. And in in the past, you know, when it's, you know, my God versus your God, the way that that was resolved is through violent conflict. And that's often, you know, power solves those those questions is 1 is defeated and and the other submits.

And so, you know, this idea that you can get on and debate the libs and so forth is, is really a fallacy because you have no shared foundation with which to resolve a dispute anyways. You're just basically getting on, you know, you're going to how does it put? You know, you're looking for the kill shot to basically, and that that doesn't really isn't really conducive to having a discussion is when you're looking out for

the kill shot. And, and I think a lot of people don't appreciate that, that you literally can't have a debate with somebody that once you cross a certain level of disagreement, you can no longer even have a debate with them. Did you probably you probably haven't seen this one. I just this was random on my feed. It was to be seen Jesse Peterson had on David Pak Man recently and he literally kicked Pac-Man off the show. He cut him off halfway and he's like, OK, bye, bye.

It was glorious cause Pac-Man was Jesse was asking pretty. You know, Jesse Peterson is one of those one of those online characters who his whole thing is he's very direct and he'll ask very pointed questions and he'll keep asking the question until he gets the answer until he's satisfied with the answer.

And David Pac-Man has become this this propaganda machine where he just, you know, when, whenever any questions asked, he's just goes into rote, you know, and you can see the program, you know, because he's just, he's got 4x4 index cards of conversations saved up that, you know, when asked this unleashed that, you know, and turn the conversation around.

Whatever things that really worked 10 years ago that I'm finding the my bitter white pill on this is that the, that the libs have gotten so lazy in their successes and so hubristic that they're using techniques that I don't think are working on normies anymore. You know, I'm just, I would just played the first half of this game called Dust Borne. It's new. It was actually funded, the Norwegian studio was funded primarily to the tune of €150 million through a European art fund.

And then we just found out there was a American, probably deep states cut out that donate another two, I don't know, 200, fifty, $250,000 or whatever it was. And playing this thing is, it's it's literally lazy propaganda. Like it's at one point you have to go around and suck out these like demons, thought demons from people's heads, right? That's how they're framing it. And the thought demons are

misinformation. And when you do it, you zoom over the, the red thing in the people's heads and what you hear is this chatter. And some of it's like, you know, don't trust the experts. And I was, I was, I was expecting to say something about getting, getting vaccinated. They didn't say that, but it was like all these like, you know, MAGA conspiracy, yadda, yadda things, right?

And and and you're supposed to like cure them by removing the information from their head by basically re educating them. You know, so game about. Yeah. Wow, that's funny. Yeah, it's it's so disturbing but so obvious that it's darkly funny. The bitter white pill here too is is what's great about it is that no one's buying this game. I think it at at its height, it

had 75 concurrent players. So I did a stream on X with this just recently played about the first half of it and I got 100 and 5200 people watching it any given time. Like we have more people watching this than be more people are than playing it. So there's a good thing. I think 1000 copies have been sold or something like that. So it's just A to, to wrap that up. It's like it's, it's very obvious propaganda.

It's very like everyone knows about it, Everyone's chattering about how obvious it is and no one's buying it anymore, which is, I think, a good thing. Well, yeah, yes, yes and no though like OK, so this example perhaps, but if. Yeah. This was being very specific

here. Yeah. Yeah, but if, if you look at the, the more sophisticated types, you know, people, you know, want to say, like, we got to harken back to the 90s or whatever, you go back and watch 90s television, like, I mean, go back and really watch like, like download, you know, go on Netflix and go back and watch some 90s series. And everything that we're dealing with now was either a, you know, made into comedy or

part of dramas. Like, and I know this is a little bit more, but you go back and, and watch say, like Grey's Anatomy. Grey's Anatomy is, is, is a pure propaganda piece designed for to propagandize women. My wife got into binge watching it and I, I tweeted out a long thread on it like, you know, a year ago or so.

But the, the show quite literally like everything that we're dealing with in terms of, you know, transgenderism and all that, they were doing episodes on that show like almost a decade before it hit the mainstream, you know, and they were doing it in very sophisticated stories in which it seemed perfectly natural and plausible.

You know, all the good guys are enlightened, you know, scientists who, and, and doctors who free people from their, you know, backwards religious parents and roots and so forth and, and enlighten them. And it's it, it. And and you realize then you look across the the whole panopticon of of. Of. You know, modern media and modern entertainment and you realize that, you know, people just simply drown in propaganda

issue. I think they just it, it's almost where they become numb to the fact that they're being, or if they even ever realized that they were being propagandized. They just become numb to the whole thing. Yeah, there's something I've been saying for a while and a certain age, it was during the flu season of 2020 to 2022 was that we make it real. We are we are part of that process because you have the propaganda, the messaging, the

narrative, right? And you have the intended outcome, let's say, or the control. But in between those two events or two, two elements are the is the audience. This goes into something I'm kind of fleshing out and to kind of complete McEwan in some ways.

McEwan, of course, is the famous Canadian who came up with the medium as a message and in reading him and reading media studies from that time period, it's all based on Agustin principles of, of common sense and and those elements, that's where they kind of built up. It's, it was all, you know, it was back when universities used to be far more religious than they are now. And I found that really

fascinating. What was always posited in, in media studies was the audience was considered that they sometimes you, you, you had a term for it called the phantom. So you kind of had to assume the audience. So in the meeting there's a message. One of the ways you can take back a statement is that, you know, a radio show, it's specific to radio. So you can do certain things with the radio show that is specific to radio. So the medium and the message

become one in that sense, right. And this is different from TV, which is different from movies at different when you get to something like the Internet, however, well, what is this medium? This is a complete medium. You know, we're I'm presenting video and audio is is it TV? Is it radio is what what is it? It's all all combined into one. Podcasting kind of breaks this, you know, especially video casting breaks this kind of barrier.

The other thing that also happens, and I can just check my comments right now is I don't have to assume the audience. The audience is right here. In fact, I can interact with them, right? So now the medium is the message is connection and there's your Trinity. So they're not having to assume the audience connection is now, which was always assumed becomes an important part of that Trinity. In fact, I would say it almost it almost supersedes the other two in terms of importance.

If there's a hierarchy of being because it without connection, the medium, the message doesn't matter. If you're not connecting to people, there's no one on the other end of the phone. You're just talking to into space. Right. So as I'm sorry I'm I'm I'm a bit rambling rambling. We're on it. That's good. We it it's rambling is fine. Yeah, to tie it up a little bit and see what you can do with that. We making it real, I think is a very important part of that

propaganda process. So as you're saying with the with with Grey's Anatomy, like they can present all these things, but if, if unless people are taking it in and making that real and making that effective in their lives, it doesn't work. So it has to be, it has to cross that barrier of, of desire, let's say, where people want this to be real, they want to live in Grey's Anatomy world, if that makes. Sense no absolutely you you have to tap into desires that are

already there with propaganda. Yeah, the I've you know the the I found that the medium is the message to be a profound analytical tool, not just in media studies, but just in dealing with technique and technology in general. And I've I've noted this on a number of occasions where and and This is why understanding the nature of the media that you're using is is very important right.

So the in the media, like the example that Mcluhan uses is the light bulb, which he argues is pure content, where that the medium and the content collapse together into it, into the single entity. So there there is no content beyond the light of the light bulb. So it it, the meaning of the light bulb is its, is its medium. So, you know, you go into a room and you turn the light bulb on. And so what's the effect of being able to turn light on into a room whenever you want it and

it's just there for you. And that's, and so Mcluhan gets the point is that the the medium itself is more important than the actual content. So the point of a television is the television itself and not, you know, whether you're watching porn on your TV or you're watching wholesome programming, but it's the fact that you are a couch potato with a three second attention span, right?

Then that or say, for example, the automobile, the fact of the mobility of the automobile is more important than anyone specific trip that you might take with the automobile, right?

So the importance of the podcast is the podcast medium itself rather than anyone particular episode that you are engaging in. So we have to ask ourselves, you know, in this regard, say with social media, again, the Twitter, right, Twitter, the, the point of Twitter is not anyone particular tweet, but you know, what is the meaning of the

medium itself? And that's really the, the fundamental question with it. And then you get 2 questions of and that's this also then helps you to analyse a lot of things like what is the administrative state? And we tend to think of, well, we have to capture the administrative state and put in like conservative policies. But if you think of the administrative state like television, that the, the true meaning of the of the administrative state is the fact of the administrative state and

not anyone particular policy. So, yeah, while it might be better to have sort of policy, you know, wholesome policies rather than policy porn, really in the end, the, the decisive thing is not the policies, but the fact of the administrative state itself. And that's, and that's kind of the end. The the the for me anyways, in terms of the medium is the message the the way that the tool has become very, very helpful for me in terms of an analytic. It's also interesting to seeing

where the authority shows. So, you know, and from our grandparents age was radio. Radio was the first, you know, getting a radio inside the house was a big deal, you know, 'cause there are big units and people would, you know, there you have all those old pictures of people crowded around the radio and that's where the news broadcast came in. That's how people learned about World War One and World War 2.

You know, that's how you you got that information that was an authority presented in the radio and then that transferred to movies for a bit. You know, in the early days of movies that then became like TV and TV for the boomers became the authority. You know, the news came from from the TV. You could trust the TV. The TV was trustworthy in ways that, you know, made, let's say, newspapers or other places where maybe had lost that authority or

had it transferred over. And now it's the authority is in podcasts. Tucker Carlson has the largest podcast on Earth right now. It's Eclipse Joe Rogan and those numbers he's pulling Eclipse every single major news network by a factor of some, in some cases a factor of 10, you know, and he's one guy. My producer. Making some noise in the corner here.

In terms of propaganda though, and this is the interesting thing is that all of these and this is gets us, this gets us back to this discussion of of the Louisville and the nature of propagandas. Maybe it's a good way to dovetail into this is that propaganda begins with mass society. So the the one common thread through all of these media is that they're all mass media.

And propaganda doesn't work in a society that has well integrated communities where your relationships are person to person and you have real human relationships. Those real human relationships need to be broken down first before propaganda can be affected. So any place that you have really strong communities where they're strong person to person relationships, such as churches, propaganda is much less effective on them.

And then also the other thing is you need to have persons whose community has been broken down, but they need to live in close proximity to them. So they have to be in sort of a a a density. That makes propaganda effective. So you have to have cities. So people who live out by themselves, like in the country tend to be much less, much harder to propagandize, as are people in tight knit person to person communities. So what happens with with

propaganda and and the radio? Well, it begins actually before the radio with the newspaper, with the printed, with the printing press in the in the 1700, you know, sixteen 1700s when they develop, you know, the new, the newspaper really kicks off propaganda and but the radio is is really exemplary. So you have a person who is, you know, either with a group or or, but they're often listening by themselves to the radio.

So they have this vertical relationship with the person who is with the broadcaster and the person speaking on the radio, but they have this sense of feeling that they're part of the audience so that they're part of a something that's larger than themselves. So they recognize that they're part of a group that are listening, but because they're listening by themselves, they have no interaction with the group. They're alone and isolated, but

they feel part of a mass. And that's kind of the precondition that's necessary for propaganda. So you have to have this, this society that's broken down into mass man. And then what the propaganda doesn't and the medium does is it takes these people that are all broken down and it reconnects them, but it doesn't reconnect them person to person. It reconnects them via the

propagandist vertically. So your connection with your with other people is always mediated to you through the propagandist, through the the voice speaking to you in the radio. So you feel like you're part of a community, you feel like you're part of a group. But that group, you know, I'm a Tucker Carlson listener, I'm a 2 bit podcast listener. So we feel like we're part of the group, but the person who is speaking to you is not necessarily person to person, but it's Jason that's speaking

to you, right? And so Jason is the voice that we all listen to. And then we're all in that, in that sense, we participate in this nature, in this propagandation. Now, like you say, you've got the comments on the side, but the comments in a sense are not

really fully human. It's not like, you know, maybe if we were sitting in a room together, you know, we could give each other hugs, look each other in the eye and roll our eyes at the radio, these types of things that would give you perhaps more like real, you know, kind of.

But even in those situations where families sitting together in a living room, they're all staring at the screen or listening to the radio, they're still not interacting with each other in a way that they would normally without the radio. They still are having the even that person to person experience is still mediated by the voice on the radio that's speaking to them. And so that that condition of mass man is what creates the condition for propaganda.

And one of the things that Allul argues is that in industrial society, because industrial society breaks down those fundamental relationships person to person, that if you didn't have propaganda, an industrial society would quickly dissolve into like all the effects of that alienation loneliness would bring. So you need propaganda to reconnect people, but they're not reconnected in a way that's

fully human. They're reconnected in a way that keeps them aligned to maintaining the industrialized, liberalized, you know, democratic world going right. So this is this is the and and this is what Elul argues is that propaganda is a necessary ingredient of our industrial and post industrial society. Also in the sense that liberal democracy requires it as well, too. So are the whole nature of modern society would dissolve very, very quickly if it wasn't for the fact that we had

propaganda holding us together. So it is propaganda that makes modern society work and it's a necessary feature of modern society. And so you you have to be propaganda. It's like, like everything about our life today is just very, very unnatural. Like prior to industrialization, you know, people worked hard, but they didn't get up and go to work at 8:00 AM and come home at 5:00 PM, right? They didn't work on a clock. They didn't have like the 40 hour work week was not a thing.

So all of these things that we get up and do are all maintained and supported by propaganda. This idea that you have to work in order to have a fulfilling life is, is part of propaganda. So there's all of these ingredients, you know, you have to get out and vote. You have to do all of these things that that you need to do are all maintained by propaganda and your social cohesion, your society is brought together and maintained by society or, or by propaganda.

And so that's the sense that, you know, perhaps the first thing that we need to understand about propaganda is it's not merely just, I mean, there is a sense where you have the evil propagandist who's then trying to manipulate you. But we have to understand that without propaganda, our society could not exist or function the way that it does. And so it's a necessary component of modern industrial society. OK, before we go any further, let's do a little bit mid show grift.

Here's a here's an ad for the expat money summit.com. Hi, I'm Jason Maranchuk, a legal Canadian immigrant living in Australia. I also hate the beach and don't wear shorts in public, which makes me an official and ironic expat. Would you like to be an expat too? Well, I have good news for you. Mikhail Thorup, a highly sought after consultant and host of The Expat Money Show, has organized the world's largest offshore and online event, The Expat Money Summit, October 7th to 11th.

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And while you're there, go check out their sexy upgrade packages. I'll be in attendance. Join us October 7th to 11th Expat money summit.com. Also, if you go down Scroll down to the description below you will find that we are partnered with Fox and Sons Coffee, a great company. Steve Stevens, a friend of the show has been on some of the shows occasionally. He built a coffee company to

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Links are down over there if you want to send some money over. Anyone who's been following the show a little bit, I haven't been let this public about it, but I'm starting to become a bit more public about it. I have some foot problems. I have nerve problems in both my feet, unfortunately, so we're trying to work that out, but it's kind of knocked me out from gainful employment. So so this is not how I wanted to go pro folks, but here here we are.

So if you want to send me some money and help pay some bills and people literally keep the lights on. I appreciate each and every one of you Crypto as well. We're here in the mid show grift. Let the people know where they can get some of your content. Well, just before I do that, I just want to 2nd the the the endorsement for for Steve's coffee. Steve Fox is is is a really good guy and and he and I've gotten

to know each other as well too. And yeah, again, because I'm cross-border to him that the problem is getting the coffee shipped here is, is, but I'm, I'm looking for, he and I are supposed to meet at some point and, and perhaps do a hand to hand exchange for coffee so that I'm looking forward to the how that would be fun. And maybe get one of those nice Fox and Sons cups that he's had the mugs that he's got as well

too. But anyways, yeah, you, I mean, you can find me at, at under score Kryptos on, on Twitter and then also again to at seekingthehiddenthing.com. That's where I do most of my serious writing. Some of it is free, some of it is behind the paywall. And that, you know, because all of these things, I have a, you know, a business that I do and, you know, doing podcasting takes away from that and takes away from family.

My wife likes it that, you know, there is a little bit of a little trickle of income that comes through that. So again, I also appreciate your support as well too. And an upcoming, I'm at noon today. I'm supposed to be recording my own podcast with that, an episode with John Slaughter on the the warrior versus soldier dichotomy today, which is, you know, one of these things that has, you know, one of these little kerfuffles that has broken out on our among our circles that way too.

So we're supposed to be talking about that today and you know, what is a warrior and so forth. So that that should be coming soon. So if you want to go oversubscribe, you won't miss that as well too. Seeking the hidden thing.com? Crup Joe's channels are well are very well worth the endorsement and the subscription and the read. We have all of 16 episodes now on the podcast, so there we go. Start somewhere, man. You gotta start somewhere. So you know, I believe in you,

kid. You keep plugging away, I think. I think one day you'll make it to the big leagues, man. I, yeah, I now I do record the vast majority of my written articles. So if you'd like to listen, there's like like 70 some articles over there that you can burn through and the many of them are like 45 minutes apiece. So yeah. Let's see what you'll do with

this. Sure. So I got a term drop in my lap this past weekend talking to someone who I think maybe I don't know if it's mutual or not, but more more on that in the future. It's not a new term, but it's a new term was a new term for me. But it in terms of our conversation I was having, it really was poignant. Data is a new oil. Now this goes back, I think to 2008.

I can call up exactly who first coined the term data is a new oil was in 2006, British mathematician client Clive Humby is said to have coined the phrase data is a new oil. But over the interceding 17 years, what he actually meant by it that has been rather lost. Like oil, data is valuable, he said, but if unrefined, it cannot really be used.

Now this kind of triggered off of a series of thoughts for me because one of the things that in in in investigation of the PayPal mafia and sort of the technocratic changes that are happening in our society and certainly people who are who are on the forefront of that. And I believe they're are forming a new counter elite and of course, matrix and his from over king pills has detailed this extensively. If anyone is watching this and isn't watching Matt, I don't

know what's wrong with you. Go go, go follow Matt immediately after the show. What really hit me with this is that I think people are people can take that statement and go, oh, it's like valuable, like oil, like it's that's valuable, but it's it's beyond that. I think where data is the is what's going to be running the system or what has been running the system for a bit and now is going to be much more formalized as the the the the resource that runs the show.

And I say that because when you get into things like World Coin, which I passed your way, Kryptos, which it gets really creepy when you get into what a lot of these guys are doing and what I even think elections have become. They're these data harvesting events that are both putting out information, messaging propaganda, and then watching

how people react. And during an election is perfect because you basically have an AB testing with this messaging going up as a constant pipeline and you can do it completely legally above board. The big tell on this was Bloomberg in 2020 ran that campaign, put up almost a billion dollars into his campaign that fizzled out in I

think 6 months or some of that. And what we've, what Matt and I found out was that Bloomberg had also set up all these secondary companies that were, you know, here today gone to more kind of kind of shell companies that seemed to only be in business to collect data there. There were basically made metadata sites. So I'm putting all this forward and letting see what you do with it. Because in terms of the conversation with propaganda, I think we're we're shifting into a new phase.

Or may I, I'll say, I'll say new, but new, relatively new. Where the medium is the message is the data harvesting to a weird degree. And it seems to me like the the real, the real conflict between the elites, at least on a technological level, is you have the group like Elon and maybe his cadre who want the raw crude.

And then you have the and I'll just use Davos as a stand in for whatever right, the vase who seem to be OK or want almost that synthetic, artificially created, manufactured, manipulated kind of data. And those two sides seem to be a conflict. And this seems to be the the real conflict of the age. And that to me is really interesting, especially now that Elon has X, which is, you know, I mean, it's it's kilometer 0 for propaganda, for messaging, for narrative, whatever you want to call it.

Narratives are born and brought into the real world on X. It's it's it's a magic box. So anyways, that's a lot. But what do you, what do you think about that in general? Where do you, where can you pick that apart anywhere? Where would you like to start with that? OK. So I, I would have a the idea of

data as a new oil. So I think there there has been this love affair that we've had with the information age and I I had my thoughts changed on this by a very pedantic and boring book, but very deep and profound. It's what did I let me get so I can get the I'm just going to look it up. The title is In Praise of Hard Industries. So in praise of hard industries, why manufacturing, not the information economy, is the Key to future prosperity. And it's by Amon Fingleton.

Just a wonderfully vibrant name there. Amon Fingleton's In Praise of Hard Industries. Why manufacturing, not the information economy, is the key to future prosperity. So no. Early life check required on that name. Yeah, that's right. So here's here's the thing. So what he's like, he's. Like noticing him. He's like noticing himself with that name. Sorry. Go ahead. Oh, yeah, no, I it's so So what Fingleton does and he breaks us.

Now this is very early in the information age, but they're, if you remember with the whole push, you and I are old enough to remember the push, you know, with opening up China and the the promise behind the scenes of of offshoring was this idea that we in North America could be the innovators and the ideas guys, right? And then we could take this, the troublesome business of manufacturing products, just ship that overseas and have cheap foreign labor, just make

the stuff. And what Fingleton does is he breaks down the, the notion that the idea is this sort of, you know, the, the whole notion that you would, the, the people struggle with when they're, you know, say if you have like a, your operating system or a program on your computer, right? So you remember you used to buy ACD and then you'd have this disk and you plug it into your computer and then you would

install the program. And your brain thinks it's because I have this disk, I own a copy of this disk, and I can do with it as please, I can install it on as many machines as I want. And then the manufacturers figured out this is what people were doing. And so you had to have keys. And what people didn't understand is that even though they had a disk, the disk was merely a vehicle or conveying a product that they didn't own. Buying that disk didn't mean that you own the software.

It just means that you had permission to use it on your computer. Computer. It was like buying a license. And so then they just dispensed with the disk and now you have to buy the licenses. And so this is this idea that you would license ideas and the ideas and then somebody else would make the product.

And what Fingleton does, he breaks it down and says that in any manufacturing operation there are a limit to, even with sophisticated intelligence, is there's a limit to how much the machine can do in terms of of making things. That that within any complex manufacturing process, there is a certain degree of intuitive knowledge that is carried within human beings that enables manufacturing to work. And once you ship that knowledge away, it just disappears and

then? And it, it then transfers to the new place. And he says the the easiest part of the whole process actually with manufacturing whatever to to hack and to steal and to reproduce is actually the ideas. So this you see now with the Chinese, the Chinese have been stealing the ideas, the information behind the ideas and using it to make the machines themselves. They don't have to innovate. They basically steal all of our ideas because those are the things that are easiest to hack.

And in many ways, what Fingleton actually argues is that the Wizards of Smart saw the ideas as being the most important part of the process and Finkelton actually argues that they are the least important part of the process. It's actually the hard manufacturing, the guys who know how to make stuff and the factories with embedded knowledge that are the most decisive part of the

manufacturing process. So now if and So what he argues is that by shipping it overseas, you are fundamentally and perhaps irreparably damaging your not only just your economy, but also your nation as a whole. Because once that knowledge slips away, people lose their sense of purpose.

And so and you see this with like the fentanyl crisis and so forth, people lose their sense of meaning because really in in any society, only about 10% of people can even hope to be in that innovative ideas guys crowd anyways. The rest of the people need to have jobs where they work at machines and factories in an industrialized economy. Anyways, So now get to get back to the question of, you know, the the data as the new oil in in many ways, our society still

runs on having to make things. And this was very apparent during COVID. You know, antibiotics, even some of the simple things like why couldn't you get a diet pop in North America? Well, because aspartame is made in China. And then with the shutdowns, you know, you couldn't, nobody knew how to make aspartame or they couldn't make aspartame over here in North America. And so we have this, this global supply chain that is really dependent upon, it's not dependent upon data.

It's dependent upon, you know, the the US having aircraft carriers in the Middle East and all of the things that maintains it. So what data represents is, is control. And so data in in the surveillance state is the panopticon is it is it like in the Chinese state with it with you think about the social credit systems. So the more data, and this is part of, of the, the, the whole goal of technique and, and the technological society is being able to engineer society towards

perfection. And so the promise of AI is that you can take the fundamental liberal promise of engineering society towards its perfection. But doing so now having the, the, the data access to control people finitely enough that you can then manipulate them in the ways that you finally need to manipulate them in order to perfect society. So in a sense, oil still remains oil manufacturing still remains manufacturing. You have to make things. Our economy is dependent upon cheap energy.

It's dependent upon manufacturing. It's dependent upon these now global supply chains. But what data gives you and, and, and the, the processing power that that's possible with these, you know, large algorithm, I hate to call it artificial intelligence, but these, these, these large algorithmic data, you know, processing and so forth, 'cause they're not even really learning, they're just. Got a language language? Language models? Large language models, yeah.

Yeah, the, the LLMS that the, the, the real thing that they give you. And in this sense they are the propagandist's dream. Because you can like let, let's say you marry this data to, you know, having a camera in every corner like you do in England. And then you, you're processing everybody's data in real time with all of these real time images. And what this gives you is, and that's the thing about propaganda, it's supposed to be

an all-encompassing environment. So you have this now, this all-encompassing environment that's monitoring everything, that's processing the data in real time. And then it's keying off algorithmically on, on key phrases, create actions, key whatever, you know, interpreting photographs, the, you know, the algorithms then then, you know, do analytical work for the break it all down. And what it promises is a kind of control of society that a propagandist 100 years ago could only dream of.

So in this sense, if you say that, you know, big data is, is the new oil, Yes and no oil still remains, you know, the new oil. But really what this is, is now propagandistic control at a level that, you know, was heretofore unimagined, because now you can generally use the, the social credit systems and, and these sort of things to, to quote UN quote, nudge people into correct behaviors so that they believe that they're, they're simply doing it.

And that's part of the whole thing of propaganda is people believe that they're acting under their own free will, but they're being manipulated. And propaganda really isn't about changing how you think, but it's changing how you act. And then your thoughts will align with your actions. Propaganda is concerned more about orthopraxis than it is

about orthodoxy. And there, there's numerous examples that you can give where people think and behave in one way in certain parts of their life, but in the key aspects that the propagandist needs them to act correctly, they act correctly, right? So you take for example, most PMCS, they get married, they have families, they stay married, they save their money. They do all of these things that you would think are very, very conservative things, right?

But when they go to the ballot box, they vote Democrat. And when you need them to come out to a peaceful demonstration for BLM, they come out to a peaceful demonstration of BLM and raise their fist. When you need them to speak out in a meeting to clamp down dissenting voices, they speak out in a meeting and clamp down dissenting voices. They do all the things that you need to do. But at the same time, in many parts of their lives, they act

and behave as conservatives. So if you were to separate them off from the from the propaganda and begin talking to them person to person, you can get them to discover that much of the way that they live their lives and the much of the way they behave and think is very conservative. But in all the key areas of the propagandist wants them to be aligned with the system. They get up and go to work every day.

They do all the things, you know, they vote in the right way, they support all the right policies. You know, they're all gung ho in the committee and when they're in a meeting room with their at the office, they're the ones that say, hey, listen, we have to support Israel. We have to support Ukraine. We have to make sure that we're for trans rights. We, you know, BLM and, and we

have to be for diversity. So on all of the key metrics and areas that you need them to be aligned with the system, They're aligned with the system, but they in in many ways how they live their lives and kind of things they do. So and they live like conservatives in many ways, which is that you saw they have these bizarre dichotomies.

And so it really isn't about them being brainwashed automatons, it's about them acting in certain key ways that support the agenda of the system where, you know, the, the key metric of, you know, how do we achieve human progress? And so the people are aligned to act in a way that the, you know, in a sense the, the, the key managers, the, the, the propagandist has decided is this is the way that human progress is achieved. And and as long as they're acting in that accord, then they're fine.

Yeah, I think there I think to go back to the data is the new oil analogy. What I found interesting about it is if you think of oil as the the resource that basically created the the the industrial revolution that you know, is the thing that they the resource that really put it on OverDrive. The data is a new oil is a new resource for this new industrial revolution, say this new technocracy, this new technological push and that I the way I see with AIAI is this

intermediary. It's like if you take the human beings create raw data, crude and AI then becomes the refinery. So we feed that data into the AI or the AI then selects all this data and transmutes it into other images, other data, right? So you have data, creating data,

creating data. One thing Matt Erickson mentioned on the Peter Thielfrender fed that everyone should go watch if you haven't already, the is that when you plug AI into AI, in terms of, you know, AI is talking to AI to create, to create images, it goes psychotic. It's like it. Doesn't get weird results like very very weird results. Right. Whereas so the human component is absolutely necessary even

with the prompts. So that to me is, I find, I find really interesting, you know, when you're looking into and in. In in many ways, it dovetails into just sort of interrupted. It dovetails into Fingleton's point that like even in an automated factory, you need human input to keep that factory going, right? And so in a sense, AI is the same thing. It needs human input to have to have property ordered results. Right.

And then then we get into if you start looking at insert Girardian models, what gets really interesting is that well, well this OK, before we do that you send me a quote from Kamal Harris. I mean, we can cover this and I think we have I don't know how long we have you on for I've. I've got I'm actually good for time, so as long as you're OK.

Yeah, yeah, we're good. So 'cause I think this, there's another part of this conversation about how the right wing gets suckered into using to being progressives or the right wing within the liberal frame are. Progressive and we can talk about, yeah, it just comes down to the fundamental nature of propaganda, right, In a sense that way that I think a lot on the right don't understand. So I'll just read the quote here. This is from from Kamala Harris's official ex profile.

Our campaign is not just about US versus Donald Trump. It's about two different visions for our nation. One focus on the future, the other on the past. We fight for the future. Yes. And that that in a sense is so this gets back to propaganda as a a sociological phenomenon. So most people don't understand that modern technological Western society is at its heart fundamentally liberal, right? So that that, or let's say this liberalism is fundamentally aligned with the general

cultural ethos of modernity. Liberalism is its natural political philosophy. So what Alluul argues is that for for propaganda to work, it has to take root or it has to, it has to work with what is there within the person. So in this regard, he says to This is why propaganda requires a lot of scientific involvement approach because you need to figure out, you know, how do people think and you know what

makes them tick. And so you, you do all of that sociological and scientific research so that way you can tap into the key things. Now what Elul argues is that all propaganda has to be because it's a sociological phenomenon. In other words, it it's necessary to make modernity work. Is it? It has to be based on the key myths upon which modernity is

built, right? And so, and This is why in many ways, the Christian, the traditionalist are the true Christian like, who really understands their faith and, and understands the, the, the core theological premises. And, you know, recognizes that modernity and Christianity are incompatible. And, and in this way, you, you, you stand outside of this and, and propaganda for the, for the true conservative, propaganda becomes a thing that you can't

even use. So he argues that there are 4 foundational presuppositions or myths of the modern world, right? So the first one is that man's aim in life is happiness. So again, you can see this with, you know, you know, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So this is this is a key fundamental Dr. within within modernity is to find happiness within this life in the material world. OK, The second one is that man is naturally good. OK, so you dispense with the doctrine of original sin.

And this is the fundamental divide between right and left in my mind, is this divide over, you know, what do you think of the, of the, the condition of man? Are man born as blank slates or are they or, or good or are they born fundamentally flawed? And a lot of things are downstream from this. And then third, that history develops in endless progress. OK, so that the, the, this is the point of, of human history is, is progress.

So and you know, cosmologically evolution is, is the cosmological frame that that justifies that. So we have our own origin. So modernity has its own origin story, just like the Genesis story we had. You know, modernity gives us the evolution story that justifies human progress because, you know, what is evolution but progress on a cosmic scale, right? And then finally, the fourth thing is that everything is matter, that there is nothing beyond the material.

There's no God, there's no spirits, there's no afterlife. There's, you know, so your 4 fundamental myths, man's aim in life is happiness. He's naturally good. He develops an everything in endless progress and everything is matter. So he says, you know, the basic myths of the modern world are, you know, science and scientific progress helps achieve that. And that again this, this idea of history, that history is moving forward in progress.

And then he says from these are derived the fundamental or you know, orientations that propaganda is built on. So he talks about the myth of work and we were, we've mentioned this, this idea that, you know, because because we have to build our future, work becomes a central component. You have to do the work right of, of building the future. Again, the myth of happiness, which he says is not the same thing as the presumption of happiness. He also talks about the myth of the nation.

It's just another fundamental idea upon which propaganda is built. Again, the myth of the youth and the myth of the hero. So the propaganda is forced to build on these propositions and to express these myths, for without them, nobody would listen to it, right? So here's here's a quote from a lul. So a propaganda that stresses virtue over happiness and presents man's future as one dominated by austerity and contemplation would have no audience at all.

A propaganda that questions progress or work would arouse disdain and reach nobody. Propaganda must also follow the general direction of evolution, which includes the belief in progress. Right? So he also then says this in in in this regards, politically says because the left is aligned with these fundamental myths, he says the political left is respectable. The right has to justify itself before the ideology of the left in which even the rightists participate.

All propaganda must contain and must evoke the principal elements of the ideology of the left in order to be accepted. And that's why I, I, I pointed that quote out to or that that tweet out to you from Kamala Harris because I'm like, that's that essential, the essence of that principle right there in like 240 characters basically of like, that's the fundamental propagandism. We are for the future.

We are for human progress. So you vote for us if you want to be free because our opponents are for the past. Therefore that you know that world of dominated by austerity contemplation and you know the questions progress and you know, hinders program. And so you see this OK, so a really, really good example of this, you know how basically everybody is a progressive in in the modern world. So Rush Limbaugh, everybody's favorite conservative.

We all grew up listening to Rush, but if you remember the debates over the environmental movement, right, how did Rush frame this at the time? So for him, the anti environmentalists, they were the people that wanted to stop human and economic progress, scientific. So here we are, we on the right, we're advancing, we're the right is about their progressives. But they're like, say you might call them economic progressives. So the the battle is not really over. Should we or shouldn't we have

modernity? Should we or shouldn't we have human, you know, this idea of human progress, but how best to achieve this thing that we all want, which is human progress? So on the right, they argue, well, you know, progress is best achieved when we get rid of government intervention. We allow the economy to to flourish. Everybody will be prosperous and happy and free and they'll have

all the things they want. So the anti environmentalist, what they want to do is they want to stifle innovation, They want to stifle the economy. And So what we need to do is we need to get these people off the backs of our of of our scientists and our economists. Just let the scientists go to work and they'll figure out ways to make money off of cleaning up

the environment. And that's when the environment will get cleaned up. And, you know, that was that was Rush Limbaugh. And and, you know, we have a hard time to leave because, well, Russia's a conservative, but Russia was actually a progressive and just a certain type of progressive. And most of the people on the right today are a certain type of progressive. So let's say, for example, if you believe like you have DEI versus the meritocracy, right? Both of those are fundamentally

progressive, right? So DEI says that equality is the way that we achieve. The utopian future that we all want, right? Whereas the meritocrat, he says, no, the way that we achieve greatness in the future is by striving for excellence. Then we can create the techno future that we know will liberate us, give us happiness and give us that bright future. So both the meritocracy and DEI and both of these are technical apparatus, and they're both basically fundamentally the same.

They're using technology to orchestrate a future. Both of these are fundamentally progressive ideas that deal with human progress, right? Neither of them is conservative. So when you look at, you know, our political battles, you basically have conservative progressives and you have liberal progressives, or you have economic progressives or

you have social progressives. And throughout our economy, we have basically even even the debate over abortion today, this whole debate over abortion, like abortion absolutism, even these are framed and, and are thought up in terms of, of progressivism. So in other words, the progressive future is a future free from abortion. So therefore we must use the administrative system in the system of law to impose it on the nation, right, to impose

this law in the nation. Because if we impose this on the nation, this is how we obtain the progressive future of a good and moral and upright society. All of the visions that we have for politics, every single one of them are essentially a progressive. It's just battles over which form of progressivism is going to dominate. And This is why like even the in the right and left battle.

So if we have a propaganda battle on in our politics today, it's not a battle between a true conservatism and liberalism. It's a battle for which form of progressivism is going to dominate. So one of the reasons I started this podcast early on, one of the things that happened to me in 2020 and that had a cascade effect was I'd became, I wanted to break the liberal frame for myself and then for others.

And in my quest to break this frame, and it wasn't to destroy liberalism or anything too grandiose. I needed to free my brain from it because I became very aware of how all my thinking was caught in this box and I couldn't out think the box like I, I had to get free of the box in order to go what, what is this? Like, what is happening? Why, why, why are all my preconceptions wrong fundamentally?

And that's, I mean, I had a religious experience that, that, that, that promoted this kind of project in the end, when I became, it's a very simple explanation that, and I'll explain my way. I'm using these terms and you tell me if you agree with them or not. Modernity to me is the removal of God from the hierarchy. Once you remove God from the hierarchy and you put man instead in there, so you take out Christ and you put in man.

The problem with putting man in there is that man then becomes indistinct, becomes this unmanned, this, you know, progressive man, but this, this liberal man. But that liberal man keeps changing constantly. And as you, as you're, as you're saying, it's, there's a, a conflict between conservative liberal man and, and progressive liberal or, you know, liberal, liberal man, however you want to how you want to dictate it. This is the Ubermensch.

This is the, you know, whatever term you want to use, but the Ubermensch is not Uber. He's retarded. And in order to break the frame successfully, you need to reinstate God into the hierarchy, because what's happened is that it becomes this cascade effect. So you remove God from the hierarchy, then all of a sudden you have to remove the king, then you have to remove the father, and then you have to remove the mother. So now children being brought up in this current state of affairs

have no models. All their models are either corrupt, like literally corrupt, or they've been told that their models are corrupt. And so then you get to the troons and this kind of phenomena, it doesn't seem weird

to me anymore. It's like, well, of course you, you, you are distrustful of your own sense of being because if you're a man and you've modeled your father or you're you, you see your father in you and yet you're told that your father is, is evil and a problem just by being a father alone. No, nothing specific about him. Then you have to question your own self. Then your identity becomes at question. And that's where these models

begin to break apart. So the only way to break liberal frame is to put God back in primacy and then to restore in some ways the desire, at least for a king. And I don't necessarily mean a man sitting on the throne, but a leader who, who is in the traditional sense of a king, the king. We're not even talking about a, you know, supreme power on that stuff. That's, that was actually a, an enlightenment idea, But the, the, the old form of the king where the king was actually the

center of culture. So the, the king would project earthly power and, and presence and people would model the king in their own way. So they would model God and Christ. And then the king, who's being, who's being directed by the church. And then the, so that your father is, is trying to fulfill all these different levels of, of, of the hierarchy. And maybe he succeeds me, he doesn't. Maybe he's a good representation, whatever, But then you're modeling your father.

And this is again, going back to my idea of, of, of the way out from the, from the vengeful son spirit that we're, we're experiencing. I think what we'll be experiencing much more in the coming years is to model the prodigal son is to return to the father to be, to repent in humility, to then and then be redeemed so that we can then turn around and start redeeming our dads. And it's in a sense redeeming the 20th century.

And the way we do that, I think, is by doing what they could, they did not or could not, which is get humble, you know, stop with this prideful assertation that cause, along with progressivism, is this pride that we have the answers that we can change these things into something good and beautiful. And the good and the beautiful and the true can be can be created a whole hawk out of these ideologies.

And we're watching these ideologies fall apart in front of in front of us. We're seeing that, as I've said before, and sorry, I'll end with this and throw it back to you. I feel like we're the, the meta crisis cause crisis is now the buzzword. But the, the meta crisis I think we're in is, is a, is a crisis of, of consequence. I do not believe and no one is ever going to convince me that planes falling from the sky was part of the plan. I just don't believe that, right?

I don't believe that our that these elites and these, you know, the men behind the curtains and all that stuff are know what they're doing anymore. And I think that their plans were watching this happen live in Britain, you know, where cursed armor just seems to be determined to to turn the entire world against him in in in one week. It's pretty it's pretty stunning. I don't think that's part of a plan.

I just think that they they've they've run out of room and the contradictions that are created within the liberal frame eventually drive you crazy. Now the problem is that when some of these guys are driving crazy, they also have the mechanisms of power and they can make your life pretty miserable. But I also, again, another bitter white pill is that I, I feel that we're, we're going to breakthrough this, whether it's tomorrow or next week or in November or next year or in 60

years, I'm not sure. But I feel that there that the the current state of majority is falling apart and it it's going to get replaced by something different. I'm not saying that's better, but it's going to be different. What do you think about that? Well, there, there's a lot there. OK, so. I drop, I drop a lot on your plate, Sir. That's kind of how. I go, yeah, that's how we. Roll well. I respect you.

I I know, I know you. You're you're intelligent enough to figure out my Wizzle Wazzle so. Yeah, there we go. How? How much have you read Murcia Eliade? 0. Zero. You should read the the myth of the return or no? What is it? Is it the myth of the eternal return? I got to Google this again. Mircia Eliade. Now there we go. Books. Yeah. The Myth of the Eternal Return, 1949. So Eliade is a histories of religion guy and with some, you know, dubious mid century associations in Romania, I

believe it was. He ended up coming and teaching at the University of Chicago. And yeah, no, no, but he's good. That's OK. So that's Eastern Europe. That's that's that's Eastern European ick. That's just, Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's internal. Internal kind of. Yeah, there we go. Yeah, Well, the inside joke, right? Yeah. The the greasy. This is like. The OK so so. You smell like trout. It's weird.

Yeah, there we go. So with Eliade, he one of the things that he argues with, and I find this again with, you know, in our conversation with Walter Ong, one of the the things that authors like Ong and Eliade are very helpful for is to get us out of our framework for understanding the world through the lens of the modern and helping get us into how did a pre modern think about the world and how, you know, in terms of how was their frame different from ours.

And so Eliade looks at this notion of time in regards to the ancients and then the Christian notion of time and the modern notion of time. So we're all familiar with the idea of the cyclical history, the, you know, and that's sort of the myth of the eternal return, that history is archetypal, it's cyclical, but the same archetypes keep manifesting themselves over and over again.

So in this type of world and frame, meaning is out there in the world, OK, The world inherently has a, a structure of meaning and it manifests itself in cycles. And so one of the ways that you, you in a sense grow or fulfill yourself as a person is, you know, let's say, and, and the, the old biblical stories very much are archetypal and they manifest this idea of recurring themes and recurring archetypes.

And there's a lot of this, this secular notion of the of, of eternal return even within the Old Testament Scriptures. So, and this is how a man like Josiah, a king like Josiah gets framed as a second David, that type of thing. So if you wanted to become a man, you become a man like the person in the great story. So you live into the stories and you become a great man, or you become the good king, the great king, these types of things. So the archetypes are out there

and then you live into them. You become the great warrior, you become the farmer, you become the housewife, you become the wise with all these different archetypes that are out there and you live into the archetype. Now they wouldn't call them archetypes, they would just be part of you live into the stories with the Christian

world. We generally, people generally say that, you know, Christianity introduced linear time, which is both yes and no. And this was a fundamental insight and Elliotti really helped me understand that. And Elliotti argued that the Christian understanding of time was in the biblical understanding time was that time is a a static architecture. So in other words, the events that we experience in this sense belong to God's plan.

So we as human beings live under this architecture of God's plan. So it begins with God and his creation. Then there was this fall, and then in the center of God's plan there is Christ, and he redeems creation, and then there's the return. And so the, the significant events in world history all happen because of God's initiation. It's God's, God's doing, God's

event. And I forget, you know, sometimes you pick things up and you, you wish that you had made note of it because you didn't realize it would be important 30 years later. But I read somewhere that there was a kind of psychic break that occurred at the end of the year 1000, that much of, you know, the Renaissance modernity and everything was kicked off. Humanism became a thing following the year 1000 when Christ didn't return as many expected him to do. So they created a kind of

psychic break in culture. Now, if you tie this into your Spangler, Spanglerian, you know, view of the world that, you know, the West really begins around the year 1000, it kind of makes sense. So there is this sense that because Christ didn't return, people didn't right away abandoned their faith, but they stopped looking heavenward in that sense for the meaning of all the events around them. So up until this time the world was fairly static and so you fit

yourself into events. Just to jump in for a second, people forget their herring of Haiti's story. A lot of Christians kind of skip over that, especially in the Western tradition, because one of the things that happened in the heroin of Hades is that Christ locked up this locked up Satan for 1000 years. So. Yeah, there you go. Dates matter. Dates do matter. So and and this is also why Orthodoxy, even if you're not Orthodox, that Orthodoxy does

matter, right? So it's the so prior to this, there is this idea of of like sort of the hierarchy of being. So because history and world events belong to God, the way that you ascend and better yourself is vertically by ascending the hierarchy of being, by directing yourself to

God, perfecting yourself. And in this way too, you know, there's a lot of talk these days about, you know, the warrior spirit and Christian, one of the things that Christianity does is it takes this idea that the the warrior is not first of all, like the great man is not first of all the one who conquers his neighbor. Although because we live in a violent world, you know, we kind of accept because we're not trying to, they're not trying to perfect the world.

They just simply accept the fact that the world is a violent place and that violence is sometimes necessary. But that what happens is in this Christian framework, violence becomes contained within this notion of a hierarchy of being. So even the night with all of his violence is trying to ascend the ladder of being towards God in the same way that that, you know, the professional priest or the monk is trying to do the

same. And so everybody in society is trying to ascend the ladder of being, to draw themselves closer to God and the way that you, you conquer the world, so to speak, you turn it inward and rather than conquering your neighbor, you conquer yourself. So this is in a sense where the knightly virtues come in. So the knight is a sense trying to frame himself within this this context of virtue. And in so doing, he also ascends the ladder of being.

So everything becomes framed and and so you're conquering yourself. So the year 1000, this breaks and all of a sudden people realize that wait a minute, they're not necessarily abandoning their faith, but a shift occurs. Now we're no longer waiting for God. So people think that.

So we're have this new humanism comes about where man is at the center of things and and or, you know, it doesn't happen overnight, but it begins to shift and then the religious vision becomes one of we have to imminentize the eschaton. This is that sort of imminentization. So we have to now realize God's heaven on earth through human progress. So this we're no longer waiting for Christ to return because he didn't return in year 1000.

So we do it in history. So the output of that or, or the the end result of this, this is what Eliade argues is that now we take on God's burden of history onto ourselves. And so we take on the burden of history and it becomes up to us now to instantiate utopia. And so this is again, it doesn't happen overnight in the year 1000, but beginning with humanism, there is this slow unfolding events.

And then you can see this now too, is that if you interiorize it, as now you combine this with like with nominalism and so forth. And you know, because nominalism cuts you off from that world of metaphysics, because if we can't prove that there's a connection with these underlying metaphysical realities, they must be just a projection of our

mind, right? So nominalism says that that all of the ideas and the concepts that are out there are just merely projections of my mind onto the world. I'm creating that order. I can't prove that they're there. I just simply have to accept that I'm the one that's that's creating this order. So if I'm creating this order and I'm going forward, right?

And then you get into sort of the romantics and this notion of personal genius, you get to a point where you have like the transgender person or the transgender person is merely taking on to themselves the burden of history of creating their own identity, right? So I'm going to now create my own utopia, right? So I believe, as you know, if I'm like a man and I believe that I'm a woman, I'm going to create my own history. I have the burden of my creating

my own identity. And now we finally have the power of science. We can, this is that same version right across the side. The power of science is going to help me realize my vision of utopia, my own personal vision of utopia, which is me as a a man who believes he's a woman who can now realize who he is perfectly. I can instantiate my own utopian person. So you think to yourself like, oh, this transgenderism, this is weird. And I think no, it's a perfectly

logical outworking of modernity. Like this is modernity worked out to its end and this is kind of instance like we take the power of technology to work out my own and it's this whole thing I need to find myself, what's my purpose in life and all these kinds of things. You know, transgenderism, it's just basically all of that. And it's it's it's this this notion of the burden of history just worked out on a personal level with the power of technology to back it.

There's nothing bizarre about transgenderism, once you understand the fundamental philosophical understandings of modernity, that that transgenderism is really its end result. One of the things I figured out in the first year after having my spiritual transformation was the crushing weight of the atheist. So the atheist has to take on all of morality, history, reality itself upon their shoulders because they they are what? Essentially saying that they are

the arbiter of reality. There is no higher order this, you know, they might have been inheriting a tradition, be it Western or law fair or whatever have you, but essentially morality has to rest on them. And this is the weight of the cross. So they're they're they're still bearing cross, but they're bearing the full weight.

The one thing I realized by accepting Christianity again was how again, going back to that Christ story of Christ bearing that cross, and how that story transformed and converted entire Pagan cultures. Because at no, this is and this is unique and this is something Gerard really strikes home with. It is that there is no other mythological story of a God humbling themselves the way that our God did.

And when you really try to get through your head what the weight of the cross upon God would would be that you're talking about an Immaculate being who could just, you know, change it if you wanted to. But he didn't.

He went through. With, and this was Gerard's like really like for all of the insights Gerard's had, you know that, that, that central idea that you can take memetic violence, you know, this, this sense of like, you have something that I want and I want to take it from you or there's a problem in society. So we must find a scapegoat.

And I must put that, you know, I, I have to sacrifice you in order to restore order to the society that Christ in his sacrifice is able to take the weight of all of that scapegoating, all of those memetic desires. You can cast them on to Christ. He dies and yet lives. And that, and in the sense it's the dying and the living that really it's not, it's not that you just cast them on him. He's dead and he's gone and you have to do this again.

But because he, he dies and he lives, you then have the power to break the cycle of memetic violence that you, you no longer have to scapegoat your neighbor because you can, you can give the problem over to Christ, you know, sort of cast it on the cross and allow Christ to take that over. And also you, you can then direct your desires to Christ and you no longer have to envy your neighbor and potentially kill him to take his stuff because you can cast her.

And, and it when, you know, when, when I first read her, it was just sort of it's, it's an insight so profound that you realize, look, how did I not see this before? You know? And and so that's that is really yes. Well then, and then, and then you go ahead and read Saint Piezo's or some of some of the Orthodox Saints and you realize that the Orthodox Church has been talking about this since, since, you know, year 1

essentially. And even in the West where where they in the West, we have talked about this as well too. Sure, sure. But. And but I think sometimes it just, it takes somebody saying it in a new way to really kind of just, Oh yeah, that's right, that this is really what we believe kind of thing, you know, to saying it in a fresh way. Yeah, giving suffering context is extremely powerful. Why it not being woe is me, but oh, is me. Oh, oh, I OK, now I have this

suffering. What can I do with it? Like how where where's my responsibility lies? Or even if it's not my responsibility, you know, something happened. You it's you can't control it. OK, well, what do I do with it now? What, what, what, what new opportunities does this suffering open up to me? You know, is it just exposing the distance I have between me and God? And you know, what do I need to do to close that distance in some ways, which is all very powerful stuff.

Well, and it was also like, you know, for, for, for how his star has fallen, you know, Jordan Peterson and even in his biblical in terms of, for the many flaws that people have pointed out in his, his mythological approach to interpreting some of the, the, the, the Genesis story, there was some really good insights that he had. And one of those ones was the Cain and Abel story of, you know, the sense of what do you do?

And, and this is one of the things I think that a lot of people don't appreciate that up until the point that his sacrifice is rejected, there's no real hint in the story itself that he's done anything wrong. But what happens when you do everything right and your sacrifice is not accepted right? You don't succeed. What do you do with that right in Cain? The story of Cain is you know, and, and, and, and in many ways, you know, God then approaches Cain and says you've got a problem.

You need to deal with this sin crouches at the door and you need to master it. And this is the fundamental thing. And but Cain in a sense doesn't master. He lets his bitterness and resentment that his brother's sacrifice was accepted and he kills his brother and, you know, reenact that kind of Gerardian, you know, scapegoat that the brother must be at the fault because I didn't, you know, God didn't receive my sacrifice. And God, you know, God never tells him.

It's just like maybe there was something in Cain that he saw. But there's, you know, in the story, you know, once the sacrifice is rejected, it's no longer about the sacrifice, Cain. It's about how you're going to deal with, you know, how are you going to respond to, to the rejection of the, of, of, of your sacrifice? And are you going to let resentment grow and are you going to let bitterness grow? And so there's a, there's a, a

profound lesson there. And this is basically the second story right after the fall into, you know, and you think to yourself how, you know, the 1st, the 1st 11 chapters of Genesis are in many ways, not so much even about the past, but help us to understand why things are the way they are today. Like why does bitterness and resentment and the Cain and Abel story seemed to reenact itself throughout society over and over

and over again. And like, you're like, well, OK, this is like a fundamental reality of sinful world, this bitterness and resentment. And then, you know, you dovetail that into to into what Christ does through the the lens of how, you know, Gerard helps us understand that.

And you realize that, well, the way to get rid of that is just to cast that resentment onto God and then to refuse the, you know, the temptations that that the evil one will put forward to you, to dwell on your bitterness and to take it out on your brother. Yeah, I mean, one of the one of the ways to think about time just to to button that hole that you mentioned earlier, and this is again coming from a more orthodox framework, is that these things are all layered.

So all these things are happening all at once, perpetually. So the garden is still happening, the fall is still happening. The end times, the actual real Esquitan. What's happening? You're happening. All these things are all happening all at once. Now we're experiencing our segment, our our sliver, our plate of time in our in our lifetime. But all the things that have that have happened before hang on pause for the cause. The oh, there we go.

Oh, there we go. Yeah, the the producer is going to bed. So a little 1 needs to be tucked in. There we go. A hug from Daddy. All righty. She's cute. Thankfully she's cute because she wouldn't get away with a lot of stuff otherwise. So, yeah, so all these things are happening all at once, all all the same time now. So the past obviously is informing us because we can experiences the past and through history and learn about it and so on and so forth and

incorporate our lives. The future is happening. The future is happening at the same time as well, but at at almost a different philosophy. And this is what revelations are, is that we are through our news, right? That this consciousness and we've gone completely off propaganda, folks. Oh yeah. Well, I mean, we can get back to it too. That's that's fine. Welcome to the two bit podcast. This is this is how we roll. OK, we'll get back. We'll we'll find a way back by this one point.

So if you can imagine that the end times has always been happening that it will that it's happening in our parlance in the future, but it's happening. But we're seeing the, we're getting the, the, the data, right. The data stream is trickling in from the future, let's say, but at our news, because we're, our consciousness is not in the body, it's from without the body, right?

So what we could say is that the, the news in the, in the Orthodox tradition is, is sort of our faculty for understanding revelation. And the revelation is that, let's say the God's frequency is, is, is giving us this information and we pick up on it and we translate it. And through discernment, we, we try to understand what these things are. And some of us are better at than others or better at at different times than others. So this, this information in some ways is, is not of us.

Let's say this is divine propaganda. If we're going to try to wing this back around and I'm trying not to veer into heresy, but you know, we'll try our best, but that would be the almost the best way of understanding it is that when you get these intuitions and sometimes it's not from God, it's from the other guy. So you have to be able. To discernment. Discernment is very is very key. Go talk to a priest. But once you discern that it's from, from God, then that's the

interesting thing, right? Because then you have to do, then you get to deal with a whole bunch of really interesting stuff, which nine times out of 10 is just get humble, stop being prideful, bear witness and, and get yourself good with that. And then all these other things kind of don't matter anymore. They matter less and less and less. You know, I find myself becoming much more agnostic on the material realm about these things where I view them as out of interest.

And obviously they, they have the ability to affect me on a physical level. So you got to, you got to pay attention. But in terms of overall interest in, let's say, involvement, I'm getting more and more detached because as I commit more to, to, to, to God and religion, the less a lot of these other things really matter to me. It's more like, huh, well, that's huh, they're doing that now. Oh, well, that's cool. Like, why were they doing that? Oh, this Kamala character is

pretty funny. Let's let's have some chuckles. But I mean, I'm not that worried about things anymore. No, it it's it's one of these there there are probably two ways that we could go. And one is to talk about, you know, the relationship between the Christian faith and propaganda and then maybe dovetail back into, you know, the the notion of like the the material in that regard. But Alluul notes that there's a dilemma for. Christian, let's, let's, let's do that.

Let's, let's do relationship with Christianity and propaganda, 'cause I think for a lot of a lot of my audience, that would be a major, a major point of interest. I'll be right back. The, the, the, The thing is, is that you can't really do propaganda in a sense in good faith. So you're, you're caught in a dilemma. And this is, it's, it's too difficult to reach people one at a time.

This is sort of the whole thing. We have to, you know, you have to convert people kind of one at a time or whatever, right? But The thing is, is that the propagandist, to be a good propagandist, can't believe, they can't believe in the they, they have to remain detached because the propagandist has to recognize the propaganda is essentially about control. And this gets back to sort of the, the AI question, right?

And, and AI is, is more about control than it is about in a sense, powering the industrial world with oil. So it's how do you control people? So that this whole notion of control, I think so you can't reach people one at a time because it's just, it's a thing. So you think to yourself, maybe we as a Christian can use

propagandist techniques. But the problem is that if you use propagandist techniques in order to reach people, you essentially give away the gospel because you materialize it and you become manipulative and it fundamentally cuts you off from God and fundamentally alienates you from each other because you have to, in order, in order to do propaganda. Remember we, we talked about this, that you need sort of the

masked man. So you have to actually breakdown community to do all of these kind of things. So if you then though as a, as a church, say, well, OK, we're not going to do propaganda the, the, in a modern world. The problem is, is that the moment your people go outside of the, the church environment, they're being propagandized by society and everything else. And this is one of the things, so they're being inculcated into how to act by the propaganda that they drown in everywhere else.

They come into church and you're expected to connect them to God in the brief period of time that you have. And then you think to yourself, well, maybe what I should do is, is use propaganda to get to my people. This is in some ways the the, the secret church model, the mega church model kind of does that. Then the only problem is is that in order to do that you have to

adapt the gospel to modernity. It has to then become about happiness, that people are basically good, that it's about human progress, and that everything is matter. But where does God fit into a world where everything is matter? So church becomes about making people happy, and it's about life fulfillment. And so you do it though in a gloss of God language. So if you try to reach people by means of propaganda, what you end up doing is emptying the gospel of its power.

But in a sense, if you don't use propaganda in a modern society, you're caught in a dilemma that the moment your people have any contact with the the world and then there's very hard to avoid contact with the world, they drown in propaganda and all the messaging in life undercuts their relationship with God.

So it's it's very, very difficult in the modern world because of the sociological necessity of propaganda for people to have a vibrant, dynamic, living relationship with God where they're able to meet God and connect with him. Because everything in society with the propaganda that we're immersed in undercuts that and undermines. That Xavier Olivia and then Chad says, how do you propaganda prove your people? Let's put a pin in that. So I think we're kind of moving towards that.

And there's a there's a way we can we can combine this with sort of anti memetics, which is something popularized by Luke Burgess, who's a very interesting guy, who's a Gerardian, I'll say scholar who wrote this book wanting, which is a good book to pick up if you want to, let's say a modern primer on Gerard. But here's a, here's some way to think of it. And again, I'm, I'm trying to not skirt my way into heresy here.

But if we think of the Sermon on the Mount, let's, let's, let's put this term out here, divine propaganda. And I know propaganda has a negative context in our circles. So let's just separate it from good, bad context. And so the the, the the Sermon on the Mount in many ways was is divine propaganda is a way of being is is God literally talking to you us throughout time, explaining it, saying this

is the way forward. If you wish to live a good life, if you wish to model Christ and therefore model God, understand the the essence through the energies, then this is the way to do it. And that that positive ISM that that again, reinstating God into the hierarchy and and not doing it out of some sort of you can't ironically pray, you know, you

can't cynically get married. There's, there's certain processes that, that, that that break this modernist mold because even in, in the Jesus prayer, which is in the Orthodox tradition, what St. Paeos has said about it was like, it's basically taking all the gospels and combining into one prayer, which is Lord Jesus Christ unto God, have mercy upon

me, a Sinner, right? A. Sinner. Yeah, and that is the synergism of the Sermon of the Mount. The entire Gospels, the entire New Testament is contained in in those lines. So and, and that in a sense, if you want to take it into a modernist terms, is propaganda because it's literally informing you how to be, how to, how to Orient yourself in the world. But it's doing it in a way that is without resentment, without

it's a cure for it, right? Because I feel that liberalism in general, and I've said this and Matthew said this and a few others, is that liberalism is a resentment factory. It, it, it, it resides on resentment.

The, the entirety. This is why I say liberalism is Luciferian to its core, because it's concept of through it's it's birthplace and nominalism on through is is this this this desire to liberate yourself from all restrictions right to to be God. To take one's place as God, not to be one with God as in as, as in with theosis, but to become God itself himself. And in that prideful desire to liberate yourself from all bounds to.

And so you can see this with the elites where this transhumanist idea, which is well, if, if we are to be gods, then we must think like gods and act like gods and eat like gods and all these things. So we will not eat of animals.

We will eat of only of bugs and plants and vegetarianism and all this crud, but which again is anti scripture and anti God and anti Bible and anti Christian and all the other all the other things that doesn't seem to matter the so to to break propaganda and I'll just from my perspective and see what you do with this Kryptos is to be anti propaganda is to be almost anti mimetic in a modernist sense is to remove this unmanned from the

hierarchy that they're asking you to model yourself against this nebulous being, this ubermensch that doesn't exist and is never well defined anyways. That seems to change with the times, you know, through the spirit of the ages and to realign yourself back to the rightful model, which in a Western tradition and let's say even an Eastern tradition is Christ. And once you re establish that for yourself, then you can re establish that with others and you start building communities

around that concept. And that's how you break this. That's the only way I for it I can say. So I have like four thoughts on this. So the first is you have to understand and accept the fact that propaganda works and that you are, if you grow up in a modern Western context, you are already at the baseline a highly

propagandized person. So if you you have to accept that the propaganda works and it has worked on you and that you are not immune and that you are already acting in line with the system already, you need to accept that.

Then the second thing is that understanding propaganda, and this was something that that Mirlu, Yos Mirlu in The Rape of the Mind underscored that one of the keys to resisting brainwashing, and this is specifically on brainwashing, is to understand that they're brainwashing you and to recognize that you're being brainwashed.

And so if you understand that you're being procurangandized, if you understand the processes of propaganda, how they do it, why they do it, what they're doing to you, you can begin to resist it, right? So, so understanding propaganda is a key. So I would recommend to everybody get out of Loole's book and read propaganda, right Is it's so then it's the other things though, too.

Now would be from a practical perspective is stop paying attention to the news seriously, because one of the foundational elements of propaganda is the news. All propaganda starts with current events, right? And so the more focused you are on the news, the more vulnerable you are to the propagandist. So the more that you get integrated into, because what happens is, is that you become sensitive to current news. And so the the news cannot permit time for a thought or reflection.

A man caught up in the news must remain on the surface of events. He's carried along in the current. There's never any awareness of himself, his condition of his society. For the man who lives by current events, one thought drives away another. Old facts are chased away by new ones. Under these conditions, there's no thought. In fact, modern man does not think about problems, he feels them. A man's capacity to forget is

limitless. So if you are somebody who focuses on the news, you are somebody who is immensely vulnerable to propaganda to it, and you're caught up in the day's events. So that's the thing. And then I would say finally, and this is perhaps the most significant and this is the most difficult is first of all, prayer, reconnecting yourself to to God, but then also reconnecting yourself to a real living. And I would say Christian community is, is important.

You have to have a real relationship with people that are unmediated by the propagandist. That there isn't like you're sitting in the radio, you know, where the propaganda speaks to you and you're part of that, that that mass crowd, but that you're real people talking with each other. OK. And then I think in and amongst that, what we have to do is resist the modern idea that you are at the center of events, the

nominalist idea. So in a sense to embrace the notion that meaning is out there, that part of, and this is a sense, the basic like the 10 commandments, you know you do not. The goal is not to be true to yourself, but real meaning is found in fitting yourself into God's ways. So you live according to God's ways, you behave according to God's ways. You fit yourself in in that regard. And so you resist the old or the this new idea that you have, you

must create yourself. But there's a certain acceptance that you don't have to create yourself, that you're given certain roles in life. And now today, I mean, it's much harder because all of that architecture, I mean, it used to be that you basically did what your father did. You were a farmer because your father was a farmer. So you fit into, you were a king because your father was a king

and all these sorts of things. But there is this sense that, you know, there is no special plan for your life. God does not have a special plan for your life, right? And, and these things and you do, you are not at the center of history, right? And your church does not have a special vision from God. You know, all of these types of things that that we generally that we anchor ourselves on in, in modern life because we are not at the center of history.

God is at the center of history and we live, you know, under that static architecture. So the idea is that then you in community ascend the ladder of being. And that is in, in a modern context, you are setting yourself apart, you know, disconnecting yourself from from the news, living in community, living with God. And then from there you just basically do the best you can 'cause you're going to drown in it everywhere, anywhere you go

anyways. But I think this idea of sort of self consciously understanding that meaning is out there, that part of it. And this is that that passage in John 5, 19. I'm not actually going to look it up right now. I'm just give me a second because I think this is very, very decisive. And, and it, it really undercuts a lot of, you know, people ask me all the, you know, how do I find out God's purpose for, for

my life? Well, you know, the truth is that God doesn't have any purpose for your life, you know, in, in the sense of the, the modern sense that where you are at the center of history and there's two kind of decisive passages. So, so here we are John 519. So Jesus gives, I tell you the truth, OK, the Son can do nothing by himself, OK? Even for Jesus there was no plan for Jesus life in that sense. You know Jesus did not have a

special plan, right? He can only do what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does, the Son also does. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does. And yes, to your amazement, he will show him even greater these for these. For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, Even so the Son gives life to whom he pleases to give it. So there is this sense that God is at work all around you in a sense. There's the architecture of

being. There's God's movement and Christian and what you need to do your role in this is to open your eyes to what God is doing and then like Jesus, join God in what he's doing and make God the set and God's action the center of your life. You know, so you think about, you know, what is it like to, you know, act in regard to to God's light? So there there's this wonderful little passage in Acts, you know, what does it mean to follow the will of God in this regard?

And we, we often don't think of it because our lives become so structured. So, you know, we get up, we go to work, we have our schedule, we have our agenda, and we don't often think about, you know, So what does this mean in a sense in a day-to-day life that you're keeping your eyes open for what God is doing, right. So Philip and the Ethiopian, there's a wonderful little story here and there's a there's a bunch of things. So now an Angel of the Lord said

to Philip, OK, go South on the road, the desert Rd. that goes down to Jerusalem from Gaza. So you're thinking, So what does it mean to do the will of God, right? Well, Philip was in prayer, the Angel of the Lord. So God speaks to Philip and says, Philip, you know what you're going to do? What's my will for you? I want you to go out and take a walk. I want you to go out and take a walk, right?

So he started out and on his way he met an Ethiopian, an Ethiopian eunuch, an important official in charge of all the treasury of Candace, queen of The Ethiopians. This man had gone up to Jerusalem to worship and on his way home was sitting in his chair reading the book of Isaiah the prophet. OK, so here, what's the next thing that the will of God says to him to do? So the Spirit told Philip, go to that chariot and stay near it. So you're just going to go, here's the will of God for you.

I want you to go over that and just kind of hang around and just be there. That's the will of God. Just go over there and just hang around, you know, put your hands in your pockets and just right. So Phillip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. And then basically now the opportunity is there, right? So God was already at work with the Ethiopian official.

And now Phillip, by listening to God in the moment and sense of going to a walk, standing where he was told to stand right, was able to see what God was doing in the moment and how he was working in the, you know, and he was able to ask the decisive question, you know, do you understand what you are reading? And then from there, everything, you know, falls up. So Philip aligned himself with where God was acting, and then

God was able to use him. And this really, I think, underscores this idea of, you know, in a sense, there's no grand plan that God has for your life in a sense like you are not at the center of history. You do not carry the burden of history. God is out there working. That's that's who's at work. And your role is to adapt yourself to what God is doing in the moment.

And I think this up from a propaganda perspective, if you know, this in many ways fundamentally breaks so many of those core Western presuppositions, the myths upon which propaganda is built, right? So that, you know, if you in a sense reject the burden of history and you reject all of these fundamental and you live fundamentally different, I believe that it inoculates you to the messaging of the propagandist because his messaging is built upon these fundamental Western myths.

One, you know, key among them is that you know you're good. You are at the center of history. It's about human progress, it's about your happiness, it's about you feeling fulfilled and all of these things. You know, this notion that no, it's not about you. You are not at the center of history and, and it's not about making you happy. You know, no, it's about God and what God is doing and you're just supposed to fit in. It's not about you feeling authentic or living an authentic

life. It's not about you being true to yourself. It's not about you, you know, living your inner truth. It's about you in the moment, seeing what God is doing, opening your eyes to the metaphysical and spiritual realities that are all around you. And the way to do that is in prayer and in community and then adapting yourself to the metaphysical and spiritual reality. And like, what is God doing and what's God's basic structure of,

of created order? And if you adapt yourself to that, then I think you go a long way towards being able to resist the, the, the messaging of the propagandist. So I hope that's a long answer for, yeah. I think that's absolutely brilliant and we're up to. Two hours now, Jason, this is. Yeah, let's let's wrap this up 'cause you got another show to do at noon. And I actually, I do, yeah, I do too as well, so.

And I feel like we've covered, we've covered a lot of ground, more ground than many would suspect. We've, we, we, we brought it back around folks, and that's. We spent maybe 30 minutes specifically talking about propaganda, but I think there's a lot of good. Like the stuff we did talk about I think was really, really good and and I think we got into like the core ideas of it. I look, I, I and I feel you're going to go around the horn with

this anyways. I know you'll speak with Pete and and others about this and, and maybe, you know, get into to more of the nitty gritty aspects of certain things. Like, you know, what I always said about the show is that we, we go where the conversation goes, you know, and, and the conversation went to, went to God and, and, and Christ. And thank you for everyone in the chat, by the way, not me, not you. I, I'm not picking a fight with a mate. I just think you're wrong.

If you're approaching the gospels and the similar amount is a story, you're it's not a story. And I know you, you think that's me being obtuse or being just a belligerent, but I'm not, it's, I'm saying this out of love and out of care for you. It's not a story. And once you accept it, that's not a story in the story sense, you can move forward. But if you're stuck on this, I think as being a story and you can come up with any rationale you want for it, it's it's not a story.

You can't, I'll give you this example. You don't build civilization on the story. You don't even the old myths, you know, Ramis and Remus, although those were stories in a sense, they were live realities of the people. People believe that they built entire structures of being based on that story, right? So it's no longer a story. Now mythological structures are slightly different than what happens with Christianity because Christ actually breaks the myth structure and that's a

whole different show. But but you have to understand that these are not stories that no one lives Harry Potter like some people do, like they dress up and they whatever. But you don't build civilization on even Tolkien or whatever. You just don't. Tolkien is a reflection, is a story about Western civilization. But you need Western civilization to to exist, to have Tolkien to write Lord of the Rings, you understand?

That and even even somebody like even somebody like Peterson who is an evolutionary psychologist, even Peterson makes the art like, and this is the thing too, like we tend to think of story and myth as like that means fake that they're not, they didn't really. Have. They're fables, right? They're just like a quaint sort of somebody made it up sitting around the fire and everybody liked the story, so they kept retelling.

Those those those dumb goat herders didn't know what they were, what what these things were. So they made-up stories about the sun and the moon and the these things and morality and and also just happened to build entire civilizations based on this Wizzle wazzle bullshit. Like that doesn't work. That doesn't. That doesn't. Happen no, and and so you can look at a story like like the story this way. So now is this a videotape of the original event? No, like that's not be dumb, right?

But these stories, and this is something that even like a Peterson would argue these stories are based on. And and this is so if you're looking at it from, say, a purely like evolutionary kind of perspective, these stories are based on an event or a series of events that are then picked up because people say this story is significant. This event is significant and it has it's revealing meaning

that's out there in the world. And so the Torah story gets told and retold and refined in a way that explicates and, and makes that and and and captures many of the depths, the nuances and the revelation and allows the story to be revealed in all of its its depth and its hiddenness and all these. But let me try. To do this, sorry, let me let me try to do my best, Peter. It's true on, on all levels, on multiple levels, on on multiple levels of of fragmentation and

examination. It's true on all these levels. It's true up here. And down there it's revealing. It's look, you, you, you see it here and you see it there like it's, it's, it's God. Look at bucko. I know you look, bucko. Yeah, it's it. And so when you, when you look and, and the, the fundament, and This is why in a sense, Scripture is not rational. It's not a sense of like systematic. God didn't just give us systematics because the stories

have power. But these stories, even if they're not, yeah, even if they're not video recordings of the event thing, they are all rooted. And this is, I guess, a fundamental claim, and you can either accept it or not accept it. But a fundamental claim of those of us who are Christians is that the stories in the Scriptures are revealing the essence of the meaning of real events, that these things actually did

happen. Now, did they happen in the in the video recording way that we would like with modern history? Well, that's the wrong question because you're trying to impose a category of meaning onto it that the scriptures really they, they don't care about that. They don't care about your, your video recording notion. They care about the meaning of events as they revealed. So they, they, they, in a sense, they see God at work in these people.

They see fundamental realities being revealed in these stories. So what's important to them is not that they preserve an accurate, you know, video account of these events. What's important to them is that they preserve. The key archetype and, and, and metaphysical and sort of divine movement aspects of this story that these are then captured and revealed in the and, and revealed in the telling of the story, because that's really what's significant in the event.

And so sometimes the order of the events change because those that changing the order of the events. So you see that in the Gospels brings out certain aspects of the, the meaning of the fundamental realities better than leaving them in the other order. It allows you to see things differently. So there's all these ways, but the, the, the story just said, well, they're stories in a sense.

They're just kind of made-up thing to think is in a sense to dismiss what the texts are actually claiming of this stuff. They're saying no, that Jesus was a real person. This is what he did. But I'm telling the story in the way that I'm telling it and I'm recounting the speeches and the things he said. And I'm doing so in a way that allows you to see the meaning that I saw in Jesus. Like they say the the author of Matthew, Matthew saw.

And is this, you know, God gave him in a sense, a certain insight. I saw in Jesus a certain meaning. And now I'm going to tell the story in a certain way that allows you to see the meaning that I saw and more. And and so you go back to the story of Adam and Eve, right? Well, Adam and Eve is telling a story about the nature of God's creation, that God, that that we were made intentionally by God and, and, and then the fallen.

So there's all these ancient stories, you know, sort of, I mean, because history really doesn't, you know, God's quote UN quote saving history doesn't really begin until Abraham. That's when, you know, the call of Abraham is sort of the beginning of divine history. And then the prehistory in a sense lays the foundation for in a sense of why is the world the way it is? You know, why is it that we are all, you know, that evil exists and we're fundamental?

Well, God created us good and we fell into sin, right? So there's all the answers, you know, why do I resent my brother for being successful? Well, we have Cain and Abel, you know, why do people build cities to reach the heavens, right? Well, we have the story of Babel, all of these types of, you know, and, and so these stories then allow us to understand and frame and give meaning to to the events that we

see. And so it allows us to recognize God's at work out there in the Creator because we can see from the stories and then we go out into the world and now we can see the things of the story out in the world. And that allows us, as we were talking about, to live into those stories. Yeah. The benefits of a good theological education. Well, you know, I've, I'm making up on time. I, I spent a large chunk of those 32 years. I hate reading the Bible and, and, and other religious texts.

So in a weird way, I did a lot of study. I just did it in the wrong with the wrong intention. Now that I'm reversed that intention, I still have a lot of work in front of me. But it's it's conversations like these that help help me level up faster. You know, even though we don't share the same faith, we do share the same. Well. We don't share the same Yeah, we don't share the same.

Sorry, We, we should say this. We don't share the same religion, but we we share the same faith and we, I think we share the same belief in mankind and I think. Well, and I and I think too like the difference. You know, people have asked me like, why don't you become Orthodox? And I said, well. Why don't you? Well, in part because I'm joking. Well, yeah. No, no, no, it's a good question. It's because I'm part of an, an, an ethnic church community.

And in a sense that for all of my appreciation and love of the Orthodox and even to some extent, even the Catholic community, that, you know, fundamentally my, my basic understanding of the world is reformed, you know, with a strong layering of, you know, insights from the Orthodox community. So I don't feel, you know, but it, it, there's certain things that, you know, as a good Calvinist that I struggle with. I, I, I understand the arguments

for icons. I get, I, I don't think that they're incorrect, but you're just not going to find me kissing icons. It's just the way you know, it's, it's just I do have AI do have a prayer, like a prayer, like a prayer chain and I pray that. Jesus prayer, I know you. I know you have a cross somewhere in your house. Wow, Yeah, it's actually right. You've seen it. It's right behind me in my office, Right. So it's right.

So but it it. You know you're, you're you're you're, you're an icon too, right? There we go, made in the image of that. I know I just. But you're not going to come over and kiss me though, Jason. So there we go. Not not not anytime soon, but I mean 2025 I'm, I'm planning a hopeful North American tour. We'll see. We'll see how that goes. So if that happens, you might you puck her up. Baby, We're, we're due, we're

due for, we're due for a beer. Yeah, that would that that we can do, that we can do. But wow, we are up over 205. Yes, Sir, this is good. All right. Yeah, I know. And gentlemen, yeah, we can. Thank you so much. You're very welcome to where they can get your get your work Kryptos before we sign up. Seekingthehiddenthing.com and at Under score Kryptos on Twitter. We're going to play the outro. Thank you very much, folks. Again, send me a copy. The links are in the channel

below. I'm without day jobs, so any and all contributions are greatly appreciated and or sign up to the friend or feds membership support the show anyway any which way you can. I know times are tough for everybody. So even if you just like subscribe, subscribe, share, put it out there. These conversations. I, I listen to a lot of shows and, you know, I always say that some of the best conversations happen on this show. And that's not just, it's my show. I just think it's, it's true.

So again, Kryptos, thank you so much man. Well, you're very welcome. It's a pleasure. I'm going to put the outro, give me two seconds and we'll talk briefly afterwards The.