Jonathan Pajot is a French-Canadian liturgical artist and icon carver known for his artistic work featured in museums across the world. He also runs a YouTube channel dedicated to the exploration of symbolism across history and religions. In this episode, Jonathan talks about his new book, "Postmodern Fairy Tales," and why he thinks fairy tales should be told in a new way: as stories told in fairy tales. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. We 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. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way. In his new series, he provides a roadmap towards 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 Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. B.P. Peterson on Depression and Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Today's episode features: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) 7) 8) 9) 10) 11) 12) 13) 14) 15) 16) 17) 18) 19) And so on and so on Enjoy! Thank you for listening to this episode! Subscribe to DailyWire Plus now! Enjoyment? Subscribe & Share it! Please tell me what you think of this episode is in your thoughts and or on Insta and I ll be listening to you re talking about this episode on this episode? & so on, I hope you re listening to it on this is a little more so that it s a little bit more like that s a bit more so like that might be a bit like that like that Like that s not more of a place that you can do it like that thing like that, right ? & such a thing, right like that can be so much more like it s not like that I think it might be like that... Thanks, you ve got that seeeeeeeeee
00:00:00.960Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.760We 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.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:57.420Hello everyone. I'm speaking once again with Jonathan Pajot today.
00:01:13.460He's a French-Canadian liturgical artist and icon carver, known for his artistic work featured in museums across the world.
00:01:20.800He carves Eastern Orthodox and other traditional images, and teaches an online carving class.
00:01:26.780He also runs a YouTube channel dedicated to the exploration of symbolism across history and religions.
00:01:33.720Well, Mr. Pajot, here we are in London.
00:02:28.520Well, 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.
00:02:34.960You know, one of the things, you know, we've been complaining, 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.
00:02:45.960And I thought instead of complaining, maybe we could try to take charge of that instead and just start to retell the stories.
00:02:53.060You know, there's a weird, there's an interesting thing that happened in the 1930s.
00:02:57.600And when we look at Disney's Snow White, we think that, like, this is this old story.
00:03:02.820It's the traditional and made total sense for Disney to make this old story.
00:03:24.260Their images, Betty Boop, and they had all these, you know, transforming characters, a lot of demons, a lot of ghosts, all this kind of weird stuff.
00:03:32.120A lot of marijuana-influenced imagery.
00:03:33.780Yeah, a lot of drug-influenced imagery.
00:03:36.300And so they did a version of Snow White in the early 1930s, which was so deconstructed and strange that it was barely recognizable, right?
00:03:44.500It was completely, you know, you really had to know the story to even know that it was Snow White because it was so weird.
00:03:50.160And 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.
00:04:00.840And I feel like maybe that's what we need to do now is that instead of complaining, you know, we should tell better stories.
00:04:07.960And so one of the things we want to do is I started writing fairy tales.
00:04:11.580We're putting out a version of Snow White.
00:04:16.640And then I'm going to put out eight fairy tales, like really the traditional fairy tales, four female-led and four male-led.
00:04:25.120And they're also, we're going to learn from the postmodern moment.
00:04:28.620It'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.
00:04:36.080But 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.
00:04:47.000And when you say we, who's the we involved?
00:04:48.980Well, it's me, but then I'm also working with some illustrators.
00:04:52.800So for the Snow White, I'm working with a woman named Heather Pollington, who's worked in Hollywood for many years.
00:04:58.360She's worked with Disney and all the big companies, all the big franchises.
00:05:01.940And so, you know, we're trying to put together this, we actually have put together this first book.
00:05:07.480And then after that, I'm going to work with other illustrators.
00:05:10.200I'm also starting a publishing company, the Symbolic World Press.
00:05:13.080And, you know, I've already hired a few people to kind of get that going.
00:05:16.500And it's really in some ways to kind of, to rather capture the, recapture the culture, right?
00:05:20.960Take it back instead of, instead of complaining that it's slipping away from us.
00:05:51.500But I took, I took the Grimm's brother fairy tale, Water of Life.
00:05:54.740And I stayed fairly close to it, you know, although I wrote music for it, lyrics for it, and so forth.
00:06:00.460And so that was a very entertaining project.
00:06:02.980It's a very deep fairy tale and very nicely structured.
00:06:05.380No one's done anything with that particular fairy tale before.
00:06:08.600And it's a good time to do that, I think, because, you know, when you look at Disney's Snow White, it was perfect.
00:06:15.420I mean, it was so beautiful and so powerful.
00:06:17.900And 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.
00:06:28.040You 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.
00:06:35.900But 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.
00:06:45.460You know, Snow White, all these stories of, you know, these female-led fairy tales, they're very powerful in what they can do.
00:06:53.960And so, you know, if we forget them or if we try to twist them, then we're also twisting, in some ways, the fabric of Western civilization.
00:07:01.160Because these old stories, right, they kind of lie at the bottom of, you know, all these folk stories, they're kind of like, I like to think of them as kind of like tuning forks for civilization.
00:07:12.300All these stories that people have been telling for centuries that, you know, there's an emergent part of it, right?
00:07:18.300There's all these variations of all these stories.
00:07:20.120And 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.
00:07:28.180So they get refined like, you know, almost like gold.
00:08:11.580And 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.
00:08:21.680And so it's narratives all the way down, right, to the very basis of what you would perceive as a singular object.
00:08:29.480So even the concept of perceptual unity is narrative in structure.
00:08:35.900And if that's true, then the postmodernist idea that there's no grand unifying narrative is an argument of convenience.
00:08:42.260Because 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.
00:09:14.760So in one way, what you could say is that the basic story structure, you know, Campbell had this whole hero's journey, which is which is powerful.
00:09:23.020And I think he captures something real.
00:09:24.780But you can reduce the story to basic one, like a one move, right?
00:09:28.700Like down and up, basically problem and then dealing with the problem, right?
00:09:33.880Situation, problem or question and then dealing with the question.
00:09:37.460And that that can help us understand why it's related to object perception, because that's what it is, right?
00:09:42.460You you don't do it consciously, but you you're constantly kind of asking what's important, you know, what what's relevant.
00:09:48.900And you can imagine when you see something that you don't know what it is.
00:09:52.540It's like it's a crisis, especially if it's coming at you in a way you have to answer that question.
00:10:01.080You end up in a place where you don't know what's happening.
00:10:04.280You don't know what's coming towards you and you have to answer that.
00:10:06.580And I think the story kind of kept the basic story pattern captured that.
00:10:10.580And the fairy tales, most of them, they capture that very much, you know, because, for example, Snow White, which we're telling now, it has that story.
00:10:40.440It has multiple levels, but you can understand as the very transformation of a young woman, it does have to do with puberty.
00:10:47.460Snow White pretty much has to do with puberty.
00:10:49.580I'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 could say, or that transformation.
00:11:11.960Like, what is what is happening to me?
00:11:14.520And so the story of Snow White has this moment where as she as she becomes possible, she comes into competition with the queen or come to the moment where she can now be in competition with the queen.
00:11:24.620Then 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.
00:12:00.300A micro narrative that isn't, that isn't, the print, if you could mix all the dwarves together and extract out the best, you'd have a prince.
00:12:51.640And then, you know, work and learn to clean and do all that stuff and kind of live in the forest.
00:12:55.740And then, ultimately, that leads to her second falling asleep and then being woken up by the right mate and so the solution.
00:13:04.220Then she finds the reason for all of this.
00:13:06.240So what's the reason for this cycle of transformation?
00:13:09.180What's the reason for all these changes in her body, in her life?
00:13:13.240She's kind of in that transition and then finding her mate, basically, finding her husband, finding her prince, that answers the question.
00:13:22.680So do you think as well, in Sleeping Beauty, of course, the princess is woken up by a kiss from the right mate, too.
00:13:32.460But I always thought that it was useful to read that story on two levels simultaneously.
00:13:39.000That 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.
00:13:52.600And 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.
00:14:09.480Yeah, 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.
00:14:22.940And she has a three-year-old and a one-year-old and is feeling some separation from them.
00:14:28.020And 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.
00:14:35.900Because it's very important for her to model to her children the fact that adults have important adult activity to engage in.
00:14:47.400Partly because the children have to see that because they're going to be adults or they end up in the Peter Pan world.
00:14:51.980It'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?
00:14:59.800And it seems perfectly reasonable to me that adult women can model adult behavior as well as taking care of children.
00:15:07.820And we know, too, that if you look at the best predictors of, well, here's a couple of different facts.
00:15:15.540The educational attainment of a mother predicts the educational attainment of children over and above the IQs of the mother and father.
00:15:31.500And then countries that value female education and emancipate women do way better on the economic front.
00:15:38.960And 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 diverse, what would you say, a diverse range of contributions from various sources.
00:15:56.600You know, that constraint of women seems to go along with a constraint on idea and flexibility in general.
00:16:17.420I have to find a way out so that the change now finds a resolution and makes sense.
00:16:22.380Yeah, well, so Piaget talked about that, too, in terms of the stage transition 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.
00:16:47.520And that can happen as a consequence of biological maturations, right?
00:16:50.860The framework that you used as a child is no longer relevant because the physiological acts that you're capable of now have radically transformed.
00:17:01.280So that viewpoint has to be radically transformed to take into account the new reality.
00:17:08.380But the new transformation has to do everything the old transformation, the old viewpoint did, plus something additional.
00:17:15.520So there's actually, it's not merely the reestablishment of a new kind of stasis, it's a more inclusive interpretive framework.
00:17:26.880This is why there's actual progress, 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.
00:17:35.720You'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.
00:17:45.480So there's, yeah, there's movement upward.
00:17:48.240You think about that as a spiraling upward, too, right?
00:17:50.700So it's a cycle of change, but one which hopefully brings you higher up.
00:17:54.900Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, well, and the pinnacle of that cycle of change, I think, is the biblical injunction that you have to become like a little child in order to enter the kingdom of heaven.
00:18:05.580It's the reintegration, 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.
00:18:25.560Yeah, because it, yeah, it joins it all together.
00:18:27.920That's what you mean by that it includes it all.
00:18:29.600Well, 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.
00:18:40.240And then there's a reintegration of the...
00:18:42.620Yeah, sometimes some stories don't reintegrate.
00:18:56.060Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:19:04.080Most 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?
00:19:11.900In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury, it's a fundamental right.
00:19:16.880Every 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.
00:19:26.360And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:19:29.560With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:19:36.640Now, you might think, what's the big deal? Who'd want my data anyway?
00:19:40.620Well, on the dark web, your personal information could fetch up to $1,000.
00:19:45.220That's right, there's a whole underground economy built on stolen identities.
00:21:23.500But what you're what we're actually doing is mastering the meta puzzle.
00:21:27.580Yeah. You're mastering the art of well, you're mastering the art of transformation to some degree, because one of the things that you do when you attend to a story is you embody the character.
00:21:37.940And so if you listen to 10 stories, you embody 10 different characters.
00:21:41.060And so then what you're embodying is the process of embodying multiple characters.
00:21:45.460Right. 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.
00:21:58.160Right. So one of the things you see in in in very restricted forms of psychopathology is the person is exactly the same in every situation.
00:22:08.300You might think, well, that's admirable stability of character.
00:22:11.020It's like, no, it's not. There's no flexibility of response.
00:22:15.780You know, so you're the same person at a party that you would be at a funeral.
00:22:21.280I mean, there are some principles underlying your behavior that should remain stable.
00:22:25.480But 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 have a discussion there that's productive.
00:22:36.720And then you can go to, you know, a highly cultured event and you can comport yourself properly there.
00:22:42.620Yeah. Yeah. And I think I think that that's it seems to me that at least that's what's going on in these types of stories like Sleeping Beauty.
00:22:50.540You mentioned her before. If you look at the structure, you'll notice that it's very similar.
00:22:55.980Is it the Snow White? Yeah. But it's similar even in the some of the elements.
00:22:59.480So when I talked about Snow White, I mentioned the idea that she doesn't understand the reason for the housework.
00:23:06.720Right. The reason for the housework is actually in her relationship with her with her mate.
00:23:10.800Like that's what gives meaning to the to the the cycle of work.
00:23:15.120And so if you think about Sleeping Beauty that way, you'll notice that it's very similar.
00:23:18.740What's going on there is that she's pricked on this spindle.
00:23:22.020Right. She's pricked on on this wheel of that that's turning.
00:23:25.640But 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.
00:23:33.960Yeah. And so it's it's both like this weaving weaving.
00:23:38.100Yeah. And so she it's as if, you know, someone someone the witch curses Sleeping Beauty that she's going to die when she hits puberty.
00:23:46.420She says 15 or whatever. It's always pretty much first blood.
00:23:49.380Yeah, exactly. Prick her finger. And so you can understand that both as exactly you can understand it both as losing virginity or as the beginning of menstruation.
00:23:57.400Yeah. It doesn't matter how death of child. It's just it's just the change which comes with the bleeding.
00:24:01.720Yeah. And so but it's as if they've hidden that from her her whole life.
00:24:07.380And so when it happens, she has no way to deal with it.
00:24:11.040She has no she has no frame. She has no reason.
00:24:13.880She doesn't understand what's going on. And so that I saw that happen to some of my clinical clients.
00:24:19.400I'm sure where where I want in particular, I remember was treated as an absolute perfect princess, like literally as literally as you were.
00:24:27.400You could enact that in a household and until she had puberty.
00:24:30.980And then she was demonized, essentially. Right.
00:24:33.580Because her parents had no idea how to integrate the well, the sexual dangers of puberty into this perfect princess little girl that they had constructed.
00:24:43.100And so, well, then all hell broke loose. I mean, she did exactly what you'd expect and went and found some absolutely horrible initial boyfriend.
00:24:50.520You know, I think he was a bloody biker and to tear her away from from that too tight maternal embrace and things things didn't go uphill from there.
00:24:59.240Let's put it that way. Yeah. And so. Yeah.
00:25:02.760And so which fairy tales you you're starting with.
00:25:05.280Which ones are you doing? So the way the way we're doing it is we're starting with I'm doing two arcs.
00:25:09.460One is going to be a female led arc and one a male led arc.
00:25:12.200So the female led arc, it's going to be Snow White, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella.
00:25:17.300Really. Oh, yeah. The classic. Yeah. Yeah.
00:25:19.180But there'll be like a surprising connection between all of them and also using some of the tropes that repeat in the stories to help people understand what the tropes are.
00:25:28.900So as the falling asleep repeats itself, as the thorns repeat themselves are different, they're different patterns that repeat themselves in the stories, then then trying to kind of obviously not explaining anything, but through surprising relationships, trying to help people see what what's going on.
00:25:46.540How do you protect yourself against propagandizing when you're used?
00:25:50.460Because I saw that happen to some degree, for example, in The Lion King, which I really like.
00:25:55.080Yeah. There's great things about The Lion King, but it it borders and this happens in Pinocchio now, now and then, too.
00:26:02.280Yeah. It borders on overt moralizing and overt psychologizing.
00:26:06.920Yeah. I mean, the people who who built The Lion King knew a fair bit about the hero's journey.
00:26:12.260Yeah. And some of that creeps in, you know, and when it when it becomes conscious in that way, the stories, the story definitely suffers. Right.
00:26:20.080It's even if the 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.
00:26:34.720Yeah. I really tried to avoid that when I wrote this.
00:26:37.080Well, I think one of the ways to do it is to do it to really do it by analogy and also to kind of dive into the story itself.
00:26:43.820So in Snow White, there are certain mysterious elements in the story.
00:26:49.660You know, there are certain things which are kind of weird.
00:26:52.700And so and then to try to just I just tried to I just been, let's say, ruminating on Snow White for 20 years, just forever.
00:26:59.720You know, for example, like we we see that she eats this apple and then she she falls asleep or she dies.
00:27:05.600And we're thinking, well, that's looks like another story. Right.
00:27:08.760It looks like that story in Genesis. Right. But what's the connection?
00:27:12.180Like what's the the the the the connection between the two?
00:27:14.800And then you look at the versions that happen in, for example, in the Grimm brothers, the witch visits her three times.
00:27:21.040The first time she brings her a corset. The second time she brings her a comb.
00:27:24.920And then the third time it's an apple. And it's like, what's going on?
00:27:28.280What is what is happening? And so, you know, it's just about meditating and trying to get insight.
00:27:33.180Right. And for example, like in that case, the inside I got is it's very strange that so it's no way to support a corset corset.
00:27:40.300It exaggerates the female figure, obviously. And the comb is a is an ornament, an ornament.
00:27:45.580Because it's not a comb for combing. It's one of those. Oh, yeah.
00:27:48.020Like a comb. Ancient people used to wear combs like ornaments.
00:27:51.100Right. So in my my version, I make it a hairpin because it's it's more like an ornament.
00:27:54.960And so there are a lot of things going on. But one of the things that's going on is the witch sees in her mirror that the most beautiful of all is Snow White.
00:28:05.400And it's kind of weird that when she goes to see Snow White, she tries to bring her supplements to her beauty.
00:28:11.080Why is she doing that? It's as if she is already the most beautiful girl in the world.
00:28:16.740So 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?
00:28:22.800So if you had the most beautiful girl in the world, you're just like, well, I'll teach you how to wear how to put makeup on.
00:28:27.380Right. What are you doing? And so that's when I started to see the relationship between the story of Genesis, this idea of the garments of skin, right?
00:28:36.160Of adding something on top. Then it clicked with me that the apple has to do with knowledge of beauty.
00:28:43.260She's trying to make Snow White self-conscious.
00:28:46.400She's trying to make her like self-aware of her beauty because until then she's beautiful but innocent.
00:28:51.420She doesn't know she's beautiful. That's probably one of the reasons why she's most beautiful.
00:28:56.160You see a woman that is so beautiful but that she's not weaponizing it, you can say, then it's usually this kind of radiant beauty.
00:29:04.440But if someone becomes too aware of their own beauty, then they start to play with it and they start to, let's say, weaponize it is a good term.
00:29:15.280They start to direct it and to use it as a way to attract attention in certain ways.
00:29:19.040So I think that's what's going on in the Snow White. So what happens in the story is I don't say that.
00:29:23.980So do you think that's how, is that an attempt by the witch to pervert her beauty?
00:29:28.620I think so. I think so. Obviously it's not, it's not a, you know, she's obviously, she's trying to kill her is what she's trying to do.
00:29:36.060But the method that she's using is very interestingly related to beauty.
00:29:41.080It's not a, she's not just trying to stab her, right?
00:29:44.700She's trying to kill her in a way that makes her, you know, tempt her into certain gestures towards beauty.
00:29:53.180So it seems to have to do with beauty and the weaponization of beauty or the, you know, innocence of beauty and how, what's the proper relationship we have to beauty.
00:30:02.600And so then, you know, then you see the queen is, you know, she's looking in a magic mirror.
00:30:07.140I love it because it doesn't have to be a magic mirror.
00:30:09.860It's just a mirror because that's what a mirror does, right?
00:30:12.860It'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.
00:31:23.400Like this dark mirror that tells you you're the most beautiful, you know, that gives you all the likes, that gives you all the attention, but then also tells you that you're not as beautiful as the others.
00:31:45.480And it's more and more like that because we do have a magic gadget now that delivers to you what you most desire, right?
00:31:54.500But if those desires become self-conscious, then that'll drown you in Narcissus' pool.
00:32:00.320And when I say that it's designed to give you exactly what you want, I actually mean that technically, right?
00:32:07.320Because there's algorithms working behind the scenes nonstop trying to understand where you're directing your attention, manipulating it to some degree.
00:32:14.420But 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.
00:33:10.040And so if the story of Cain, let's say, is the story of envy, well, and envy is portrayed in that story as like one of the cardinal sources of motivation, the darkest source of motivation.
00:33:26.160But 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?
00:33:36.360And that seems, that seems definitely, definitely likely.
00:33:48.360Yeah, well, then it makes you wonder too, like, is it, it is giving you what you want.
00:33:52.900It's just that some of the things that you want are dark things, right?
00:33:57.700I mean, if you ask them what they wanted and they were going to answer that naively, they would just talk about maybe the material goods that they would like delivered to them.
00:34:07.100But the phone does enable you to indulge in the darkest of motivations and some of that might be the pleasures of envy and the pleasure, but I mean, you certainly see that you can indulge in the pleasure of, in sadistic pleasures in the online world.
00:34:29.620Starting a business can be tough, but thanks to Shopify, running your online storefront is easier than ever.
00:34:35.140Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business.
00:34:40.160From the launch your online shop stage, all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage, Shopify is here to help you grow.
00:34:47.040Our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise and we love how easy it is to add more items, ship products, and track conversions.
00:34:54.280With Shopify, customize your online store to your style with flexible templates and powerful tools, alongside an endless list of integrations and third-party apps like on-demand printing, accounting, and chatbots.
00:35:06.440Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout, up to 36% better compared to other leading e-commerce platforms.
00:35:14.360No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level.
00:35:21.300Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash jbp, all lowercase.
00:35:27.260Go to shopify.com slash jbp now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in.
00:36:46.080I mean, the AI, you know, because it can just function through iteration over iteration over iteration, just infinite iterations.
00:36:52.540You know, it can, you could have some aspect of AI that's locking into just Jordan Peterson or just one person and just figuring out exactly what to hit.
00:37:56.040But anyways, it was extremely interesting to watch that.
00:37:59.320One of the ways I've been thinking about AI, I did a video on that just recently, is, is actually the story of Aladdin or the story of the genie's lamp.
00:38:06.620That seems to be in my, my, because I've been thinking a lot about, we talk about artificial intelligence, you know, and we've been talking about this.
00:38:13.980We talked about this with Jim Keller, you know, and one of the points I was trying to make was that the intelligence doesn't seem to come from the machine.
00:39:29.660But 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?
00:39:39.240What do you give, you can have one wish, and then Solomon answers properly.
00:39:45.660And 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.
00:40:05.060And that's just, it's like an unbalance of the relationship of how much power you put towards a certain goal.
00:40:10.700And so, the only thing that would, would, would handle.
00:40:13.640Well, you know, there's a, 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 as celebrating a lesser deity.
00:40:29.840Because you're allowed to wish for a sandwich, right?
00:40:32.480If I'm hungry and I wish for a sandwich, that's fine.
00:40:35.060But the problem is, like, if I wish for a sandwich with, like, infinite power behind, behind me, and I'm, and I'm, and like, I'm going into this infinite power to get this secondary good.
00:40:45.920Like, it's okay to wish for, to have money.
00:40:48.200But if you, if you put all the resources of everything into getting money.
00:40:52.000Well, that means it's okay to wish for that if it's in its proper place.
00:41:08.820What 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.
00:41:18.960Tammy's been playing with this a lot, you know, and she tries to orient herself in the morning properly to see what's on her mind and what's concerning her.
00:41:25.980But then to try to face the day with a certain degree of faith and gratitude and to orient herself towards the thing that should be at the top of the pyramid, let's say.
00:41:35.440That's a good definition of God is whatever God is, is whatever should be placed properly at the pinnacle of the pyramid of, you could say, integrated desire.
00:41:57.300Like, 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.
00:42:10.200Think of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, et cetera, as meditations on the divine feminine, right, characterizing it from a variety of different perspectives.
00:42:18.860What you see happening in the biblical corpus is that you, each story contains a particularized characterization of the proper animating spirit.
00:42:29.900That's a good way of thinking about it.
00:42:31.600So in Noah, for example, God is the spirit that calls the wise to prepare when the storms are brewing.
00:43:37.060And 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.
00:43:46.120You know, it's like a little, it's like playing around something you can't completely.
00:43:59.820Or that's, or, 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 make it, that you can communicate about what this underlying unity might be.
00:44:18.900But I don't know if you ever get to the point where the explicit descriptions are actually have more potency, explanatory potency than the stories.
00:44:35.680It, what, you know, you, you can think you've got it, but then you, you just, you know, a year later, two years later, all of a sudden you see it from this other tack.
00:45:10.440And it's an unbelievably rich set of sequential images.
00:45:15.540And even if, and it isn't as if the information in the story is encapsulated precisely in the words, it's encapsulated in the image that the words generate.
00:45:25.840And that image has information in it that transcends the words.
00:45:29.420That's why it's an inexhaustible source.
00:45:32.080So one of the things, so it's interesting because I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between fairy tales and scripture.
00:45:38.360And when I was writing the fairy tales, I realized that I was kind of, I was kind of using scripture as a model, you know, because scripture has a certain way of writing, which is quite, which is one of the reasons why certain people think that it's bad literature is because it doesn't describe inner states.
00:45:55.680It doesn't describe the landscape very much.
00:47:18.440Yeah, to kind of point at it, to point at it from different directions and to play along with it.
00:47:22.640But with, what's great about fairy tales is you have, you know, an indefinite amount of them and they all have little variations on themes and little, little games.
00:47:31.360There's probably valid ways of doing that too.
00:47:34.080So you might say, if you are elaborating on the story in the spirit of the story, then you could amplify it.
00:47:44.160See, Jung did that all the time when he was analyzing dreams.
00:47:46.840His technique, he called his technique amplification.
00:47:49.940And I played a lot with that in therapy.
00:47:52.120So, you know, if you told me a dream, then I would watch what images, like, okay.
00:47:58.340So first of all, we would set the stage and the setting would be,
00:48:03.440well, we're going to try to understand this dream in a manner that will further the therapeutic endeavor.
00:48:09.480And the therapeutic endeavor would be clarifying the nature of your problems
00:48:13.480and clarifying the nature of potential solutions, right, without trying to impose that.
01:12:30.700Well, I've been, I've been crafting the invitation letters to this 1500 person ARC conference and trying to lay out, you know, what makes a story better.
01:12:41.000And certainly, I think a better story is one that's attractive in the absence of fear or compulsion.
01:12:47.640You know, I've been thinking about how to adjudicate the quality of leadership in the face of crisis.
01:12:53.740So, what happened during the COVID pandemic, which wasn't, it was a pandemic of tyranny, pure and simple.
01:13:26.080Okay, now, if, and you can point to various manifestations of the potential apocalyptic crisis.
01:13:32.840And, 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.
01:13:42.700So, 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.
01:13:50.360And what I see happening on the environmental front is exactly that.
01:13:57.920And 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.
01:14:13.280And 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.
01:14:21.120And say, well, here's how we could, if we could have the future that we might want to have, what would it look like?
01:14:26.780And without assuming a priori that it has to be one of forced privation and want, which seems to be the way things are going now.
01:14:57.320I 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.
01:15:24.100Well, it's, it's also because I kind of perceived a, a possible secret arc through the four.
01:15:30.060And so the, the, you know, at first it'll, they're all standalone stories, all standalone stories that you can tell kids, sit with them and tell them the story.
01:15:38.120But then through, through the, the four, there'll be like a surprising art that I won't tell everybody what it is already.
01:15:44.240But there's like a surprising art that goes through them.
01:15:46.800And then the male stories, it's funny because the male stories are harder to find.
01:15:50.380In fairy tale world, there's a lot of female-led stories for some reason that we've remembered more.
01:15:55.540And in the male stories, they're less, they're not as easy.
01:15:59.540But, but I'm starting with Jack and the Beanstalk.
01:24:51.380I 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.
01:26:57.680And 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.
01:27:22.840But then as he comes back down, all the monsters, you know, the monster follows him down.
01:27:28.140The monster, the tyrant, you know, the monster of the hierarchy follows him down.
01:27:30.940Well, 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 descent of a new kind of tyranny.
01:27:45.060Because 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.
01:28:37.560Yeah, 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 and narrow on the masculine front.
01:28:51.720It's one that can be perverted and misused as well.
01:28:54.260But you can understand that, like, the castrating narrative, you know, it's a neutral narrative, right?
01:29:00.440It's like the idea of the woman that can, you know, take your confidence away with a word, you know, that can be very dangerous to us.
01:29:09.780But it can also be useful in several circumstances for that to happen, because sometimes, you know, someone who's taking up too much space, who's really cocky, or thinks that he's the king of the hill, and then, you know, then a beautiful young lady can just take that away from him with one word.
01:29:31.020And that, like I said, can be used for good or ill, and can, and becomes mythologized, you know, in all kinds of ways, you know.
01:29:38.440So tell me a little bit more concretely about how these productions are going to make themselves manifest.
01:29:45.800These are illustrated books, like high quality, beautifully hardbound illustrated books.
01:29:50.920We put, we put a large amount of effort into designing the books, designing the illustrations.
01:29:56.020You know, there's also narrative elements which don't appear in the text that are only followed in the illustration.
01:30:01.260So the, 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.
01:30:09.460And there's, there are two readings in the text, basically, a reading for children and a reading for adults.
01:30:14.040But the reading for adults is not the kind of dirty jokes that are cynical reading that you see in Trek.
01:30:51.980It's really is using the fairy tale style.
01:30:54.300But hopefully, especially for an adult that has a little bit of intuition about stories and has cared about these stories before, I try to resolve some of the, some of the threads in the stories that, in a way that reveals more of what the meaning is.
01:31:15.440So 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.
01:31:28.740And so, but we're doing something similar as we're doing with the fairy tales, which is in God's dog.
01:31:34.840What we're doing is we're using the, the biblical Christian cosmos.
01:31:40.420You could say it that way as a, as a world building, as a world building tool to create a story, which is something that not many people have done.
01:31:49.420Milton did it, Dante did it, you know?
01:31:51.140But in the modern world, when you look at modern fantasy, you have people like Tolkien or C.S. Lewis that kind of inaugurated the modern fantasy movement.
01:31:59.080And what they wanted to do, although they were Christians, they want, they created this kind of pagan world.
01:32:05.120That was, that, that, that was coherent.
01:32:08.140Yeah, I wonder why they turned to the pagan world to do that instead of, because as you said, both Tolkien and Lewis were like, were committed Christians and deep Christian thinkers.
01:32:17.600So why do you think they turned to the pagan world?
01:32:23.480I think on the one hand, it was a double problem, one, which, one, which was, it might've offended too many people if they had done a kind of, let's say, Christian fantasy world.
01:32:35.800You could have offended Christians and non-Christians.
01:32:38.500And it would have annoyed the non-Christians, let's say.
01:32:53.080And so, and so in a way, there's a, there's a possibility of diving into the stories, telling, you know, kind of varying versions of these stories, bringing them together too.
01:33:01.080In God's Dog, we, we bring in all kinds of, you know, we have St. Christopher, who is a dog-headed, dog-headed monster.
01:33:07.300We have St. George, who's the dragon killer.
01:33:09.180You know, we also have giants and the Leviathan and all these, all these kind of thing, weird things in scripture and in tradition.
01:33:15.440We kind of jammed them together into one story.
01:33:17.760So there is that in the sense that we want to use some postmodern storytelling.
01:33:21.480Postmodern storytelling, like collage storytelling, has, has, has, can, does bring insight, right?
01:33:28.660There is a way in which it can capture insights.
01:33:31.420So if you think of, well, even when you're analyzing postmodernism, you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
01:33:38.320So, so the idea is that how can we use the insight of, of, 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, that exist.
01:33:51.980And then they interact with each other, 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.
01:34:01.860Because like, what does it mean for a saint who's a monster, like St. Christopher with this, this dog headed monster to meet a dry, a monster killer, who's also a saint, who's St. George.
01:34:12.840So it's like, you know, there are actually our traditions where they coexist a little bit in the ancient tradition, but like, what if you had a story of those two types of characters together, you know?
01:34:21.660And 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.
01:34:29.480So that's the kind of thing, I mean, they did that in the, the ancient days too.
01:34:33.400Like 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, the like powerful characters from mythology and smash them into one story and then watch them interact with each other.
01:34:52.820So it's not like this hasn't happened before.
01:34:55.240And 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.
01:35:26.000And so it's just, yeah, we're just continuously selling them and we're preparing the second book, hopefully trying to also build up on the attention that it's getting.
01:36:29.860I actually, Hellboy 2, it's so weird because in, when I watched Hellboy 2 a long time ago now, I noticed just how well the design was done.
01:36:37.260And there's one object, which is like this medieval book that they have that tells the story of the elves in it.
01:36:42.860And I remember that object watching the movie and thinking, oh my goodness, it's the first time, one of the rare times that I see someone with like a book that looks, in a movie, that looks like a real object.
01:36:54.100That this is, looks like something that has history or whatever, that has all this weight to it.
01:37:23.200Like, I started gathering these kind of, this cobbling artist together.
01:37:27.720You know, just, just a few weeks ago, I met a, someone who was a, who was a storyboard artist, like a main storyboard artist for Disney, who kind of moved, moved on and is doing other projects.
01:37:40.360But who also said, like, she read my brother's book.
01:37:54.520She 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.
01:38:05.120She 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.
01:38:18.900You and Matthew have your own interpretive framework, but you're not trying to obliterate the utility of narrative in the, in the, in favor of something like a narrative of power, which the postmodernists, the bloody leftist postmodernists did that at the drop of a hat in France.
01:38:46.280So we, we do find pleasure in these stories, but it's somewhat, it's like a, right, it's like the, the pleasure of a binge drinking or something, right?
01:38:54.160It's like, it's like this, this euphoric pleasure of watching our stories get twisted and, and turned and kind of deconstructed and, and flipped upside down.
01:39:03.080But it leaves us ultimately with not much, you know, in terms of, and so what, 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.
01:39:16.680To see them really as something to build on and something that is, that we can, that we can unashamed, unashamedly celebrate.
01:39:24.080Well, it does seem to me too, that that will occur with an increment in consciousness, because I think we're at a point now.
01:39:32.620And this is partly as a consequence to a work done by people like Vervecki, that we will return to these ancient stories, but we'll also understand their explicit utility in a way that we hadn't understood before.
01:39:47.440And I would say in a perverse way, the postmodern enterprise has actually probably contributed to that.
01:39:52.940Because it took a kind of skepticism as far as it could be taken.
01:39:56.520But even like, so, 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?
01:40:10.000And so, for example, like most kids have not read the version of Rapunzel where she gets pregnant in the tower.
01:40:15.800But, but in some ways without that, you actually miss out on much of what the story is offering.
01:40:21.920And so one of the things that I'm doing is without in any way being inappropriate, I'm not shying away from the fact that these, that there is a layer of these stories that has to do with, with puberty, with transformation, with sexuality, the way that the, that the psychoanalysts analyze.
01:40:40.300In 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.
01:40:50.060Because those are obviously in the story.
01:40:51.300So how can we do, how can we tell that story now in a way that is not inappropriate, but just helps, you know, is there in the, in the, in the, in the subtext.
01:40:59.620Well, you know, you could, you could say, you could say that the terrible identity confusion on the pubertal and trans front now is actually a consequence of our failure to integrate those elements into a transcendent, uniting narrative.
01:41:14.520So now they're crying out for integration.
01:41:17.640That's a reasonable way of thinking about it.
01:41:38.220So you can see that like, so a good, a good, in terms of the, 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.
01:41:49.660And they have to do with the, with the, let's say the possibilities, the dangers of beauty, the dangers of how you treat beauty.
01:41:57.480So it's, there's a whole theme of beauty in this and also the transformation of the, of the woman, you know, who becomes beautiful and desirable.
01:42:04.480And what does that mean and how to deal with it?
01:42:07.120So that's what basically unites all the stories together.
01:42:10.880And it, and so it really becomes a way to, let's say to a tuning fork, hopefully for, for young people to, to be able to kind of have these stories in their unconscious, really.
01:42:22.000You have these stories in their, in their, just their basic frame, their implicit frame, so that they approach life in the, in, with more, with a, a healthy mix of cautious caution, but then also adventure, right?
01:42:35.360It's like finding that balance between the two.
01:42:37.540Because 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.
01:42:52.660Whereas Rapunzel, it's the mother that sees the beauty of her daughter, but wants to protect her completely from the outside.
01:42:59.880And so one throws her out into the outside, literally gives her to the hunter, right?
01:43:03.860So that he does whatever he wants with her.
01:43:40.220You know, so that I can get the project started.
01:43:42.140I'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.
01:43:50.400That's what I would, that's definitely what I would like.
01:44:28.080Jonathan's here, as am I, in London, also to, to engage in a series of meetings to do with this ARC Enterprise Alliance for Responsible Citizenship,
01:44:37.840which we're trying to generate as an enterprise based on a, an attractive, positive narrative of abundance, let's say, in relationship to the future.
01:44:48.200And all the things we talked about today in terms of rediscovering, revamping fundamental stories are part and parcel of that enterprise as well,
01:44:56.500because everyone involved does understand that this, in the final analysis, is a storytelling venture.
01:45:02.300Strangely enough, who would have guessed that?