 Welcome, guys, back to another episode of Amir Approve. Today's special guest is Jonathan Pageau. He's a professional artist, writer, and public speaker. He delivers several lectures every year in universities, conferences, and other venues around North America. Now, originally, where I first discovered Jonathan was through Jordan Peterson. And you were talking about symbolism, mythology. And I've been studying mythology for a long time, studying Arthur Schopenhauer, Joseph Campbell, Carl I've always been fascinated by that. And I dived into your work and I was looking at your take on symbolism. And my first question to you, Jonathan, is what was your initial catalyst that got you interested in this whole world of symbolism? It was mostly I grew up as a Christian and I grew up in a, let's say, type of Christianity that's leaning more towards fundamentalism, not totally fundamentalist, but just leaning in that direction and as my own intellect developed in university years, I became very dissatisfied with the answers that I was getting and the level of interpretation that I was receiving. And so it became like a crisis in my life which was either I was gonna give up my faith or it was gonna, something needed to happen. And so in discovering, in reading The Church Fathers and in reading ancient texts, I started to see the more profound aspects in the Bible and in the Christian tradition. And that's what kind of launched me into seeing patterns, not just in my own tradition, not just in Christianity, but then in other stories from myths from other cultures, but then ultimately even in popular culture today. Yeah, like, I think people really underestimate the importance of symbology, mythology and symbolism in general, how they create narratives and structures in the human mind. So can we kind of like summarize in your words, like pretend somebody's listening to this and let's say they're like, I don't know, we'll say both camps. Like for me, let's kind of like, I'll come in my perspective. I am, I'm fundamentally against capital R religion as an institution, but fundamentally promote religion as an underscore R. So self-individual religion. So let's call it spirituality, right? Right, right. Figure it out, right? The whole institution, you gotta follow my way or the highway. I'm like, I don't, I don't go with that. I don't go with that. And so whatsoever. And so let's take it towards that direction. Cause for the most part, most people in modern day society, they'll say they're not religious in a conversation. However, in reality, they are following religious doctrines. So they may tell you they're not religious, but that's not really the truth. So somebody's listening that's in a nutshell, what's the selling point? Like why should they care about symbols? Well, the idea is as we kind of reach the end of, you know, we had a period in human history now, let's say from the 17th century kind of ramping up this idea that science was going to save us, that science was going to solve all our problems, that materialism was the solution. And now we're kind of reaching the end of that where as science is starting to now, science left something out for the whole time, left this, the idea of consciousness just out of the picture. Didn't talk about it as if it didn't exist. Looking through consciousness, but not looking back at it. And now we're reaching the end of it where all of a sudden we realize, oh, this whole consciousness thing, this whole idea of a conscious agent, all of these problems, we haven't dealt with it. So now we have to go back and deal with it. And in turning the lens of science back on consciousness, all of a sudden things started to get very loopy and things started to get very strange. And so this is where, this is the place where all of a sudden a lot of people now, I'm seeing through Jordan Peterson and other thinkers as well are realizing, oh, wait a minute, these stories, these structures, they're not just these arbitrary things that people have been telling for the past millennia, but they're actually patterns by which we are able to engage with the world. Science will tell you now, like there's just too much stuff out there. There are too many things. There's an unlimited amount of detail in every single movement, every single thing that you do. The question is, why do we focus on certain things? Why do we put our attention on certain things? So when we tell a story, we have to take some events in the world and we have to string them up in a certain order for them to sound like a story. In order to realize that, you can think that every time you hear a story, imagine that there's also, every blade of grass is moving in that story. Every piece of cloth is slightly shifting in that story, but we don't talk about that because it's not meaningful. So the question is, what is meaningful and how does meaning appear? And that's when the patterns of storytelling start to make sense, because we realize that as conscious agents, we have to organize this unlimited amount of facts into patterns. And these patterns are not arbitrary. They're not up to our own individual whims, but they're the very manner in which we engage the world, either the manner also in which we recognize communities, we recognize unity in terms of cities or nations, in terms of stories, in terms of what makes something related to something in the past. Like why do you think that you have something in common with your grandfather? You have like in terms of where's that, what's the story? What relates you to that? And it's these patterns of storytelling, which is what symbolism, at least the way that I approach symbolism is looking at. Do you think people have though in like a negative connotation when it comes to symbolism? I think so. It's because, I think it's also because we have this sense that symbolism is a kind of allegorical thing where you arbitrarily attribute meaning to something, you know, like, well, it's kind of like this. It's kind of like the green light means go and the red light means stop. And we think it's just this arbitrary thing that we decided, we just decided that green light means go and red light means stop. And that's the symbolism. But in actuality, real symbolism is coherent. It's the pattern of reality, you know? And even green light means go and red light means stop is not totally arbitrary. It does have something to do, especially with red in terms of how we perceive red and what red tends to mean to us, you know? It's like, there's a reason why poisonous fruits are red. It's not our arbitrary. There are patterns to these things. I think also people, they tend to be too dogmatic meaning they attach the absolute to a symbol, but they're not delineating the difference between the message and the physical symbol itself. Well, my approach to symbolism is to understand that the relationship between meaning and the instantiation of meaning or the symbol is an actual example of that which it represents. So it's not, like I said, it's not arbitrary. So we need the instantiations. We can't just access the abstract symbols. So a good example that I always give is that let's say the image of center and periphery. So every culture, every space has a center or something which defines it and then it has a place where it stops being what it is. It could be a mall, it could be a church, it could be anything, any a house. There's something which makes it something and then there's a, but that something which makes it something isn't arbitrary, you know? If it's a house, then the idea is that it's a home of a family or a person that that is not an arbitrary thing. So the symbolism, let's say the symbolism of home, that house is an instantiation of that symbolism. It's not arbitrary. You couldn't attach the same symbolism to a potato, like you just can't. It actually connects in that sense. I don't know if that makes sense. Yeah, like for me, when I look at symbolism or look at mythology, I like try to rewind back in time. So like most people when they're talking about symbolism today or mythology, they're still predating to the Abrahamic religion. So let's say like Islam, Judaism and Christianity, pretty simple, I wanna say similar, but they all share narratives and stories. There's a resemblance among that. To me, when I study history, I'm like, that's just a blimp that just happened a couple of thousand years ago. We as a society or let's say as a civilization or a species, we've been here for a very long time. And obviously a lot of these symbols and experiences that we have came from when we were early stage humans, hunting and gathering, experiencing nature. And so I always find it curious of like, there has to be an evolutionary process where a lot of the modern day symbols and stories that we have originate from the time when we're hunters and gatherers. Well, I think it is very useful in terms of symbolism to try to strip back a lot of our society. Like strip back a lot of the technology, a lot of the modern perceptions in order to get to the core thing. You know, an example that I always give is the idea of the sun. Let's say, if you try to understand the sun in terms of modern science and in terms of modern cosmology, you're not never gonna understand the symbolism of the sun. You have to imagine yourself in a world that's dark and then all of a sudden this thing comes up from the east and illumines the sky and then the days get longer and the days get shorter and there's this whole thing, this whole pattern of manifestation of light in the world. That's how you're right. You do have to strip away a lot of the modernity in order to be able to get to the kind of primal experience of what the symbolism- Correct me if I'm wrong. Like if we look at symbolism in a nutshell, symbolism tries to create a narrative and a story to explain something in a compact data bit. There's a saying, a picture says a thousand words, right? And so backing, I think the sun's a great example, specifically for people north of the equator, right? So symbolism changes depending on the world. Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah, right? And so north of the equator, we're like, well, fuck, we get winter, man. So sun is really holy to us. It's very important to us, especially once we evolved past hunting and gathering, we went to the agricultural society. And so the sun was even more important to us at that point. And so it's, I think people need to understand that symbols, they're here from the gecko from human civilization, they were used as modern day science to maybe explain a certain phenomenon or crises or some type of event that was happening within that current environment to maybe dictate or guide that tribe or community into more, I wanna say safer place or maybe more of a structure type of society as opposed to chaotic one. I mean, you could say it that way. But it's even more primal than that. It's like, let's say we take the sun. Well, the sun is the main source of light in our world. It's the source of light. Everything else is 10 times less than the sun. You can light a fire in your house, but it's nothing like the sun. And so then it's inevitable that everything that's related to light, everything that's related to seeing, to things being available to you rather than being hidden from you, that the world being clear rather than being muddled, all this imagery of clear of, and so it even takes on an intellectual version where it's like, when you have clear thoughts, then it's clear, the reason why we use the word clear, has to do with light, has to do with, so the analogies are not the real and they're based on this kind of primal experience of the sun, which is giving you light. And so it goes even more, like to me, it goes even further than trying to understand I always tell people, the best way to do it is not so much to try to kind of imagine the historical contingency of our ancestors because we can't really do that. A lot of it is just conjecture. But if you actually imagine just yourself out in the woods and the sun comes up after you spent a dark night alone in the woods, then you can understand what the meaning of the sun is because everything becomes clear. You don't bump your knee anymore. Things don't have these ominous shapes around you. Everything becomes clear. So the exercise I always tell people is to try to come to the phenomenological experience of something as much as possible to be able to grasp the symbolism. Yeah, and so like continuing on our talk about that, for me, I think a lot of people have this question is like, A, how can I better understand symbolism today and B, like how does that pertain to my, let's say spiritual or religious belief system? Well, I have to say that I think that the best way today to understand symbolism is just to still to look at our religious traditions. I don't see that there's anything that has replaced it. People have tried in the psycho, like you talked about Jung before, modern people have tried to kind of create secular versions of these symbolic structures. But in the end, they're not as profound as the actual participative realities that the religious traditions have. And so if you want to understand the heart, let's say symbolism of the center of your own center, then to look at the architecture of a church or even the architecture of a mosque or even the architecture of any temple of any sacred space has a similar structure with like an inner part and then different outer parts that come and the inner part is hidden and people aren't only a few people are allowed. And then as you get further out, you have more and more people. So you can understand your own self in analogy to these structures. And I think really, I do think that it's still the best way to go about it. Even though I know you said you don't like the capital R religions, one of the reasons why, let me give my pitch for the capital R religions, okay? So one of the reasons why we need... I'm a libertarian, so everything goes. All right. One of the reasons why we need the capital R religion is because there's a way in which this symbol is symbolic structure has to scale up for it to be real, okay? So if you say it just applies to me, to my own self, then you run into a problem because the structure of your person, let's say is in the symbolic thinking, the structure of your person can be found also in the structure of a family, can be found also in the structure of a nation, can be found also in any communal thing, anything that is both one and many will have the same structure as yourself. And so the symbolism has to scale up. So if you have a, if you say, I would just want a kind of individual spirituality, you're gonna run into a problem, which is at some point you're, at some point you're not, your society is gonna fragment. And it's one of the things that we're seeing happen in the West is that as we moved away from the central traditions, the society starts to fragment because there's nothing bringing us together. There's no common vision, which is making us one, making us something. I'm actually gonna agree on that, but I'm also gonna push back and say, I don't think so wherever meant to be one. Well, we are supposed to be one in many because if we're just many, then we fight. Yeah, so like I look at tribes, right? You had different mythologies and different viewpoints and different behaviors and different epigenetic expressions, depending on the circumstances, like the jungle tribes of the Amazonians versus the Northern Aborigines of Canada versus let's say Sahara, or not Sahara, the Bedouins in Middle East, right? They have very different cultural identity and belief systems and they wouldn't kind of mix together. And so I do agree on your aspect of hierarchal, like let's say on my individual belief system, I believe in X, certain symbolism. Well, if this X needs to go higher in the, when it needs to evolve higher in the hierarchy, meaning if I take my personal belief system and I apply it to my community, it needs to benefit them too. Beyond my community, it needs to benefit, let's say, I don't know, my province, okay? Beyond my province, it needs to benefit my nation, right, give or take. That I agree, like there has to be, your belief system needs to benefit other human beings. It can't be like, well, my belief over your belief system, go fuck yourself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But even in terms of tribe, like the thing in terms of a tribe is that you have, you have that structure of unity at the level of the tribe. So you can't avoid it, it just depends on what level you're going to put it. Now the problem of keeping the level of unity at the level of the tribe is, I mean, it's tribal life. It's that you constantly being rated, constantly rating other people for the women, constantly rating them for the resources. You see the other as complete, as almost like as a demon that you can kill, that you can do whatever you want to. And so there's this, the world kind of, sometimes there's an uneasy balance which ends up being set up between, let's say the sedentary tribes and the nomadic tribes, but most of the time it just ends up being constant, like constant fear and conflict. And so some of the, let's say the monotheistic religions, one of the things they try to do, especially Islam and Christianity, is to try to say, can we scale that up? Like how high can we scale that up without destroying the commonality, the common tribe? And so, because that's one of the problems of, let's say the empire, is that it can suck up all the tribes into one thing. That's what we saw in the modern age, right? Communism, Nazism, all of that was insane, like they would just try to suck everything up into one thing and then you have a crazy monster. But in the Christian vision, like the traditional Christian vision, there's this idea that there's a balance between our unity and our multiplicity, that you're allowed to be Armenian or you're allowed to be Greek or Bulgarian or whatever, but there is this thing that we also have in common which makes it so that we have a certain amount of communion together. And we're not completely ripping each other apart, you know? And you see the same, you see similar things in Islam too, like Islam also tends to leave ways, like let's say local customs and stuff and not kind of bother local customs so much. Islam did one good thing that the Roman Catholics took away had originally, Islam kept Arabic as a unity language. Yeah, and the Catholic Church had Latin, the Orthodox Church had Greek as it's kind of main thing. And that, yeah, the common language is a big part of just trying to find a way for people to remain together. It wasn't too long ago, it used to go to Mass and then we'll be spoken in Latin. Yeah, right. So there's a common unity, depending if you're traveling or meeting somebody, you have this common denominator of a language they can speak to. Yeah. Well, one of the problems that happened in the Catholic Church is that the problem with this, in terms of symbolism and structure, let's say the basic structure where you kind of look at it, the problem of one in many, let's say, like that structure is one of the most primal symbolic structures. Now, the difficulty is that how hard do you pull on one side or how hard do you pull on the other? And so in the modern age from the Baroque, like the counter-reformation, the Catholic Church pulled really hard on centralization, pulled super hard. It's like everything has to be in Latin, everybody has to kind of bow to the Pope. So there's like massive centralization, but when you go to like Indonesia or Vietnam or whatever at some point, your Latin starts to not make a lot of sense anymore. It makes sense in Western Europe because everybody has a kind of common culture, like this common European thing. But when you're out in the middle of nowhere, like it doesn't mean anything. So you're pulling, you're pulling, and then what happened is that the opposite happened. It broke apart and now it's like anything goes in the Catholic Church and it's all chaos and it's all like they couldn't find that balance between having a central identity or central language and at least lower in the hierarchy somewhere to leave room for people to have their local customs and stuff. Yeah, but I think Joseph Campbell said it well too in the past was he didn't necessarily have a problem with religion. He had the problem with how religion wasn't updating its belief system for modern times. So you gotta look at things in context. You have whether it's the Quran, whether it's the Bible, whether it's the Torah, written thousands of years ago, specifically the Bible, written by many people, hundreds of years ago after Jesus was crucified. And so you have the certain rules or ideological belief systems that might've been beneficial 2000 years ago, but we're talking about 2020. Now we're not saying rewrite the religion. We're not going against your faith, but what we're saying is like for you to have a mythology and a narrative that's beneficial for people, you need to update it with current times. Yeah. Well, the thing is, is that religion has always done that. It just always has. One of the reasons why people don't think, don't realize that it has is that it, a lot of it happened in the informal. Like a lot of it happened in the, in the, can I say this, in the actual practice of the traditions. You know, we have a weird way of thinking today, which is, you know, you have this, it's almost like a computer program way of thinking where it's like you have a program and the program runs and there's no difference between the program and how it runs. That's not how religions work. Religions don't work that way. Religions have basics, basic patterns. And then as they play out, they adapt to the situation that they're in. You don't change the patterns, but then the way that they manifest themselves ends up being slightly different depending on the situation. As you said, and that's something that really, honestly, the idea that that's not happening is a very modern phenomena. You know, and you see it in, you see it in kind of fundamentalist Christianity. You see it in kind of Wahhabi Islam. It's kind of crazy, you know, but that is not, that has never been traditional Christianity. You don't see that traditional religions always have this ebb and flow. You know, sometimes it gets too wild and there's a bit of a poll to kind of make things straighter and then, but then it's never, like the idea of the Gestapo that comes into your house or the Inquisition, that somehow the Inquisition was something like, you know, the secret police, the KGB secret police that came to get you, that never was the case. It's a modern phenomena that doesn't exist in the ancient world. Yeah, like things like baffle me. I don't know, it was a while ago, but like one of the popes was not, it was condoning condoms in Africa. You remember that? Well, the Catholic Church has had a strict stance on contraception. I'm like, come on, like are you, like you're telling me you're not gonna recommend condoms, even as fucking HIV and sexually transmitted diseases are happening in Africa? Like stuff like this is like, why? Like why not recommend it? Like I just don't get, it's for the betterment of like everybody. Well, okay, so let's take your example and break it down. Like let's take your example and break it down. Let's say that I say, so the thing is that you can't isolate, you can't isolate effects of things. So you can say, I want to encourage, I want to encourage people in Africa to use condoms because I don't want them to get HIV. And it's like, that's a good idea. Like to say, you don't want people to get HIV. Of course, who wants people to get HIV? And so you say, so let's encourage condoms in Africa. Now, it's kind of like if you said something like, I would like to introduce the car into North America because I really want the car to help people move faster and see their friends and all it's great. But what I don't want, I don't want society to fragment and I don't want malls, you know, community to be completely separate and then people to drive to shop and to drive to go everywhere. And then people don't know their neighbors and they drive 20 minutes everywhere they go and there's no community anymore. It's like, I don't want that but you can't get one without the other. If you introduce the car into society, you get the fragmentation of culture. If you introduce contraception then you get our world, our world, you get sexuality completely divorced from having children and then everything goes kind of wacky and then people don't stay in their families. People get divorced, people remarried, kids are messed up, you know, like the, and then society breaks down. So that's the problem with like, and so the thing about, let's say the thing about a traditional way of seeing it would be to say, we condone, we condemn the use of condoms and then not, can I say this? Not make a big deal out of it when people use them. It's kind of like, it's even the same thing like you see in Canada, we can't think that way anymore. We don't think that way. We don't think like, you know, maybe in Canada we could have condemned marijuana but then stop prosecuting people for it. But it's like, because we have this weird program thinking where we think the program has to run all the way through we can't let it kind of slightly change as it moves. We're like, no, we have to legalize it. We have to legalize it completely. And then we think, well, that's not gonna have any side effects, right? That's not gonna have any side effects. And then a year later, now they want to up the age of 21 and you're gonna see it in a few years and you're gonna want to up it up to 25 because it's causing massive chaos in society. It's like- The law and fairness, if alcohol was discovered today by their standards from the drug administration- Probably. No, not probably, and it's truth. It would be illegal. You would not be allowed to, this is by their standards. I mean, it's like, I'm not even against, I'm not against illegalization marijuana, to be honest. It doesn't bother me. But what the example I'm using is mostly to say that this is one of the things that symbolism helps you to see actually, is to see how you, if you have a pattern of behaviors and a pattern of manifestation, you can't isolate what it's going to do. I agree. There's- Things are gonna collate- Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we have to be able, if you see the pattern properly, then you can understand, let's say, the greater ramifications of something and not just see the thing you wanted to do, right? I don't know if that makes sense. Like, you know, I like to use like rational thinking. I like to figure out first order thinking, second order thinking, and it's not always set in stone. You can't always execute on it, but it's a good thought experiment on different topics you have. Like, for example, with the condom, it's like, okay, let's say the pope did say, yes, I recommend using condoms. Now, they might've changed your stance. This was a couple of years ago, so I don't know their current stance. No, they can't. They can't say, they can't recommend the use of condoms. The Catholic Church can't. They can't. So if they do that, then they're just not the Catholic Church anymore. Okay, so they can't. No. And so let's say hypothetically, they did in this scenario. And you mentioned splintering or segmentations of certain ideological belief systems in Africa. And Africa is a huge continent. So you have Northern Africa is very different than Southern Africa is very different than Central Africa. You have all these different types of ethnicity, different religions, different history, et cetera. So it's very hard to just group Africa as an African. Of course, yeah, of course. And so it's like, okay, they say, yeah, I should be like, oh, cool, I'm Roman Catholic. In this case, you know, the Vatican Pope said, cool condoms, I'm gonna use condoms. And it's, or the guy would say that. It's interesting to see if this would actually play out in a negative. It's like, okay, people are using con net utility. Maybe we do have less HIV. Will this necessarily cause families? Well, we can see in our culture what it did. We can look at what contraception did to our culture, like in North America. We can use that as an example. Yeah, but it's a very complex, like I'll give you examples. So you look at social economic levels, the more money you make, the less kids you wanna have. Number two, beyond just social economic levels, if we're looking at modern society, I'm living in Toronto, you're close somewhere around Montreal. Toronto's fucking expensive to live or center Toronto, like as a base family, like you need about like $150,000 minimum to live downtown Toronto. The average Canadian male across all provinces, across all different types of careers, is about 40, $45,000, right? And so you can't financially live in Toronto, but the majority of opportunities is obviously proximity to major cities. So Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, Alberta. Okay, good luck raising kids when you're young. I mean, today's time, it's different than my parents. No, this is why context matters. Like, I don't, it's like I understand at the same time in terms of kids, like I just think it just depends what you want from life and in raising kids and having kids, it really depends what you want from life. Being poor actually isn't that bad. No, it's nothing about poor. It's about poor, right? Like if you, a lot of people tell me like I don't want to have kids because I can't afford them. And it's like, I'm not so sure about that. Like, we can't afford them because we also want to live a certain way. It's also about the constitutional, I am a firm believer in having a family constitution sitting down and figuring out what everybody wants. And so being honest with yourself, it's like, okay, we want to live in a certain neighborhood. It doesn't have to be Toronto, it can be anywhere in the world, you guys decide where you want to live. The reality is if two parents are working, the child has to be in daycare. At least daycare costs is pretty much a part-time salary. So in Toronto, a good daycare, and obviously you want to send your kids a good daycare, nobody wants to send their kids so bad daycare. Of course. So a good daycare is like $2,000 a month. Okay, so you're talking about $24,000 here. That doesn't include anything else. That's just the fee for your child to be there. Now the question is, wait a second, maybe it's cheaper for me to stay home. Yeah. Right? Then for me to work, right? Probably better too. Yeah, well, obviously it's better for the child. At least one of you, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, 100%. Yeah. Fuck, 100%. And so then the question is like really figuring out your family constitution is like, well, this is the reality. This is the financial cost that costs a child, at least one child in this area. Do we want to be killing ourselves and working 40 hours each a week and not saving any money and not really being with our child, only being with our child after five o'clock? Or is there better ways to do, I think what most people get stuck into, this also applies to religion. And this is why, you know, I like rational thinking or I like even like a Buddhism or even like Hinduism sometimes, or like even symbolism is like, okay, within this context of religion, whether whatever religion you are or belief system you are, everybody's doing the same thing. Cool, that's kind of like a template. Your template can't be applied to everybody. It's just a template. That's the word, template. You need to figure out within this template what works for you. I think most people are following just other people. Yeah, I mean, the thing about what works for you is that one of the problems with that is that you don't know what works for you. It's like, people don't know. Like people don't really know what makes them happy. If people knew what made them happy, people wouldn't be drowning in stuff and taking depression pills. Like people drown in stuff and go on vacation, go to Cancun every year, but then are on antidepressants. It's like, I don't think people really know what makes you happy. Because they have, I have a thesis for this. Yeah, go ahead. Especially in Western Europe or Western nations. I think for the most part, most people have an experienced life. Like there's an innate reason why we are human beings and we're very nomadic. That's why we conquer the world. We're hunters and gatherers by DNA. We're nomadic. This is why we love to travel. This is why we love to experience new things. This is why you can look in deep in literature of science. Literally being in nature, like walking within the forest or being on the beach makes you healthier. In Japan, they have a saying to call a force bathing. And so I think if you look at Western Europe or Western nations, it's pretty much ingrained from high school. It's like, okay, Jonathan, you need to get good grades in high school. You need to follow this path. Why? Well, you're going to go to university. Why? Well, you're going to get this piece of paper and then you're going to go work at KPMG or some consulting thing. And why? Well, you're going to get a mortgage. And so your whole life is kind of already set forth and your parents are pushing you there. And maybe you're part of a church or mosque and telling you, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, go get your piece of paper and blah, blah, blah. And then you've never paused and asked yourself, well, what have I experienced? I haven't done shit in my life. I've just sat in a classroom, went to college, sat in another desk, and there's my fucking life. Yeah, yeah, that's pathetic. I mean, that's not life. I mean, I agree with you, totally agree with you. I think that we have modern kind of delusions about what life is and what brings us true joy and true satisfaction. But I'm not sure that it's just, because there's also the experienced hunter who actually isn't any better than the guy who goes and works for KPMG. And then you know that guy, that guy who thinks he's going to backpack through Europe for five years and who does extreme sports, that kind of experience hunting, you look at that 50-year-old experience hunter. You know that guy, right? He wears linen shirts and he's got kind of natty hair and he smokes pot, he smells like patchouli, that guy. Like you don't want to be that guy at 50, man. That guy is not doing super great. So there is, I think you're right, I think you're right. But I think, I mean, I'm going to get all Jordan Peterson on you, but I do think that the idea of taking on responsibility is actually something which one of the things, at least as men for sure, that we find the most satisfactory. Like to have, you know, that's why, like one of the problems that like we do, people do it in their career. Like if you take on responsibility in your career and you kind of, you have more things that you're in charge of, then you feel that satisfaction. But it's also true in terms of personal life. You know, like, you know, marrying someone, having kids, that is also something which will, it's one of the things it's so impossible to explain. But if you, once you have kids and you do it fully, like you're not, if you're running away, then you're going to be miserable. Like if you want, if you have kids, but you're running away, you're going to hate it. But if you have kids and you're like, I'm going to jump in this thing, it's the most amazing thing ever. And you can't even explain it to people because all you do is work. All you do is suffer for your kids, you know, but there's this amazing joy. Like when my daughter, my nine year old daughter comes and sits on my lap and I give her a huge hug and she wants me to read her a story. Like that sense of satisfaction is, it's very, it's difficult to, it's difficult to describe how powerful that is. I agree and I'll iterate on this point. Yes, many people do not take responsibility. Now, it goes back to the point that I mentioned, most people specifically for like the new generation or I think I was the first in line, I was like the, from 85, so like just the first generation millennials or until, I don't know. Okay, yeah. And I was the first generation not exposed to social media. Also, I was the last generation not exposed to social media. So I didn't grow up with you. You didn't grow up with like a tablet in your hand. Thank fucking God, cameras existed when I was younger. It's crazy. I was a wild child. And so I look at tribes and I agree with you that family, healthy family structures is the key to a healthy society. You look at tribes, I look at like how they were raised. I look at if it wasn't for the way that they lived, we wouldn't be here today. I look at certain tribal rituals where there is a transformation, literally in some cases a transformation from a boy to a man. Class of case people make is that one tribe in Africa where you put your hands within those banana leaves and they got fire ants in there and you got to last for like five minutes without flinching, right? To show that you're a man and literally they pass you sometimes a staff or some kind of object that's symbolic of that graduation from boy to man. That doesn't happen today. This ritual act for the most part of a child or a boy graduating a man. Yeah, well you can do it. We did it in our family, both for my son and for my daughter. So we, it's true that like Jews still have bar mitzvahs which are very, very still very culturally powerful and medieval Christianity did have rights of passage in terms of if you were an apprentice you would already at 13, 14, you would already be having initiation stages as you move into that year field or if you were a squire and you were studying to be a knight then already you would have these kinds of rights of passage. And I think that you can do it today. Like what we did with my son for example is we gathered all the men in the family, my father, my uncle, my cousin, people that were around that could come and we just rented, like we rented a shack in the woods and we spend the weekend there. And we just gave my son advice and gave him like a symbolic gift, like a knife, perfect symbolic gift for a 13 year old. And so I think that it's possible to create these moments even today. But for sure, like I'm gonna bring you back to the big R religion. It's like the family also has to have something it's looking up to or else it's also not gonna work. It's, you can't have this kind of weird incestuous thing of just the family. It's not, it doesn't totally function. Like the family also has to look up towards something which transcends it. Now, you know, in the modern world it's been things like nation or sometimes it has been tribe, but even in tribe, I mean, I think that even in tribes like the tribes would also have some kind of spiritual reality that they would submit to. Like it wouldn't just be tribe in the modern kind of nationalistic or ethnic sense. It would also kind of be moving up towards something higher, you know? And I think you totally, if you need that in order for the lower aspect to cohere, you know? Just like you need your mind for your body to have any meaning. Like if you, if you just take care of your body and you don't have a purpose it's you're just gonna be running around in circles. Well, obviously the problem today is no one's following the so-called, let's say it for the sake of the conversation, the most simplistic pure form of capital R. Like if people really did follow it to a T. Oh man, of course, like the thing, it's true. I mean, the reason why, you know, the reason why the Catholic Church is crumbling, the reason why Christianity is crumbling is because Christians fault. It's not anybody else's fault. It's like our own fault that we're not living up to what Christianity is supposed to be. Like I definitely, that's how I tend to see it. Whatever external force has come to attack Christianity it only was successful because of the rotten corruption that existed inside and I agree. And I think that when you do meet people that have an authentic spiritual path and an authentic spiritual path that is communal as well not just the kind of new agey individual part but really is communal then you see it in those people, you know? And in a way, sometimes it's like even something I don't agree with, like I can watch like, you know, it's like I really dislike things like Mormonism or Jehovah's Witnesses but sometimes like just the fact that they actually take it seriously and they're involved in what they believe they have this kind of, they can sometimes have a very beautiful coherence which is there. I don't wanna condone Mormonism but you know, like I said, authenticity definitely is part of the problem in religion today for sure. Mormonism, which one is it? Is it Mormon? The one's that- The one's Joseph Smith. Is that the polygamy one? Yeah, yeah. Well, they're not polygamous anymore. No, no. I mean, some factions are but they, no, they have, you know, Salt Lake City they have their kind of temple there. Yeah, I don't know. It's fascinating. I think there's always gonna be, I think religion is or we can call it a belief system. Belief system is innately human. It's in our DNA. But the thing is it can't just be a belief system. It has to be enacted. Like when we talk about symbolism it's like you don't believe that putting my hand out and doing this is going to create a communion between you and I. You don't even think about it. You just do it. And then all of a sudden putting my hand out and doing this suddenly makes a relationship between you like how weird is that? But it has to be enacted, right? It can't just be believed. It has to be participated in. And so our social rituals like not just the religious ones but things like knowing how to get in line like knowing that if you're coming if you're in the store like you have to let people out before you go in like all these rituals that we have that keep our society together they have to be engaged in and not just thought about or believed in. And then that's what's happened. That's what happens with religious rituals as well. You think only way to get there is through religion? I think we have to ultimately we do have to submit to something above us. Now that thing above us can sometimes if it's too low it can be dangerous. Like I mentioned about the modern world is that people tried to replace God with nation. And that's what led us to the world wars because nation became the ultimate thing. And it's like the Italians are gonna kick the French's ass and the Germans are gonna get the and so it was like this total breakdown. Nation states won't last. Well, they'll last in our lifetime but they're the most artificial thing possible. It's the natural ecosystems of humans are city states. Yeah, I guess. I think, I mean, I agree to a certain extent let's say a hierarchy of city states at least in that seem to be in the way that it worked the best. Like, and if you think about, if you think about Rome the reason why city states work in the long run. How do you stop them from fighting? So, good question. What's your solution to that? So this is the thing when it comes to when it comes to anything in life. So there's a famous biological law called Gaul's law no complex organism ever evolved from another complex organism. It evolves from a singular cellular organism and it works the way up. You look at nation states and for the most part they try to clump everybody together. Cost example, this horrible is where I'm from is for me to slide that we call it vulcanization. Take a bunch of people, throw them together and magic things will happen. Yeah, magic things will happen. And so we look at another thing in nature or in science we call it Dunbar's number, right? You roughly can, I wanna say negotiate but have a strong relationship with about 150 people within your network, right? And Facebook has proven this and there's neural networks as well looking at your Facebook friend list is about 150 people. So it's a pretty accurate number. And we look at people around the world. I'll give you an example of Middle East. My wife is Kuwaiti Iraqi, Middle Eastern descent. I'm from Yugoslavian descent. That side is Turkish. And people convoluted a lot of time Islam Middle East. Yeah, for sure. It's messed up, yeah. It's messed up. But what people really don't realize like a lot of this fucking strife in Middle East is all tribal honor system. It predates Islam. Most people are even flying fuck about that. It's literally honor system. My family versus your family. It's a very, very high honor. And so it's very, and the reason why I'm bringing this back to city-states is like the more of a game theoretical model you build in the world the better options people have. And I'll give you an example. Imagine in Canada, we had city-states where Toronto was allowed to create their own taxation, our own economic policies, anything we want. And no province can't come in. Montreal can do the same thing, Alberta can do the same thing. Okay, you talk about the military. In this essence, the city-states will create a federation. The federation pays towards a generalized military. But even still, each type of city-states has their own independent military. So does the city-state, does the city-state have like small vassal states? Like what do you do with the countryside and stuff? Like give me an example. So if you have Toronto, what do you do with like, I don't know, what's a small town near Toronto? Like what do you do with those? Like Bury, their city-state as well. So every town is a city-state? Technically, you could be, yeah. But the people think it's gonna go back to fighting. The new form of fighting is not warfare as we traditionally think it's warfare. It doesn't pay that well anymore. It's gonna be economic warfare. And so Switzerland's a good example of a semi-city-state type of nation where each city-state or in this case, they're called cantons. They compete on taxation laws. Well, I'll give you an example. You live around Montreal, near Montreal is Sherburne, right? So let's say Sherburne all of a sudden is like, all right guys, we have no income tax in Sherburne. I don't know about you, but if I was living in Montreal, then Sherburne comes around and says there's no income tax. I'm moving to Sherburne, right? So they're gonna create competition. In nature, it's not survival who's smartest. It's not the survival who's the strongest. It's the survival who's the most adapted towards the environment. And so Switzerland doesn't have really, well, they have a military, but barely. Like they're the most armed citizens in the world per capita. Right, they all have guns, that's for sure. And they're old mandatory military at the age of 18. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's an interesting idea. It's an interesting idea. I mean, Switzerland is an example of a place where that has at least worked until now from the Middle Ages. It's also in their case, it's quite an old. And they're able to hold together, like people of Italian descent, German, French and also Protestant and Catholics. And they've been able to kind of surf through until now. Yeah, I've never really studied Switzerland. It'd be interesting to see how they manage, how they've been able to kind of get through this. Yeah, like I wanna relate it back to like religion in a nutshell is like, you know, you're never gonna have a global religion. You wouldn't want a global religion either. No, no. And so looking at nations in as far as I can see, nation states will stay here for a very long time. But my long-term thesis, whether it's 500 years or 100 years or 300 years, I slowly believe that nation states will deteriorate in power. They'll play in a proximity type of way. They'll technically exist, but they won't have the power as they have today. And we're gonna go to that city states. We're gonna have to create environments where religions will need to adapt to technology. And the reason why I keep on saying religion needs to adapt to technology, we're heading to a place where human beings will have the ability to genetically modify their DNA. We're gonna have, we're heading to a period where like you talk about the Catholic church, you know, when a sperm hits the egg, that's it. That's life, right? Their definition, right? So no abortion, that's life. As soon as sperm attaches to egg, what's the definition there? Okay, sure, that's their take. Then how do we then explain what humans, when a baby is born 100% outside of a womb, which is gonna happen, right? So this I'm saying like technology is- Okay, so let's take your example. Like the thing is that, let's take the symbolic, like if I take the symbolic structure, the technology isn't neutral. Technology is not a neutral thing in terms of meaning and what it does to society. And so as you create this technological society, you are also, ultimately you are inevitably going to create a society that is more and more sterile. It just, it's just inevitable. It actually, it just works that way. And so as you come to creating, let's say, children that are raised in bags or genetically modified children, it's like you might have that possibility. Like you might be able to do that. And especially you'll be able to do it if you've lost a higher purpose and you don't even know why you're doing it, you're just doing it because you can. You can make money or whatever. So you're kind of creating these kind of hybrids and genetically modified whatever and monsters and what like you're doing all this stuff. Now imagine then in that case, like in that situation, you have societies that don't do that and have children and have family and have something which transcends what they all look towards in order to unify them. It's like that society is gonna win. It's gonna win in the end. There's no way around it, dude. If it's an open society that allows anybody to be themselves because this is the reason people go to North America. There's a reason my parents fled Yugoslavia to come to Canada. No, they didn't go to Russia. They didn't go to China. They're communist allies. No, no, no, I'm off fucking North America. No, I agree. I agree. I mean, I understand the appeal of North America and I understand the appeal of capitalism. It's capitalism, but it's capitalism but it's the fact that they can practice their religion. You can have a Muslim, Jew, Christian, Hindu, whatever over here on the same roof doing whatever and by constitutional right to have that. You don't have that in many places in the world. No, I agree. I agree. And it has certain advantages but it also has certain disadvantages and those disadvantages are already starting to play its themselves out because the reality is that like you said, rich societies have less children. They just do. And in the end, demography wins. Like demography is, you can't stop it. Like if you kind of believe in just normal evolutionary thing it's like, that's the thing that's just always never gonna go away. Just always- I have a thesis on this. Go for it. Demography always wins and we need demography. We need more birth rate. I think people don't understand we actually have an issue with birth rate. We need more human beings. The reason why we need more human beings, we need them to pay forward for the future of everybody. Right, yeah. In a nutshell, right? Yeah, yeah. And it's scary. For example, you look at China and through their- Yeah, the one child system, yeah. Which is not non-existent anymore. Right. Their version of their communist slash capitalism, they got about a hundred million Chinese out of poverty into middle class, like a higher upper middle class. And think about this. You have a nation of 1.2 billion people. Their birth rate last year is 18 million. It's very low. You look at global birth rates are on decline. In fact, Jack Ma and Elon Musk were on a panel a couple of months ago and they both agree on this. Like one of the biggest threats is the human birth rate because it's not just the fact of we need more people for the future. It's like, we also need people for catastrophic events. So statistically speaking, we're overdue. It's not if it's gonna happen, when it's gonna happen. Hey, I win. For sure. Yeah, so something's gonna happen. It can be a virus outbreak. It can be a, I don't know, something's gonna happen and you got one third of the human population wiped out. Yeah. And so yes, I agree with you 100%. The nations that have the most birth rate will have the most upside of a nation. And cost example in Africa is Nigeria. They have the highest birth rate. Like I think it's like four, on average 3.8 or four kids per family compared to the other African nations. And they're one of the fastest growing GDP economies within Africa. A lot of money being pumped into Nigeria. I think everything's cyclical. I think everything happens. Like if you look at the symbol of the Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, one of the oldest symbols in human species. It's like- But like if you take your story, like if you take our situation, there's a story in the Bible which talks about, people don't totally realize that it talks about our time now, but in the Bible there's a cycle. It starts at creation and it ends at the flood. It's like a little world, right? So you have a creation of a world and then you have the end of the world where the waters of chaos come in and swallow everything up, right? So if you want to think of the Ouroboros, that's it. That's the place where the head eats the tail, where nothing makes sense anymore, where all order breaks apart. Now, if you look at in the Bible, you actually see that as the fall happens, Cain, the bad son, he creates cities. He's the first one to make a city. And then his descendants develop technologies and their technologies lead to war. But they also lead to strange mixtures between like angels and men. Like it doesn't matter what that means. What it means is that there's a confusion. There's this confusion. And so when you talk about like genetically modifying humans and all this stuff, like it's all there. Like it's all in that story. And the idea of genetically modifying humans is, it has, there are stories about that and it's all the stories of monsters. Monsters are sterile. Monsters are always sterile. And the fact that our society is sterile and that we also are thinking of creating monstrous humans of genetically modifying them and people are already doing it, obviously. It's not like it's not happening. It's just because we don't know about it. That leads to collapse, it leads to a collapse because like I said, the fact that the story is already there, it's been told before. Now we're just seeing a bigger version of it, like a bigger cycle. Well, we'll see, you know, we'll see how it plays out, you know. I have a hypothetical. Go for it. Or ask you based on this hypothetical. Okay, so I mentioned earlier that our modern day three major Abrahamic religions are fairly new in the whole grand scheme of things. Okay. But let me just caveat that. All right, all right. Even though they're fairly new, we don't have access to much else. This takes me to my question. Right, the only thing that's really older than our three Abrahamic religions maybe is Hinduism. Hinduism, yeah. Which is fascinating, man, the stories in Hinduism is crazy. Very interesting. Okay, so I agree with Sam Harris on this take. I believe if we as a human species don't fuck ourselves in the next 100 years, we should be good. I think the next 100 years is very important for us. Okay, so I'm an optimist in the past 100 years. Okay, now we're in the future. I don't care about colonization of Mars. I think it's cool. I don't give a shit about it. I think it's a cool like plan B, if shit hits the fan, maybe Earth gets hit by a crazy meteorite. We'll at least have Mars or some other planet. I think no matter what, we're gonna be intergalactic. Now my question though is this. Fast forward a thousand years from now. Do you see new religions being created or evolving that have the same, let's say stronghold or impact as we saw these three major religions? Not in this cycle, not in this massive huge historical cycle. For sure not. I think that these, I think that our this big story is ultimately going to, let's say all religions, Islam and Christianity and Judaism, but then even in Hinduism, all have an eschatological vision. But they all have a vision that what we have now is not the totality of what is there. And that what we have is like looking in a mirror. St. Paul talks about like it's as if I'm looking in the mirror, then in the eschatological moment, I will see things completely. And so there is a sense in which that all of this is going to lead to something, to a some totality. And so I agree, I do think that, but I think that there's definitely going to be a major, major crisis before that happens, like major crisis. And I don't think it's gonna be very pleasant. You're talking like a global. Yeah, for sure. I mean, like some kind of breakdown, I don't see it. I don't see the thing is that you can't, the idea that you can just accumulate things is just not, doesn't work that way. You can't just accumulate things. That for the same reason that you need to sleep, a society civilizations also need to sleep. You can't, every level of reality has the same pattern. And so you can't, you can't just think that we're just gonna keep progressing. It doesn't work that way. The reality just doesn't work that way. And the idea also that technology is the solution is not true. It's just not true because technology is actually just more and more power. But if you have more and more power and less and less wisdom, you're just going to run right into a wall. You know, the very fact that our society is willing to do things like create nuclear weapons, the very fact that our society is capable of doing, of having, creating things which cause mass addictions, you know, whether it's, whether it's electronics or drugs or pornography or whatever. Like whether or not we're, the very fact that we're willing to do that shows us that we're adding more technology or more knowledge of how the brain works is just not going to save us. It's actually gonna make it all worse. You know, because it's just more power. It's like you're giving a child, you say like, if I just give a child more power then that child is going to solve its problem. Like maybe that child is gonna use that power to just, to kill everybody. You know, it's like, there's a Twilight Zone episode where it's like this child who has unlimited power. And if you know, have you ever seen that? I know the series, yeah. Yeah, it's a classic episode. I love it, yeah. A child that has unlimited power. And it's like, he doesn't have the wisdom to use that unlimited power. And so he uses it in all these disturbing, perverse ways. And so, you know, it's like, is social media good for us? Like is Twitter good for us? Seems not. But it's a tool though, it's a tool. So this, okay. So one of my, one of the famous quotes from the biologist, O.N.E. Wilson. He states, we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and God-like technologies are the very nature of the Homo sapien or the human itself has in needs a very long time to adapt to all these technologies. These technologies are piggybacking off of very ancient pathways in our body, piggybacking off our dopamine, our serotonin, all these addiction pathways and utilizing it. It's a pre-existing pathways. The thing is, is technology is innate. It's just an object. It's, we haven't had enough of a time span to look back in hindsight and realize, oh, this is fucked up, that's fucked up, that's fucked up. We're slowly now coming to realize that social media, it's not healthy for us. Screen time is not healthy for us. And so it's on to us as individuals to educate ourselves, not expect the government or some kind of other entity to tell us that if it's good or bad and to educate our kids or educate our community. I'm like, listen, this is, this thing over here, like I wouldn't have my business if it wasn't for this, but the exact same time, it's very addictive. And so we have to, like a gun. You know, people say guns are evil. I'm like, what is a gun by itself? No, no, it's a human being behind the gun that shoots somebody else. That individual has psychological issues and we have to deal with the psychological problem, not the innate object itself. And so I think there's a Buddhist saying it is as it should be, you mentioned, we can't just change things in real time. Eventually, when the process happens, we're gonna revert backwards and realize, well, this is what we have to do now. I mean, I'm happy that you have that optimism. What I'm seeing is that we have, in the past few hundred years, we have, as technology has developed, it's not just a technology has developed, is that we have poo pooed our wisdom traditions. We have mocked those that have brought wisdom. We've mocked our sages. We've mocked our saints. We've mocked all the things that it was there to guide us in terms of how to live our lives. And so if it was true, I mean, I don't think it's possible because I think there's an actual pattern to this. It's not arbitrary, like I said. Oh no, 100% there's a pattern to this. So one of the patterns that I talk about is the pattern of the garments of skin. Like that's what I call it because when Adam and Eve fell, God gave them garments of skin and these garments of skin are covered. So it's like, you're lacking, you're missing something because you're moving out of your home, you're outside, you need to be covered. So you wear this garments of skin. And then a city is the same thing and all technology ends up being these garments of skin that we add to our nature in order to make us more powerful. But every time you make something more powerful, you always make it weaker at the same time. You cannot avoid it for the same reason that I can start a fire like this by flicking a match. But if I didn't have my book of matches, I would be in serious trouble because I don't know how to start a fire. My great grandparents did, they took them 20 minutes to start a fire, they could do it just with a stick and a rope. And so there's an inevitability of this. Like as we get, as our world complexifies and if there's a disaster, like if there's a disaster right now, like a real disaster, we will lose everything. And regain everything. You think all these like memory chips, all these bits and that are out there in wires and is why I'm very optimistic. Like people don't realize we as a human species have gone through so much more shit than any of the world wars at all. Like there's one theory. And it's a theory, and I mean the hypothesis at one point, I forget what it was called, but the human species dwindled down to only 50,000 people on this planet. And here we are like like seven billion people. We've gone through tremendous experiences as human beings, right? Now, but I totally agree with you. Like the image, like I always tell people, the last image in the Bible, the last image is the image of the heavenly Jerusalem. That is, it's the image of the city. The city, you can use the city as a stand-in for all human activity, all technology, all of that. And then all of a sudden this city is a perfect city, but it's a glorious city made of precious stones and it's a perfect cube and it's like this perfect image. And so there is a possibility. I don't think it's impossible that our technology can be transfigured and can be transformed for the better of our human species. But to be honest, it's like, I don't think this is an inevitable thing. And I don't think that it's gonna come by more technology. It's not gonna come by more technology. It's gonna come by rediscovering wisdom, like rediscovering purpose and rediscovering why, like why we rediscovering the deep truth, the deep mystical truths. Then that might transfigure technology, but learning how to like increase your mental capacity with an implant, dude, that's not gonna do anything. It's gonna make you a more powerful evil genius. It's not gonna make you a better person, you know? Anyways, Brainiac is not, you know, Brainiac is very powerful, but he's not a good person. I think you're also like, you're talking a lot about what might people say like an Elysium type of society where there's one group of people that chooses to be in a technocratic type of society and a second group of people that might choose a more like simpler type of like village type of lifestyle, which is totally plausible. But how I see it is, I view it from like René Girard's memetic theory. Monkey see, monkey do. There's a tipping point, boiling point, escape goes. Some shit hits a fan, shit blows up. Okay, cool. We've cleansed ourselves of our sins and now we're starting over. Now it can be another world war. Now as we know it, it can be economic war, it can be a viral breakout. It can be so many different things. And if you look though at the lineage, even though we're currently, you're saying we're in a bad position, yes. But if I elongate history right now and I look at how my grandmother lived and I lived, I'm fucking lucky I live now. Oh yeah, I mean. My grandmother lived like, you know, back in the day, the average lifespan was 45 or 47. I didn't want to live till 47. You know, the average lifespan right now is 87, right? Yeah, it depends though. It's like, I'd rather live until 47 with a purpose in life and live until 90 sitting on a couch, you know, and playing video games. That's to say if they had a purpose, I have no idea, right? But I agree, you shouldn't just be sitting down, but eventually what I'm saying is this, you got technology, you got crazy people running countries. We're still running as like apes pre-programmed and conflict happened, shit hits the fan. You learn from it, we get a little bit better. So we got to elongate the time span a lot because we only been here for kind of like a speck in the whole grand scheme of things. So we got to look like a couple of thousand years and we're like, hopefully that time is like, things are good. To be totally, I mean, I understand that position. It's like the Steven Pinker position. I'm not a big fan of that. Not to be a fan because I don't think that. I think that there are certain things that have trade-offs that there are trade-offs that you just can't, so you can't have, you can at the same time have a technocratic society and have a wisdom society. You just can't, like at least not if you put all your energy on the technocratic side, like if you do that, then you're going to have to, you have a limited amount of energy, some things are in a balance and you can't have both. And there's a reason why that why religious traditions have aesthetic practices, like the fact of actually peeling back these garments, peeling back these exteriors is actually a way to send to yourself to enter into something which is aligned and which will help you see purpose and to see the bigger picture. But then that's actually, you get stories in the Bible of like whole city's morning, like everybody's morning in the city and everybody is fasting and all this stuff. Like maybe we would need something like that. That's not going to happen. Like can you, it's not going to happen. Well, people are trying to come up with their own thing. What do they call it? Was it like all these from sober, November, whatever sober October, whatever like that. They inevitably will come back to it because it's like a natural thing to want to do that. But we're lacking, they only want to do it for health purpose. They don't have this idea that you're going to find some kind of, some kind of insight into your life by stripping back some of this. Well, this is once again, what I said, we're like, if people are the problem with modern religion and I wouldn't even relate to the Vatican, I related to like, let's say their local church or mosque, whatever, whatever temple you go to. The fuck, what can I call them? Like, well, in Islam, it's a mom and then there's a father. I don't know, you could call it the whole priest. Yeah, let's call them priests. Yeah, okay. So you got the priest inside this temple and the priest is usually kind of like the person guiding you, right? Okay. They need to update. Like if they had better communication and better updating for like modern times, people will listen to them and it's like, maybe it's my marketing mind thinking over here. Like if they use apps and they... Well, not even apps, like better communication, man. It's like none of this, like, you can take old ideologies and beliefs and update it to the new time and create better. Cause at the end of the day, what you want, you want a better, you want a healthier, better and happier family unit. More better and happier family units create the better society. A better society becomes a richer society. Like it works up from the grassroots. But what we need is not better communication. What we need are saints. But we need our holy people. Like you said before, we need our people who take it seriously. People who act in good faith. People who are trying to look at themselves, transform themselves first, remove their own, remove the splinter from their eye. All of that, all of the things that Christ told us to do, that's the key, that's the solution. That's my favorite quote in the Bible, Matthew seven. But that's what we need to do, you know? And so that's the only, that's the real solution is that, and the only way to go about it is that you have to do it. Like I have to do it, not you. Like I have to do that. Like I have to be that. And if I'm that, then, then, you know, Christ talks about that, you know, if you become a tree, then the birds sit in your, come to sit in your branches. Like if you, if you're transformed as a person, you know, this great quote by Saint Seraphim of Sarov who says, acquire the spirit of peace and a thousand around you will be saved. It's like, if you, if you yourself get transformed, then the world will be transformed. I think this message is generally in most practice. Like, like you look at the Sufi like Rumi as a famous thing. Yesterday I was clever, I want to change the world. Today I'm wise, I want to change myself. Oh, you're right. So I think the message, you just got to get the message to people where it's like, yeah, your, your temple may help you, but the truth isn't out to the truths in you. You got to work on yourself. You got to take responsibility for yourself. But part of that is submitting to something higher than you. Part of it is, is, because one of the biggest obstacle to, to transforming yourself is pride. Like that's the biggest obstacle is to think that I got it, I got this, I'm in charge, I'm doing this, all of that. And one of the reasons why we have churches, one of the reasons why we have spiritual hierarchies is so that you have someone above you who can tell you, dude, you don't, you're, you're, you're, you're off. Like this isn't right. You're not, you're not doing it right. You know, and just that, even just accepting to submit yourself to something higher is already part of the transformation. You know, that's, that's why we have that, you know, because we, we delude ourselves. And if you meet people all the time, you meet, you meet, you meet some person who's spiritual, you know, and is going doing yoga classes and meditation and everything and their life is in complete shambles. Like their relationships are horrible. They've just gotten a divorce. They're fighting for their kids. It's like, my goodness, dude, like that spiritual stuff, like it's not helping you, my friend. It's no good. Not for him, but then some other people that does help. I think it's all case dependent, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, maybe even for myself, like what do I define myself as? I don't believe in capital. So what did you, what did you grow up as? You said, you said you're from. Nothing really, these communists was fucking atheism. Right, yeah, atheism. Like you can't practice by law. You couldn't practice. Like in a nutshell, my family background is a mixture of like Islam and orthodox Christianity from the Balkans. Yeah. Well, for the most part, it's not. Which is atheistic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not like you're atheist by label. You don't, it's just like one by law, you couldn't practice like China, right? And two, it's just like, it's more cultural than anything. It's like cultural beliefs as opposed to like, let's say like religious beliefs. Yeah, yeah. But like for me, it's like, I'm not like, I get what you're saying, but like I'm not guided by the Holy Spirit or something like that. I'm guided by like, how do I become a better me, a better husband, a better partner, a better business person? How do I help people around me? How do I create a better community? Yeah. Like stuff like that. I think there's ways of hybridizing that as opposed to like, I need to have somebody telling me what to do. Well, it's good to have a mix of both. Because we dilute ourselves. Well, people, I mean, you can always pay for a shrink for the shrink to do that for you. Like people do that. I pop five grams of mushrooms and I sit down. Oh man. I mean, yeah, it's like, I understand that's the world we're in. Like what you're saying is the world we're in. And also to a certain extent, the fact that the church has been corrupt and the fact that we've seen all these horrible stories come out in the past years, it's a sad state. Like it's a sad situation. But there's something about, I mean, there's something about talking to someone else, especially someone that does have some kind of power over you. I think what you're referring to is role models, man. Like case example, which is a lot of missing a lot in within boys and men. Like you have absentee fathers. Like for me, my dad was like, was an absentee, but he was like a piece of furniture there, but not there, if you know what I mean. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How's my mom going to show me? I was a fucking nutcase as a child. You're my mom's not going to control me. Bless your soul. But like if you have, if you have like proper role model, not someone telling you, well, Jonathan, this is what you must do. And if you don't listen to me, you're going to go, none of that bullshit, but more or less being a friend, showing them exam, above all, not having a hypocrisy. Yeah, I understand. People say one thing, but the actions speak another thing. Like live by example. Yeah. No, I agree. And that's why, you know, and it's like I said, what we need to a certain extent are saints, even if it's like a little S saints, but when you do get like a, like a capital S saint, you know, you have, you have transformations. Like you, when there is someone who is authentic and real and living it out and not being hypocrite, you know, you can. Is there example of somebody in recent times that you would kind of put in that category? Yeah, they're definitely, they're definitely, I mean, because I'm in the Orthodox Church, there are several elders in Mount Athos who command great respect and who have people who go and get their wisdom and then is able to spread that wisdom around. There's quite a few of those. You know, we have several saints, even some Serbian saints who were in America and who had some great effect and who kind of gave the tone for the church. And so there are people, but there are very few. That's true. And I think the fact that there are so few is why everything's so messed up. Like we just look around and sad, it's kind of sad. So I understand your frustration with big R religion, but at the same time, I don't buy your alternative. I don't have an alternative. I'm just here doing me. I'm not selling anything to anybody. I was like, yeah, well, you know, I just, listen, I go by the golden rule. I'm a simpleton. I'm like, work on yourself, treat others how you want to be treated, do good in the world. And I always say, like focus on the primal things that makes a human being. Work out, be in physical shape, because physical shape will dictate mental shape. Work on your mental health, right? And all these things are interconnected, right? When you feel good, you do good. And so it's like, at least like focusing on the basics. And you can relate the basics. Like these simple things are much easier. Like I'm a firm believer in having a stepping stone and an inception to helping people. Cause let's say you're talking to a 17 year old and I work with a lot of young kids and you start talking about religion, forget about it, right? And I'm not coming from a religious perspective, but if you're talking about, hey man, like I know what you want. I know you want to make money in the future. I know you want to live a good life, but this is how you do it. You know, like take care of yourself, treat people right. You know, like, and obviously have guidance too. It's like, you know, don't just go out with every single girl and just get a girl pregnant being like, like, like very bait, like I'm not talking about complicated fucking things over here. Like you would think, you know, you would think that people would have this and I didn't have any of this mentorship or guidance when I was young. I had to learn everything myself through mistakes, right? No one sat me down. No one gave me this like, you know, you're a good father and I think your kid is blessed to have you. It's like, no one, you know, no one sat me down to have this. And I think a lot of this is just very basic stuff. It's like having a good family structure, having a good community to relate to, having somebody to talk to, having some role models to look at. Like, fuck. So where like, for example, like your community, like where does it come from? If I had to say would be the entrepreneurial community. Okay. Yeah. But then like you look at their behaviors, it aligns to like a lot of responsibility. They got to take care of everybody. They have two families. They have their family, which is their business and their platonic family, right? They got to take care of their health. They got to take care of their mentality. They got to take care of their finances. So to be a successful entrepreneur, like it takes a lot of these building blocks already to beat that level. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. But I think we'll wrap it up that. If people want to get to know more about you and everything, all the work you do, what's the best resource for them? Yeah. I mean, in terms of my speaking, it's really the YouTube channel. You can look me up, Jonathan Pajoe on YouTube or thesymbolicworld.com. That's my website. Usually all of my videos come out on that as well. And yeah, I also am a artist. I make religious art. And people can check out my website, Paschal Carvings. That's usually the best place to find me. All right, guys. Thanks for watching. And also if you're listening to some iTunes, please leave a review and go check out Jonathan's stuff. I will leave a link in the show notes to his carvings. Let's check out his carvings. It's pretty cool. I'm gonna buy one. Well, thanks for your, how can I say this? You know, I know I like that. We're on two different sides of a question and I really appreciate the generosity with which you engage with me. So thanks a lot. Likewise. All the best. All right, all the best.