Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and a roadmap towards healing. In his new series, he provides a roadmap toward healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you re suffering, please know you are not alone. There s hope, and there s a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on Depression and Anxiety. Let s take a first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Subscribe to Daily Wire Plus to get immediate access to all new episodes of the show. Subscribe today using our podcast s promo code JBPodcast for $10 per month or $100 per year, and you ll get 10% off the premium version of the paid version, JBP Supercast. Subscribe today! Subscribe to JBP Podcast: Season 4, Episode 76, where we re still unwrapping the Bible and exploring the Old Testament in depth! Subscribe Today! Learn more about your ad choices. Become a supporter of the podcast by becoming a patron of JBP: bit.ly/support-yourselfjordanbpetersonsupercast. JBP is giving you the chance to receive 20% off your first month of the premium JBP Provence Provencibly priced plan when you become a patron! JBP's first month gets you an ad discount when you sign up for $100+ gets you re-only get $10/month, they get $5/month and get a discount of $50/month gets you get a VIP membership when you get the VIP discount when they get the offer of $100/month get the JBP gets the VIP membership offer startship startship and they also get VIP access gets $4/month discount startship, and they get access to VIP access startship gets $24/choice gets VIP access, they also receive VIP access to the VIP deal startship? Get all JBP Plus gets the deal starts starting starting startship begins starting at $99/month only they can choose JBP startshiprocks and VIP access? Subscribe and get an ad-only deal starts after they receive $4-choice startship only they get full-up, they'll also get $24-choice?
00:00:01.000Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.000Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.000We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:19.000With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.000He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.000If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.000Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.000Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:52.000Welcome to the JBP Podcast, Season 4, Episode 76.
00:00:59.000We use stories to understand the world around us.
00:01:02.000It's the reason we appreciate a beautiful poem, or why our breath is taken away by a movie.
00:01:07.000Any great piece of music tells a story, too. Through the lyrics, of course, but through the instrumental arrangement, too.
00:01:13.000Personally, I've noticed that parts of life are arranged in stories, too, overlapping narratives for different aspects of your life, relationships, adventures.
00:01:22.000I find it particularly obvious during trying times. Those times feel like narratives.
00:01:28.000Part one of this compilation focuses on Season 4 conversations between Dad, Randall Wallace, Chloe Valdry, that episode's coming soon, and Angus Fletcher.
00:02:14.000It's also in the show notes. I hope you enjoy this episode.
00:02:17.000We're still unwrapping, well, we're certainly still unwrapping the Bible. We're still unwrapping Shakespeare.
00:02:39.000There's more depth there than we can understand explicitly.
00:02:44.000And so anything that uses character has that tremendous advantage.
00:02:48.000And then there's also this strange ability that some people have in spades to create fictional worlds that are of unbelievable profundity and power.
00:02:59.000And, I mean, the greatest example of that in the last 30 years in terms of sheer imaginative power has got to be J.K. Rowling and the Harry Potter series,
00:03:08.000which, you know, gripped the imagination of the entire planet for a decade and produced untold wealth and spread literacy everywhere as well.
00:03:18.000She had a remarkably creative imagination and something quite mysterious.
00:03:26.000And so you're fortunate enough to work at the marriage of ideas and drama.
00:03:31.000Yes. And, you know, it's really interesting when you've spoken about Dostoevsky and others in some of your lectures.
00:03:39.000I'm fascinated by him and all the Russians. I studied Russian for four years in college and read some of these in the original.
00:03:48.000My Russian wasn't fluent enough for me to really. I mean, I had to grind through them.
00:03:53.000But Tolstoy, Chekhov, Chekhov, who was a doctor, a medical doctor, as well as a writer.
00:04:01.000So that that congruence of of a commitment, not just in terms of literature, but that he used his profession as a doctor to also inform him as a writer.
00:04:19.000He famously said medicine is my is my wife and literature is my mistress.
00:04:28.000And when I tire of one, I spend time with the other.
00:04:31.000And I and Pushkin, who would who would write stories that that were full of thought, but the story itself was bigger than any thought he could put around it.
00:04:47.000It was it was more resonant. It carried more.
00:04:52.000By the way, when I listened to your your biblical series, it caused me to decide to read through the whole Bible and just start to finish.
00:05:05.000And I grew up Southern Baptist. So ever since I could read, I've read the Bible virtually every day of my life.
00:05:13.000But I'd never read the Bible start to finish. And there were some books that even when I was a religion major at university, I would get to some of the books and go, I can't stay awake for this book.
00:05:26.000I just got to move on. But when you really go through it and you see the the Old Testament as this this incredible saga of a people trying to find the rules that that kept them together as a people.
00:05:44.000And it felt if you disobey these rules, then it's going to end badly for us all.
00:05:51.000And the greatest the greatest violation is to erect altars to other guys.
00:05:59.000Right. That's false idols. Yeah, that's the worst.
00:06:02.000And then along comes Jesus, who is completely steeped in all of the Old Testament.
00:06:08.000I mean, he is he is profound in his knowledge of it.
00:06:12.000And he lives and does and says these things.
00:06:17.000But it's not like it's a philosophy. It's a narrative, a narrative which I've studied a great deal.
00:06:23.000And I believe is is largely historical or I should say significantly historical.
00:07:14.000But it is remarkable that the Bible does, in fact, make a coherent narrative because we don't understand that it was seek.
00:07:25.000It was written by a very diverse range of people over a span of time that we can perhaps not even imagine.
00:07:31.000It's very difficult to tell how old the the oldest stories in Genesis particular are the the the the story of the fall and of Adam and Eve and and Cain and Abel.
00:07:42.000They bear all the hallmarks of a previous oral tradition that would have existed in relatively unchanged form for tens of thousands of years and perhaps even longer than that.
00:07:55.000And so they're unbelievably ancient and then parts of it obviously are newer and the written parts are obviously newer than any tentative oral tradition.
00:08:05.000But you have a you have at the bare minimum an unbelievably deep psychological development document that weaves itself over centuries into a coherent story.
00:08:17.000And Northrop Fry, I would say he's a Canadian literary critic, has did more for me than any other particular thinker to help me understand the nature of the narrative.
00:08:28.000Because Fry, I suppose he did the same thing or I'm doing the same thing that he did because he preceded me also at the University of Toronto.
00:08:36.000He assessed the Bible as a work of literature, as a narrative, and that to me was never any denigration because narrative, a powerful narrative.
00:08:52.000And you talk about this when you talk about Braveheart, for example, because there isn't that much known about William Wallace historically, but you craft you crafted a narrative.
00:09:01.000That's that was true enough, let's say, to be unbelievably attractive to people and to motivate them very deeply because it's an affecting movie.
00:09:10.000Well, and if it wasn't, it wouldn't have been so popular.
00:09:13.000And so there's a there's a truth in narrative that I think is even deeper than historical truth, a true like a truly profound narrative truth is like the average of a whole variety of historical truths.
00:09:27.000And so it's the essence of historical truth.
00:09:30.000So it's even more true than his than than what we would consider, say, eyewitness history, because eyewitness history is just it's one battle, you know, and and there is maybe an epic theme in that battle.
00:09:42.000But then imagine that you could look at a thousand battles and you could and you could extract out from that what was canonical about heroic victory across all 1000 battles.
00:09:52.000You see something like that happening in the Old Testament and the narrative, the narrative thread is really quite deep that their societies emerge formulate fall off the path, worship false idols collapse.
00:10:08.000And then the same thing happens again and the collapse happens and the collapse happens because people become too prideful.
00:10:15.000The kings in particular, they don't listen to the voice of conscience.
00:10:19.000And a prophetic voice arises and says, you're wandering off the tried and true path and you're going to be punished terribly for that.
00:10:30.000And generally speaking, the kings ignore that and catastrophe breaks free.
00:10:36.000And you see, and in the Old Testament in particular, there's the promise of the ultimate state in some sense.
00:10:44.000The utopian promises that run through it, the search for the promised land.
00:10:47.000And then so strangely, you see that transformed into something that's not really political in the New Testament.
00:10:53.000You see that the promised land becomes the nature of experience as a consequence of a particular form of moral being.
00:11:01.000And then perhaps that has political implications because people who acted like that would produce a particular state.
00:11:08.000But it's no longer the dream of establishing the state that will solve all problems.
00:11:16.000It's psychologized and it's it's unbelievably profound.
00:11:20.000And it's and that's I think you can derive all of that from from the biblical writings without even starting to move on to classically religious territory.
00:11:31.000And and and it's and then that does beg the question, of course, is what does all that wisdom point to in the final analysis?
00:11:40.000And that's when the questions start to become religious.
00:12:54.000In Braveheart, so many people said to me it was it was when the woman that William Wallace loves when her throat is cut.
00:13:04.000That's when suddenly they knew they were not in a typical action movie, even to the very end of Braveheart.
00:13:14.000There would have been many people in Hollywood and were who thought, well, that this movie needs to end with his friends swinging in on vines and saving him.
00:13:24.000We can't end an expensive historical epic movie with a guy beheaded and disemboweled.
00:13:33.000But that was where it had to end for me.
00:13:37.000But but how we get there and what it says surprised me and surprised the audience, too.
00:13:48.000And in that, I think, is how it becomes resonant.
00:13:53.000I was doing a charity screening of Braveheart a few years ago for the first time in two decades to sit in a theater and actually see the movie screened, not on television, but projected in a theater and doing it for a charity in Austin, Texas.
00:14:16.000And at the end of the movie, I walked up onto the stage to do a Q&A and the first person who stood up was a young woman in the front row, 19 years old.
00:14:28.000So she wasn't born when Braveheart had come out.
00:14:32.000And I was surprised that she stood up first and she said, Mr. Wallace, I don't have a question.
00:15:15.000And and the and the idea that that men want to be courageous, they want to be willing to sacrifice themselves for what's worth sacrificing for.
00:15:55.000I want to go back to your your discussion of surprise.
00:15:59.000I mean, among people who assess information theory, there's a strong association between something that's informative and something that's surprising.
00:16:10.000If you can predict it, technically speaking, it doesn't contain any information.
00:16:14.000And so information always comes in the form of surprise, technically speaking.
00:16:20.000And and we are wired to attend to what's informative because that's what updates and teaches us.
00:16:27.000And so then you you said revelation comes in the form of surprise.
00:16:33.000And I would say that's virtually the case by definition, isn't it?
00:16:36.000Because imagine that you're viewing this narrative through a particular lens.
00:16:40.000You're you're in a you're in a cognitive perceptual structure, a frame of reference that you're using to track all the actions and to make sense of them and to make predictions.
00:16:50.000And if something unexpected happens, that means that you've just learned that that frame of reference is no longer applicable to the current circumstance.
00:17:00.000And so what that really does mean is that something transcendent, at least from the perspective of that current frame of reference, has, in fact, occurred because so that's a mini miracle in some sense.
00:17:12.000Because yes, a miracle is something that doesn't obey the laws that you're currently following that that that that that's one way of thinking about it.
00:17:22.000And so a revel a surprising revelation is a mini miracle.
00:17:40.000It also it also gives you a new frame of reference instantly within which that surprise now makes sense.
00:17:49.000And if it doesn't, then you're left unsatisfied by the movie.
00:17:52.000You think because I've seen that often in particularly in movies, it doesn't seem to happen quite so much in novels where the director and the writer will throw a whole variety of things up in the air.
00:18:31.000There's a stable state to begin with, and then something that disrupts it and throws everything into a state of chaos temporarily and then the establishment of a new state.
00:18:39.000And and a good story definitely does that for us and guides us through that and shows us that we're the thing that does that as well.
00:18:47.000Well, like if you take an Agatha Christie movie or or story, there'll be all of these clues.
00:18:55.000And then then Hercule Perrault or we we have a term in screenwriting, we call it Irving the explainer will show up at the end of the movie to to explain everything.
00:19:07.000And then it off and and and the Sherlock Holmes movies will often be that way, too.
00:20:20.000But that to me is a difference about a story like you say, the Agatha Christie or or they throw up a whole bunch of parts and they they never come together for a great story.
00:20:45.000I hate to keep referencing Braveheart, but but I wanted to make a movie and it was my first movie.
00:20:52.000I wanted to to make a movie that would have people walk out of the theaters the way I walked out of theaters at different times in my life and would say my life will never be the same after what I just experienced there.
00:21:09.000I mean, that that's always been what I was look for.
00:21:17.000I mean, a burly, brawling, head butting Scott come up to me after a screening of Braveheart and look at me with tears in his eyes and say, I will never forget that.
00:21:27.000And and I think of like a story like Tolstoy wrote a tale called The Woodfelling or The Woodfelling Party.
00:21:37.000And it was about some some Russian soldiers who were fighting.
00:21:42.000I believe they were fighting Afghan or Muslim troops in Azerbaijan or in the mountains, but they've been in this cold forbidding place for a long, long time.
00:21:55.000They've seen all sorts of death and they've gone out to to cut wood and loaded firewood and loaded into a wagon.
00:22:03.000And a sniper hits one of them in the leg and he's or hits him in the body and he's bleeding to death and he knows he's dying.
00:22:11.000And they load him on the wood wagon to carry him back while he's still alive.
00:22:15.000But he grabs the lieutenant by the collar and says, there are letters from my wife in my boot, take them and send them back to my wife so she'll have them.
00:22:25.000And the officer says, yeah, yeah, I will.
00:22:27.000But the dying man knows he won't because he's seen many men die and just pitched into shallow graves and there's just so much death.
00:22:36.000So he says, no, take them while I'm still alive and then I know you'll do it.
00:22:40.000So the officer gives the order and they strip off the man's boot and cut through his his pant and unwrap the wrappings around his leg that he's done to keep warm.
00:22:53.000But what the officer sees for the first time in months and months, maybe years, is the bare flesh of a man's leg, this white sunless flesh.
00:23:05.000And it's that that reminds him that this is a human being.
00:23:11.000And Tolstoy says he was struck with a terrible dread of the loss of life.
00:23:16.000It and I thought even I was 18 when I read that this is what an artist does.
00:23:23.000You you hold up to us when we've become inured, immune to the to certain things like watching women.
00:24:23.000I mean, another thing that I've been doing is working on the story for the resurrection, which I have studied since well, since I was in school.
00:24:33.000The resurrection has fascinated me more than anything else, in part because as I think it's N.T. Wright would say, if you if you don't think the resurrection is preposterous, you're missing the point.
00:24:50.000The whole point is that this is beyond anything you could imagine.
00:24:56.000You said in a few weeks ago, I was listening to your podcast and I was believe with that brilliant.
00:25:03.000I think it's Canadian who makes the icons.
00:25:43.000And and and it's actually a reasonably intelligent critique.
00:25:46.000You could say, well, if you wanted to enslave people and and oppress them, then you could invent a story and you could use that as a manipulative technique.
00:25:56.000But then you you'd see it seems to me that you'd want a story that was sort of maximally fantasy like an attractive.
00:26:04.000And so then you're stuck with, well, why invent hell, for example?
00:26:10.000And then you can say, well, that's where you put your enemies, you know, so that's kind of convenient.
00:26:16.000If you take medieval experience seriously, it's quite obvious.
00:26:23.000There's a philosopher in in Canada, Taylor, who wrote a wrote about this in a book called Sources of the Self.
00:26:32.000Medieval people took the idea of hell extremely seriously and tortured themselves with it, believe that the fruits of immorality were infinitely terrible.
00:26:42.000Well, that isn't something that that you go that you that you use as a childish defense against the world.
00:26:49.000In fact, fear of hell is actually more intense, I would say, in some sense than fear of death.
00:26:55.000And I believe that I think there are things that are if you if the thing you're most afraid of is death, you haven't been very afraid because there are things that are far more terrifying than death.
00:27:05.000And certainly, well, hell is among those.
00:27:09.000And I suppose that's the place that you're eternally tortured for for your own immorality, maybe perhaps even defined by your own conscience.
00:27:19.000Anyways, you wouldn't invent that as something attractive to the masses.
00:27:24.000And and there's much of of religious thinking that's like that.
00:27:28.000It doesn't have the aspect of there's too much burden in it for it to be pure escapist fantasy.
00:27:36.000There's too much and there's too much about it that's incomprehensible for it to be like what would a cons a conspiratorial machination.
00:27:53.000Well, it's a limit case also in some sense like you talked earlier about you said something about sacrifice, you know, and that.
00:28:01.000Well, people don't take the idea of sacrifice very seriously.
00:28:04.000I've looked at the development of the idea of sacrifice in the Old Testament.
00:28:09.000And one of the things I've come to realize is that one of the great human discoveries was actually that of sacrifice because it was the discovery of the fact that you could modify the present.
00:28:22.000So it signals the discovery of the future by humanity, the idea of sacrifice, because you become consciously aware, perhaps after acting it out for God only knows how long that you can give up something that you're deeply committed to in the present, something of extreme value and obtain something of even more value in the future.
00:29:25.000And while you can give up something that you own, you can give up something that you love, you can die for something or you can sacrifice your entire life to it.
00:29:36.000And it seems to me that in some sense, the latter, the last of those is the ultimate sacrifice to to give up your entire life for the sake of the highest ideal.
00:30:44.000Is instead of it just being a negotiation central to the sacrifice, it seems to me, is is a transforming commitment that the person is being transformed and what he is giving is transforming.
00:31:01.000It's like one of the most commonly quoted lines from Braveheart is every man dies.
00:31:50.000Is it stubbornness that keeps William Wallace in the dungeon, refusing to to submit to the king, refusing to ask the king for mercy and maybe buy time in his life so he can survive a while longer?
00:32:05.000And the queen, the future queen comes to him with that offer.
00:32:36.000And it in thinking of, say, Jesus at Golgotha, that if you took a snapshot at Golgotha on the day Jesus was crucified and you said, who's the victor in this picture?
00:32:51.000You probably wouldn't be inclined to say the guy on the middle cross.
00:32:56.000But you might if you stared at the picture long enough, you actually might see it.
00:33:03.000Human beings may recognize that that this one.
00:33:08.000Here in this way was doing something beyond all understanding.
00:33:16.000And to me, writing a story isn't just me going, what will surprise the audience?
00:33:23.000It's I am being surprised by the story as it's coming through to me.
00:33:29.000And the most notable part of that in Braveheart was I reached the end of the story.
00:33:34.000And and I can see this clearly now, although it was more than 25 years ago, the the axe is falling toward William Wallace's throat.
00:35:37.000What what makes music magical is not that it's what we if it's just the same beat, the same monotony, the same chord changes we've heard, the same lyrics we've heard.
00:35:52.000But when it's when it's just enough different that we notice the difference and are drawn into it.
00:35:58.000Now, if it's too different, you know, when I was in school and took music classes and they're telling us about a tonal this and that and abstract.
00:39:16.000So try this special offer and explore your creativity at Skillshare.com slash Peterson and get a one month free trial.
00:39:23.000That's one month free, only at Skillshare.com slash Peterson.
00:39:29.000Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:39:35.000Most of the time you'll probably be fine, but what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:39:43.000In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.
00:39:48.000Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:39:57.000And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:40:01.000With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:40:08.000Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:42:23.000You obviously thought about that for a long time.
00:42:25.000It's interesting because I feel like the term enchantment came to me almost in passing.
00:42:38.000I was trying to figure out how to, and we don't have to get into the details of this.
00:42:43.000I'm happy to get into it if you'd like.
00:42:45.000But I was trying to teach people or figure out a framework that could teach people how to love each other in the agapic sense of the word.
00:42:55.000And then I began to ask myself, what are people already in love with?
00:43:00.000And so I ventured into pop culture because pop culture shows us what people are already in love with.
00:43:05.000And I started to study aspects of our popular culture, which included things like Disney films and Nike and Beyonce and all these brands that have quasi religious, actually not quasi, religious like devotion from their fans.
00:43:26.000And I was just like, why, what is happening there?
00:43:31.000That's so interesting because it means that you, you, this is one of the problems I have with the rationalist atheist types.
00:44:17.000And you participate that, participate in that in dance and in music, and in these popular stories, which is why I've been so interested in taking apart Disney films, for example.
00:44:26.000And they're very expensive productions.
00:45:04.000So I'm looking at pop culture and I'm studying Disney and Beyonce and Apple and Nike and all of these brands.
00:45:12.000And I'm looking for a common theme to see if there's a common pattern across all of these.
00:45:17.000And the common pattern I'm seeing is that all of these brands are creating content where their audience sees themselves, their, their imperfect selves and their potential reflected in the content, which is why they gravitate toward it.
00:45:33.000And so I'm seeing, you know, these, these Disney films that are motifs for the human condition, where this imperfect flawed would be hero has to go through a series of ups and downs and ups and downs and ups and downs to discover their potential self and emerge the hero.
00:45:48.000So I'm seeing, you know, I'm seeing, you know, almost every Nike ad being this, this narrative for this, you know, sort of junior varsity athlete trying to become better and better and better at her craft and then emerge in a spirit of excellence.
00:46:05.000I'm seeing Beyonce say things like who run the world girls and women gravitating towards that because they see their potential reflected in those lyrics.
00:46:18.000And it's a universal, it's a universal ideal that compels us to imitate.
00:46:23.360And that's what attracts our attention.
00:46:24.900And that pattern to identify that pattern is to look for what is truly religious because the pattern that underlies all of the pattern that underlies everything that
00:46:34.680compels us is the religious pattern and it's the religious instinct that orients us towards that.
00:46:40.800And that is not an ontological claim about the structure of reality.
00:46:56.960As a, as a, from a propositional perspective.
00:47:00.260Which would be the wrong question anyway, I would argue.
00:47:03.460But, but yeah, so I, I was seeing all of this emerge from the research that I was conducting.
00:47:10.280And then at the time I was, I also read a book called Enchantment, which was written by Guy Kawasaki, the former marketing director of Apple.
00:47:20.520And he defined enchantment as a process by which you delight someone where a person sort of starts to open up to life.
00:47:28.840It's enticement, an enticement, an invitation, an invitation, an attraction, so to speak.
00:47:36.300And he, he said that this can be present in a human being and a product in an idea.
00:47:43.580And he also said that Steve Jobs used this idea to design Apple products to, to sort of figure out the, the aesthetic of what Apple products should look like.
00:47:54.180And meanwhile, you know, the idea of enchantment correlates very closely with Disney because Disney is, you know, takes place in these enchanted forests and these magical kingdoms.
00:48:03.540And there's this underlying concept of enchantment.
00:48:05.980And so I just decided that enchantment seemed like the proper word to define this or to describe this phenomenon by which we start to open up to the complexity of ourselves and thus to others and can, and which can give us a sense of a relational way of being as opposed to a consuming way of being.
00:48:29.900Right. Eric Fromm, the philosopher, wrote a number of essays on the difference between having and being and how he talked about how in the West in particular, we have become caught up in this need to consume where we define our identity according to how much we possess, according to how much we have, as opposed to our capacity to become wise, to be right, not to have, to be, to be wise, to be mature.
00:48:57.660And that should also be viewed with a tremendous amount of sympathy because it wasn't that long ago when we were all like struggling to feed hand to mouth in the face of terrible privation and starvation.
00:49:10.220Yes, yes. So, so that's another place to have some sympathy for hyper-consuming human beings. It's like, oh, look, we, we have enough. Oh, well, that's never happened before, ever. So now we don't really know what to do with this.
00:49:22.900It's so true. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that, but that's very, that's very well said. And it's not like we don't need, we have, we do have to have things, right, to survive. We have to have food and water and shelter.
00:49:35.940But we've fallen into what John Verveke calls this modal confusion, where we said, I want to be mature, so I need to have as many carbs as possible, right?
00:49:49.340So we're confusing the having mode with the being mode. So enchantment, the objective of enchantment, of the theory of enchantment is to bring people back to this relational way of being and to be in balance with the complexity of themselves, which includes the having mode, right?
00:50:04.400Which includes our shadows, which includes our aggression, which includes our angst and anxiety and our melancholy. It's not to the end of suppressing any of those sort of more negative, more darker emotions, but to be in balance with all of them, which is what Jung said was the ultimate ideal or the ultimate objective of doing shadow work in the first place.
00:50:26.980The same thing is happening in literary studies now that happened in the Middle Ages. People read the same book. They come up with conflicting interpretations of them. Those interpretations reflect their ideal ideologies, and then they argue about them.
00:50:41.600And so we just have these sort of endless combustions that don't go anywhere, just like the Protestants and the Catholics in the Middle Ages. And so, you know, what my work basically says is, what if we just back out of that? And what if we just do the same thing that science has done?
00:50:56.240And we focus on the way that stories can empower us, the way the stories can improve our human performance? Because that's really why they were created by our ancestors. Our ancestors came to be in a tragic world where they realized their own frailty and insufficiency.
00:51:13.380They said, how do I find strength in the face of my own mortality? How do I lift myself up when I see so much frailty within myself? I see so much frailty in terms of my capacity for anger, for hate, and also my ability to be damaged, my ability to suffer grief and trauma and loneliness.
00:51:36.300How do I lift myself up? How do I lift myself up? What tool could help me do that? And so the beginning of that, literature with early scriptures, there's a ton of technologies, as I talk about in my work, that we can actually trace their effects in the brain.
00:51:47.760And then going beyond that healing work into actually making us into our better selves, empowering us with joy, with creativity, with resilience, with the power to lift up others.
00:51:59.920And perhaps most importantly, the power to grow, to not stay still, to take on damage and turn that damage around into a source of strength.
00:52:10.660And so what my work does is my work focuses on how literature does all those things, which all of us know intuitively.
00:52:16.940All of us have read a book at some time, have read a novel at some time or watched a movie at some time or read a poem at some time and felt healed or uplifted or strengthened.
00:52:26.440If you have a favorite musician, a favorite artist, a favorite rapper, you'll listen to their lyrics and feel the same thing.
00:52:32.540But the question has always been, how? How is it doing that?
00:52:35.640And so my work goes into that, but also more powerfully, my work breaks down the technology of literature so you can identify the specific nuts and bolts, the specific blueprints that are having those specific effects.
00:52:47.140And so that's the work that I do at Project Narrative.
00:52:49.300So in Wonderworks, in this book, which I referred to earlier, you list out what you consider 25 inventions and they basically constitute the chapter structure of the book.
00:53:02.200And so you examine the manner in which stories do such things as rally courage or stoke romance or help control anger or transcend hurt or excite curiosity.
00:53:15.560I'm not going to go through all of them, but to dispense with pessimism and banish despair and heal from grief and decide more wisely.
00:53:26.160And so in some sense, it's a listing of existential concerns.
00:53:30.420And so you've broken down narrative in these 25 ways in this book to discuss the major sources of existential concern that plague mankind and then have put forward the notion that we have stories that surround each of these fundamental concerns that help us understand, verbalize, communicate about,
00:53:54.620and maybe see a pathway through each of these, in the case of the terrible emotions, each of the terrible emotions or to foster and develop the ones that are more positive.
00:54:04.620I mean, that's exactly right. And even more than that. So, I mean, part of what stories do is they is they give us a plot, a roadmap out of some of these negative emotions into positive emotions.
00:54:16.620But even more powerfully, they can actually shape our emotions once we understand how to use them.
00:54:22.360Certain stories can just build optimism or resilience or courage.
00:54:26.300So to take the first chapter of the book, which is about courage, Homer's Iliad, this extraordinary work.
00:54:33.660When you read the Iliad, it makes you feel braver. It makes you feel stronger.
00:54:40.120And it can do that even when it's not talking about courage, even when it has no message about courage, even when it's talking about, oh, well, how does it do that?
00:54:48.600Well, Homer, he probably didn't invent this technology, but we don't know who did it before him.
00:54:54.460And so we give Homer credit. Homer realized that when he saw soldiers marching into war, they sang songs.
00:55:02.660And those songs made them feel braver. Why did those songs make them feel braver?
00:55:07.080Well, those songs made them feel part of a larger voice.
00:55:09.960They felt they were bigger than themselves. And on a deep psychological level, they could feel that strength because they knew that even if their individual body died, the voice would carry on.
00:55:20.000And that's a scientific power of song. We know that to be the case, that when people sing together in choirs, they feel braver.
00:55:27.380They feel more courageous. And so what Homer did is he said, well, what if I could give you that power of singing without you actually singing?
00:55:35.280What if I could create a technology, a way of writing so that it tripped your brain into thinking that you were singing as part of a choir?
00:55:42.560And that's, of course, what the Iliad does. It makes you believe that you were listening to the song of a god, sing goddess of the anger.
00:55:52.220That's how it begins. And it uses all these tricks and techniques, which I go through in the book, into making your brain believe that you are singing as part of this larger chorus.
00:56:02.660And so when you simply read the book, it makes you feel braver.
00:56:06.960And that technology, that idea that you had there, that it, that, that group singing unites you with the central voice whose existence transcends death.
00:56:17.600I mean, there's a very deep religious like idea in there that's, that's implicit, right?
00:56:22.180That there is a voice and there are words that unite and transcend and that supersede death.
00:56:28.940And so that's some, that's part of that heroic pattern, I suppose, that Homer is referring to, that you can step into as an, what would you say, an active agent in engaging in this literature.
00:56:41.720Just like when you walk into a movie and you, you embody the heroes or the, or the antiheroes sometimes that you see on the screen and experience the emotions that they experience for better or for worse, as a, as I suppose, as a form of practice.
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00:58:20.100And, you know, one of the things that is distinct about the Homeric gods is they're large humans.
00:58:24.340You know, Homeric gods, you know, unlike sort of an extreme Gnostic version of God as, you know, as the via negativa or something that is completely non-human and that we can't access,
00:58:35.400these Homeric gods are essentially heroes in the sense of just being bigger versions of us.
00:58:40.120And so they're gripped with all the same problems that we have, all the same frailties that we have, jealousy, rage, insufficiency.
00:58:47.260And so when you join with them in this bigger voice, just as you would in a hero in a movie, you feel that you are becoming yourself only greater.
00:58:59.840You don't feel like you're losing yourself, but you're joining this bigger thing that is yourself, that makes you bigger, that makes you more powerful.
00:59:05.360And that's where the spiritual experience comes from.
00:59:06.900And absolutely, one of the basic primordial experiences of literature, which is so basic, I don't even include it as one of the technologies in the book.
00:59:13.960I just talk about it in the introduction, is spiritual experience.
00:59:18.840We can actually detect you having deactivation in your parietal lobe, as you have what's known as a self-transcendent experience,
00:59:26.320in which you feel the boundaries of yourself and the world dissolving, between yourself and the world dissolving.
00:59:31.500And that's associated with increased life purpose, increased generosity and kindness, because you no longer have the same sense of ego.
00:59:49.720And so if there's one fundamental thing, more fundamental even than any of the technologies that I talk about, to get from literature,
00:59:55.700it simply is that sense of spiritual experience.
00:59:57.580And I do think that that is the basic and most powerful experience that any of us can have in this world,
01:00:02.440because it makes us not only stronger and more purposeful in ourselves, but kinder to others.
01:00:07.980And really, that's ethics, to be stronger in yourself and kinder to others.
01:00:12.880Right, to be more effective and more useful socially, broadly.
01:00:17.180So, okay, I want to ask you a couple of things.
01:00:21.260I've done a lot of thinking about narrative.
01:00:23.520When I read, I read this book back in the 1980s, The Neuropsychology of Anxiety by Jeffrey Gray.
01:00:31.000And that book had a tremendous impact in the field of psychology, although it took about 20 years before people, I suppose, incorporated at least some of what Gray had proposed.
01:00:42.760And he got a lot of his ideas, although I didn't know it at the time, from Norbert Weiner, I don't know how to say his name,
01:00:50.660a brilliant cybernetician who worked on establishing what might be the basis of intelligent abstraction,
01:03:51.180And then, we feel positive emotion when we see any indication from the environmental feedback that our actions are moving us towards the goal.
01:04:02.540And we feel, and that's technically positive affect, because it's associated with forward movement, left hemisphere activation, dopaminergically mediated.
01:04:13.740So, we can conceptualize the goal abstractly, interestingly enough.
01:04:19.040And we have to do that, because we can play with these spatial-temporal frames of reference.
01:04:23.160And then, if we see a pathway to the goal, a clear pathway that we can implement behaviorally, then that fills us with positive emotion.
01:04:34.080If we see obstacles in the way, then that induces negative emotion and stops us.
01:04:40.140And when we stop, we'll play around with the spatial-temporal framing, making it smaller.
01:04:46.240Maybe we have to deal with the next minute, or larger, trying to reconceptualize the territory, so that we can continue our movement forward.
01:05:58.980It's a story about how a story can decompose, collapse into catastrophe, and rekindle itself.
01:06:04.860And it seemed to me that there isn't anything more basic to our abstract thinking than that sort of nesting inside of stories.
01:06:14.060First of all, I completely agree on the overall point.
01:06:19.280So, I mean, I actually have a book coming out next year on Columbia University Press, and the title is Story Thinking, because basically my belief is that human cognition is largely narrative.
01:06:29.500And that actually we process the world narratively in this exact way.
01:06:35.880And this is actually what makes our brain function different from computers and AI.
01:06:40.600Whether or not computers and humans can do the same tasks, we do them differently.
01:06:47.120Computers think in these kinds of logical correlational sequences.
01:06:50.520And humans, to your point, think in plots and plans and narratives and goals.
01:06:57.100And those plots and plans are then associated with emotions.
01:06:59.940Because a computer exists in the mathematical present tense, so it cannot have desire.
01:07:04.360There's nothing missing to a computer, because it's always in the same place all the time.
01:07:07.560It's always the equal sign of the mathematical present tense.
01:07:10.880But we as humans are able, through plotting and planning, to imagine a future that is distinct from the present, which creates desire or fear or hope or all these other emotions.
01:07:19.040And so narrative and emotion just go together completely in human experience.
01:07:23.820And that's why emotions are both shaped through narrative, but narratives are also shaped through emotion.
01:07:29.960So the kind of simple thing is to say, well, we can use narratives to influence people's emotions.
01:07:37.320I mean, this is the sort of thing that is somewhat, sometimes positive, but often a kind of cheap political trick.
01:07:56.740I'm trying to control my own anger or increase my own hope.
01:08:00.120How do I do that by retelling my own stories in my own head?
01:08:03.540And then the second factor of that is, how can my emotions come into play and enable my narratives?
01:08:09.280How can I develop the emotional resilience to be more likely to carry on my own story?
01:08:13.560How can I complete my story, even though I have these obstacles in front of me?
01:08:18.760And to me, the function of literature.
01:08:20.880So literature is related to stories, but slightly different in the fact that literature is really the kind of experimental zone where you're pushing the envelope.
01:08:29.100I mean, you know, literary writers are people who are somewhat dissatisfied to kind of, you know, talk, you know, to think about how you're talking about stories breaking.
01:08:38.600They're dissatisfied with the stories they have, you know, they're not working, you know, and they say, how can I take these stories and somehow make them new?
01:08:45.640How can I go beyond the stories that I've inherited?
01:08:48.000You know, how can I push that envelope?
01:08:50.120And so really what I do in the book is say, you know, here's 25 examples of how stories were broken and then put back together again.
01:08:56.940And how this technology, just like, you know, any technology that humans have developed, has been expanded and innovated over time to go beyond that simple, I just have to get to this goal story, which I agree with you.
01:09:08.420Is that, I mean, that's a fundamental story, beginning, end, you know, the most basic unit, you know, beginning, end, and I find myself in the middle.
01:09:14.980But, you know, the wonder of being on this earth is that there is this possibility to tell our own story and beyond that to build stories that we can hand on to other people to empower them to tell their own stories.
01:09:31.440And it all goes back to this sense of dynamism that you're talking about, and also these emotions that you're talking about.
01:09:38.240And to unite us, and to unite us in a collective story so that we can work cooperating together towards the same ends, right, so that we all come under the same banner in some sense.
01:09:47.780And that's that shared intentionality that's very specifically human.
01:09:52.160You don't see that much manifest itself much in other animals.
01:09:54.880Even the higher apes have a hard time with it compared to us.
01:10:30.100You know, that would be disinteresting to us emotionally.
01:10:33.420You know, we want to tell our own stories.
01:10:34.820We want to be particular in ourselves.
01:10:36.560I would also say that even though human psychology has remained relatively constant for at least 300,000 years and parts of it for over a million, our world is changing and has changed.
01:10:47.860And there are real differences between the way the world works now and the kinds of actions and behaviors that are going to function now than there was even 500 years ago.
01:10:56.060And so there is this need for flexibility in narrative.
01:10:59.200So even as what you're talking about, I think, Jordan, is this fundamental spiritual component of narrative, the way in which narrative can connect us with the eternal, a sense of things bigger than ourselves.
01:11:08.860And that transcendent sense of purpose is what lifts us.
01:11:12.740But narrative also has this flexibility outside the spiritual in the material world to say, OK, how do I navigate this challenge?
01:11:20.220I'm not going to navigate this challenge as Luke Skywalker or Christ because Luke Skywalker Christ didn't encounter it.
01:12:17.440OK, so so we have now this shared narrative.
01:12:21.400So imagine this is part this perhaps relates to the particular the absolute.
01:12:25.060As you specify the narrative for small scale actions, and those would be particularized, the connection with the absolute, the larger absolute, in some sense, falls away.
01:12:54.200Well, there's a bigger story outside of that, because we want to further our knowledge about narrative and we want to share that with other people.
01:12:59.840And then there's a story outside of that, which is, well, why?
01:13:03.400Well, because we're both we're both educators and public communicators.