Ep 241 | People, Angels & Demons: Do They Walk Among Us? | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Summary

Summary of Ep 241 | People, Angels & Demons: Do They Walk Among Us? | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Release Date: January 18, 2025

In Episode 241 of "The Glenn Beck Program," hosted by Glenn Beck on Blaze Podcast Network, Glenn Beck engages in a profound and enlightening conversation with Jonathan Pageau, a renowned Christian artist and public intellectual. This episode explores the intricate relationship between American culture, politics, and deep-seated mythological and symbolic narratives that shape societal perceptions of good and evil.

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1. The Allure of Angels and Demons in Modern Society

Glenn Beck opens the discussion by questioning the fascination with supernatural entities, asking, "Do we live in a world with angels and demons? And if we don't, why do we find the idea so fascinating?" (00:09). This sets the stage for a deep dive into how these concepts reflect broader societal fears and hopes.

Jonathan Pageau explains that humanity's intrigue with angels and demons stems from a "spiritual world" perspective, suggesting that our attraction to these ideas points to "entire dimensions of reality that we are oblivious to" (00:11).

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2. Conspiracy Theories as Reflections of Leadership Distrust

Beck brings up prevalent conspiracy theories, such as "Pizzagate" and the notion of "lizard people," stating, "There's this collective feeling that elites are raping our children and we don't have any evidence" (04:34).

Pageau interprets these theories as symbolic expressions of distrust in leadership. He notes, "People have an insight about our leadership... They see us as just something to feed upon," comparing it to mythological images like the serpent in the Garden of Eden (05:06).

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3. Principality and Transpersonal Agencies

The conversation delves into complex theological concepts when Pageau introduces "principality," describing it as an active principle or force that binds society, akin to a boss in a workplace (11:40). He relates this to modern-day phenomena where collective intentions shape societal outcomes, sometimes leading to chaos and destruction.

Pageau further explains, "These transpersonal agencies spiral into chaos," drawing parallels between mythological demons and contemporary societal issues driven by unseen forces (12:14).

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4. The Nature of Evil and Demonic Influence

Beck presses on the reality of evil entities, asking, "Do you believe in evil as an entity?" (13:59). Pageau affirms his belief in the devil as a parasitic force that distorts good into evil: "Evil doesn't have its own existence. It's a parasite" (14:07).

The discussion touches on how these malevolent forces manifest in society, such as through destructive ideologies or movements that deviate from traditional moral frameworks (14:23).

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5. Societal Breakdown and Historical Cycles

Beck and Pageau explore the idea that American society is on the brink of a significant crisis, comparable to historical moments like the fall of the Roman Empire. Pageau states, "Any culture becomes obsessed with that which is strange signals something about who we are. It signals that we're running out of fuel, on the edge of death" (09:22).

They discuss how contemporary movements like "wokeism" and postmodernism reflect a societal obsession with difference and multiplicity, leading to either decomposition or the rise of authoritarian structures (21:23).

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6. Symbolism in Fairy Tales and Religious Narratives

A substantial portion of the episode examines fairy tales and religious stories as symbolic representations of life's transitions. Pageau analyzes "Snow White," highlighting its themes of coming-of-age, chaos, and the discovery of identity: "It's about transition... a girl, a young girl who is innocent and beautiful... she starts to change" (35:20).

He contrasts this with modern retellings, criticizing how companies like Disney strip away deeper meanings to create sanitized versions that lose their symbolic depth (38:15).

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7. The Decline of Traditional Religious Institutions

Beck and Pageau discuss the diminishing role of churches and traditional religious symbols in modern society. Pageau argues that without these symbolic anchors, society loses its orienting mechanisms, leading to confusion and moral decay: "We need to give these teenagers a way to see something beyond themselves and to participate in it" (30:56).

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8. Architecture as a Symbolic Language

Pageau emphasizes the importance of architecture in conveying cultural values and maintaining societal hierarchies. He criticizes postmodern architecture for its assault on traditional forms, stating, "Postmodern architecture is an assault. It is trying to reprogram us to understand what is inside and what is outside" (52:07).

Beck references iconic structures like Rockefeller Center, interpreting them as deliberate symbols of man’s triumph over traditional values and hierarchy (52:33).

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9. Personal Faith and Discernment

Beck shares a personal anecdote about receiving a mysterious painting of Christ, which he interprets as a divine sign of protection and guidance. This story underscores the episode's theme that meaningful, spiritual experiences often guide individuals through personal and societal turmoil (69:10).

Pageau concurs, highlighting that such experiences are "little glimmers that we are in something bigger," reinforcing the idea that humanity is part of a larger, meaningful reality (81:07).

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10. The Role of Secrets and Symbolism in Society

In the latter part of the discussion, Beck and Pageau explore the symbolism behind modern myths like aliens and UFOs. Pageau posits that these symbols represent humanity's fear and fascination with the unknown: "Aliens exist and UFOs exist... the story is about the alien influence on us" (89:25).

They debate whether these narratives are external threats or manifestations of internal societal issues, ultimately agreeing that such symbols reflect deeper truths about power, control, and trust in leadership (96:19).

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Jonathan Pageau [04:28]: “A good way to understand it is that famous conspiracy theory about the lizard people is a good way to understand it.”

• Jonathan Pageau [12:14]: “These transpersonal agencies spiral into chaos.”

• Jonathan Pageau [14:07]: “Evil doesn't have its own existence. It's a parasite.”

• Glenn Beck [30:56]: “It's the hero generation.”

• Jonathan Pageau [34:12]: “Fairy tales are orienting mechanisms. They help people understand how to be with others and how to orient yourself as you move.”

• Jonathan Pageau [52:07]: “Postmodern architecture is an assault. It is trying to reprogram us to understand what is inside and what is outside.”

• Glenn Beck [69:10]: “You give. And it wants more, of course.”

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Conclusion

Episode 241 of "The Glenn Beck Program" presents a comprehensive exploration of how ancient symbols and modern myths intertwine to shape contemporary American culture and politics. Through the insightful dialogue between Glenn Beck and Jonathan Pageau, listeners gain a deeper understanding of the metaphysical underpinnings of societal behaviors and the critical importance of maintaining traditional values and symbolic narratives to navigate the complexities of modern life.

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Note: Advertisements and non-content segments within the transcript were omitted to focus solely on the substantive discussions.

Transcript

[Glenn Beck]

Everybody, these are violent criminals, so they're.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Not gonna go down easy.

[Glenn Beck]

ABC Tuesdays Cops. Let's get this done. The rookie is back.

[Jonathan Pageau]

We have two new rookies starting today.

[Glenn Beck]

Howdy. Being a cop is stressful. 24 7. Every year on the job is different. And training day, we have a serial killer at large. Never ends. We need an ambulance. The rookie. All new Tuesdays on ABC and stream on Hulu. And now a Blaze Media podcast. I think it was the philosopher Madonna that said, we are living in a material world. She was wrong. We actually live in a spiritual world. We live in the kind of world where the haunted house on the block gives us the heebie jeebies. And you know, where. Where we like people because we get a good feeling. There is no material explanation for that. The only explanation is that there is more to life that we can see, maybe entire dimensions of reality that we are oblivious to. Do we live in a world with angels and demons? And if we don't, why do we find the idea so fascinating? Does it say something about us? Today I have an expert with me you are going to love. He's a guy who has studied the hidden and almost magical world of symbolism. He can explain why, whether it's in our fairy tales or our conspiracy theories. I'm going to talk about all of them and what does it say about us? But we always tell the same stories. Welcome renowned Christian artist, public intellectual and the host of the Symbolic World, Jonathan Pagod. First, before we get to Jonathan. If pain is affecting your life the way it used to affect mine, maybe your resolution for the year 2025 should be make 2025 the year of feeling good again. I suffered from terrible pain in my hands for years. It got so bad I thought I was going to have to quit my job. But I discovered something. Actually, I can't take credit for this. My wife discovered something and then told me to take it. And I'm afraid of my wife at times. So I took it and I got my life back. It completely shocked me. I didn't expect it to work, but it did. Relief Factor. It's a daily supplement that helps your body fight pain by fighting inflammation, which is the source of most of the pain in our bodies and a lot of our disease. It's 100% drug free, developed by doctors to help reduce or eliminate pain. And over a million people have tried relief factors quick start kit. 70% of them have gone on to order it again and again. Make 2025 the year of feeling good. And l trying Relief factor is easy. Get their three week quick start for only 1995. That's less than a dollar a day. Call 800 for relief. 800 the number four relief or relieffactor.com. oh, it's such a clutch off season pickup, Dave. I was worried we'd bring back the same team. I meant Those blackout motorized shades lines.com made it crazy affordable to replace our old blinds. Hard to install. No, it's easy. I installed these and then got some for my mom. She talked to a design consultant for free and scheduled a professional meas and install hall of fame son. They're the number one online retailer of custom window coverings in the world. Blinds.com is the goat.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Go to blinds.com for 40% off site wide. Blinds.com rules and restrictions may apply. Hi.

[Glenn Beck]

I. I said a few weeks ago that there's something going on with all of us. You know, the Pizzagate people, they were wrong, but they weren't wrong in some ways. You know what I mean? There's this collective, this collective feeling that elites are raping our children and we don't have any evidence. I don't know where this has come from, but we now know it looks like that's true all over the world. What is that? What is that?

[Jonathan Pageau]

A good way to understand it is that famous conspiracy theory about the lizard people is a good way to understand it. And what happens is people have an insight about our leadership. And the insight is something like our leaders are supposed to be there for us, but they're not. They're there for something else. And what it is that they want or what it is they're doing isn't clear. They want something else. They want power. They see us as just something to feed upon, you know, and so that gets structured in images. And the image of the lizard person is a great image. Like they look like humans, but they're actually some other thing I've said a million times.

[Glenn Beck]

And I, I know they're not lizard people.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah.

[Glenn Beck]

But would you be surprised if they pulled off a mask? It would make more sense. You know what I mean?

[Jonathan Pageau]

And so that's the way to think about it is you can see these types of crazy conspiracy theories. Pizzagate's another example where some of the details of the thing people are seeing are wrong and they're kind of crazy and over the top. And you know, they get into conspiracy minded, like crazy conspiracy minded ideas. But if you think of the people as like a tuning fork, you know, and they get a sense, they kind of start to vibrate, and they start to sound an alarm, like there's something wrong. There's something wrong about the way that our leaders are acting with us. We have to listen. We don't have to take all the details seriously.

[Glenn Beck]

Correct.

[Jonathan Pageau]

But usually they have. The sense that they have is probably right. And so we can look through the mythological images and realize that, you know, even if, you know, I don't believe in actual lizard people, but the image of the serpent, you know, in the garden, telling, it's.

[Glenn Beck]

We shouldn't be thinking about the serpent or the lizard. We should be thinking about. What is that saying?

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah, what is it saying about the moment in culture and the way in which we interact with our leaders? And that's true about a lot of conspiracy theorists. You can usually, if you take one step, one step back, and you look at it, you can kind of understand it. I remember the conspiracy theory in Covid when they said 5G causes Covid, right? And you're like, whatever. So you realize, no, actually, 5G doesn't cause cause Covid mechanically. But does 5G cause Covid? Like, if we didn't have the connection that we had on the Internet and we didn't have all this way of surveilling and of staying in touch, like, tracking everyone, would there have been the COVID reaction that there was? And the answer is obviously no. A hundred years ago, people would have died, and we would have gone on with our life. And so does 5G cause Covid? Well, in a way, yes. It's not a mechanical cause, but it is something that is like a meaning cause, like, it's related. And the people, like, just the regular Joes, they sense that, but they formulate it in all kinds of weird ways that are sticky. And so I think that there are ways to look at cultural narratives that can help us understand what's happening. If that's what we want, if we want to understand what's happening in the world.

[Glenn Beck]

Yeah, I'd like to.

[Jonathan Pageau]

It's like we can look at these cultural narratives from one step removed, and we can actually understand what's happening.

[Glenn Beck]

So what are the cultural narratives that you're seeing that you're like, well, one.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Of them is the lizard people. One is a good one to understand. And it has to do with the fetishization of or the obsession with that, which is strange. It's a good way of thinking about it, right? So you have your world, right? You have your story. You have your identity. No matter which one it is, it doesn't matter. You have your family. And then there are elements that are strange, that don't belong. And what's been happening now for the past, since World War II, really, is we're obsessed with that question. So on the one hand, we fetishize that which is strange. So you have narratives, like basically the idea that anything that's not my identity is better. Right. So we fetishize other cultures, we fetishize other things. Or it's the opposite. Or we kind of fall into this idea that we're in danger. We have. We're being invaded from without in all kinds of ways. The people with bad intentions that are trying to influence our children or that are trying to come in and take our jobs or whatever it is.

[Glenn Beck]

But both of those, a step back are absolutely true.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Right, right.

[Glenn Beck]

Okay.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah. And so both of those are showing a moment in culture that is worth noticing, which is that when any culture becomes obsessed with that which is outside, it signals something about who we are. It signals something about how we're running out of our own, of ourselves. We're running out of fuel. We're on the edge of death, you could say. So the end of a world has a shape. It looks a certain way. When the Roman Empire was close to its own, you know, its own fall, the young people were obsessed with the barbarians. They actually, like, people would complain that they dressed like the barbarians, they would wear pants, and they would wear their hair like their enemy. And so it's like, what. What does that mean? And it signals that we're nearing some kind of crisis is a good way to think about it.

[Glenn Beck]

So I got so many questions on just that. So let me start here. Chicken and the egg.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah.

[Glenn Beck]

What's happening first and how do we all connect that? I mean, I find it strange people are finding God. You know, they're questioning demons. Now I talk to atheists who say there's no other way to describe what's happening other than evil. And around the world, we're all protesting the same things our governments are doing. This is global in its nature, and that makes it feel otherworldly. It makes it feel like that evil is an actual force. And I don't think the average American and especially European have been there in a long time.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah, well, there's definitely something happening. And like you said, there's a phenomena that's happening in every field simultaneously, which is materialism is running out, the mechanical explanations of things, the way that we describe things as basically billiard balls bumping into each other is not sufficient. And people are reaching that conclusion in science, in psychology, in all the different fields simultaneously, it's the problem of complexity, it's the problem of emergence. They have different ways of talking about it. It's like, how do we account for how multiplicity becomes one? Like, how can something be? Many things, like, have parts, but then also be. You can see it as one thing. And how does that work in terms of people? Right? So it's like, how is America one thing? America is billions of. It's like millions and millions and millions of things.

[Glenn Beck]

But if I. If I may, Our whole country was built on e pluribus unum. And our unum were the principles that built us that we don't share those anymore.

[Jonathan Pageau]

That's right. And that's what I think people are noticing, is that the way that people join together into one is not arbitrary. There has to be something. It has to be a principle or a principality. You can say it in different ways. That is overseeing or that is binding multiplicity together.

[Glenn Beck]

Explain Principality. Interesting word.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Well, so principality is an. Is something like a principle, but a principle that's active, right? It's acting on us. And so a boss is a principality for all intents and purposes. You know, so you have a boss, you have a team, and the boss is trying to embody the purpose of the team, but he's doing it actively. It's not just a passive principle that we all kind of follow. It's like, if you don't follow this, there'll be punishment.

[Glenn Beck]

So that could be. There'll be reward and all that stuff beyond a boss. God and Satan.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Satan, but also all kinds of principalities, right? So that's why when you said the idea of demons, in some ways we're at a point where the question or the possibility of angels and demons all of a sudden becomes prescient. Again, where I'm talking to cognitive psychologists and they use fancy words, you know, they talk about, you know, they talk about transpersonal agency, right? What the. What are we talking about? What's a transpersonal agency? It means that they. Recognizing patterns of agency that are beyond the human person. And they realize that when people act together in groups that there's something binding them together and there's something making them work towards a single goal. And that something like an angel. They won't use the word angel, but that's really what it is that they're slowly kind of pointing to and that there are some of these transpersonal agents, agencies that spiral into chaos, right? They kind of spiral you down into breakdown. They capture you think about a street gang. A street gang has a type of transpersonal agency, but it's devouring the people inside. It's basically just destroying them. So it's like, well, what's that? Well, that's a demon. That's what we used to call a demon. Now people don't want to use that word. But it's in some ways becoming. We're moving towards a position where it's becoming better to actually use these terms to understand. And it's really to understand because what you want to do is to be able to see what's happening and to recognize what's going on. When you have a kind of intellectual fashion or some kind of idea that starts to capture people and push them in a direction, that's a type of agency. It wants something.

[Glenn Beck]

Okay, so wait, let's just explain a couple of things. Do you believe in evil as an entity?

[Jonathan Pageau]

I would say I believe that. I mean, I believe in the devil. Yes, I do believe in the devil. I believe that the evil. Evil doesn't have its own existence. It's a parasite. That's the best way of understanding it. It's like it takes something good and it twists it.

[Glenn Beck]

Correct.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Right.

[Glenn Beck]

But it has its own, it has.

[Jonathan Pageau]

A coherence to it. It has a type of coherence.

[Glenn Beck]

And so when you're looking at things happening all around the world, I mean I think we're seeing possession all the time. You watch people on TV and sometimes they absolutely look possessed. They act like possessed people and it's all part of this insanity that's going on. What I want to know is, are you saying that this is a physical thing that you start getting wrapped up into this and then you just go down? Or are you saying no, no, no, this is an outside force that is coming in and invading and we're just ripe for the picking.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah, I think the best way to understand it is as. Especially for a demon, the best way to understand it is as an outside force. Because the reason why we think of it that way is because let's say the, the transpersonal agency, let's say that's making you drink, let's say like it doesn't want good for you, it's bringing you on a path that's actually destroying you. And so if you think about that like at a higher level in terms of a group, if you have a group that's engaging in absolutely self destructive behavior, that cannot be, say it cannot be an inner truth, it's an outer truth, it's something that is, that has intentions that are from something else. So you can imagine, like, we have to be careful. We have to, I try to try to keep it as, as, let's say, grounded as possible. Right. So you have a foreign government, right. That foreign government has interest in your government, let's say, falling apart. So they would be willing to influence your people, let's say funding drug gangs or funding all kinds of things that will bring the breakdown of your. Of your or your people. And so you're like, well, that's a foreign influence. Right? And that's how to think about it. You can think about it in terms of, let's say, another government. But sometimes there's also something happening even at higher levels where you have beings that have other intentions that are affecting us and bringing us towards our own destruction. Usually it has to do with, let's say, just gaining power for that being. Right. It's like anger, let's say, in a person. It's like if you give in to the sin of anger, it's like anger wants to be primordial. Right. It wants to rule you. It wants to take over all your energies, the gambling or you can think of all the things that take over people. But that happens in societies too. So, I mean, we've seen like this rainbow stuff. Like that's part of, like it's completely coherent and it wants something and it's infecting or it's taking over people's minds.

[Glenn Beck]

It just is destructive.

[Jonathan Pageau]

And it's destructive to them, destructive to our society.

[Glenn Beck]

Everything. Because it's. You cannot feed it, it just keeps consuming. Yeah, you give. And it wants more, of course. Yeah.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Because it wants everything.

[Glenn Beck]

Right.

[Jonathan Pageau]

It wants to take and is willing.

[Glenn Beck]

To destroy whatever stands in its way.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Exactly. And so that's a good way to understand it. And the best way to understand it, like, so that you don't fall into just woo stuff or like kind of magical thinking, is to think about a foreign influence, like to think about a government that is affecting us. And so let's say for the rainbow stuff, you can realize that there's an actual principality, like a kind of some transpersonal agency, a demon that is. That wants something and is devouring us. And you'll also have foreign agents that are willing to feed that because it's to their advantage that you're destroyed. And so all of this makes sense. Like, it means that you can trace sometimes the causalities. You can say, oh, I can see that there are people with bad intentions that are influencing us towards something. But They're. They're doing it using some. A bigger story, which is, you know, basically a coherent path towards destruction. You know, like any society that. Any society that starts to emphasize behaviors that lead you away from just having children is a society on its deathbed. It's a society that's moving towards its own destruction.

[Glenn Beck]

Objective.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah, just very, very objective. Like, very Darwinian. Almost like. Just like if you don't have children, you stop existing. It's very simple.

[Glenn Beck]

Right. So you just brought up Darwin. Where did we begin to go wrong this time? Is it Darwin? Is it the bomb? Is it science? What is it? Because I've never in my lifetime seen people interact and talk about the things en masse. Like, we're talking. I was just sitting here thinking, 20 years ago, I could have had you on the podcast, and I would have been thinking the whole time, I don't know who's getting this. I don't know who's getting this. I'm interested, but I don't know. But now this is the kind of stuff the average person they can see. Yeah. At least can recognize and go, yeah, I think I've seen kind of that for sure.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Our world is based on our world now. And all of the positive and negative elements of our world is based on World War II. It is related in some extent to the bomb and also to the things that we did during World War II. Because one of the problems you can have, think about it this way, is that, let's say nations have identities. They have a transpersonal type of agency. And During World War II, the fascists got that wrong. They treated that as an idol. They basically, we have this national identity or this ethnic identity, and this is ours, and it belongs to us, and we're going to raise it up superior to everybody else. Everything we've been seeing since then in some ways has been kind of a reaction to that. So we actually now are very suspicious of identity. And we tend to emphasize things that are diminutive of identity. And so we want equality. All these things are not bad in themselves. They're just dangerous if you don't see where. If you push them too far, where it goes. And so we want equality, we want difference, we want multiplicity, we want variety. And then if you push that too far, then at some point, it becomes decomposition, because variety without unity is just basically death. It's decomposition. So that's where we are. You can see it like, after World War II, the next generation become the hippies, and then you can just cycle it in a few cycles and then you end up with basically like kind of crazy woke culture right now. It's directly related. That's why there's a feeling of Marxism in the wokeism. There's a feeling of like kind of postmodern multiplicity. There's revolutionary ideas in all of the woke stuff. And it's all because I think it's like a wave that started at the end of World War II.

[Glenn Beck]

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[Jonathan Pageau]

I think that's a good way of thinking about it. You know that it's hard to know how big the cycle is.

[Glenn Beck]

I keep saying it's the biggest in my lifetime. You know, this isn't the Jesus movement of the 70s. This is. There's deep, deep rot here.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah, I think that that's the best way to think about it is that there are natural cycles. Natural in the sense that societies and individuals, they emphasize certain things and that leads to certain counterbalance. And so you have these kind of cycles that the thing is, how big is this moment? That's the question. Because we're clearly at the end of something. We kind of feel we're at the end of something. We can even see the new beginning kind of peeking through in these insights. The fact that, for example, people are now normal people. Who would have thought, talking about transpersonal agencies or angels or demons would have thought you were just a kooky, crazy person are now saying, well, actually, no, I kind of see that this is part of the world. This is a new beginning. This is something that's kind of peeking through.

[Glenn Beck]

That's the green shoot, if you will.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah, possibly. It might also be negative in some ways too, because people are like, oh, you know, there are transpersonal agents. They're demons. Where can we talk to these people? Can we talk to these beings and, you know, have them influence us? You know, you have these. You have all these stories of tech people, you know, who take psychedelics in order to kind of receive information from the other side, you know, even to build their technologies.

[Glenn Beck]

It's very similar. I don't know if you've ever read the book. I think you'd love it. Hitler's Monsters. And it was a guy who wanted to write the quintessential book on. He started out, was this a Christian movement or not? And he went back and he found the deep, deep roots. Once you get rid of God, then you start going back to witchcraft and everything else. And he showed that Nietzsche is right and you're going to find a God. But their God was a mixture of science, technology, science, and then the occult. And that's really kind of where we are now.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah, I think you're right. And there is a. There's kind of a hidden strain of history that most people don't know, which is the development of kind of esoteric and occult thinking. And that's definitely now. I mean, now it's weird because it's in the popular sphere. You know, you have people, like regular people who are interested in these things, say they're witches or interest, you know, are casting spells.

[Glenn Beck]

Yeah, it's bizarre.

[Jonathan Pageau]

So it's a very. It's like as if this thing that used to be kind of elite and in the secret societies and all this stuff has now become almost like we have a witchcraft school at the. Like two streets from my house. It's like it's a witchcraft school. I don't know what they're.

[Glenn Beck]

They're teaching Canada. Yeah.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah.

[Glenn Beck]

What are they teaching?

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I didn't go in to figure out. I'm sure they're teaching people how to cast spells and to do all that stuff. So it's very weird. Yeah. We're in a very. So in every town in Canada, for example, now in Quebec, where I'm from, know there used to be. Used to be the most Catholic place in the world, and now every little town has, like a new age, you know, shop, but the churches are closing down.

[Glenn Beck]

Yeah, yeah. So when you say that people are casting spells and new age stuff, people think they're just shredding. It's just shedding religion, which is a man's, you know, man sees and hears God and then his way to interpret and be able to get a group together and pass that information on through religion. They think they're just shedding that, but it's. You don't just. You can't leave the vacuum.

[Jonathan Pageau]

No, that's impossible. And that's why you can see it. One of the things funny, because one of the things that the Internet has done is made people aware of these agencies that are running through us because they used to, let's say, these types of agencies used to act on us over long periods of time, so maybe generations, you don't see it. But now we're seeing it happen very quickly because of the Internet. So we're seeing these things take over, like virality in general. Like, you obviously see something. Everybody cares about something for like 10 minutes, and then it's gone. It's like, what is this? How is it mobilizing people? And we're seeing it definitely happen in social spheres. And it seems like one of the things that there was hope or some of the elites wanted to do was realizing that we have this religious problem and trying to substitute it with a kind of green, like a kind of environmental religion or also the rainbow type religion, transgenderism, all that stuff presented like the trans is sacred aspect of the LGBT movement, realizing we need some kind of religious theory, and so we're going to do this with these. These other structures. But in a religion isn't arbitrary. You can't just decide what it is.

[Glenn Beck]

You get people together. Religious movement in. In the, you know, in the BC days, there. There were times where societies would have these gods.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah.

[Glenn Beck]

And the men would become women. And it would celebrate, you know, abortion. Abortion. And all the things that we're doing, we're just casting it in a different light. But it's. It's the same thing when you tell me that, no, there's something that's in you, but it's not physical. And it's telling you that you're not really a boy or a girl. You're Recasting the soul.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah.

[Glenn Beck]

And then. And attaching something to it that the soul wouldn't tell you.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah, yeah. You're feeding on a narrative and a story and an agency that is beyond your individual. So you can think about it this way. It's pretty simple. Like, in terms of phenomena, you can get it. It's like a teenager is in a moment of transition. Right. A teenager is no longer a child, is moving away from the parents, and in that moment of transition is the time where you want to cast that being. That's why we would have initiation ritual. We'd have all these kind of things to kind of say, we're going to, like, we're going to take this problem of someone in transition and confused and asking questions, and we're going to give it a direction, you know? And so all of the. Yeah. Bar Mitzvah is a good example. And so it makes sense that there's another force there. All kinds of things are trying. That's why teenagers are always the, you know, the prey of, like, rock and roll culture or all these things. And the. I mean, the LGBT stuff is just the most recent one, which is like, someone, a teenager, is confused and saying. And then they say, well, we have an answer for that confusion. We can explain to you why you don't know who you are. We can explain to you why you have these feelings that make you feel like you're alienated from your body. And it's totally normal when you reach puberty to be alienated from your body because you're going through such rapid changes that you are, in some ways becoming a kind of potential for. On which, you know, a community. Exactly. That's a good. So that's the moment to get people. It's like in that moment of puberty, you can completely capture people towards something. And so we have to. If we're. If we know that, if we can see it, we have to be able to formulate positive answers, because this is one of the issues that we have, is that one of the problems that's happened, I think, in North America is that we focus so much on the individual and everything that we just want the teenager, for example, to just, like, to figure themselves out. But that's not what's happening when you're a teenager. You're actually looking for allegiance. You're looking. That's why teenagers follow all these weird fashions and all. So they're looking to connect. So we have to find ways to give these teenagers a way to see something beyond themselves and to participate in it. And if we don't, someone else will.

[Glenn Beck]

So it's, it's, it's interesting because you, the ones who are now waking up, Generation Z, they're not buying any of this bull crap. And they're the ones that I think are going to save the world in the end. They're the hero generation. But we have acquiesced as parents and society. We've acquiesced to the scientists, to the doctors, to the experts. Experts. And we just stand there quietly, even though we know the experts have no idea what they're talking about. No idea. And we're seeing now the results of it. And is that because the churches just became irrelevant?

[Jonathan Pageau]

I think it might be in some part because the churches failed to understand the grandeur of what they were holding. And so one of the things that we saw in the late 19th and 20th century is that in some ways the churches became very materialistic. And on the one hand they were like, well, we believe in God, we believe in all this stuff, but we also think that really it's science. Like, it really it's science.

[Glenn Beck]

Right.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Like, but what.

[Glenn Beck]

But wait, wait, wait.

[Jonathan Pageau]

I'm not against science, but I'm not saying that science isn't real, but science explains mechanical causes. It doesn't capture meaning, I think.

[Glenn Beck]

Exactly. I think if there is a God, he's the greatest scientist, because this is all math, of course. Okay, but that doesn't. Math's not behind all this. You know, math is how it exists and how it works. But that's not the mind behind the math.

[Jonathan Pageau]

And that's exactly the way of thinking about it, is that humans are a joining of mind and matter. You know, they're joining of intention, of will, of. Of, you know, agency and capital.

[Glenn Beck]

M. Mind.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah. And so I think that one of the things that happened is in some ways the church or the Christians, they lost sight of what they were holding. Like the story, the world view, you could say that they were holding, and they reduced it to morality and science, basically. But what we have is way more than that. Like the vision that's presented in the Bible and the vision that's presented in the. The Christian cosmology or the religious cosmology is something like an orienting structure. It helps people understand how to be. How to be with others and how to orient yourself as you move. And if we forget that, then we have this problem, which is that someone else is going to take it from you and someone else is going to take that from you, because that's actually how we exist. And so one of the things we've been trying to do, you know, in the past few years is say, how can we help people connect again with these things? You know, like, that's why, like, what I do on the symbolic world is basically help people see how the stories, not just the Bible, but, you know, even like our fairy tales, the different kind of cultural stories that we have, that they are these orienting mechanisms. There are ways for you to identify with a purpose and a group or, you know, a value and then orient yourself with others towards that, you know.

[Glenn Beck]

So I've often thought, you know, Grimm's fairy tales, they're really grim. The real ones are grim. You know, I know you just redid Snow White and took all the Disney stuff out of it and made it the real tale. These were simply ways to tell a story to prepare you for life.

[Jonathan Pageau]

That's what it is. That's right, yeah.

[Glenn Beck]

In a way you could understand as a child. Yeah.

[Jonathan Pageau]

And you didn't even have to understand it. It really is like how when you train a child in doing something, they don't understand the fullness of what it is that they're doing because they don't have maturity anyways. It's giving them a kind of pattern of being in which to embark. And that's why people often don't understand the fairy tales. They think that the fairy tales are morality tales, but they're not. They're much deeper than that. They really are orienting mechanisms. And so that's one of the things we were trying to do with these fairy tales is say, can we represent them to the world in a way that will play that role again?

[Glenn Beck]

So tell me the story of Snow White. What's important in the actual story of Snow White?

[Jonathan Pageau]

Well, the story of Snow White is really a lot of the fairytales, especially these types of fairy tales, they are about transition. So they're really about a child becoming an adult. And so in the story of Snow White, it's a girl. And so it's like there is a kind of coming of age aspect to it. There is, there is. And this is funny because a lot of the Christians, they don't like the fact that the secular people have told them there's a sexual element to the story. And the truth is there is, but it's not just a sexual story, but there is an aspect of it which has to do with sexual maturation, which has to do with finding your place in the world and just in general kind of going through Chaos and finding your own identity. Right. That basic story trope of you're somewhere, you kind of fall into a kind of confusion and chaos. And then you find your way out and you're in a better place. That's what happens during a teenage years, by the way. And so the story of Snow White is about that for a girl, it's like a girl, a young girl who is innocent and beautiful. As she starts to change, she now at first faces all the negative consequences of that jealousy from the other women. All these. All these men that are kind of like a caricature of men that. There are these little men. Yeah. That are like just dopey and Sneezy or whatever, that they can't be my mate. So they're kind of disgusting, right? These men that. And I have to work and I have to clean the house and I have to serve these men that aren't. And I don't know what it is. And I've just gone through this kind of chaos where I'm thrown into this world where everything is changing. And then the story of Snuide is about that image as a kind of death. It is related in some extent to a young girl kind of reaching the age where she starts her menstrual cycle. And so. And then she really. Then she finds out what it's all about. Like, what does this change for what is happening? And then she meets the prince. That's what it's for. That's what this whole change was for. Like, you were a little girl, you become a woman. And then you realize it's not just pain and it's not just annoyance. There's something beautiful and powerful that can come out of it. And that's why it ends with a wedding. That's why it ends with, like, finding the prince. The idea of finding the prince isn't like a ridiculous kind of dream of a little girl. It's like that's how you make people. That's how society continues. So you don't help children. I have to tell you, it's so obvious, isn't it?

[Glenn Beck]

It is.

[Jonathan Pageau]

It's like. It's so obvious.

[Glenn Beck]

It is.

[Jonathan Pageau]

If you help children reach there, then they were going to lose themselves in the forest before they get there.

[Glenn Beck]

That is fantastic. Disney has given us this little fantasy that you have to have this big elaborate dress and wedding and everything else, and you're gonna be a fairy princess. And I hate. As a dad of three children, four daughter, three daughters. It drives me out of my mind that that's Cause that's coming from this, it's coming from the Disney. And they've lost everything else.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah, well, right now, Disney, they basically decided to throw the fairy tales out. They don't want them because what's in them for them is fire. Like, they can't touch it. They don't understand it. They. They just see it through their own little political lens. And so, you know, they're making a version of Snow White now. That's one of the reasons why we published this book was because I found out through the grapevine around 20, 20, 2021 that Disney was going to put out a version of Snow White, live action. And I thought, they can't. They can't do it. They can't have. There's so many things in the story that they can't do because of all their. Because of their kind of weird ideological position. They thought this is the moment where we need to take these stories back, take them back, present them beautifully. You know, we have. We're doing it in an amazing way with an amazing illustrator, world class illustrator, beautiful.

[Glenn Beck]

He's a beautiful book.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Like kind of, let's say, yeah, heirloom book. Like a treasure, not like a throwaway thing, something you put up on the shelf. And you have to ask your parents, you know, can we read Snow White again? And so that's what we want. It's like, let's do this. Because a lot of conservatives, they complain. You know, it's like we complain about.

[Glenn Beck]

The state of culture, but we don't do anything.

[Jonathan Pageau]

But we don't do. And that's what we want to do.

[Glenn Beck]

So. But I think that's changed. I think.

[Jonathan Pageau]

I hope so.

[Glenn Beck]

Yeah, I think so. What other stories are you telling?

[Jonathan Pageau]

And so what we're doing is we're doing eight fairy tales, kind of like eight of the most known fairy tales. And we're doing them in a series. So we're doing Snow White. The next one is Jack and the Beanstalk. It's called Jack and the Fallen Beans.

[Glenn Beck]

Tell me, tell me what that really means.

[Jonathan Pageau]

So what I wanted too is like I wanted a girl and boy line in the fairy tales, right? So you have a coming of age story of a girl, then you have the coming of age story of a boy and Jack. That's what Jack is about. And everything is in the story. Once you kind of understand the basic images, you can see what it is. So Jack doesn't have a father. He's with his mother and they're running out of food and it's Imaged as a cow that's running out of milk, and that's his mother. His mother and the cow are related in the sense that she doesn't have a husband. She's running out of fertility. So is the cow. And so his mom's like, you have to go sell the cow off so that we can have food. But that means death, right?

[Glenn Beck]

It's like.

[Jonathan Pageau]

I mean, just like in the story of Elijah and the widow. It's like, well, I'm just gonna go and spend my last money, and then we're gonna eat the food, and then we're gonna die, right? And so Jack discovers seed. So the discovery of seed is both his own transformation into a man, but it's also something more. It's also something like. What's a seed? A seed is like the pattern of food, right? It's not food. Just one seed. What is that worth? It's nothing. But if you know what it is, if you understand what it is, you can eat forever, right? And so that's. So it's like it is magic seed. But then seed is magic already because that's what it is. So the rest of the story is about him becoming a man, facing the problems of manhood, right? Goes up into the. Goes up the hierarchy, encounters the men that just want to devour him, right? That just want to use their authority and their power to crush him. And he has to find his way through that pattern and find this hierarchy of patterns. That's a way to think about it, right? So he finds the first a seed, and it's like, well, what's better than a seed? You know, it's like, seed. You can. What does it mean? What is. I don't know what it means. So he goes up. He goes up into the beanstalk, and the first time he gets his bag of gold, that's something like, in terms of becoming a man, in terms of understanding what it means to be responsible, what it means to have authority. It's like, if I have gold, I could buy food. Huh. That's an interesting idea. I don't need food, but I have gold. I can buy food. But then there's a problem, right? That runs out. So what's better than gold? Well, the thing that makes gold. So the next one he gets is a chicken that lays golden eggs. That sounds stupid in the story, but it's like, well, it doesn't matter. Basically, first he finds gold, then he finds the thing that makes gold. If I can have that, then I'm good. I can eat forever. Right. And so that's the story of Jack. And the final one he gets is. And that's the one it took me forever to understand, which is that he first gets gold, then he gets a chicken that lays golden eggs, and then he gets a harp. Thinking, what's the relationship between all that? I can kind of see the other ones. Right. It's like value, you know? And what I finally realized is that when he gets the singing harp, he's basically getting the pattern of everything. Something like the Logos, something like the song of the world or the. You know, the music of the spheres, they used to say. Basically kind of being able to perceive the pattern of everything as he's in the highest point of heaven or something like that. And so that is what makes everything move. Right. The music that Aslan created the world with. Something like that.

[Glenn Beck]

That's what he's getting, Right?

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah.

[Glenn Beck]

Talk to me about religious stories or fairy tales. Some would say Jonah and the Whale. Yeah.

[Jonathan Pageau]

What's going on?

[Glenn Beck]

What is going on with that?

[Jonathan Pageau]

Jonah and the Whale is a beautiful. It's one of the most powerful stories in scripture. I want to be cautious. I think that fairy tales, for example, in the secular world are the closest thing to scripture that we have. But they're not nothing compared to scripture. Scripture is astounding. Like, the story of scripture is astounding.

[Glenn Beck]

So scripture is God's knowledge given. This is man's knowledge put in stories.

[Jonathan Pageau]

It's like a pale reflection. It's like a more embodied. You know, for kids, this is easier to kind of absorb. Some of the images in scripture are. They're harder. They're harder to see. But once you see them, you know, it's really astounding. So Jonah. You can think about Jonah as. Again, this idea that Jonah is called towards something, right? So think about Snow White. Right? Snow White is facing a transition. She's becoming a woman. But that. What. How do we do this? So Jonah doesn't want that purpose. He wants his own purpose. So what? He has to do what? Sadly, because of that, he has to fall. He has to go down. He has to come back up. So the story of Jonah, you can think about it as the entire story of humanity. It's like Adam is called towards something, and he's like, no, I want myself. And God's like, okay, well, you're gonna make it, but it's gonna. You're gonna have to go low. Like, you're gonna have to go through a lot of pain and suffering until you finally come to what my Purpose is for you. And so that's really what. The story of Jonah. It's a repetition of the whole story of the Bible, right? Because it. It starts with God calling him a refusal, and it ends in a city that is saved. That's the story of the Bible, right? It starts in the garden, refusal of Adam, and it ends with the heavenly Jerusalem. It's like a little image of what the whole Bible is about. And there are, you know, there are different images that you can see. The story of Jonah is also a bit of a comedy. It's like everything in the story is kind of upside down. It's kind of making fun, not making fun, but, you know, presenting things in an ironic way so you understand the message. You can also understand it as a, let's say, a backward. A return from the fall as well, right? So you go backwards from death, and then you go back up, and then you go into the city, which comes after the fall, and then after that, he goes into the garden with the plants and the. And the serpent. And so it's like this whole structure that follows basically the story of the Bible. It's really. It's really astounding.

[Glenn Beck]

So what's your background?

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah, it's weird. It's weird. I. You know, I studied. I studied art, and I was always interested in ideas. I became very disillusioned with, let's say, academia quite quickly. And I saw. Because a lot of the crazy postmodern stuff that we have now in popular culture, in the world of art, was there long time ago. Long time ago. So all the ideas that are now bearing fruit.

[Glenn Beck]

Where do you think that started? What art period do you think that started? That we're kind of still seeing today?

[Jonathan Pageau]

I mean, it really is actually early 20th. So everything that we're dealing with now was already there in the first decades of the 20th century. So Cubism and Dada are the model for all the postmodern, like Dada is. Basically. We've kind of accepted Dada and surrealism as the worldview that we live in.

[Glenn Beck]

Now, which is insane.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Which is completely crazy.

[Glenn Beck]

I mean, we're gonna. People will dig up our societies, you know, and wonder, what are we celebrating? Was that a building?

[Jonathan Pageau]

Nobody will guess that this.

[Glenn Beck]

Yeah, they won't ever think that that was art.

[Jonathan Pageau]

I mean, think about it, you know, the very idea. Even normal people, like, even us, will catch yourself thinking that something that has value is valuable because it's different. That's a very strange way of thinking, by the way. But we think that we Think that artists should be different, that artists are always manifesting, like, a new way of doing things. But that's not how the ancients understood the arts. That's not how the ancient arts were. The artists were celebratory.

[Glenn Beck]

Right, right.

[Jonathan Pageau]

They were there to celebrate things. And so they were. That's what.

[Glenn Beck]

And they weren't celebrating themselves and their own identity.

[Jonathan Pageau]

No. Their participation in the bigger story, their participation in. In the state, their participation in their religious tradition. That's what the artists used to do. And now we have this weird idea that artists have to question authority, that artists are questioning the narrative that they're always deconstructing. And so while I was studying art, I was reading a lot of postmodern philosophy, just reading Derrida, reading Lyotard and Baudrillard, all these French theorists. And there was something about it that was kind of breaking me. That was. That was causing insight in me. And at the same time, my brother Matthew, who wrote an amazing book about symbolism, if people want to know, he was also kind of in that same questioning period. So in our 20s, we started discussing and reading and talking, and we started. And that's what led me to become Orthodox Christian, which is that I started to see the patterns in the Bible and the pattern in the architecture and in the art and in the music and thinking, oh, wow, this is like. It's like a tuning thing.

[Glenn Beck]

It's the whole package.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah. It's this whole way of being and of seeing. And I started to explore that, you know, all through my 20s and 30s. But it's weird. It's kind of like what you said before about how if we had had this conversation 20 years ago, people wouldn't have understood. Both my brother and I felt like we had found this key way of seeing the world, but that when we tried to explain it to others, they just didn't. They didn't understand it or they didn't even know what the subject was. Like, what are you talking about? And then, I mean, so I continued on my world, becoming an artist and also writing about traditional Christian symbolism, you know, writing about iconography, writing about architecture.

[Glenn Beck]

And that's what. That's the kind of art you do.

[Jonathan Pageau]

That's the kind of art that I. That I do. I don't do a lot now, but. Because I've been kind of taken on this weird.

[Glenn Beck]

Right.

[Jonathan Pageau]

This weird thing, so.

[Glenn Beck]

But you were just. So people understand. You built altars.

[Jonathan Pageau]

And so I make. Yeah, I make images for churches. That's what I did for many years. Professionally, you know, icons, carvings, making croziers for, you know, just objects that are used in the church or images. And that's what I did for many years. And I wrote about it. I started with a friend of mine, something called the Orthodox Art Journal, where I wrote about the symbolism. But I always knew that it wasn't just about religious art, that it was actually about all stories and all images.

[Glenn Beck]

I mean, because that's where this came from, isn't it? I mean, it was a way to tell. Thomas Jefferson said something I just absolutely love. If you want people to know what you and your culture was about, embed it in the architecture.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah.

[Glenn Beck]

And so that's really. What they were doing, was embedded, embedding it everywhere, telling the story in as many different ways as you can. Right.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah. And the architecture is. I really believe, honestly, that architecture is the most important art.

[Glenn Beck]

I agree.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Because it tells you what's inside, what's outside. It tells you. It gives you a relationship to hierarchy. It gives you a relationship to identity itself. And it's completely unconscious. You don't have to think about it. You just realize. And we know that.

[Glenn Beck]

So it's that feeling when you walk into a place and you're just like, oh, my gosh, I feel so good here. I feel I just want to stay here forever.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah, exactly.

[Glenn Beck]

It comes from the way it was.

[Jonathan Pageau]

All designed and the appropriateness. Right. And so it's not like there's one type of, let's say, architecture, one type of space, but there are spaces that are designed to do certain things. Right? So, you know, like a den where you're smoking cigars is not the same as a grand hall where you're gonna have a ceremony or something. And so all of these. This way of thinking is really. And so postmodern architecture is an assault. It is an assault on humanity. And it is trying to reprogram us to understand what is inside and what is outside and what is, you know, what is above and what is below. Even the modern skyscraper. Think about, you know, in the middle. In the Middle Ages or later than that, there were literally rules that said you weren't allowed to build anything higher than the church in the. In the. In the town. And that was in order to establish the right hierarchy. It's like, what's the highest thing? Well, God's the highest thing. And then maybe the, you know, the civil building will be the other one. And we have this kind of this. It's embedded in the land, in our perception, in our engagement with space. But when you go into New York, you're like, well, what's the highest thing? It's the banks. We know that it's the banks. It's not the church anymore. They are the ones that rule. And it creates this whole sense of. It shifts hierarchy. And then postmodern architecture does that towards the idea of difference or deconstruction or multiplicity or variability. And so we have these buildings that are completely wacky and that are completely wild and try to actually subvert your sense of inside and outside and your sense. And it makes people sick. Like, it makes you sick.

[Glenn Beck]

Have you ever done any research on Rockefeller Center?

[Jonathan Pageau]

I mean, I know a little bit about it.

[Glenn Beck]

I was hammered for saying that is a temple to man.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah.

[Glenn Beck]

And it's all embedded. I mean, I could take you around that and show you everything and say, that's what this means. That's what this means.

[Jonathan Pageau]

I mean, they have a statue of Prometheus right there in the. Outside there.

[Glenn Beck]

Right. And I'm always amazed that people will walk by. I think it's, in its own way, a very beautiful building, a beautiful collection of buildings. But you just walk by it and you have no idea. That building is screaming to you. I mean, even Atlas, across the street from St. Patrick's Atlas holding the World, Challenging the Church. It's amazing.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah. And the thing that people don't realize, and that's the thing about Breakdown, is that at first, there's something shiny about it. Like this idea of celebration of man. It can look really shiny at the beginning, but what's downstream from Rockefeller center is strip malls. Like, that's what's downstream from Rockefeller. And it's like just, you know, like the suburbs. This, like.

[Glenn Beck]

No, no, no. Literally, underground is the first mall.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah, There you go.

[Glenn Beck]

It was literally the thing under the grass and the concrete.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah, yeah. So you can. You can see that. Like you said, if we don't celebrate the right things in the right place, then it leads us to breakdown. So someone who could go to the Rockefeller center and say, well, why can't we make things like this anymore? You know? And it's. It's actually because they made this that we can't. Because they. They didn't understand that if you have to celebrate something that transcends you first, and then everything else can come downstream from that.

[Glenn Beck]

Well, they. But they did. They did. It was man and machine and the powerful and the money that came from.

[Jonathan Pageau]

I mean, Atlas and Prometheus, these are all images of their titans.

[Glenn Beck]

Yeah. But you walk into the lobby and it originally was kind of a weird ode to science and the machine and Marxism, and it still is kind of now. It's an amazing thing. But they picked their God. Yeah, they picked their God. Yeah. And it's interesting because he's. Rockefeller said he wanted. He wanted a purely American architecture, and so he was trying to create American architecture.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Interesting.

[Glenn Beck]

Saying that America is about the almighty dollar.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah.

[Glenn Beck]

It's about, you know, man can do anything, create anything.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Glenn Beck]

You said earlier that this always happens and it's alerting you to an end. Okay, so where are we on that path? I have not met more people. I'm telling you, it is crazy. I can go anywhere. And especially before the election, a little less now. People are like, well, maybe God gave us a break. But before the election, everybody I know was saying, I think Christ is coming.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah.

[Glenn Beck]

You know, where are we? What are all of these things telling us?

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah. I mean, we think we always have to be. We have to be cautious. We don't want to just be screaming, fire in a building. But I think that all the signs. And when I say signs, I mean really the things that we've been talking about, they're showing an end. Like, they're showing that we're running out. And so.

[Glenn Beck]

Wait, wait, because we all have this. Is that a sign of God to you? Because it's almost. You know, I used to describe it, and I'm not sure this is correct anymore. I used to describe it. You know, when you have something of value, you put an alarm on it, and God gave us rights. And I think that's the alarm. It's almost like a silent alarm going off and everybody going, something's not right. Yeah, you know what I mean? Something's about to be taken.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah, I think that that's right. But it happens. And this is something maybe that can be useful for people to see is that we know. We talked a lot about the deconstruction and the decomposition and the breakdown. And that is definitely one of the clearest signs of the end. But there's another sign which is the opposite. It's something like the compensation for that breakdown. And so what happens is that as things are breaking down, there's also systems of power that are becoming more and more powerful simultaneously. And it looks like a contradiction at the outset, but obviously everybody can see it happen now. It's like globalism and its kind of idea of a world government, or however they want to phrase it, is hand in hand with the destruction, with, like, the kind of variety and you know, same thing with this worship of difference and this worship of. So both of those are happening. Happening simultaneously. So we have to. We have to be able to watch. So even, like, in terms of America, you know, I hate Americans. Some might not be happy what I'm about to say, which is, all right, you're Canadian. If you're, If. If you're not careful and you focus too much on individual rights.

[Glenn Beck]

Yes.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Right. Then you are simultaneously calling upon higher and higher forms of authority because you need an arbiter for those rights. There's no way around it. You know, usually the way that it would function in kind of any society or traditional society is that all those relationships would be moderated on the local sphere. Right. So, you know, it's like, who's a guarantee of your rights and responsibilities? What's your family? It's your. It's your village, it's your town, it's your parish, it's like your church or whatever. But now, because we're like, I'll do whatever I want to do. And as much on the left as on the right, it's like, I'll do whatever I want. And nobody can tell me what to do. Either that person has, like, crazy rainbow hair or is. Has a gas and flag and is saying, it's me that is calling constantly the arbiters of power to become more powerful, because you always need someone to arbitrate that power. And so it's happening in America, but it's also happening even at a global scale. We can see it.

[Glenn Beck]

That's why I think people. Because I wonder if people really want responsibility. A lot of people just don't want. They just want to check in, check out, have a cute little life and move on. But real, true freedom requires an awful lot of work as an individual. And we kind of gave that away in America. We just kind of went, oh, they're going to take care of.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah, we want the rights, but not the responsibilities.

[Glenn Beck]

Not the responsibilities at all. And. And because we gave it all to Washington, which was a long way away, we can just bitch about how things were being done in Washington because they're falling apart here and not taking the responsibility that. Yeah, dummy, it's falling apart here. Not just because you didn't pay attention to what's happening, but because you're not doing anything here.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think you're absolutely right. I think that one of the things that was fascinating about America in some ways is that the rights part was made explicit in order to protect people. But the responsibility part was almost like implicit. Like, everybody knew when it started that, yeah, of course you're responsible, of course, of course. But now we just have the rights, and we've lost this sense of local responsibility and local participation and all of these things. And so it's as if you can see. Right in the story of the US you can kind of see this move towards centralization, even though the beginning of the country was actually a way to try to stop. To prevent too much centralization. But now everybody just looks to the President. I mean, as much on the right and the left, it was like, well, the President's going to save us. It's like, how the hell.

[Glenn Beck]

How's that?

[Jonathan Pageau]

Why is that real?

[Glenn Beck]

It's one of my biggest beefs. And I've been saying, you got a reprieve. God was like, you know what? I'm not into the smoting thing right now. Let him go. And so we have this reprieve, but God only does the things that we cannot do. And then he leaves all the stuff up that we can do up to us. And it's kind of like, okay, guys, I mean, I just answered your prayer. He's not the Savior. It's going to require you to change your life as well. And I hope we've learned that lesson.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah, I hope so. You know, and that's what. In some ways, at least, I mean, I think everybody is trying to do their part. That's why. Because one of the things we saw, I think, in the past few generations is how those that are really ideologically taken, possessed, they want to get involved in education. Like, they're actually trying. They go into the. The school boards, they take over, you know, the schools, they become principals, they become teachers. And we're like, you know, we just want to make money and want to, like, we don't want to get involved in this, but it's like your kids are getting taken. And so one of the things we've been trying to. That's one of the reasons why. Because it sounds weird when you people talk to me. They're like, how are you? Why? Like, you're doing explaining symbolism, but you're writing these fairy tales. It's like, that's one of the things we want to do is to say, no, we need to be now mindful and say, what stories are we telling our children? Can we get involved? Like, how can we get involved in. Because a lot of people doing homeschooling, that's a way to do it. There are different ways to do it. But we need to be mindful and look towards what it is that is forming our kids. And that's a better guarantee of the future than making a million dollars.

[Glenn Beck]

So do you find any of the call back to traditionalism, do you find any of it to be a little scary? Like, there's people who I know who are great and they want the Latin mass. Okay, I'm not a Catholic, so I don't understand, but that is full of symbolism and ritual and everything else, and sounds pretty great. But there's also people who are also kind of going a little further.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Oh, yeah.

[Glenn Beck]

You know, to. Again, to another kind of dark side of. Yeah, now let's use this power. And we'll have a. A vicar of Christ in power, which is also terrifying.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah, no, I agree. I think that, you know, this is, you know, obviously I'm an orthodox Christian, so I definitely do love tradition. But we have to be obviously careful that we don't weaponize tradition towards something else. You know, the purpose of tradition is to orient us towards the highest good, which is God. But if we think of it as a weapon in order to kind of control people and get what we want, then it's doing the opposite of what it should be doing. And that's the temptation. It's part of this dual problem that we. That I mentioned at the outset, which is that as we watch things kind of deconstruct and fall apart, like we tend, some people would be want, oh, I'm going to look towards unity. I'm going to look towards something that binds us together, and that's absolutely normal and necessary. But we have to be careful not to do it in a way, you know, that is in some ways becomes tyrannical, because that's not what we want. The idea of tradition isn't tyranny. It's this balance between unity and multiplicity.

[Glenn Beck]

Right.

[Jonathan Pageau]

It's this balance between kind of things that are set in our ways, but also kind of mercy and forgiveness and compassion towards those that can't kind of can't necessarily totally align themselves. And it's hard because it's. Because when things get crazy and crazier and more and more decomposed, we want to, like, turn around and grab on to the most solid thing that we can find. And I think that's completely normal. But we also, like you said, have to be cautious because I think that that's actually what happened in the 20th century. I think that the shift from Weimar to the Reich is exactly that. It's like things were falling Apart, crazy, chaotic, evil.

[Glenn Beck]

And the people that were rising up were evil, but they. They grabbed the churches who were all too willing to participate. And then it became also about a God thing. And it was like, what are you doing?

[Jonathan Pageau]

So that's definitely the issue. Now. We have to. I think as religious people, as Christians, we have to be attentive, you know, to kind of always remember the vision that Christ gave. In some ways, Christ gave the best vision for that, because what Christ offers is a kind of authority and a kind of power. But that is loving, right? It's forgiveness. It's giving itself to those that has authority above. And so we have to be careful not to think really, like in the 20th century to think, oh, things are falling apart now. It's total case. We need to grab this. We need to just, like, impose order, get everybody in step so that we avoid that. But that leads to its own. It leads to its own. I mean, we saw it in the 20th century. It leads to its own madness.

[Glenn Beck]

Talk to me about. And I don't know if you even can, but I think the use of symbolism by the Jewish people on Sabbath and Passover is the most divine I've ever seen. I mean, I don't think they would have lasted if they didn't have those rituals, you know, being scattered all over the earth if they hadn't said, what's this spice mean? What does this mean? What does this mean? What do the candles represent? And had that tradition, they might have forgotten who they were.

[Jonathan Pageau]

I totally agree. I totally agree. You know, I think that, you know, we can look at that also for Christians. That is. We have the same thing. We have it all. It's all there, too. Like, we have Easter and we have Pascha. We have Pascha, and we have all these celebrations. Pascha is Easter, basically, like the resurrection.

[Glenn Beck]

Okay. Yeah.

[Jonathan Pageau]

And we have these feasts that we've celebrated over millennia. And they also do that. They kind of. They're similar in the way that the Jewish. Jewish people have their kind of weekly rituals and also their yearly rituals where they celebrate certain things that bind them together in the presence of God over the year. And so Christians have all that, too. But because of this weird materialism that has set itself up in Christianity, we've tried to get rid of that, thinking it's superstition or something like that saying, like, all this is maybe superstition or.

[Glenn Beck]

Idolatry or whatever you hear all the time, well, Christmas isn't Christmas. That was just. That was the day the Sun God worshipers were Worshiping, and they just took that. It's not the day, by the way. I know, but it's not the day date that they chose. And they might have done that to bring more people into the fold, but they're not teaching paganism. It was the. Let's make this ritual important to teach this principle. Right?

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah. And people. It's also because people. Because they're not used to thinking in the language of symbolism, they don't realize, for example, you know, people will say, well, look at these images that we use during Christmas. Some of them look like images that would exist in a pagan world. And, you know, by the way, that's also true of the tabernacle and the temple. Right. The way that the tabernacle is described in scripture, there are analogies between that tabernacle and some, you know, some temple in Egypt, you know, or in Babylon. But it's just that it was reoriented towards the true God and toward the true purpose. And so the idea that sometimes you might find certain things that people are doing in, let's say, in Christmas, for example.

[Glenn Beck]

This is the best explanation I've ever heard.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah. You say, oh, so, you know, the pagans had trees that they decorated. And so we can't do that because, you know, it's stupid. But it's like, well, look at the tree we're doing. Look at what we're doing. We're putting a star at the top or an angel. Because in this Christmas story, that's what showed people the way to Christ. And then we decorate it with all these beautiful images, all these beautiful kind of bright things. And then we put the hidden gifts at the bottom. Like Christ was hidden in the cave or hidden in the manger. It's like the whole structure of the tree is a Christian structure. Now, whether or not pagans did something similar, it doesn't matter. Yeah.

[Glenn Beck]

It's like Satan takes something good and perverts it.

[Jonathan Pageau]

That's right.

[Glenn Beck]

You can. God can take the things that have been bad and change it for good.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah. And that's it. By the way, in scripture, it happens all the time. Right. All of the building arts come from Cain's descendants. Right. They come as a consequence of the fall and are used to build weapons and to build civilization in a negative way. But then God is constantly taking that and saying, no, no, let's turn it. Let's turn it towards the right purpose. And the. The image of the heavenly Jerusalem at the end of scripture is exactly that. It's like all of this civilization stuff that you guys have that was developed because of the fall. I'm going to help reorder it towards its true purpose.

[Glenn Beck]

Let me go back to demons here for a second. Tucker Carlson said recently that he had encountered a demon. He had scratches on his body. What do you make of that? I mean, I know Tucker. I believe Tucker. He's not a.

[Jonathan Pageau]

No, I don't think. I think definitely that his experience is absolutely real. I don't think he's making it up at all. I think that this is going to sound weird for people when I say this. It's like he's sleeping in bed with his dogs. And so first thing you think is, it's the dogs, right? The dogs did it. And. And the answer to me is something like, well, maybe it's the dogs. But maybe just like in the story of the lizard people and the story of the 5G causing Covid, maybe it's not just the dogs in the sense that maybe the causality of it, even though maybe the mechanical causes are the dog scratching him, the coalescence of all the things that he experienced, which is he experienced this terror and he experienced this being frozen in the pressure on his chest, then waking up and having this. These scratches, all those phenomena together, even though they might have their own mechanical causes. Maybe he ate something wrong or maybe whatever, like God doesn't work outside of mechanical causes. But it's how these come together.

[Glenn Beck]

You can't change the math.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Exactly. It's how these come together into these meaningful, powerful experiences that what's important. And so if you ask me, did Tucker encounter a demon? My answer is, I think so. I think he really did. Does it mean that there are no mechanical causes to what happened to him and that. No, not. Why would that matter?

[Glenn Beck]

Isn't a miracle in some ways a change in perspective?

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah. And I think that that's what he experienced. He experienced something that brought him to be able to see more of reality and to understand his place in the world in a way that he had never seen before. And that, like you said, is a small miracle. And I think that a lot of people are seeing that happen to them in different ways right now, where, you know, through weird circumstances, through all kinds of things that happen in your life, through these coincidences, you could say that happen. It forces us to see that there's some higher meaning that's kind of drawing us towards itself.

[Glenn Beck]

And do you think you need to have the belly of the whale to get the land and standing upright again?

[Jonathan Pageau]

I think for most of us, probably there are stories of people that are kind of faithful from. From birth. You know, you see it in scripture and like Samuel, for example. And there. There's certain characters like that that are. But I think for most of us, we kind of need to kind of smack down because. And it's not a, you know, it's not a kind of masochism or it's anything like that. Is that in order to be able to give yourself to a higher participation in meaning, you have to experience the incapacity to do it on your own. And that's true at the micro level. Like, you know, the only way you can be good in a basketball team is if you understand that you can't do it on your own. And if you try to do it on your own, you're going to be the worst basketball player in the world. You have to kind of give that up. And then when you do, then your little part now coalesces with others and then yield this beautiful thing. But that's true for all of life, which is that unless you realize that you don't have the power to do it on your own, to participate in the highest goods, then you're going to have to suffer. Like suffering will be part of your experience. And that suffering will kind of force you to give up in some ways and to say no, Whatever strength that has has to be in service of something higher, or else it's pointless.

[Glenn Beck]

Twenty years ago, I was on tour every day. I was meeting about probably 1,000 to 2,000 people. I was doing a stage show, television show, radio show, meet and greets for a book. And it was intense every day. And it was right before Christmas. And at that time, I had my first real death threat. We had to have two buses and I'd have to switch buses. And you never knew which one I was on. And somebody tried to run one of the buses off the road and actually did. Luckily it wasn't the one I was on. And there was this really demonic video on the Internet at the time when it was still pretty young. And they had taken a clip of me and slowed it down and. And then put this driving hard rock music behind it. And it said, traitor. Where my name would have been if I was on television. Okay. And this computer voice just said over and over again, all traitors must die.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Oh my goodness.

[Glenn Beck]

All traders must die. Terrifying.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah.

[Glenn Beck]

So I'm going to these meet and greets every single day with a thousand people coming up. And I had probably six to eight people on me as body people. And I'm in this store, this bookstore, and I see this guy. He's wearing a long trench coat. It was cold, but he just caught my eye. Didn't look right. He had his hands in his pockets. And I realized my guys had noticed him too, because they started kind of closing in on me as he was closing.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Oh, my.

[Glenn Beck]

By the time he got up to me, they were all right there. And he had his hands in his pockets. And I remember thinking, I'm not afraid, not afraid. I'm just going to wish him Merry Christmas. And I said, merry Christmas. I put my hand out, and he started taking his hand out and he said, all traders. And he was on the ground.

[Jonathan Pageau]

That's wild.

[Glenn Beck]

That freaked me out, obviously. And I had this. I had this wrestle with what I do, what I say. Who am I really? Why am I doing this? And then this connection with God. I. I was. This sounds so weird, but I was given in a blessing, the gift of discernment. And I still have it today. I don't have it in, like, this setting, per se, but when I'm in a crowd and I can look you in the eye for a second, I'll hear sad, tired, happy, filled with the spirit. I'll actually hear those things. And I can know what's going on.

[Jonathan Pageau]

And from that moment, that.

[Glenn Beck]

From that, it's from a blessing right after that moment. And so I go home. I'm high as a kite. I've just been through this, but I feel, like, spiritually empowered. I get home and there's this big box in my foyer. I had a year before, and only one person knew this, not even my wife. Nobody knew this. I was in a temple, and I was looking at this painting of Christ holding the black sheep. And the black sheep, his head was in the crook of Christ's arm, but he was looking back from where Christ is walking away from. And I sat there and I looked at it for the longest time, and I thought, why is he looking back? Is he worried about the other sheep that might still be lost? Is he. You know, what is happening in that symbolism, if there was any. And I wanted to get that painting. And so I looked online. I couldn't find the painting anywhere. Year later, I'm coming home from that tour, and this giant box is sitting in my foyer, and it's right before Christmas. And I just walked by because I thought, well, something my wife got for me or something else. And she just kept walking by because she thought it was something that I had gotten her. And I finally said, this box yeah, are we going to move the box under the tree? And she said, I thought that was something you got. And I said, no, we open it up, there's no note. There's nothing. It's that painting, framed. We call the people who shipped it. And the guy said, look, I know this is going to sound weird. I don't know you at all. He said, but for some reason, he said, I saw you in a store a year ago, and you asked for that painting. And they said they didn't have it. And he said, I just heard, help him find that painting. And he's like, I'm like, I don't even know him. I'm just dismissing that. And he went after a year, dismissing it over and over and over again over a year's period. He said, that painting showed up on my dock. And I went around to everybody and said, where's this painting? Who put this here? And he said, I don't know how it got here, he said, but I interpreted it as, lord, if you want him to have the painting, okay, I can at least frame it and ship it. He's like, so I'm sorry if that sounds really weird. He didn't know the rest of the story. So now I'm like, the Lord has you. He has you. He knows you personally, and he's got you.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah.

[Glenn Beck]

I go in for surgery. Four days later, I have surgery. I'm. But I'm in so much pain, and I'm very high tolerant to drugs, and they can't keep me out of pain. And so they're just loading me with fentanyl and everything else. And I'm in this weakened state, and it's bone crushing in this hospital room. I go from the highest ever to the most desperate ever because I'm hearing voices. You think you know how I can. You think you. You know how I'm going to destroy you? You have no chance. I'm going to destroy you and your family. And it was real to me. And if the windows hadn't been in, if it wasn't a New York hospital that had locks on the windows, I think I would have honestly thrown myself out of the window. My wife calls, says, I'm on my way. Do you need anything? I said, no, honey, there's no reason to come. I'm okay. And she said, I just immediately overwhelmed with. He's in trouble, she said, I came now. I had fallen back to sleep in between. And I wake up and my wife is singing hymns. And the spirit is that darkness completely gone. I'M sorry, but if you don't believe that kind of stuff, you know, I don't think that happens to everybody, but it does happen.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah. I think everybody has at least little versions of things like that in their.

[Glenn Beck]

Life, but they'll dismiss it as a coincidence.

[Jonathan Pageau]

That's right. Yeah.

[Glenn Beck]

Or maybe that was crazy. I was just thinking that.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah. Well, in your case, you know, things align so much that it's hard to say, just it's a coincidence. But there are smaller versions that everybody deals with all the time. You know, these little moments kind of coalescing and becoming bright, you know, and kind of standing out from everyday life. This kind of boring everyday life. And that's exactly what it is. In some ways, they are little glimmers that we are in something bigger. Like we participate in something bigger than ourselves and we've been trained to ignore them or to say, like you said, it's just coincidence, it's superstition, you know. But these are part of the world. Like, they are what brings reality together. You know, this type of thing, like this idea that events come together and kind of manifest meaning, you know, it happens to you every day, all the time, in the little ways. You know, every time you. You were able to finish a project or you're able to work with someone in the team or whatever, you have these little experiences and sometimes, like the story you told me, then it shows itself in a way that is really drawing you. Right. Drawing you into something bigger than you. But that's actually how the world works.

[Glenn Beck]

It is, yeah. You were brought to if. You know, I really. I'm a recovering alcoholic, so I had this massive crash in my life and didn't know what I believed in and blah, blah, blah. And one of the first things I adopted was don't accept anything as a coincidence. Anything for 30 days, dismiss. Wow, that was weird. Pursue it. And sometimes you'll pursue it and you go down a dead end and there's nothing that you can find there other than it was just kind of a weird coincidence. But there are other times that you're like, holy cow, look at how God is working, how the universe works. It's amazing.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah. And the nihilists are absolutely wrong. You cannot avoid meaning. Meaning is. The world is structured in meaning. For every movement you make, everything you do, every time you move towards the door, or that you. Anything that you do is always an alignment towards purpose. You can't avoid it. Everything you do, there's body language. And it's the opposite of what the nihilists say it's actually, you can't avoid meaning. You can't. It's the way that you are.

[Glenn Beck]

Then how come so many of us are looking for meaning in our life?

[Jonathan Pageau]

That's because they. How can I say this? It's like they're looking. They have this lofty idea. Right. You know, Christ says you have to be faithful in small things before you have access to the bigger things. You know, if you can't see the biggest, the bigger meaning. Like, if you can't find, like, a purpose for your life, realize that there are purposes in front of you that are very close to you that you can engage with right away. Whether it's your friendships, whether it's your family, whether it's, you know, your community, whatever it is. There are these little things that you can embark on that will give you little meanings in life. And that those. If you're faithful in those. And all of a sudden, like you said, like the story that you told, all of a sudden, miracles start to appear and you realize that the world is actually full of light and is full of miracles.

[Glenn Beck]

Did you see that the tabernacle was found in one of the churches that burned down in California?

[Jonathan Pageau]

No. No.

[Glenn Beck]

Yeah. There's a couple of stories the firefighters are saying now that there was a tabernacle in a church. Everything was completely destroyed. It was like the chimney and the tabernacle. I mean, that's an awfully hot fire for that to go unscathed. And there's always stories like that about religious icons or whatever. Yeah.

[Jonathan Pageau]

That survive fires and that are just almost magically present after the disaster. Yeah, these are. I mean, these are real. These are real things. And you could say it's funny, you could say it's a coincidence, but it's like you have in the case of a tabernacle, or the case of the image of Christ or an icon, it's like that's the image of the thing that's the most important for you. And through the chaos, it's preserved. And it's like that's what you hope for, that's what you wish for, that's what you want to happen. When your family go through a crisis, is that the little kernel, that seed, is preserved through the flood? And so when you see it happen, why are you saying it's a coincidence? It's like that's everything that we're made to participate in, and that's everything we look for. If you make it out of a crisis, it's because you are able to find that Kernel, that little seed that is kind of going to pull you through that little arc that is going to bring you through the chaos. So when it happens at a greater scale, why are you surprised? It's like, that's how the world works. That's how your life works. That's how all of our lives work.

[Glenn Beck]

You know, it's. Somebody said recently to me, faith is a choice. Hope is a byproduct.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah, yeah, you're right. And if you, if you align yourself, faith is. You can understand faith exactly as this. How can I say this? It's like when you're in a situation of chaos, like in a difficulty, you lose sight of that which is pulling you forward. But you can know that it's there, right? You can know that it's there because you're still breathing, you're still moving, you're still eating, you're still doing these little things that are aligned towards purpose. You know, St. Paul talks about how faith is the proof, the proof of things unseen. And that's it, right? It's like if you move towards something, even if you don't have it yet, then like you said, then hope will be inevitable. Right? Act. Can I say this? Like, believe that your family can become a little image of the kingdom of God. And that really can, even though it's not right now, it really can. And if you do that, then everything will align towards that. Like, if you really believe it and you move towards it, things will align.

[Glenn Beck]

It, of course, act as though it is, and it, it manifests, it will.

[Jonathan Pageau]

It will come together. You know, and people weaponize that in all kinds of kind of annoying ways where they're, you know, they're like, if you want to make money, you know, you, you kind of visualize it and it's like, yeah, you know, that probably does work, but there are better applications of this than just making a bunch of money. There are those that actually, like, hold the world together and, like, align it towards the highest good.

[Glenn Beck]

Final segment with Jonathan here in just a second. First, let me talk to you about preborn, the sanctity of life that is. This month, we honor the 66 million babies whose lives have been tragically ended through abortion since Roe vs. Wade. Sadly, since Roe was overturned, babies, lives are even at greater risk because the abortion pill accounts for over 60% of all abortions now. Now, this tragedy is even a bigger tragedy because it's available on man 24 7. But in the midst of this darkness, there is a light that shines, and it's preborn They've rescued over 300,000 babies from abortion. And every day, on average, they rescue another 200. When a woman is considering abortion, she hears her baby's heartbeat and sees the face on ultrasound. The baby's chance at life is doubled. Preborn shares free heartbeats and God's love for mom and child. They both need our help. For just $28, the cost of a dinner, you can sponsor an ultrasound and introduce a mom to her baby for the first time. 100% of your donation will go towards saving babies. Will you help? Dial £250. Say the keyword baby. That's £250, keyword baby. Or go to preborn.com glenn. That's preborn.com glenn. Can I ask you, we talked on radio today a little bit about these aliens. First of all, just what do aliens represent in the world of icons?

[Jonathan Pageau]

Well, it's all there in the language, if you think about it. So we say unidentified flying objects. It's so funny because when someone asks you, they ask you, do you believe in unidentified flying objects? You're like, well, how could I not believe in unidentified. They're unidentified flying objects.

[Glenn Beck]

So, of course you're not asking me if I believe in.

[Jonathan Pageau]

It's like, what are you asking? It's like, do you believe in aliens? Well, of course I believe in aliens. Aliens means things that I don't know what they are, or people that I don't know what they are, or creatures that I don't know what they are. So they're different. Aliens exist and UFOs exist. Now, what does it mean in terms of the story? And the key is in that question, or the key is what is something that's alien? What is something that presents itself to you as puzzle? Something that you don't know what it is. A strange, a stranger. Right. It's like a stranger isn't. Isn't like a specific type of person. It's just the type of person that you don't know. Right. And so the fact this has to do with this question, the fact that we're obsessed with the strange, we're obsessed with difference, is the mythological expression of that is something like obsessed with UFOs and obsessed with aliens. Right. Because we see value in the alien, that which is.

[Glenn Beck]

Right. So this is the tyranny of exception, something like that. Yeah.

[Jonathan Pageau]

And so people project. And so people. Well, there are. There are two sides of it. Like, if you look at the mythology of aliens, you kind of have two aspects of it. On the one hand, you have the alien in the sense of the different monster that comes and eats me, right? So if you think of like War of the Worlds, you know, or Independence Day, that's how it's presented. And so we're America there. These like things that we don't know what they are, they're attacking us, they're invading us. They're trying to take. To destroy us. And we have to stop them, right? So that's one image of the. Of the strange. There's another one which is a fetishization of the strange, which is they're angels, they're going to save us. These aliens, they're superior, they're more advanced. Like we have all this type of imagery that projects them into this higher role where they are now going to kind of save us. So we have to be attentive to that. We really have to be attentive to when people kind of fall into these narrative images about what it is that these strange and unidentified things are. Because it tells us, first of all, it shows us that we're dealing with a world that's on the limit, right? So the strange manifests itself on the border, right? So you have an identity, you have a border. And that which is on the other side, that's what's strange. It's the dragon that's out there.

[Glenn Beck]

But there is, but there's also the dragon in the elite circle, in the government. You're like, I don't trust that either to protect me.

[Jonathan Pageau]

That is one of the problems of our moment now, which is normally your leader, your father is the origin of you, right? The peepers that are above you, they are related to you. Not necessarily biological. They're related to you in the sense that they identify with you as a body. And you are serving them, they're serving you. And so that's like a normal thing. But one of the problems we have now is that we have this weird situation where people are think that the elites want something else. Like they are a strange influence on us. And so that's the. That's like the. You could say it's the infiltration of the strange into the hierarchy. It's a kind of corruption from inside. And the corruption from inside, everybody understands it. There's a mythological image which is the lizard people, but there's also, you know, the police chief that is serving another interest besides the one he's supposed to serve. His interest is he wants to fill his pockets. So because of that, he's corrupting the world because he's using his position of authority. In order to gather things to himself rather than do the job he's supposed to do. And so. So we can understand this idea of the influence of the strange in our world. Now, that's the negative aspect of it. The reason why we also have this image of, like, the kind of glowing alien or the one that's going to save us, is that sometimes the strange is also a land of opportunity, right? So, like, that's where trade comes from. So the stranger brings new things, like, things that we. And so we want to engage with this, with that which is strange, because there are hidden treasures. There are, like, hidden opportunities. It grows your world. It makes your world bigger. If you kind of engage with the people around you, with the people you don't know or things you don't know, they're like little treasures hidden in that. And that's what. So the. The mythological image is these two extremes, right? This idea of, like, the alien that will save us, right, or the alien that will devour us. But the reality is, in our everyday life is there's a kind of balance between the two, right? So think about, like, you know, if you think about the idea, even just of space exploration, you know, this idea of going out like it's a mariner's tale, like, this idea of going out on a boat and, like, discovering new lands. And then there are, like, all these new treasures, but then they're also, you know, like we saw in the Colombian exchange, There's also, like, disease and all these things that happen at the conjunction of that which is known and that which is strange. So that's a way. In terms of storytelling, that's a way of understanding it. We can see how it affects our thinking. That, to me, is more important than understanding what these things are. So let me just break it down so that people understand that. So let's say we have these unidentified flying things, right? And so we can say clearly that they are an alien influence on us. There's some kind of foreign influence on. On our society, but we don't know what it is, because that's why it's unidentified. So is it extraterrestrials from, like, other planets that are trying to kind of pierce into our world and communicate with us? We don't know, is it aliens from another dimension or whatever that are trying. We don't know, is it foreign governments that are trying to spot us, or is it our government that are doing things that we don't know what it is and that are hiding from us? All of those, in terms of story are the same. They are foreign alien influences that are trying to affect us and we don't know what they are. So whichever it is, and I'm not saying it's one or the other, but whichever it is, we can see it in the same way. So instead of debating just like, obviously we have to find out what these are because it's dangerous to have alien influences that you can't recognize and you can't identify. It's very dangerous to have that. It's like a spy or like, you know.

[Glenn Beck]

Well, it's also, it also, you know, part of this is, you know, I've had the thought, is this the government staging this to distract us or to do some sort of mind game on us? Because it does play mind games on.

[Jonathan Pageau]

And that would be a lizard, the lizard person situation.

[Glenn Beck]

Right.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Where the government has intentions that are opaque to us.

[Glenn Beck]

Yes.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Even though they're supposed to be our leaders.

[Glenn Beck]

Right.

[Jonathan Pageau]

But they're supposed to help us.

[Glenn Beck]

Right.

[Jonathan Pageau]

But they have other intentions. We don't know what they are. They're opaque and so they're lying to us and pretending about these things.

[Glenn Beck]

What happens to a society where you don't get the answer?

[Jonathan Pageau]

I think that either it leads to further breakdown or it's a hidden aspect to create more tyranny. That's one or the other. Right. So it's like if the government, let's say, is trying to establish more control over us and they use this smoke screen, the smoke show of like aliens that are coming to distract us while they're doing something else. Like a little like a magic show. Right. It's like it leads towards tyranny. If it's, you know, if it's like foreign governments that are trying to like get information from us or do that, then it leads to similar consequences which is basically being taken over by a foreign, foreign power. And so all of these. That's why when you have.

[Glenn Beck]

But wouldn't it be better for society if the government came out, said whatever answer it is, and just said, look, here's all of the documents. We really don't know what it is, but we think it's this. Isn't that better long term for a people than saying what are you talking about? That's a conspiracy theory for sure.

[Jonathan Pageau]

There's a game being played. There's definitely a game being played. I think that the U.S. government, but not just the U.S. government, the modern government uses secrecy. We are used to thinking that it's normal that the government keeps secrets from its people and they, it's not. It's absolutely not normal. It's very odd that we have these secret agencies, agencies that function without. We don't even know what their structure of accountability is.

[Glenn Beck]

I've talked to congressmen who oversee those.

[Jonathan Pageau]

People, and they don't even know.

[Glenn Beck]

And they say, I'm not telling you. I oversee you. I'm oversight. Nope, nope.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah, yeah.

[Glenn Beck]

That's not normal.

[Jonathan Pageau]

That's a very, very dangerous situation, for sure. Yeah, yeah. And it has to do with this problem, you know, because think about the secret. Like, a secret is a good way to understand what it is we're talking about. So a secret is something that's hidden, that's unknown, that's similar to the alien. There's something happening and it's hidden. I don't know what it is. I can see some, like. I can see some things poking out. Like, I can see things kind of poking out, and I can see that there's some phenomena. But there's a secret. Right. And that. That. Exactly. How can I say this? That is. This. That is the realm of that. All of this story, the realm of the alien, the realm of all of this stuff.

[Glenn Beck]

But it's also. It's also the realm of iconography, is it not? There is something there, but it's kind of hidden. You have to study it and you can find the answer. And it has the story.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Yeah, well, so there's a type of secret that is bound in religious stories, which is something like the secret of the sacred, the secret of the divine. Right. So God does. God reveals himself in small ways. And behind those revelations is something much larger and bigger and more. And loftier. Right. So in that sense, that is this. That's the good secret. There is obviously something that's a good secret which is, you know, there is something of. A good example would be like there is the secret intimacy that you share with your wife. That's a good secret. Right? That is. That is very different from. It's very different from the alien conspiracy type secret.

[Glenn Beck]

Yeah, a destructive secret.

[Jonathan Pageau]

But secrets aren't bad in themselves. Like, intimacy is a form of secret. Yeah. But, like, it's different from intimacy. And alien is the opposite from each other.

[Glenn Beck]

Right.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Intimacy is a secret that we share together and that we know and it's to our goodness. And the alien secret is a secret that I'm keeping from others with other intentions that are using you to get something that. I don't know what it is from you. It's very different.

[Glenn Beck]

It's great to talk to you I hope you come back.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Oh, definitely. This is a great conversation. I really appreciate it.

[Glenn Beck]

Thank you so much.

[Jonathan Pageau]

Thanks. Thanks.

[Glenn Beck]

Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so if you be discovered by other people.