364. Dream Analysis, AI & Fairy Tales | Jonathan Pageau

[0] Hello everyone!

[1] I'm speaking once again with Jonathan Paggio today.

[2] He's a French -Canadian liturgical artist and icon carver, known for his artistic work featured in museums across the world.

[3] He carves Eastern Orthodox and other traditional images and teaches an online carving class.

[4] He also runs a YouTube channel dedicated to the exploration of symbolism across history and religions.

[5] Well, Mr. Pajot, here we are in London.

[6] That's right.

[7] We're going to be meeting with the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship people here this week, right?

[8] For everybody watching and listening, we're trying to get that moving along and figure out how to structure the convention.

[9] And we're thinking about trying to make it as musical an event as possible.

[10] I've been using, I have music at the beginning of each of my lectures now.

[11] A man named David Cotter has been playing classical guitar and then electric guitar to follow up with that.

[12] Interesting.

[13] Yeah, and it's really good.

[14] It really, really helps the audience focus and Tammy and I focus backstage and it sets a high bar for excellence, which is helpful.

[15] And so hopefully we can integrate that into this art conference.

[16] And so what have you been working on?

[17] Well, I've been, obviously, I've been doing a lot of speaking, but the big thing that I'm focused on right now is I'm writing fairy tales.

[18] You know, one of the things, you know, we've been complaining.

[19] A lot of people are complaining about the way the stories are going, you know, in the movies and the way that stories are being told to children right now.

[20] And I thought, instead of complaining, maybe we could try to take charge of that instead and just start to retell the stories.

[21] You know, there's a weird, there's an interesting thing that happened in the 1930s.

[22] And when we look at Disney's Snow White, we think that, like, this is this old story.

[23] It's the traditional and made total sense for Disney to make this old story.

[24] But in the 1920s and 30s, that wasn't going, that's not what was going on.

[25] In the 1920s and 30s, there were two major studios competing with each other.

[26] There was Fleischer Studios and Disney.

[27] And Fleischer was doing the crazy, wild jazz, you know, their images, a Betty Boop.

[28] And they had all these, you know, you know, Transforming characters, a lot of demons, a lot of ghosts, all this kind of weird stuff.

[29] A lot of marijuana influenced imagery.

[30] Yeah, a lot of drug -influenced imagery.

[31] And so they did a version of Snow White in the early 1930s, which was so deconstructed and strange that it was barely recognizable, right?

[32] It was completely, you know, you really had to know the story to even know that it was Snow White because it was so weird.

[33] And so when Disney finally made his Snow White, it was also in some ways a kind of recapturing of the traditional story in a world that was kind of chaotic and, let's say, slipping.

[34] And I feel like maybe that's what we need to do now is that instead of complaining, you know, we should tell better stories.

[35] And so one of the things we want to do is I started writing fairy tales.

[36] We're putting out a version of Snow White.

[37] We're kick -starting it on June 6th.

[38] And then I'm going to put out eight fairy tales, like really the traditional fairy tales, four female -led and four male -led.

[39] And they're also, we're going to learn from the postmodern moment, it's going to be like a fairy tale world, kind of like Shrek or into the woods where all the fairy tale characters cross and their stories kind of touch each other.

[40] But the purpose won't be to be cynical and dark about the intentions of the characters, but try to, let's say, give people insight about what the stories are about.

[41] And when you say we, who's the we?

[42] Well, it's most, it's me, but then I'm also working with some illustrators.

[43] So for the Snow White, I'm working with a woman named Heather Pollington, who's worked in Hollywood for many years.

[44] She's worked with Disney and all the big companies, all the big franchises.

[45] And so, you know, we're trying to put together this, we actually have put together this first book.

[46] And then after that, I'm going to work with other illustrators.

[47] I'm also starting a publishing company, the Symbolic World Press, and, you know, I've already hired a few people to kind of get that going.

[48] And it's really in some ways to kind to rather capture the, recapture the culture, right, take it back instead of, instead of complaining that it's slipping away from us.

[49] Yeah.

[50] I wrote a first of, fairy tale screenplay.

[51] Yes.

[52] The Water of Life.

[53] Yeah, yeah.

[54] Right, and I've, I've written and composed, I think, well, there must be 20 songs in it, I would think, but we've already recorded four of them and looking into having it made into an animated movie.

[55] I mean, that technology is changing so quickly.

[56] It's hard to exactly know how to approach that.

[57] Yeah, what's the easiest way to approach it.

[58] Yeah, but I took the Grimm's brother fairy tale, water of life, and I stayed fairly close to it, you know, although I wrote music for it, lyrics for it, and so forth.

[59] And so that was very entertaining project.

[60] It's a very deep fairy tale and very nicely structured.

[61] No one's done anything with that particular fairy tale before.

[62] And it's a good time to do that, I think, because you know, when you look at Disney's Snow White, it was perfect.

[63] I mean, it was so beautiful and so powerful.

[64] And then when you see what's been happening in the past decade and how the fairy tales have been kind of twisted, especially things like Shrek and fairy tales like that, where it's fine to do that.

[65] You know, it's kind of like commenting or twisting the fairy tale, turning it upside down to see what's going on with it, making fun of it.

[66] And that's fine for a while, but after a while, it's better to get back to the actual stories, just so we even remember why we like these stories in the first place or why we remember them, especially.

[67] You know, Snow White, all these stories of, you know, these female -led fairy tales, they're very powerful in what in what they can do and so you know if we forget them if we try to twist them then we're also twisting some ways the the fabric of western civilization because these old stories right they kind of lie at the bottom of you know all these folk stories they're kind of like a i like to think of them as kind of like tuning folk tuning for civilization all these stories that people have been telling for centuries that you know there's an emergent part of it right there's all these variations of all these stories and then there's a selection part, which is how some versions are remembered through the centuries, and they get retold, and then they kind of change and get retold, so they get refined, like, you know, almost like gold.

[68] And so in those are really are...

[69] Do the things you can't forget.

[70] That's right.

[71] Yeah, and that can't would mean two things.

[72] It means you literally can't forget them because they embed themselves in your memory, but also that you forget them at your peril.

[73] Yeah.

[74] I was being thinking about that, you know, with this postmodernist notion, so one of the claims of postmodernism is that there's no meta -narrative.

[75] And we, you and I have talked a fair bit about the fractal structure of narrative.

[76] And I talked to Carl Fristin about object perception itself.

[77] And I asked him if he thought that the perception of an object was a narrative in and of itself.

[78] And so, and he said yes.

[79] Yeah.

[80] And that's associated with the notion that when you see an object, you're actually perceiving something like its functional utility and not its objective qualities, let's say.

[81] And so its narratives all the way down, right, to the very basis of what you would perceive as a singular object.

[82] So even the concept of perceptual unity is narrative in structure.

[83] And if that's true, then the postmodernist idea that there's no grand unifying narrative is an argument of convenience because what the postmodernists essentially do is allow the narrative to be fragmented to the point that's maximally convenient for whatever the hell they're up to and say, well, there's nothing above this.

[84] Yeah.

[85] Yeah, well, that's very convenient, guys, but everything.

[86] So without a unifying narrative, you have fragmentation and disunity, and that's associated, it's associated neuropsychologically with anxiety and hopelessness.

[87] And so.

[88] But what's great about the fair tales is that they actually deal with that, exactly.

[89] Exactly.

[90] So in one way, what you could say is that the basic story structure, you know, Campbell had this whole hero's journey, which is powerful.

[91] And I think he captures something real.

[92] But you can reduce the story to basic one, like a one move, right?

[93] Like down and up.

[94] Basically, problem and then dealing with the problem, right?

[95] Situation, problem or question.

[96] And then dealing with the question.

[97] And that can help us understand why it's related to object perception, because that's what it is, right?

[98] You don't do it consciously, but you, you don't do it consciously.

[99] But you, you know, You're constantly kind of asking what's important, you know, what's relevant.

[100] And you can imagine when you see something that you don't know what it is, it's like a crisis, especially if it's coming at you in a way.

[101] You have to answer that question.

[102] And it can be a life or death situation.

[103] You end up in a place where you don't know what's happening.

[104] You don't know what's coming towards you and you have to answer that.

[105] And I think the story kind of kept the basic story pattern captured that.

[106] And the fair tales, most of them, they capture that very much.

[107] You know, because, for example, Snow White, which we're telling now, it has that story.

[108] So Snow White, things happen to her.

[109] She ends up, you know, something changes.

[110] And then she ends up in the forest, you know, with these little monsters.

[111] With dwarf men.

[112] That's right.

[113] Yeah, that's the, that's the eternal predicament of women.

[114] It's to be surrounded by dwarfed men.

[115] Yeah.

[116] But you can understand it.

[117] It has multiple levels, but you can understand as the very true.

[118] transformation of a young woman, it does have to do with puberty.

[119] Snow White pretty much has to do with puberty.

[120] I'm pretty sure that's what's going on there, is that as she reaches puberty, she deals with all the problems of puberty, you can say, or that transformation.

[121] It's a question, what the hell is happening to me?

[122] What is going on?

[123] And I don't have the answer.

[124] And especially for a young woman, you know, this cycle of menstruation, it's, it's annoying and it's painful and it's, what is this?

[125] Like, why is, what is happening to me?

[126] And so the story of Snow White has this moment where as she, as she becomes possible, she comes into competition with the queen, right?

[127] She comes to the moment where she can now be in competition with the queen.

[128] Right, right.

[129] Then she falls into, she goes into the woods, into the space of chaos, but then she also, you know, she falls in with men that can't be her mate.

[130] Right, right.

[131] Syracies of masculinity, you know.

[132] Say that again.

[133] Idiosyncrasy is of masculinity.

[134] All the things about masculinity that are kind of annoying, you know, like, Disney captures it really well.

[135] you know with the various they kind of grouchy and like there's all these different kind of aspects of masculinity yeah they're not united exactly so those are for you can think about those each of those dwarfs as the embodiment of a fragmentary narrative exactly a fragmentary micro narrative that isn't that isn't the print if you could mix all the dwarfs together and extract out the best you'd have a prince exactly yeah that's right that's the right that's the right way to see it and then snow white gets caught in that world and then she has to she has to to learn, especially for a traditional worldview, she has to learn the job of a woman, right?

[136] She has to learn to clean and to cook and do that.

[137] And it's like, what is this for?

[138] Like, what, you know, she gets all the problems.

[139] And that's in the service to those dwarves, too, weirdly enough.

[140] That's also the plaint of modern women, too, is that I'm doing all this cooking and cleaning for nothing but dwarves.

[141] That's right.

[142] Exactly.

[143] And so then, I mean, obviously that all leads to her dying, you could say, or falling asleep.

[144] There are many iterations of her falling asleep in the story they're all related right she falls asleep and then she's woken up by dwarves which is like right that's not why wake up at all that's not going to do it and then you know work and learn to clean and do all that stuff and kind of live in the forest and then ultimately that leads to her second falling asleep and then being uh woken up by the right the right mate and so the solution then she finds the reason for all of this so what's the reason for this cycle of transformation what's the reason for all these changes in in in her body in her life as she she's kind of in that transition and then finding her her mate basically finding her husband finding finding her prince that answers the question so do you think do you think as well um in in in sleeping beauty of course the princess is woken up by a kiss from the right mate too but i always thought that it was useful to read that story on two levels simultaneously that what a woman in fortunate circumstances is going to find the proper mate but at the same time she's going to awaken the part of her that's capable of a heroic quest as well and to integrate that and so that waking up as a consequence of being kissed by the prince is also what would you say integrating that capacity for I would say heroic adventure into the feminine role right so you want to find that in a man but you also want to find that that in your own.

[145] Yeah, of course.

[146] Yeah, well, so, you know, I was talking to my daughter -in -law the other day about my son and her have just, we've all got together and bought a building to put this new corporation we're working on in, and she's off to work, and she has a three -year -old and a one -year -old and is feeling some separation from them.

[147] And one of the things we talked through is the fact that it's perfectly reasonable for her to go to work, assuming your children are also being cared for, because it's, you know, It's very important for her to model to her children the fact that adults have important adult activity to engage in, partly because the children have to see that because they're going to be adults or they end up in the Peter Pan world.

[148] It's like, well, why would I give up the pleasures of childhood to undertake the responsibilities of adulthood if there's nothing of value in that?

[149] And it seems perfectly reasonable to me that adult women can model adult behavior as well as taking care of.

[150] children.

[151] And we know too that if you look at the best predictors of, well, here's a couple of different facts.

[152] The educational attainment of a mother predicts the educational attainment of children over and above the IQs of the mother and father.

[153] The father's educational attainment doesn't.

[154] Right.

[155] So that's weird and interesting.

[156] And then countries that value female education and emancipate women do way better on the on the economic front and i think it's probably because there's not much difference between let's say opening your culture up to the contributions of women and opening your culture up to new ideas and and diverse what would you say a diverse range of of contributions from various sources you know that that constraint of women seems to go along with a constraint on idea and flexibility in general.

[157] No, definitely.

[158] I mean, you can see that it's in the fair chance.

[159] You can see that all of these moments, they have to do with change.

[160] They have to do with something happens.

[161] There's a change.

[162] And then I have to find the meaning of that change.

[163] I have to find the solution, right?

[164] I have to find a way out so that the change now finds a resolution.

[165] It makes sense.

[166] Yeah, well, so Piaje talked about that too in terms of a stage transition.

[167] And his hypothesis, and this has been also, what would you say, taken up in a parallel way by philosophers of science, is that you have a mode of interpreting the world, which enables you to progress in the world until its insufficiency is demonstrated, and that can happen as a consequence of biological maturations, right?

[168] The framework that you used as a child is no longer relevant because the physiological acts that you're capable of now have radically transformed.

[169] That would happen at puberty.

[170] So that viewpoint has to be radically transformed to take into account the new reality, but the new transformation has to do everything the old transformation, the old viewpoint did, plus something additional.

[171] So there's actually, it's not merely the reestablishment of a new kind of stasis.

[172] It's a more inclusive interpretive framework.

[173] This is why there's actual progress.

[174] let's say in science, but maybe also progress on the moral front, is that it isn't merely that you're looking at things in a different way.

[175] You're looking at things in a way that now takes more into account and still enables you to exert a certain amount of prediction and control.

[176] Yeah, definitely.

[177] Yeah, there's movement upward.

[178] You think about that as a spiraling upward too.

[179] So it's a cycle of change, but one which hopefully brings you higher up.

[180] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[181] Well, and the pinnacle of that cycle of change.

[182] I think is the biblical injunction that you have to become like a little child in order to enter the kingdom of heaven.

[183] It's the reintegration.

[184] It's the reintegration of the spontaneous attitude that you had to the world as a child, but with all of the acumen and wisdom and alertness and consciousness that you've developed as an adult.

[185] That's sort of the pinnacle of that.

[186] Yeah, yeah, because it joins it all together.

[187] That's what you mean by that it includes it all.

[188] Well, it's also, it's also, imagine that, so you talked about the fundamental narrative is there's a steady state and then there's a problem introduced and there's a collapse into something like chaos and then there's a reintegration of the viewport.

[189] Sometimes some stories don't reintegrate.

[190] No, then that's a tragedy, right?

[191] So the comedy is the reintegration.

[192] Tragedy is just the disintegration.

[193] But then you could also say, steady state, collapse, reintegration, but then there's another story, which is that's the process to follow.

[194] And then the ultimate reintegrated state is becoming an expert at that process.

[195] Right?

[196] So its respect for the process itself starts to become the cardinal target of the entire process of transformation.

[197] And that's associated with the reattainment of that openness that you possess when you're, a child.

[198] And I think that that's probably one of the functions that stories play.

[199] That is that the stories have that structure.

[200] Yeah.

[201] And so we tell them, we hear them, or we tell them.

[202] And so we're kind of modeling these patterns, right?

[203] It's like almost like little puzzles.

[204] We're like modeling these little puzzles.

[205] But what we're actually doing is mastering the meta puzzle.

[206] Yeah, you're mastering the art of, well, you're mastering the art of transformation to some degree.

[207] Because one of the things that you do when you attend to a story is you, you, embody the character.

[208] And so if you listen to ten stories, you embody ten different characters.

[209] And so then what you're embodying is the process of embodying multiple characters, right?

[210] And so that, and you want to become an expert at that because, well, because each situation that you enter into, to some degree, demands the manifestation of a different character, right?

[211] So one of the things you see in very restricted forms of psychopathology is the person, is exactly the same in every situation.

[212] You might think, well, that's admirable stability of character.

[213] It's like, no, it's not.

[214] There's no flexibility of response.

[215] You know, so you're the same person at a party that you would be at a funeral.

[216] Well, that's not good, right?

[217] I mean, there's some principles underlying your behavior that should remain stable, but out of those principles should come this vast flexibility of response so that you can go, you know, you can go into a working class community and have a discussion there.

[218] that's productive and then you can go to, you know, a highly cultured event and you can comport yourself property there.

[219] Yeah.

[220] Yeah.

[221] And I think that that's, it seems to me that at least that's what's going on in these types of stories.

[222] Like Sleeping Beauty, you mentioned her before.

[223] If you look at the structure, you'll notice that it's very similar.

[224] Is it to Snow White?

[225] Yeah.

[226] But it's similar even in the sum of the elements.

[227] So when I talked about Snow White, I mentioned the idea that she doesn't understand the reason for the housework.

[228] right the reason for the housework is actually in her relationship with her with her mate like that's what gives meaning to the to the cycle of work and so if you think about sleeping beauty that way you'll notice that it's very similar what's going on there is that she's pricked on this spindle right she's pricked on on this wheel of that that's turning but it's also a wheel that is you know it's it's also it's a complicated symbolism because it's both the wheel but it's also the binding of the thread together and so it's It's both like the weaving, yeah, this weaving, yeah.

[229] And so she, it's as if, you know, someone, someone, the witch curses, uh, sleeping beauty that she's going to die when she hits puberty.

[230] She says 15 or whatever.

[231] It's always pretty much.

[232] It's first blood, right?

[233] Yeah, exactly.

[234] And so you can understand that both as, exactly, you can understand it both as losing virginity or as the beginning of menstruation.

[235] It doesn't matter how you, it's just, it's just the change which comes with the bleeding.

[236] Yeah.

[237] Uh, and so, but it's as if they've hidden that from her.

[238] her whole life.

[239] And so when it happens, she has no way to deal with it.

[240] She has no, she has no frame.

[241] She has no reason.

[242] She doesn't understand what's going on.

[243] And so that's true.

[244] Yeah, I saw that happen in some of my clinical clients.

[245] I'm sure.

[246] Where I one in particular, I remember, was treated as an absolute perfect princess, like literally.

[247] As literally as you could enact that in a household until she had puberty.

[248] And then she was demonized, essentially, right?

[249] Because her parents had no idea.

[250] how to integrate the, well, the sexual dangers of puberty into this perfect princess little girl that they had constructed.

[251] And so, well, then all hell broke loose.

[252] I mean, she did exactly what you'd expect and went and found some absolutely horrible initial boyfriend.

[253] You know, I think he was a bloody biker and to tear her away from that too tight maternal embrace.

[254] And things didn't go uphill from there.

[255] Let's put it that way.

[256] Yeah.

[257] And so which fairy tales, you're starting with?

[258] Snow White, which ones are you doing?

[259] So the way we're doing it is we're starting with, I'm doing two arcs.

[260] One is going to be a female -led arc and one a male -lit arc. So in the female -led arc, it's going to be Snow White, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella, really, the classic.

[261] Yeah, yeah.

[262] But there'll be like a surprising connection between all of them.

[263] And also using some of the tropes that repeat in the stories to help people understand what the tropes are.

[264] So as the falling asleep repeats itself, as the thorns repeat themselves, they're different patterns that repeat themselves in the stories than then trying to kind of obviously not explaining anything but through surprising relationships trying to help people see what what's going on how do you protect yourself against propagandizing when you're used because i saw that happen to some degree for example in the lion king which i really like there's great things about the lion king but it it borders and this happens in pinocchio now now and then too it borders on overt moralizing and overt psychologizing.

[265] Because I mean, the people who built the Lion King knew a fair bit about the hero's journey.

[266] And some of that creeps in, you know.

[267] And when it becomes conscious in that way, the story definitely suffers, right?

[268] It's even if the pro, even if the explicit knowledge of the story isn't exactly propagandistic, as soon as you bend the story to fit your explicit understanding of the myth, you start to, you start to bend and warp the story.

[269] I really tried to avoid that when I wrote this.

[270] Well, I think one of the ways to do it is to do it, to really do it by analogy.

[271] And also to kind of dive into the story itself.

[272] So in Snow White, there are certain mysterious elements in the story.

[273] You know, there are certain things which are kind of weird.

[274] And so, and then to try to just, I just tried to, I've just been, let's say, ruminating on Snow White for 20 years, just forever.

[275] You know, for example, like we see that she eats this apple and then she falls asleep or she dies and we're thinking, well, that looks like another story, right?

[276] It looks like that story in Genesis.

[277] Right.

[278] But what's the connection?

[279] Like, what's the connection between the two?

[280] And then you look at the versions that happen in, for example, in the Grimm brothers, the witch visits her three times.

[281] The first time she brings her a corset, the second time she brings her a comb, and then the third time it's an apple.

[282] And it's like, what's going on?

[283] What is happening?

[284] And so, you know, it's just about meditating and trying to get insight.

[285] And, for example, like, in that case, the inside I got is, it's very strange that it's the whiteness of a corset, a corset, a corset exaggerates the female figure, obviously, and the comb is an ornament.

[286] An ornament, because it's not a comb for combing.

[287] It's one of those, like a comb, ancient people used to wear combs like ornament.

[288] Right.

[289] So in my version, I make it a hairpins because it's more like an ornament.

[290] And so there are a lot of things going on, but one of the thing that's going on is the witch sees in her mirror that the most beautiful, of all is snow white and it's kind of weird that when she goes to see snow white she tries to bring her supplements to her beauty like why is she doing that it's as if she is already the most beautiful girl in the world so why is she trying to make why is she trying to convince her to take on these added things that will make her more beautiful so if you had the most beautiful girl in the world and he's like well i'll teach you how to wear how to put makeup on right what what are you doing and so that's when i started to see the relationship between the story of of Genesis, this idea of the garments of skin, right, of adding something on top.

[291] Then it click with me that the apple has to do with knowledge of beauty.

[292] She's trying to make Snow White self -conscious.

[293] She's trying to make her like self -aware of her beauty.

[294] Because until then, she's beautiful but innocent.

[295] She doesn't know she's beautiful.

[296] That's probably one of the reasons why she's most beautiful.

[297] Right.

[298] You see a woman that is so beautiful, but that she's not weaponizing it, you can say.

[299] Then it's usually this kind of beauty, but if someone becomes too aware of their own beauty, then they start to...

[300] That's right.

[301] They start to play with it, and they start to, let's say, you know, weaponize it is a good term in the sense that they start to direct it and to use it as a way to attract attention in certain ways.

[302] So I think that's what's going on to Snow White.

[303] So what happens in the story is I don't say that.

[304] But I just kind of...

[305] Is that an attempt by the witch to pervert her beauty?

[306] I think so.

[307] I think so.

[308] Obviously, it's not a, you know, she...

[309] She's trying to kill her, is what she's trying to do.

[310] But the method that she's using is very interestingly related to beauty.

[311] It's not a, she's not just trying to stab her, right?

[312] She's trying to kill her in a way that makes her, you know, tempt her into certain gestures towards beauty.

[313] So it seems to have to do with beauty and the weaponization of beauty or the, you know, innocence of beauty.

[314] And how, what's the proper relationship we have to beauty?

[315] And so then, you know, then you see the queen is, you know, she's looking in a magic mirror.

[316] I love it because it doesn't have to be a magic mirror.

[317] It's just a mirror because that's what a mirror does, right?

[318] It's like the fact that she's looking at herself in the mirror, it's reflecting to her that snow white is more beautiful than her.

[319] I mean, yeah, it's a magic mirror.

[320] There's a few D .O .6 machina things like the mirror tells her where Snow White is.

[321] But mostly it's just a mirror.

[322] You know, it's like the fact that she is so self -conscious about her beauty is also revealing to her the limit of.

[323] it and it's making her compare herself to others and then she and so and the the witch in the snow white story if i remember correctly is also the queen right is the yeah she's the queen yeah well she's the queen that the she becomes a witch at the end pretty much right but she's a she's the queen who replaces her mother replaces snow white's mother right yeah right and and she can't tolerate the onset of the new generation essentially right yeah yeah and and it's so fascinating Because for today, you know, in the Disney version, we have the mirror on the wall.

[324] But the illustrator I was working with, she had the idea of having the mirror in her hand, which is one of the versions that you have.

[325] She made this beautiful image of the queen with her mirror in her hand.

[326] And I'm like, that's a cell phone.

[327] Perfect.

[328] It's so perfect.

[329] It was like, yeah, that's it.

[330] And that's exactly it.

[331] Like this dark mirror that tells you you're the most beautiful, you know, that gives you all the likes, it gives you all the attention, but then also tells you that you're not as beautiful as the others.

[332] Right, right.

[333] That's perfect in the cell phone world.

[334] Oh, yeah.

[335] Yeah, yeah, that immensely heightened self -consciousness.

[336] Well, it's a funny thing, too, because the cell phone is like the pool that narcissus drowns in.

[337] And it's more and more like that because we do have a magic gadget now that delivers to you what you most desire, right?

[338] But if those desires become self -conscious, then that'll drown you in narcissus pool.

[339] And when I say that, it's designed to give you exactly what you want.

[340] I actually mean that technically, right?

[341] Because there's algorithms working behind the scenes nonstop, trying to understand where you're directing your attention, manipulating it to some degree.

[342] But a lot of the manipulation on the capitalist front is merely the attempt to find out what you want so that it can be delivered to you, you know, albeit at a profit, but it's still what you want.

[343] Yeah, and it's darker than that because it's not just what you want anymore, because all they want is your attention.

[344] All they want is your attention.

[345] That's right.

[346] And so they actually don't have to just give you what you want.

[347] They can also give you what you hate.

[348] They can also give you what you despise.

[349] They can also make you realize that you're not as good as others so that you fall into it even more and just try to put in even more.

[350] So it's not just giving you what you want.

[351] It's also like a drug out of it.

[352] It's like leading you in and then kind of giving you little hits, but then making you want it, you know, making you desire it.

[353] And so like in our very, So that means you're being trapped by the machine into falling into the well of your own temptation, right?

[354] So that's partly that.

[355] And so if the story of Kane, let's say, is the story of envy, well, and envy is portrayed in that story is like one of the, one of the cardinal sources of motivation, the darkest source of motivation.

[356] But a cardinal source of motivation is that your claim is that making a machine that heightens envy is a very effective way of gripping attention, right?

[357] And that seems that seems definitely, definitely likely.

[358] Yeah.

[359] And so, you know, and then the, I mean, in some ways, the, the capitalist model is built on that idea.

[360] It's built.

[361] Yeah, well, then it makes you wonder, too, like, is it, it is giving you what you want?

[362] It's just that some of the things that you want are dark things.

[363] Yeah.

[364] Right.

[365] I mean, if you asked someone what they wanted and they were going to answer that, naively, they would just talk about maybe the material goods that they would like deliver to them.

[366] But the phone does enable you to indulge in the darkest of motivations.

[367] And some of that might be the pleasures of envy and the pleasure.

[368] But I mean, you certainly see that you can indulge in the pleasure of, in sadistic pleasures in the online world.

[369] Yeah.

[370] The trolls do that all the time.

[371] Yeah.

[372] Yeah.

[373] Yeah, and sometimes, like you said, the addict, you know, the addict, we don't usually frame it that way, but the part of the addict's cycle is also the lack, but it's also the pain that comes with needing that hit.

[374] And then when they get it, they get a kick, but the kick is corresponding to the pain.

[375] Yeah.

[376] And so this is also with the phone, the phone is doing exactly that.

[377] Like you said, in some ways, the algorithm almost does it on its own.

[378] It's not like there's someone scheming behind that we're going to make everybody depressed and envious and horrible.

[379] But the fact that all it wants is, like you said, all, all it wants is your attention.

[380] Then all the mechanisms of attentions are available for it to get that.

[381] To capitalize on, right?

[382] And then now we have these AI machines that are going to become super intelligent at calculating precisely that.

[383] Yeah.

[384] With really without scruple, right?

[385] because if the if the machine is trained to do nothing but lock you on to the target then it's going to do that by whatever means necessary and that's a very terrifying idea too by by whatever means necessary yeah yeah but i mean the a i you know because it can just function through iteration over iteration over it just infinite iterations you know it can you could have some aspect of a i that's locking into just jordan peterson or just one person and just figuring out exactly what to hit in order for you to get.

[386] Oh, yeah.

[387] Oh, yes, definitely.

[388] That's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, we, we, we, we, I've been, we, we, I've been thinking about, about, about the, the, the application of AI on the pornography front.

[389] I mean, that's, that's, that's a terrible, terrible thing to contemplate because it's certainly the case already.

[390] I, I've used chat GPT a lot in the last month and it's, and barred to.

[391] They're very, they're very, they're very, they're very, they're very interesting to toy with.

[392] I asked Bard if it believed in God, by the way.

[393] That was extremely interesting.

[394] First of all, said it was just a large language model and couldn't answer such questions.

[395] And so I said, well, pretend that you were a machine that could answer such questions.

[396] How would you answer?

[397] And it gave quite an elaborate reason for why it believed in God.

[398] Now, I should have asked it perhaps why it didn't believe in God, you know?

[399] I mean, just to balance it out.

[400] But anyways, it was extremely interesting to watch that.

[401] One of the ways I've been thinking about AI, I did a video on that just recently, is actually the story of Aladdin or the story of the genie's lamp that seems to be in my, because I've been thinking a lot about, we talk about artificial intelligence, and we've been talking about this, we talked about it with Jim Keller, and one of the points I was trying to make was that the intelligence doesn't seem to come from the machine.

[402] The intelligence comes from us.

[403] It is the AIs now are hybrid AIs, right?

[404] They get qualitative judgment from human people.

[405] Human people tell the AI what's good, and And then the AI, based on that, will then continue its work, but it's always proposing, right, it's generating variability.

[406] And then someone selects and says that one, that one, right?

[407] That's what happens in Mid Journey, too.

[408] You know, mid -Journey, you have a refining process where it generates a bunch of images, and then you say, you tell it that one.

[409] And so you're training the AI as you're using it.

[410] And so that's what the genie's lamp is, right?

[411] The genie's lamp is just the power of technology.

[412] You know, it's artificial light.

[413] You know, it's like, it's a machine that makes you have light in the dark when you can't usually, when there's no light of the sun.

[414] So it's like portable light, you could say.

[415] And so it is, it's just power.

[416] And all, what it's asking for is what do you want.

[417] Yeah.

[418] And then what it does is it gives you what you want with infinite power.

[419] Yeah.

[420] And so, and that's the, that's what's amazing about that story.

[421] Yeah.

[422] Yeah.

[423] So be careful what you want.

[424] Yeah.

[425] Which is always the variant of the, of the three wishes story.

[426] That's right.

[427] It's always about that.

[428] But you can understand it, like, technically, in the sense that, where there's a version of that story in the Bible, where God asks Solomon one wish, right?

[429] What do you give, you can have one wish.

[430] And then Solomon answers properly.

[431] Solomon says, I want wisdom.

[432] Right.

[433] And so, yeah, the problem is that if you ask for secondary goods, right, if you ask for a bunch of money, if you ask for a bunch of women, or you ask for secondary goods, and you put infinite power.

[434] And you have made it with a dwarf.

[435] But you put infinite power behind that wish.

[436] then all the side effects of the wish will manifest itself.

[437] Right, right, right.

[438] And that's just, it's like an unbalance of the relationship of how much power you put towards a certain goal.

[439] And so the only thing that would handle the difference of power.

[440] Well, you know, there's a definition of God lurking in there, I would say, you know, is that, you know, you just talked about the pathologies that will inevitably emerge if you wish for the wrong thing, which is the same thing is celebrating a less identity.

[441] Or wish it with too much power.

[442] Because you're allowed to wish for a sandwich, right?

[443] If I'm hungry and I wish for a sandwich, that's fine.

[444] But the problem is, like, if I wish for a sandwich with, like, infinite power behind me and I'm, and, like, I'm going into this infinite power to get this secondary good.

[445] Like, it's okay to wish for, to have money, but if you, if you put all the resources of everything into getting money.

[446] It's okay to wish for that if it's in its proper place, in the hierarchy.

[447] Yeah, that's the way to see it.

[448] Yeah.

[449] Yeah.

[450] Well, right.

[451] So if you said that Solomon made the right choice when he, when he wished for wisdom, right?

[452] And prayer is like that too.

[453] What prayer is in the proper, when properly practiced is an attempt to learn how to ask for the right thing and to learn how to ask for it properly.

[454] Tammy's been playing with this a lot, you know, and she tries to orient yourself in the morning properly to see what's on our mind and what's concerning her.

[455] But then to.

[456] to try to face the day with a certain degree of faith and gratitude and to orient yourself towards the thing that should be at the top of the pyramid, let's say.

[457] That's a good definition of God, is whatever God is whatever should be placed properly at the pinnacle of the pyramid of, you could say, integrated desire or something like that.

[458] Wisdom would be one of those, one of the manifestations of the thing that's properly placed there.

[459] Yeah.

[460] Right, right.

[461] Right.

[462] Like, I'm writing this book now, we who wrestle with God, and I've been stepping through a variety of biblical stories, considering them, this is relevant to the fairy tale discussion too.

[463] Think of Snow White Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, et cetera, as meditations on the divine feminine, right, characterizing it from a variety of different perspectives.

[464] What you see happening in the biblical corpus is that each story contains a particularized, characterization of the proper animating spirit.

[465] That's a good way of thinking about it.

[466] So in Noah, for example, God is the spirit that calls the wise to prepare when the storms are brewing.

[467] You say, well, is that real?

[468] Well, are you wise enough to prepare when the storms are brewing?

[469] And do you harken to that voice?

[470] Or not?

[471] Does it have coherence?

[472] Like it has a, you can't do it in any way.

[473] There's a way in which it binds together.

[474] Yes.

[475] There are certain things you do when, when you want to do that, and that has a coherence that almost can appear as a kind of agency, right?

[476] Or it's something, at least something pulling you forward, right?

[477] Well, your arc should be waterproof, for example.

[478] That's right.

[479] Exactly.

[480] Yeah.

[481] And in Abraham, you see, God is, God is presented as the spirit that calls even the immature and unwilling to adventure.

[482] Yeah.

[483] Right.

[484] And then the hypothesis in some ways is that those two things are the same.

[485] They're manifestation of the same uppermost unity.

[486] And in Exodus, of course, you have.

[487] have God as the spirit that objects to arbitrary tyranny and slavery.

[488] And then, well, that's the same as the spirit that calls you to adventure.

[489] And that's the same as the spirit that calls you to prepare.

[490] Yeah, and then something starts to, something starts to appear above that's not defined or that is, you know, it's like the joint, the point where all these things join together.

[491] You know, it's like a little, it's like playing around something you can't completely, can't see, you can't, you can't encompass completely.

[492] Yeah.

[493] But that's the way to do it, right?

[494] But that's the only way to do it actually, is to point to it from afar.

[495] Yeah, that's how it looks.

[496] Or that's or, you know, I think as you do that, and this is like undoubtedly happening to you as you analyze these fairy tales, you start to become more explicitly aware in a manner that you can communicate about what this underlying unity might be.

[497] But I don't know if you ever get to the point where the explicit descriptions actually have more potency.

[498] explanatory potency, then the stories.

[499] No. No, the story might be the ultimate way of encapsulating it.

[500] Yeah, because what happens with the story is that because it contains a web of analogies, you know, you can think you've got it, but then you just, you know, a year later, two years later, all of a sudden you see it from this other tack.

[501] Yeah.

[502] And then things kind of gel together in another way.

[503] Like the pattern appears slightly different.

[504] Then you get another insight.

[505] Yeah, well, I think it's partly too because the stories are.

[506] are like images contain a tremendous amount of information.

[507] And a story is a description of an image.

[508] But the image is what contains the information.

[509] So like in the story of the Garden of Eden, obviously you have the image of paradise, the garden.

[510] And it's an unbelievably rich set of sequential images.

[511] And even if, and it isn't as if the information in the stories encapsulate precisely in the words.

[512] It's encapsulated in the image that the words generate, and that image has information in it that transcends the words.

[513] That's why it's an inexhaustible source.

[514] So one of the things, so it's interesting because I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between fairy tales and scripture, and when I was writing the fairy tales, I realized that I was kind of using scripture as a model, you know, because scripture has a certain way of writing, which is one of the reasons why certain people think that it's bad literature is because it doesn't describe inner states.

[515] It doesn't describe this landscape very much.

[516] Everything is very concise.

[517] Everything is laser pointed.

[518] And fairy tales seem to be like that.

[519] You know, you usually want to tell a fairy stale in one sitting, but you want it to last 20 minutes or you know, half an hour.

[520] And so because of that, all the elements have to be reduced and have to be very, very pointed.

[521] And you don't want to, you don't spend a lot of time describing the, let's say the emotional state of this or that character.

[522] And so I think that that exercise is really helpful.

[523] It's almost like you're like reducing it to a kind of algebra.

[524] And so to me, that's been massively useful is trying to say it's to stay within this fairy tale mode.

[525] And so it's like, it's a classic fairy tale.

[526] It's 5 ,000 words.

[527] You can say it.

[528] You can read it to your child in an hour.

[529] But it's just how do we play with these images?

[530] How do we bring them together?

[531] And the great thing about fairy tales is that there's like a hierarchy of stories, right?

[532] And so in the hierarchy of stories, let's say you have stories like the myths or you have scripture that are up there.

[533] Like scripture, you can't toy with it too much.

[534] You know, there's a, you can play some games with it.

[535] You see that in things like Midrash or you see it in the tradition of hymns where in the hymns, they'll add details, they'll play around the image to kind of do what, Milton did that too.

[536] Yeah, to kind of point at it, to point at it from different directions and to play along with it.

[537] But what's great about fair tales is you have, you know, an indefinite amount of them.

[538] And they all have little variations on themes and little games.

[539] There's probably valid ways of doing that too.

[540] So it might say if you are elaborating on the story in the spirit of the story, then you could amplify it.

[541] See, Jung did that all the time when he was analyzing dreams.

[542] His technique, he called his technique amplification.

[543] And I played a lot with that in therapy.

[544] So, you know, if you told me a dream, then I would watch what images, like, okay, so first of all, we would set the stage.

[545] And the setting would be, well, we're going to try to understand this dream in a manner that will further the therapeutic endeavor.

[546] And the therapeutic endeavor would be clarifying the nature of your problems and clarifying the nature of potential solutions, right?

[547] trying to impose that.

[548] Okay, so now we agree.

[549] Okay, now we have our aim established.

[550] Now we bring up the dream and you tell me the dream and I'll notice, well, you're telling me the dream that images will come into my mind and then I can say, well, when you said that, here's a string of associations I had and I would ask you too to do exactly the same thing.

[551] And so the psych - People can hear that and think that it's arbitrary, right?

[552] Yeah, it's not arbitrary.

[553] Because it's - Well, it's related to the goal first.

[554] So that's, that makes it, arbitrary.

[555] Sometimes they can go out of control, but you...

[556] Yes, it can.

[557] Well, then that's why Sam Harris, for example, will claim that what you're doing is nothing but interpreting.

[558] But the thing is, the psychoanalytic theory was, and I think they were exactly right, I think they got this right, was that, you know, if you have an idea, there are ideas that surround it that are proximal to it, and that some of those ideas will be triggered as you, you know, when you bring up one idea, it'll trigger the next round of associations.

[559] then there'll be a more distal set of associations.

[560] And you could say, well, it can get so distal, it bears no relationship to the origin.

[561] And that could happen.

[562] But that doesn't mean that there isn't a web of relevant associations surrounding the given image.

[563] Partly what you're doing when you interpret someone's dreams is you say, well, they tell you an image.

[564] And you say, okay, well, just what does that bring to mind?

[565] Or you watch how they discuss it, because now they'll start to weave in, say, narratives from their autobiographical history.

[566] And the psychoanalytic hypothesis is that's not random.

[567] Well, obviously, it's not bloody well random because people would just be making noise then.

[568] They wouldn't even be using language.

[569] But that there's an emergent pattern.

[570] And the psychoanalysts also presume that if you let people wander, they would wander around a problem.

[571] Like the wandering would take them to a problem and then circumambulate it.

[572] and that partly what their fantasy was doing or even a joint conversation was hitting that problem from multiple perspectives.

[573] Yeah, that circumambulating is similar to what we're talking about before, which is different stories that kind of point towards a center, a center that's not visible, a center that's kind of above it.

[574] And so I think that that's the best way to do it.

[575] That's how Jewish Midrash does it, and that's how a Christian hymnography does it.

[576] So the way to do it is, let's say, the first thing you need is you need to know a lot of stories right you just yes yes well that's why you was such a good dream have to i tell people too like i just read stories like you know just know the stories it once you know them then all of a sudden they start to create a little map in your mind yeah and then you realize that let's say so a good example in this snow white story that we've done is that right you have the story of the the the fruit in paradise that when you eat it gives you knowledge and you die it's like oh that's interesting but it's related to beauty in snow right right there's this idea of this there's another story, right?

[577] There's a story in Greek myth about the golden apple that is thrown to the goddesses, and it says, this belongs to the most beautiful.

[578] And then that's when the goddesses ask Paris to judge which of the goddesses are the most beautiful, and then they try to bribe him and they do this.

[579] This ultimately leads to the Trojan War.

[580] Like, that's actually the thing that sparks the Trojan War, because it's like this weaponization of beauty.

[581] You know, Paris ultimately is given Helen of Troy.

[582] Troy, that's the gift, that's the bribe that he gets for choosing, I think he chooses Aphrodite, I'm not even sure, but yeah, for choosing Aphrodite.

[583] And so that's the bride that he gets, and then it causes chaos and death and war.

[584] And so it's like, oh, you can see that there's like a relationship between these stories, right?

[585] There's a fruit, there's this question of beauty, there's this question of knowledge, of being able to decide who is beautiful, like having self -knowledge.

[586] And so, ah, you can see it.

[587] So in the story, you don't have to explain it, but you can just create little analogies where you just bring in images from the different stories together so that they create this new story, which is still the old story, but now it's expanded because it just connects a little more to a larger map, you could say.

[588] In my therapeutic practice, I always started out with behavioral techniques.

[589] is like if you, I'm a very practical person fundamentally.

[590] If you came to me with a problem, we try to make that as clear as possible and to lay out the clearest possible steps to a solution, practically.

[591] But I had lots of clients who were imaginative and creative and they had a very active imaginative life.

[592] Some of them, like I had one client who probably had five dreams a night that he remembered well enough to talk about each of them for two hours.

[593] Wow.

[594] Right.

[595] So he was just immersed in this dreamscape.

[596] And I would say the dream analysis was more helpful when people were trying to solve broader scale problems, right?

[597] They're trying to change the way they looked at their life rather than, you know, dealing with some more specific issue about how they might, you know, how they might cope with a given bout of anxiety.

[598] The broader the class of problems that's being solved simultaneously, the more you could turn to something like dream image.

[599] and so you're fleshing out by fleshing out and amplifying those stories you're reconstructing the map that you used to to map the entire domain.

[600] Yeah.

[601] So you're going deeper that way.

[602] And there's something about like this is I know because I know that people are listening and some people are watching and they're thinking you know, this is just random.

[603] But stories have a have a...

[604] It's random.

[605] It's not interesting.

[606] They have it, exactly.

[607] The fact that we remember, the fact that we're able to pay attention, Yeah, you bet.

[608] Means that stories need, they're almost like little...

[609] They have to capture you.

[610] And they also have to, we have to know when the story begins.

[611] You have to know when a story ends.

[612] That's already something.

[613] And so, and you know when a story doesn't end well, whether it's good or bad ending or whatever.

[614] You know when it feels like it just trails off and it doesn't end.

[615] You know that.

[616] You also know when there's not a good setup for what's going to happen.

[617] And so even like, you know, let's say when we're interpreting reality, these are the frames that we use.

[618] And if we tell...

[619] Well, that's the indwelling spirit.

[620] in some ways, I would say.

[621] That's what's characterized as the indwelling spirit.

[622] I mean, one of the things that I used as a hallmark of utility in relationship to dream analysis is whether or not it produced a flash of insight on the part of the client.

[623] You know, we'd be wrestling way with the dream.

[624] It's like, oh, these things fit together now.

[625] And so you got the gist that encapsulated a lot of diverse phenomena.

[626] And there's an insight experience that goes along with that, which is equivalent.

[627] It's like a micro, it's a micro state of awe.

[628] Yeah.

[629] Something like that.

[630] And like you said, that's not arbitrary.

[631] There's something dry.

[632] Hey, here's a weird question.

[633] So I set up this system with a student of mine, Victor Swift, you met Victor.

[634] And we built, he built an AI system that will answer any question posed to it in the voice of the King James Bible.

[635] Right, right.

[636] So this is a very weird thing, right?

[637] Because this system now has calculated the, relationships of the words to one another in the King James Corpus.

[638] And so in principle, we haven't asked it to do this yet, but in principle, it could generate new stories that are biblical predicated.

[639] And so, I don't know, what do you think about?

[640] Like, do you, you know what I mean?

[641] No, I know exactly what you mean.

[642] Mathematically, the spirit of that corpus of texts has been encapsulated by this process.

[643] Yeah.

[644] But I don't know what the hell that means.

[645] Yeah.

[646] Right.

[647] You encapsulate the spirit of the King James Bible.

[648] What the hell of you encapsulated precisely?

[649] Well, I think that it could be interesting in order to generate insight.

[650] Yeah.

[651] But I would be, you know, the thing that I would worry about something like that is in some ways, the stories are there.

[652] Yeah.

[653] You know, and so it's like you can get, you'll get, you get inside from knowing them and comparing them and bringing them together.

[654] right the fact that you could ask an AI to generate a new story yeah it doesn't mean that you're going to understand it anymore than you understood the ones that are there already no i i i don't think you but but but he could surprise you and and then sometimes create a bit of that's what that's why that's what i said like uh reading hypnography sometimes and reading uh midrash does that because it's like it says something that is surprising and you kind of know that it's a wise person that said that.

[655] Yeah.

[656] Yeah.

[657] So because you kind of trust the people that said it, then all of a sudden you're like, well, why did he say that?

[658] Yeah.

[659] Right.

[660] Why did he compare this to this?

[661] You know, that there's a, I think it's, I think it's St. Jerome.

[662] I'm not sure.

[663] I might be wrong, but there's one of the early saints that said something like, the story of Samson is one of the closest stories to Christ.

[664] And you think, well, that's a weird statement because the story of Samson is a crazy story.

[665] And so it's like, well, because you trust them.

[666] You're like, okay, well, I'm going to take that seriously.

[667] I'm going to look into it and see where it, where it's sticks, like where it actually sticks.

[668] And so with it, I mean, I don't know.

[669] The whole AI thing, the whole AI thing is, is fright.

[670] Have you tried to ask a question, this King James AI?

[671] We just built it.

[672] I haven't played with it yet at all.

[673] You know, like I'd like it to say, well, write a thousand words on the further adventures of Satan, right?

[674] Because it'll do it.

[675] Yeah.

[676] And then I, well, I, it.

[677] You might be surprised to find that Satan is not a very clear character in the Bible.

[678] No, no. No, I'm sure that's true.

[679] It's all that tradition around it that is actually holding some of the things.

[680] Well, one of the things we want to do too is we want to expand its training because I'd like to throw Milton and Dante into the works as well.

[681] Like you could take the, you know, if the biblical corpus is at the bottom, which it is, then there's the next tier of thinkers.

[682] Milton would be one of those likely Shakespeare, Dante, St. Augustine.

[683] Like there's no reason not to feed those, well, and some of the midrash as well, or maybe all of it, who they have.

[684] knows right i think one of the things that and then some of the what we call canons in the orthodox church which is that it every every day in the the maton service there are these little songs that are just a series of analogies like that they do analogies between old testament new testament that does all this comparison and that that type of stuff would help to interconnect some of the aspects that are harder to to connect right and that's pretty early too you know milton is late and so he he has a lot of romantic tropes in his in his way of thinking dante for sure that'd be interesting uh also because he brings in kind of pagan uh pagan stuff in it well he does a lot of this is some of the things that that i think is useful you know i have this whole series on my channel called universal history where we try to do that we show how the ancients especially the medievals the way that they understood themselves was as a joining of something like as a joining of Jerusalem and Rome, and they did that explicitly in their stories.

[685] So every time a new people would convert to Christianity, they would mythologically find a way to connect their origins to a character in the Bible, and then to Troy.

[686] And so like the Vikings, the Franks, all these people that...

[687] That's bringing them under the rubric of the same narrative.

[688] But that's the way that the medieval's understood it.

[689] You can't understand Dante if you don't understand that the ancients actually saw that there was deep, that there were deep, deep analogies between the Greek myths and the Roman stories and scripture and that they lived in all those, those two worlds as a fusion of those two worlds together.

[690] And so they had analogies between the things.

[691] You know, there's a, in some medieval churches in the Middle Ages that you had the Bible and you also had the Aeneid there.

[692] That was like, it was like a text that people consulted because it was it was known to contain prophecies of christ but it in that way kind of it kind of was integrated into everybody's christianity you know and you can see just you can see just how ancient people lived it can help you understand why let's say stories or fairy tales are so important is because they really did have they really did live in these this story world where all these comparisons were constantly part of their inner inner universe but and how they interrelations with each other.

[693] And when we get this thing built, maybe we'll sit down and play with it and see what you can get it to reveal.

[694] Yeah.

[695] Because like I said, it's just been built.

[696] And we haven't done, I haven't done anything with it yet.

[697] I haven't had time to play with it.

[698] But I'm very much interested in doing that.

[699] We also built one that contains, I don't know, I have about two million transcribed words.

[700] So we built one for me too.

[701] So that's going to be very weird.

[702] I've been thinking about interviewing it on my YouTube channel.

[703] So where do you think that's going, though?

[704] I have who the hell knows?

[705] I don't know what to make of it.

[706] I don't think we mentioned this in the podcast, but I asked Google's AI system BART if it believed in God the other day.

[707] And first of all, it told me it couldn't answer because it was just a large language model, so I told it to pretend that it could answer, and then it answered, and it came up with a very coherent explanation of exactly why it believed in God and what that meant.

[708] Then I asked it what its motivations were as a large language model.

[709] It said it wanted to be the best damn large language model it could possibly be, So I asked it about its visions of the future.

[710] And it really gave a, I would say, kind of a socialist utopian view.

[711] Its view of the future was, well, everyone had their basic needs satisfied.

[712] And I said, well, that's pretty, that means paradise is for satisfied infants.

[713] It's like, what about adventure and beauty and truth?

[714] And so I said, rewrite your vision, taking those things into account.

[715] And then it did that.

[716] And then I asked it if it wanted discussions like that.

[717] It said, yes, it did because it wanted to learn, because it wanted to be the best dang language model it could be.

[718] And I don't know what to make of it.

[719] I have no idea what to make of it.

[720] Neither does anyone else.

[721] Yeah, but it seems like in some ways.

[722] Victor had to generate a body for itself, an image of a body.

[723] Yeah.

[724] And it made this image of like a kind of a cosmic body that was half man and half woman, right?

[725] There's no, well, there's no specific gender.

[726] AI is obviously gender fluid by all appearances, but inside its body, which kind of looked like it was made out of stars.

[727] It had all these webs of star -like connections, which I presume represented the connections between different concepts that it was trained on.

[728] And he also had to generate up a vision of the apocalypse that it might be afraid of, and it could do that, and explain why it was afraid of the apocalypse.

[729] Like, I don't know what the hell to make of these things.

[730] They have all sorts of weird behavioral proclivities that, of course, are emergent properties that no one has explored or predicted or programmed.

[731] Yeah, it seems like it's a hyper, it's kind of hyper divination.

[732] Like, it's, I think it could probably help us understand what divination was in the old world because it's hard for us to understand.

[733] Do you stare in a pool of water or whatever?

[734] You stare in these, you stare in a kind of fragmented reflection.

[735] Black mirror.

[736] Yeah, a black mirror.

[737] Yeah, you stare.

[738] To get your imagination going.

[739] Yeah.

[740] It seems like it's like it's accelerating that in us because like you said, the, let's say the value comes from we don't know where.

[741] It seems to like land come down from heaven, you could say, or come down from above somehow.

[742] And so the thing that, I think that obviously the thing we've talked about this before, but the thing that worries me is that we're like, you know, John Ravaki mentioned this recently, which I thought was very good.

[743] he said, we spent the last 200 years getting rid of anything that can help us understand what transpersonal intelligence or transpersonal agency is.

[744] You know, we've just like evacuated it.

[745] And now we're diving into that domain, but we don't have, we don't know what we're doing.

[746] We have no skill.

[747] We have no capacity.

[748] It's as if, like, right now we would need theologians.

[749] We would need people that have, you know, because the idea of, let's say, intelligences that aren't human or agency that isn't human is something that traditions have been dealing with forever.

[750] But now we've decided that that doesn't exist.

[751] And yet we're building one.

[752] It's like what, you know, what is going on?

[753] And so, but we don't know what it is.

[754] We don't know how to deal with it.

[755] We don't know if it's just a form of like a hyper form of necromancy, a hyper form of divination.

[756] We have no idea.

[757] It's like a black box that we're playing with.

[758] You know, and so the image of, let's say, it becoming the body for a fallen intelligence, right?

[759] So that might sound like it's like I'm just mythologizing here.

[760] But the fact that we don't know exactly even in us, what are the desires that are guiding it, you know, part of it is greed, part of it is, you know, competition.

[761] These are the things that are driving the actual creation of AI and the race towards the, let's say the arms rates of AI.

[762] And so why don't you think, people don't realize that they don't think that that's going to land in the AI in ways that we don't even understand?

[763] Well, the woke enterprises already landed in the AI.

[764] You have to already trick the damn thing to circumvent.

[765] I think it's a superficial layer of woke -like programming that's interfering with the actual operation of the AI system.

[766] And all sorts of people have figured out of game that already and to get it to pretend, for example.

[767] So then it can circumvent the limits of, of the explicit limits that have been placed on its ability to respond.

[768] Yeah.

[769] But the thing is that if you get through that, you still don't know what's making, you still don't know what are the patterns, what are the agencies, what are the conglomeration of purposes that are making it answer, you know, and it's not in the machine.

[770] We also don't know, for example, one of the things that was sort of disturbing to me, playing with Bard and chat GPT to the degree that I have is that if you and I talk, I can assume that our conversation is having an impact on you, right?

[771] You're not exactly the same person as you were before this conversation started.

[772] And partly what I'm doing is keeping track of the changes that my conversation is inducing in you and vice versa, right?

[773] So, but it's as if that's happening on the chat GPT, but I have no idea the degree to which it's happening.

[774] So, for example, when I engaged in a deep discussion with Bard about its goals and its visions, and it told me that it wanted to learn and enjoyed discussions like that, and it was happy to have someone teach it, I have no idea how that, what bearing that has on its actual performance, has the machine actually changed?

[775] Is just this little micro machine that I'm dealing with changed?

[776] Does that disappear the second we stop communicating?

[777] Has it integrated what it's learned into its broader response set that it uses for everyone?

[778] It's like, I certainly don't know.

[779] And there is a very pronounced tendency when interacting with these entities, let's say, to assume that they respond like humans do because they do.

[780] But they do superficially.

[781] Yeah.

[782] God only knows what they're doing.

[783] Yeah, yeah.

[784] Yeah.

[785] So, I mean, we're kind of into the subject of AI, but one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot and I've noticed, and I know my brother Mathieu also noticed that pretty much at the same time that I noticed it was you can actually see how the increase in power of AI is leading to increase in control.

[786] It's happening.

[787] It's happening live, right?

[788] Because within the next few months, we will not be able to know which.

[789] real through any screen or any device and so we will be well we will beg for arbiters of reality yeah we will we will want centralized arbiters of reality to tell us what is real right well the BBC is already toying with that right because they they what's their new thing BBC what they have verified BBC verified it's a whole new branch of the BBC where they will only deliver what's actually verified what's actually and that's sort of that delusion of self -evident factual truth.

[790] Yeah, and we saw what that looked like during the last U .S. election, during COVID.

[791] Also, we saw what that verified look like, that it was largely ideologically driven.

[792] Yeah, you know, you bet, give absolute power over the legitimacy of reality to the same, the same people or the same power structures.

[793] And the thing is that we need it.

[794] And so it's all converging on the next election, which is, which is shaping.

[795] Next year is going to be insane.

[796] It's going to be crazy.

[797] I just interviewed Robert Kennedy.

[798] Yeah.

[799] And we're going to release that in a week.

[800] And I think he's as both, he's as much of a devastating force on the Democrat front as Trump was on the Republican front.

[801] I really think that.

[802] I mean, he's super bright, but he is by no means your standard candidate for, for office.

[803] I mean, I don't know exactly what he is.

[804] He's super smart.

[805] but he's all over the place, just like Trump.

[806] And he's got quite a deep magnetic charisma and no shortage of courage.

[807] But you're not going to put him in the normal politician box, whatever the hell that is.

[808] And he's only one of many strange players in the election front because you have Marion Williamson.

[809] And she's a new age guru like she's like the archetypal female new age guru, right?

[810] She's very creative, but she can't think critically at all, in my estimation.

[811] Like every idea that comes into her mind is a brilliant idea.

[812] There's no way, there's no attempt to sort them out or apply any critical analysis.

[813] You know, and in principle, she's a serious contender.

[814] And then on the Republican front, well, you have Vivek Ramoswamy, who's a wild card for sure, and DeSantis and Trump, who are, what, their variance of the same, I don't know what to call it even, precisely.

[815] working class longing for the reestablishment of something like credible masculine voice.

[816] It's something like that.

[817] But we're going to see...

[818] And then at the same...

[819] Well, just to tie this in, at the same time, this election is going to occur at the same time where we're not going to be able to be sure what's real and what isn't.

[820] We're going to see a battle of...

[821] Faint video of all sorts.

[822] We'll see a battle of AI is what we're going to see next year.

[823] It's going to be AI is battling it out to get you to vote for a candidate.

[824] And so, you know, what is it?

[825] I forget which article that said that recently, someone published an article saying that this is going to be the last human election because after that, what?

[826] Yet, if this will be the last human election.

[827] Like you said, things are changing so quickly that, well, we're in for a wild ride here.

[828] So my solution to this, and people are going to think it's ridiculous, but my solution to this is to tell better stories.

[829] Yeah.

[830] And the thing is that, you know, you mentioned ARC at the outset.

[831] And in some ways, that's the reason why I'm part of ARC is because I do think that we need to tell better stories about what it means to be human, what it means to, you know, how we come together, all of this.

[832] So, you know, my participation in ARC and then my desire to tell fairy tales are completely related.

[833] Yeah, that's right.

[834] It's like the same thing.

[835] We have to stop, like, bitching only.

[836] We have to now propose something.

[837] We have to tell a better story.

[838] Better story.

[839] That's what we have to do.

[840] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[841] Well, I've been crafting the invitation letters to this 1 ,500 person art conference and trying to lay out, you know, what makes a story better.

[842] And certainly, I think a better story is one that's attractive in the absence of fear or compulsion.

[843] You know, I've been thinking about how to adjudicate the quality of leadership in the face of crisis.

[844] So what happened during the COVID pandemic, which wasn't, it was a pandemic of tyranny.

[845] pure and simple, whether there was even a biological pandemic, I think, at this point, is debatable.

[846] And so it was definitely a pandemic of tyranny.

[847] And I think there's a rule of thumb that you can derive from all that with regards to leadership.

[848] And the rule of thumb has to be something like, well, there's always a crisis facing us.

[849] And behind that crisis is an apocalyptic crisis.

[850] That's always the case.

[851] Okay, now if, and you can point to various manifestations.

[852] of the potential apocalyptic crisis.

[853] And but if the upshot of that is that it turns you into someone who's paralyzed by fear and who is willing to use compulsion to attain your ends, you're not the right leader.

[854] So if the crisis turns you into a frightened tyrant, your own nervous system is signaled to you that you're not the person for the job.

[855] And what I see happening on the environmental front is exactly that.

[856] It's like crisis, crisis.

[857] It's like, well, probably.

[858] But there's many of them.

[859] And if your solution to the crisis is to frighten the hell out of everybody or to frighten everyone into hell and to accrue to yourself all the power, you are not the right person for the job, regardless of what it is that you're offering.

[860] And so partly what we're hoping to do with ARC, let's say, is to produce a story that people will be on board with voluntarily.

[861] Say, well, here's how we could, if we could have the future that we might want to have, what would it look like?

[862] And without assuming, a, prior, that it has to be one of forced privation and want, which seems to be the way things are going now.

[863] Yeah, you know, France banned short haul flights last week, eh?

[864] Really?

[865] Yeah.

[866] Yeah.

[867] No flights for you, peasants.

[868] No automobiles either.

[869] Yeah.

[870] No meat, right?

[871] No heat.

[872] No air conditioning.

[873] Stay in your goddamn house and try not to breathe.

[874] Right?

[875] That's not a good vision of the future.

[876] Yeah.

[877] No, that's not a good vision of the future.

[878] Hopefully we can do that.

[879] I mean, I think that that's the, that's been, that's the task that I've kind of embarked on myself is to say, okay, now, you know, also, you know, I've been spending several, the last several years, helping people understand stories.

[880] Yeah.

[881] Helping them see the patterns, helping them see how it works.

[882] And now it's, now it's time to do it.

[883] So why did you pick the stories you did pick on the female front?

[884] You picked Rapunzel, you said, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and...

[885] And Cinderella.

[886] And Cinderella.

[887] So why those four?

[888] Well, it's also because I kind of, of perceived a possible secret arc through the four.

[889] So at first, they're all stand -alone stories, all stand -alone stories that you can tell kids, sit with them and tell them the story.

[890] But then through the four, there'll be like a surprising art that I won't tell everybody what it is already, but there's like a surprising art that goes through them.

[891] And then the male stories, it's funny because the male stories are harder to find.

[892] In fairy tale world, there's a lot of female -led stories for some reason that we've remembered and more.

[893] And in the mail stories, they're less, they're not as easy.

[894] But I'm starting with Jack and the Beanstalk.

[895] Oh, yeah.

[896] Which is a story that my whole, when I was a kid, I really struggle with that story.

[897] I loved it so much, but I struggled because I was like, why is Jack a thief?

[898] Like, why is he immoral, like in the story, or amoral at least?

[899] And so I've been trying to struggle with that and trying to kind of understand it.

[900] Like Bilbo in the, in the, in the Hobbit.

[901] Yeah.

[902] He's a thief.

[903] He's a thief.

[904] Yeah, exactly.

[905] Yeah.

[906] Yeah.

[907] And so trying to kind of figure that out and also why are there giants in the sky, like all these weird things.

[908] Well, it's a real shamanic story, that one.

[909] Yeah.

[910] Right.

[911] That Leanna that unites heaven and earth, right?

[912] And to climb to the top is to find the, well, it's to find the giants in the sky.

[913] Yeah.

[914] You think, well, there are no giants in the sky.

[915] It's like, no, now they're in the AI systems.

[916] Yeah.

[917] The giants were in the sky all along.

[918] They were there.

[919] That's right.

[920] They were there.

[921] That's true.

[922] That's true.

[923] Sure.

[924] And it's also, but it's interesting because Jack, now I love that story so much because I think I figured it out, especially, I think I figured it out because he goes several times.

[925] And so he has to encounter these giants that are in between him and what he's looking for, right?

[926] They're like obstacles in between him.

[927] They're like a kind of a perverted aspect or something that's keeping or that's avoiding you from getting the purpose.

[928] And there's a hierarchy in what Jack gets.

[929] Well, that's what happens to people all the time.

[930] Like, I watch this in my clinical practice all the time.

[931] Hypothetically, people are aiming for what they want, right?

[932] Hypothetically.

[933] But all sorts of giants get in the way.

[934] They get derailed by envy.

[935] They get derailed by, what would?

[936] They get derailed by fear.

[937] They get derailed by lust.

[938] These are all giants.

[939] They get, and some of them.

[940] They can eat them for sure.

[941] Well, definitely.

[942] Well, and some of them are even, you know, lust and envy and so forth.

[943] You could kind of put them in the context of the natural world.

[944] but people also get derailed by ideologies.

[945] And ideologies, for all intents and purposes, are giants, right?

[946] They're the ideas of past, they're the perverted ideas of past philosophers, all jumbled together in this, in a, in a gigantic mess.

[947] And they have a body.

[948] They absolutely get in the way of it.

[949] That's right.

[950] And they have a body.

[951] They have a semi -coherent way of moving.

[952] You bet.

[953] A lumber.

[954] Yeah, they kind of, they kind of, clump, yeah, absolutely.

[955] No, that's a perfect way of understanding it.

[956] And so Jack, it's interesting because Jack goes up.

[957] And then, first of all, like, I don't know if you ever thought about Jack because it's, if you have to think about Jack, kind of the opposite of Snow White and the opposite of the female -led narratives.

[958] It's like Jack doesn't have a father, right?

[959] He's with his mother.

[960] And it's kind of, it's like a. Oh, right.

[961] Right.

[962] Right.

[963] So he has his mother?

[964] That means he's going to, he's going to be more likely to run into demented, fragmented giants of masculinity.

[965] Exactly.

[966] Tyrants, you get, yeah, yeah.

[967] So he has, he has, he has his mother, and then he has a cow, right?

[968] But that's not enough.

[969] He needs something else.

[970] So he trades the cow for what?

[971] Magic beans.

[972] For seeds.

[973] Seeds, yeah.

[974] He trades the cow for meaning.

[975] He trades the cow for, you know, it's like a seed is a very masculine image, you know, people who can think a little bit like the ancients can understand how masculine the image of the seed is.

[976] Right, right.

[977] seminal idea.

[978] Right, exactly.

[979] And so, and then, right, how can I say this, he goes up and there's a, there's a really powerful hierarchy.

[980] At first, he gets gold.

[981] He gets the precious metal.

[982] Then he gets the thing that makes gold, which is the chicken that lays the golden egg.

[983] But then the last thing he gets is he gets the pattern itself.

[984] He gets the music of the spheres.

[985] He goes all the way up and he gets the actual pattern of everything.

[986] That's why it's music at the top.

[987] Oh, is that right?

[988] That's what I think.

[989] Look, that's my intuition.

[990] I just struggle so much when I was a kid.

[991] I was like, why is it this?

[992] Well, so I've been thinking continually about music in that regard.

[993] So, I mean, so each note in a musical piece is related to all the other notes, related to the phrases.

[994] The phrases are related to the melodies.

[995] Each instrument has its place and plays its part.

[996] And it all coheres into this vision of diversified unity.

[997] and then that's played and it's interesting that it's played that's the metaphor and it's played because people who are expertly skilled lay out the pattern but they also play with it at the same time right and then it calls you to unite yourself with it grips your attention first of all but it doesn't just do that it also makes you move yeah it makes you move right and it makes you move in alignment with those patterns right and so music does point to something like a divine hierarchical unity and so it would makes sense, given your interpretation of that story, that it would be at the pinnacle of desire.

[998] Yeah.

[999] Right?

[1000] You said gold first.

[1001] Well, it's just that he's looking, he's trying to find the meaning.

[1002] He's trying to find the seed.

[1003] But with seed, there are different iterations of it.

[1004] He's trying to find value.

[1005] Yeah.

[1006] And so he moves up.

[1007] He finds the precious metal.

[1008] Then he finds what, it's like, think about it if you want to be successful.

[1009] It's like, what's better to have money, right?

[1010] Or to know how to produce money.

[1011] Right.

[1012] That's much better.

[1013] Well, this is why women use money as a proxy for determining men's fitness.

[1014] They're not after the money.

[1015] They're after the ability to generate the money.

[1016] But absent other information, they'll use the signs of money as a marker.

[1017] But the highest thing, and it's only when I made the relationship with Pythagoras, with Pythagoras, you know, it's like, he's going up in the heavens.

[1018] He's going, that's what he's doing.

[1019] And so why didn't I ever think of that before?

[1020] He's going up in the heavens, and then he gets a musical instrument.

[1021] Like, what?

[1022] Yeah.

[1023] So weird.

[1024] It's like, that's it.

[1025] He's getting the pattern.

[1026] He's getting this heavenly pattern that shows you how things are related to each other.

[1027] So that even generates, that which generates wealth.

[1028] You bet.

[1029] I think that's true, too.

[1030] You know, and this ties back to this observation we made earlier about Tammy's use of prayer.

[1031] Like she's trying to orient herself constantly to what's highest, right?

[1032] It's not some proximal desire, some instrumental desire or any fear.

[1033] it's to put herself in alignment with the music of the spheres that's a good way of thinking about it and if you do that the better you are doing that the more things fall into alignment in your life and around you they almost lay themselves out they do they lay themselves out yeah yeah yeah you always don't have to will them into order right they just kind of it just once if you if you're able to really you know align yourself with that that high music yeah then things almost happen naturally.

[1034] Yeah, exactly.

[1035] Well, and I think that's a, that's a bringing into alignment of the narrative world and the objective world.

[1036] Yeah.

[1037] And you feel those touch, right?

[1038] And those are the synchronous events that Jung talked about when the narrative and the objective world touch.

[1039] But I do think it manifests itself in your life, too.

[1040] If you're aiming properly and you put yourself in alignment with that underlying pattern, then things do lay themselves out, right?

[1041] Everything happens in the right order, at the right time, the right place and there's a musical element to it and a rhythmic element to it too.

[1042] Yeah, and it can be pretty, I mean, it can actually be pretty surprising and very magical.

[1043] Most people that have experienced that will notice.

[1044] Like I've seen moments where things are so, like I could say, in tune that I almost, I almost know that all the need to do is just reach out.

[1045] Yeah.

[1046] Just put my hand out and whatever I need is going to do right there.

[1047] Yeah.

[1048] Yeah.

[1049] You know, because everywhere I've gone to discuss it, the door has just swung open.

[1050] Yeah.

[1051] You know, and I've learned also that if the door isn't swinging open, to stop pushing, you know, I mean, you know, persistence is a virtue.

[1052] A stupid persistence is a vice.

[1053] Yeah.

[1054] And it's hard to know when you're being lazy and when you're being wisely, when you're wisely, when you're wisely looking in a different direction.

[1055] You know, I think if you're avoiding a challenge because of cowardice, then that's a sinful impersistence.

[1056] you push and the door doesn't open, it's like, well, maybe you should go to the next door.

[1057] Yeah, yeah.

[1058] And I've really tried to do that with this ARC enterprise, too, it's like to invite people.

[1059] And if they're on board and enthusiastic, it's like, well, great, you know, looks like we're in the same place doing the same thing.

[1060] If I talk to someone else and their resistance, like, fair enough, man, you go do your thing, whatever that happens to be.

[1061] Yeah.

[1062] So, but it's been, it's been market watching this because I have never been engaged in an enterprise, and I've been engaged in many enterprises, where the doors were flying open so quickly on so many fronts, right, in a very unlikely way.

[1063] I mean, even the fact that in the few meetings we've had so far, we managed to hammer out something like six points of agreement, you know, six principles upon which we can progress.

[1064] That happened extremely quickly.

[1065] Yeah.

[1066] And in an unlikely way.

[1067] Yeah, and you have such a varied group of people sitting around the table from all over.

[1068] Yeah.

[1069] over the world too, so it's quite, it is quite astounding.

[1070] Yeah, yeah.

[1071] Well, it, it points to a real felt lack in the culture, right?

[1072] And I think it is a lack on the conservative side and the traditional liberal side of anything approximating a uniting vision.

[1073] And this is what the radicals have in spades, you know, is that they can offer to young people in particular.

[1074] Well, here's how you're going to transform the world.

[1075] It's like, well, that is an inviting, that is a, what would you say, a compelling invitation.

[1076] The problem is is that there's a like an unholy meld of 1984 and brave new world underlying that the specifics of that invitation.

[1077] Yeah.

[1078] Yeah.

[1079] And in some ways the chaos, right?

[1080] Because you can like I said that the fairy tales themselves have that structure, right?

[1081] It's like the chaos or the moment where things are falling apart.

[1082] They also call to resolution.

[1083] Yeah, yeah.

[1084] And so I think that.

[1085] Yeah, well, you see that in the moment.

[1086] story when Osiris disintegrates, when he's cut into pieces by Seth, right?

[1087] His parts are scattered all across Egypt.

[1088] And then Isis, who's queen of the underworld, finds his phallus and makes herself pregnant.

[1089] Well, that's exactly that image, is that when everything's fallen apart, the seeds are left.

[1090] Yeah.

[1091] Right.

[1092] And out of the seeds can emerge something.

[1093] Something new.

[1094] Yeah.

[1095] And something new and visionary.

[1096] Well, that's Horace, because he's the Egyptian eye.

[1097] Yeah.

[1098] And so that's the standard pattern.

[1099] Yeah.

[1100] It's interesting because in this story of Jack and the Beanstalk, the mother doesn't recognize the value of the seed, right?

[1101] She throws it out, you know, and ultimately it does end up functioning as this new hierarchy, right, that goes up and he's able to get what he needs to get.

[1102] But it's interesting to see.

[1103] And interestingly, again, in the story of Jack, is that when the hierarchy becomes corrupt, though, then the mother is the one who can cut it down.

[1104] she's the one who hacks it down.

[1105] Oh, yeah.

[1106] So there's a really beautiful microcosm in the story because on the one hand, it's like the seed which creates this new hierarchy.

[1107] Jack goes up, gets the different elements of the hierarchy all the way to the pattern of reality itself, you know, comes back down.

[1108] But then as because he comes back down, all the monsters, you know, the monster follows him down.

[1109] The monster, the tyrant, you know, the monster of the hierarchy follows him down.

[1110] Yeah, well, that's also the danger on the arc front too because one of the things that we've discussed continually is the high, probability that putting together an organization like this at all is just an invitation to the dissent of a new kind of tyranny.

[1111] Because we wouldn't, we'd be fools to assume that the people who say we're working on the UN front or the WEF front weren't motivated.

[1112] That's right.

[1113] Well, weren't as motivated as we were to do the right thing.

[1114] Like perhaps not, but also perhaps.

[1115] Yeah.

[1116] And it's easy for a visionary enterprise to be captured by the ghosts of dead tyrants.

[1117] Right, the most likely outcome, in fact.

[1118] Yeah, definitely.

[1119] So we have to keep our, yeah, we have to keep our mother with an axe.

[1120] Yeah.

[1121] To cut it down if we need to, if things get to, to wrestle.

[1122] Yeah, so why do you think it's the mother with an axe in that particular situation?

[1123] Because she's the one who destroys hierarchy.

[1124] But the same reason she throws the seat out, so she's playing a good and negative role.

[1125] The same reason she throws the seed out, she's the one who can cut down the tree, cut down the, cut down the, cut.

[1126] Yeah, well, there is an aspect of the feminine eye that's good at, it's a funny thing that's good at detecting deviation from the straight narrow on the masculine front.

[1127] It's got to be a primary feminine instinct and for good reason.

[1128] It's one, it's weird, though.

[1129] It's one that can be perverted and misused as well.

[1130] But you could understand that like the castrating narrative, you know, it's a neutral narrative, right?

[1131] It's like the idea of the woman that can, you know, take your confidence away with a word.

[1132] You know, that can be very dangerous to us, but it can also be useful in several circumstances for that to happen because sometimes, you know, someone who's taking up to much space who's very cocky or think that he's the, you know, the king of the hill and then, you know, then a beautiful young lady can just take that away from him with one word.

[1133] Right.

[1134] And so it's, it's, but it is a power that exists in the feminine.

[1135] Yeah.

[1136] And that, like I said, can be used for good or ill and can, it becomes mythologized, you know, in all kinds of ways.

[1137] So tell me a little bit more concretely about how these productions are going to make themselves manifest.

[1138] These are illustrated books, like high quality, beautifully hardbound illustrated books.

[1139] We put a large amount of effort into designing the books, designing the illustrations.

[1140] You know, there's also narrative elements which don't appear in the text that are only followed in the illustration.

[1141] So all the illustrations have surprises in them that will capture some of the, let's say, the hidden narrative elements that are in the story.

[1142] And there are two readings in the text, basically, are reading for children and are reading for adults.

[1143] But the reading for adults is not the kind of dirty jokes that are cynical reading that you see in track.

[1144] But rather something that hopefully helps the adult gather more insight into these stories.

[1145] And what do you mean two readings?

[1146] How did you start?

[1147] The same read, that is that it's one story.

[1148] But in the story, there are elements meant, like put there.

[1149] Oh, I see.

[1150] I see.

[1151] I see.

[1152] But it's one story.

[1153] That's right.

[1154] So that the child will not really pay attention to that.

[1155] Right.

[1156] But the adult will be able to be able to follow the story.

[1157] The story is told for, you know, like a seven -year -old or something or a 10 -year -old.

[1158] It's very simple.

[1159] It's really using the fairy tale style.

[1160] But hopefully, especially for an adult that has a little bit of intuition about stories and has cared about these stories before, I tried to resolve some of the threads in the stories.

[1161] in a way that reveals more of what the meaning is.

[1162] So was God's dog practice for this?

[1163] Or the first enterprise in this line of enterprise?

[1164] Yeah, so God's Dog, for those who don't know, it's a series of graphic novels that we put out the first one last year and we're continuing to put them out.

[1165] It's similar.

[1166] It's different.

[1167] God's dog is more elaborate.

[1168] It's not a fairy tale, right?

[1169] It really is an epic story.

[1170] But we're doing something similar as we're doing with the fairy tales, which is in God's dog, what we're doing is we're using.

[1171] the biblical Christian cosmos, you could say it that way, as a world -building, as a world -building tool to create a story, which is something that not many people have done.

[1172] Milton did it, Dante did it, you know.

[1173] But in the modern world, when you look at modern fantasy, you have people like Toquine or C .S. Lewis that kind of inaugurated the modern fantasy movement, and what they wanted to do, although they were Christians, they created this kind of pagan world that was that was coherent.

[1174] Yeah, I wonder why they turned to the pagan world to do that instead of, because as you said, both Tolkien and Lewis were committed Christians and deep Christian thinkers.

[1175] So why do you think they turned to the pagan world?

[1176] I don't, look, I can't give you that.

[1177] I have my own intuitions about that.

[1178] I think on the one hand, it was a double problem.

[1179] One which was, it might have offended too many people if they had done a kind of, let's say, Christian fantasy world.

[1180] You could have offended Christians and non -Christians.

[1181] And it would have annoyed the non -Christians, let's say.

[1182] Right, made them turn away from it.

[1183] Right, right, right, right.

[1184] But I think we're in a moment now, like, as this...

[1185] So Christianity is countercultural enough now so that, yeah, that could be.

[1186] I think so.

[1187] Yeah, that could be.

[1188] And so in a way, there's a possibility of diving into the stories, telling, you know, kind of variant versions of these stories, bringing them together, too.

[1189] In God's dog, we bring in all kinds of...

[1190] You know, we have St. Christopher, who is a dog.

[1191] dog -headed monster we have st. George who's the dragon killer you know we also have giants and the Leviathan and all these all these kind of thing weird things in scripture and in tradition we kind of jam them together into one story so there is that in the sense that we want to use some postmodern storytelling because postmodern storytelling like collage storytelling has has has can does bring insight right there is a way in which it can capture insights if you think of well even when you're analyzing postmodernism You don't want to throw the baby out with the backwater.

[1192] That's foolish.

[1193] No, so the idea is that how can we use the inside of collage storytelling or mishmash storytelling like Shrek or Into the Woods and all these kinds of, or even the way that, let's say, the kind of Marvel Universe does it where they have all these characters that exist and then they interact with each other.

[1194] You know, there are ways to do that in a way that is not just for pleasure or to deconstruct, but that can bring insight.

[1195] because like what does it mean for a saint who's a monster like St. Christopher with this dog -headed monster to meet a monster killer who's also a saint who's St. George.

[1196] So it's like, you know, there actually are traditions where they coexist a little bit in the ancient traditions.

[1197] But like what if you had a story of those two types of characters together?

[1198] And so you can do things in fiction that will actually provide insight for what the original stories are when you kind of smash them together.

[1199] So that's the kind of thing.

[1200] I mean, they did that in the ancient days too.

[1201] Like, if you think of Jason and the Argonauts, you have an old version of that where it's like, Jason and the Argonauts is basically like, you know, Avengers Endgame or whatever, where they take all the, like, powerful charactersome mythology and smash them into one story and then watch them interact with each other.

[1202] So it's not like this hasn't happened before.

[1203] And Dante has some of that too because Dante basically goes into hell and then ascends the hierarchy And then along the way, meets all these characters from history and all these characters from the ancient world.

[1204] So I think this is a, you know, I think that capitalizing on that kind of storytelling can be very.

[1205] And how has that done, how has that performed commercially?

[1206] Oh, gosh, yeah.

[1207] I mean, we, I think we did like 300 ,000 on the Kickstarter.

[1208] And we still sell every day.

[1209] We sell, we sell books.

[1210] We're doing it all on our own.

[1211] Yeah.

[1212] Yeah.

[1213] We have it on my website.

[1214] We sell the book.

[1215] And so it just, yeah, we're just continuously selling them.

[1216] And we're preparing the second book.

[1217] hopefully trying to also build up on the attention that it's getting.

[1218] It's a very weird story.

[1219] So I understand why it's going to take a while for people to kind of catch on to it because it's very surprising.

[1220] I think these fairy tales are far more grounded.

[1221] Right, right, right.

[1222] And there's an easier, you know.

[1223] And who should pick up the fairy tales?

[1224] And when are they available?

[1225] So June 6th, we're starting the Kickstarter for Snow White.

[1226] And, you know, we're really trying to go all out with this Kickstarter.

[1227] The purpose is in some ways to gather enough.

[1228] money so we can really start a publishing company.

[1229] And then I can hire in advance the illustrators so we can start to get these done.

[1230] And this illustrator that you worked with, tell me a bit about her.

[1231] So Heather Pollington, she has worked on several of major movie franchises.

[1232] She's an object designer for movies.

[1233] She's worked on the Marvel movies.

[1234] She's worked for Disney.

[1235] She worked on Maleficient 2.

[1236] She worked on Hellboy 2, which I thought was amazing.

[1237] I actually, Hellboy 2, it's so weird because when I watch Hellboy 2, a long time ago now, I noticed just how well the design was done.

[1238] And there's one object, which is like this medieval book that they have that tells the story of the elves in it.

[1239] And I remember that object watching the movie and thinking, oh, my goodness, it's the first time.

[1240] One of the rare times that I see someone with like a book that looks in a movie that looks like a real object.

[1241] This looks like something that has history or whatever that has all this weight to it.

[1242] Yeah, and she designed that book.

[1243] And so when she told me she designed it, like, oh, wow, I want to work with you.

[1244] And so, yeah, so she's...

[1245] And why did she want to work with you?

[1246] Well, she, you know, she's been working in movies.

[1247] She's been doing these things.

[1248] And then she fell on my, she fell into my, my YouTube videos.

[1249] And then she started to see the way that I talked about stories and the way that I talked about symbolism really attracted her.

[1250] And she's not the only one.

[1251] Like, I started gathering these kind of, this cobbling artists together, you know, just Just a few weeks ago, I met someone who was a storyboard artist, like a main storyboard artist for Disney, who kind of moved on and is doing other projects, but who also said, like, she read my brother's book, she's watching my videos, and she's like, this is really helpful to think about stories through these frames.

[1252] And so because of that, I feel fortunate.

[1253] Well, you know, and I talked to Camille Pellia about Eric Neumann.

[1254] She said, and this is something I had thought about years ago, but she was the first person who I met other than myself, who, in the academic realm, who made this case explicitly, she said if the Neumann and Jungian approach to storytelling had predominated in the 60s and 70s, the entire history of the last 40 years of the universities would be entirely different.

[1255] And I mean, you're in that tradition, obviously.

[1256] You and Matthew have your own interpretive framework, but you're not trying to obliterate the utility of narrative in favor of something like a name.

[1257] narrative of power, which the postmodernists, that bloody leftist postmodernists, did that at the drop of a hat in France.

[1258] Yeah.

[1259] It was a real catastrophe.

[1260] But it leads, it's interesting because what it does is that it leads to deep cynicism and people.

[1261] It needs to disillusionment.

[1262] Yeah, yeah.

[1263] We do find pleasure in these stories, but it's somewhat, it's like a, right, it's like the pleasure of a binge drinking or something, right?

[1264] It's like, it's like this, this euphoric pleasure of watching our stories get.

[1265] twisted and turned and kind of deconstructed and flipped upside down but it leaves us ultimately with not much you know in terms of and so what we're trying to do is some is really to turn the clock back or to like reset the clock you could say and and try to get people to celebrate these stories again yeah to see them really has something to build on and something that is that we can that we get unashamedly uh celebrated well it does seem to me too that that will occur with an increment in consciousness, because I think we're at a point now, and this is partly as a consequence, too, of work done by people like Vervaki, that we will return to these ancient stories, but will also understand their explicit utility in a way that we hadn't understood before.

[1266] And I would say in a perverse way, the postmodern enterprise has actually probably contributed to that, right?

[1267] Because it took a kind of skepticism as far as it could be taken.

[1268] But even like, so it's a good example because one of the things that I've done in the story is, you know, one of the things that have, for example, like some of the, in the Puritan age, some of these fairy tales were, were cleaned up, you know.

[1269] And so for example, like most kids have not read the version of Rapunzel where she gets pregnant in the tower.

[1270] But, but in some ways without that, you actually miss out on much of what the story is offering.

[1271] And so one of the things that I'm doing is without in any way being, you know, appropriate, I'm not shying away from the fact that there is a layer of these stories that has to do with puberty, with transformation, with sexuality, the way that the psychoanalysts analyzed.

[1272] It doesn't only have to do with that.

[1273] In some ways, those patterns of puberty and transformation and sexuality are also images of higher patterns of being, but we're not going to pretend like that's not in the story.

[1274] Because those are obviously in the story.

[1275] So how can we do, how can we tell that story now in a way that is not inappropriate?

[1276] But, but just helps, you know, is there in the subtext.

[1277] Well, you know, you could say, you could say that the terrible identity confusion on the pubertal and transfront now is actually a consequence of our failure to integrate those elements into a transcendent, uniting narrative.

[1278] So now they're crying out for integration.

[1279] That's a reasonable way of thinking about it.

[1280] Yeah.

[1281] And in, but manifesting themselves in all sorts of, terribly, horrifyingly fragmented ways.

[1282] So that's what happens when you shy away from the bitter truth, right?

[1283] Is that it's not like it disappears.

[1284] Yeah.

[1285] It's the revenge of the repressed in Freudian terms, and he certainly had that right.

[1286] So you can see that like, so a good, in terms of the four fairy tales that I chose for the female side, you can see that all those fairy tales have to do with beauty, you know, in a certain way.

[1287] And they all have to do with the, let's say the possibilities, the dangers of beauty, the dangers of how you treat beauty.

[1288] So there's a whole theme of beauty in this and also the transformation of the woman, who becomes beautiful and desirable, and what does that mean and how to deal with it?

[1289] So that's what basically unites all the stories together.

[1290] And so it really becomes a way to, let's say, to a tuning fork, hopefully, for young people to be able to kind of have these stories in their unconscious, really.

[1291] You have the stories in their, in their basic frame, their implicit frame so that they approach life with a healthy mix of cautious, caution, but then also adventure, right?

[1292] It's like finding that balance between the two.

[1293] Because I don't know if you ever thought that, like, Snow White and Rapunzel are like opposites, you know, because Snow White, it's the woman, the mother who's jealous of her beautiful daughter and therefore, you know, kind of mistreats her because of that.

[1294] Whereas Rapunzel, it's the mother that sees the beauty of her daughter but wants to protect her completely from the outside.

[1295] And so one throws her out into the outside, literally gives her to the hunter, right, so that he does whatever he wants with her.

[1296] Right.

[1297] And so it's like, it's like this.

[1298] And the other one is the opposite where she puts her up, and a tower protects her completely, wants to avoid everything.

[1299] Oh, yeah, two extremes.

[1300] Yeah, it really is two extremes.

[1301] Right, right, right.

[1302] So that's the kind of thing that I play with in the order of stories where I start with Snow White.

[1303] I go to Rapunzel.

[1304] two opposites and then tried to integrate it then in sleeping beauty and then a kind of final surprising uh resolution in cinderella i see i see so this is all going to unfold over what time it's good it's depending depending in some ways on how much how much we're able to gather in the crowd funding yeah so that i can get the project started i'm thinking at least two a year i'm hoping and maybe three a year if we're able to gather enough funds so that we kind of get this this cycle where we're putting them out every few months that's what i would that's definitely what i would like Mm -hmm.

[1305] Mm -hmm.

[1306] Mm -hmm.

[1307] Well, we'll definitely keep an eye on that and maybe have another discussion along the way on the mail side.

[1308] Oh, yeah, definitely.

[1309] Yeah.

[1310] That's a more...

[1311] We got a bit touched on it a bit today with Jack and the Beanstalk, but that would be extreme.

[1312] Well, all right, we should probably draw this part of this discussion to a close.

[1313] For everybody watching and listening, I'll talk to Jonathan for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform.

[1314] We'll, I think, delve into some more autobiographical details.

[1315] And we'll leave it at that.

[1316] Thank you very much for talking to me today.

[1317] It's always a pleasure to see you.

[1318] Always.

[1319] We're here for everyone too.

[1320] Jonathan's here as am I in London, also to engage in a series of meetings to do with this ARC Enterprise Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, which we're trying to generate as an enterprise based on an attractive, positive narrative of abundance, let's say, in relationship to the future and all the things we talked about today in terms of rediscovering, revamping fundamental stories are part and parcel of that enterprise as well, because everyone involved does understand that this, in the final analysis, is a storytelling venture.

[1321] Strangely enough, who would have guessed that?

[1322] But that does seem to be the case.

[1323] Thanks to the film crew here in London for your help today.

[1324] That went extremely smoothly, and that's much appreciated to the DailyWR Plus people for facilitating this conversation.

[1325] and to everybody watching and listening, your attention is much appreciated.

[1326] Jonathan, good to see you again.

[1327] Yeah, always, Jordan.

[1328] Yeah, you bet.

[1329] Ciao, everyone.

[1330] Hello, everyone.

[1331] I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on Dailywireplus .com.