Jonathan Pajo, thanks for coming on the podcast.

That's a pleasure.

I wanted to begin by asking, hopefully not to embarrass you, but when I first invited you on this

podcast, you expressed a sort of skepticism about doing it and you said something like

look I've done this sort of religion atheism thing before and a lot of the time it's a lot of talking past each other and

told me that I think at one point at least you

use the word rationalist and said you know you're probably better off talking to these people

because I approach this from a different angle and we might just end up talking

past each other. What was it, if I might ask, that inspired that skepticism in you?

Well I tried to do a few of these with someone called rationality rules and then a few other people.

And what ended up happening was that we would talk past each other and you could follow it in the comments section which is that usually

I would be accused of woo-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-ing by the people that are fans of me would say you don't

understand the argument. And so we did, I did that a few iterations and then at some point I felt like this isn't

useful because it's just not helping it's just it's just increasing

polarization and it's it's not worth it to just get clicks let's say it that way you know but I so I got your email and I kind of and I also saw the type of people that you were you were talking about talking to and and I thought okay this is just not just not my usual apologetics and that type of stuff is just not my purview.

But I don't know why for some reason it kept running in my mind after I got your email.

And then we met in London just happenststance and I thought oh okay well this is you know let's just

follow the bread crumbs and so here we are. Here we are indeed and I suppose people who have seen you before will know that you offer a lot of

commentaries on religious issues and religious stories but you're an artist by trade, if I'm not mistaken.

Yes, I'm a painter. I studied painting, but I kind of did my own, you could say, I became disillusion with the academy that after my bachelor's degree, especially

because in art, a lot of the madness that we see now was already there in the art world.

So I saw, beginning of that stuff.

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