The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 364. Dream Analysis, AI & Fairy Tales ｜ Jonathan Pageau

00:00:00.960 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

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00:00:57.420 Hello everyone. I'm speaking once again with Jonathan Pajot today.

00:01:13.460 He's a French-Canadian liturgical artist and icon carver, known for his artistic work featured in museums across the world.

00:01:20.800 He carves Eastern Orthodox and other traditional images, and teaches an online carving class.

00:01:26.780 He also runs a YouTube channel dedicated to the exploration of symbolism across history and religions.

00:01:33.720 Well, Mr. Pajot, here we are in London.

00:01:36.220 That's right.

00:01:37.040 We're going to be meeting with the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship People here this week.

00:01:43.780 For everybody watching and listening, we're trying to get that moving along and figure out how to structure the convention.

00:01:51.800 And we're thinking about trying to make it as musical an event as possible.

00:01:56.880 I've been using, I have music at the beginning of each of my lectures now.

00:02:00.860 Yeah.

00:02:01.340 A man named David Cotter has been playing classical guitar and then electric guitar.

00:02:07.840 Okay.

00:02:08.200 To follow up with that.

00:02:09.220 Interesting.

00:02:09.580 Yeah, and it's really good.

00:02:10.920 It really, really helps the audience focus.

00:02:15.080 And Tammy and I focus backstage, and it sets a high bar for excellence, which is helpful.

00:02:21.720 And so hopefully we can integrate that into this art conference.

00:02:25.380 And so what have you been working on?

00:02:28.520 Well, 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.

00:02:34.960 You 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.

00:02:45.960 And I thought instead of complaining, maybe we could try to take charge of that instead and just start to retell the stories.

00:02:53.060 You know, there's a weird, there's an interesting thing that happened in the 1930s.

00:02:57.600 And when we look at Disney's Snow White, we think that, like, this is this old story.

00:03:02.820 It's the traditional and made total sense for Disney to make this old story.

00:03:06.780 Yeah.

00:03:06.880 But in the 1920s and 30s, that wasn't, wasn't going, that's not what was going on.

00:03:12.520 In the 1920s and 30s, there were two major studios competing with each other.

00:03:17.100 There was Fleischer Studios and Disney.

00:03:19.380 And Fleischer was doing the crazy, wild jazz, you know.

00:03:23.460 Yeah, Betty Boop. 1.00

00:03:24.260 Their 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.

00:03:32.120 A lot of marijuana-influenced imagery.

00:03:33.780 Yeah, a lot of drug-influenced imagery.

00:03:36.300 And so they did a version of Snow White in the early 1930s, which was so deconstructed and strange that it was barely recognizable, right?

00:03:44.500 It was completely, you know, you really had to know the story to even know that it was Snow White because it was so weird.

00:03:50.160 And so when Disney finally made his Snow White, it was also in some ways a kind of recapturing of the traditional story in a world that was kind of chaotic and, let's say, slipping.

00:04:00.840 And I feel like maybe that's what we need to do now is that instead of complaining, you know, we should tell better stories.

00:04:07.960 And so one of the things we want to do is I started writing fairy tales.

00:04:11.580 We're putting out a version of Snow White.

00:04:14.320 We're kick-starting it on June 6th.

00:04:16.640 And then I'm going to put out eight fairy tales, like really the traditional fairy tales, four female-led and four male-led.

00:04:25.120 And they're also, we're going to learn from the postmodern moment.

00:04:28.620 It's going to be like a fairy tale world, kind of like Shrek or Into the Woods, where all the fairy tale characters cross and their stories kind of touch each other.

00:04:36.080 But the purpose won't be to be cynical and dark about the intentions of the characters, but try to, let's say, give people insight about what the stories are about.

00:04:47.000 And when you say we, who's the we involved?

00:04:48.980 Well, it's me, but then I'm also working with some illustrators.

00:04:52.800 So for the Snow White, I'm working with a woman named Heather Pollington, who's worked in Hollywood for many years.

00:04:58.360 She's worked with Disney and all the big companies, all the big franchises.

00:05:01.940 And so, you know, we're trying to put together this, we actually have put together this first book.

00:05:07.480 And then after that, I'm going to work with other illustrators.

00:05:10.200 I'm also starting a publishing company, the Symbolic World Press.

00:05:13.080 And, you know, I've already hired a few people to kind of get that going.

00:05:16.500 And it's really in some ways to kind of, to rather capture the, recapture the culture, right?

00:05:20.960 Take it back instead of, instead of complaining that it's slipping away from us.

00:05:25.380 Yeah.

00:05:26.140 I wrote a fairy tale screenplay.

00:05:28.300 Yes.

00:05:28.780 The Water of Life.

00:05:29.960 Yeah.

00:05:30.120 Right.

00:05:30.780 And I've, I've written and composed, I think five, well, there must be 20 songs in it, I would think.

00:05:38.600 But we've already recorded four of them and looking into having it made into an animated movie.

00:05:44.480 I mean, that technology is training, changing so quickly.

00:05:47.220 It's hard to exactly know how to approach that.

00:05:49.420 Yeah.

00:05:49.560 What's the easiest way to approach it?

00:05:51.300 Yeah.

00:05:51.500 But I took, I took the Grimm's brother fairy tale, Water of Life.

00:05:54.740 And I stayed fairly close to it, you know, although I wrote music for it, lyrics for it, and so forth.

00:06:00.460 And so that was a very entertaining project.

00:06:02.980 It's a very deep fairy tale and very nicely structured.

00:06:05.380 No one's done anything with that particular fairy tale before.

00:06:08.600 And it's a good time to do that, I think, because, you know, when you look at Disney's Snow White, it was perfect.

00:06:15.420 I mean, it was so beautiful and so powerful.

00:06:17.900 And then when you see what's been happening in the past decade and how the fairy tales have been kind of twisted, especially things like Shrek and fairy tales like that, where it's fine to do that.

00:06:28.040 You know, it's kind of like commenting or twisting the fairy tale, turning it upside down to see what's going on with it, making fun of it.

00:06:34.660 And that's fine for a while.

00:06:35.900 But after a while, it's better to get back to the actual stories, just so we even remember why we like these stories in the first place or why we remember them, especially.

00:06:45.460 You know, Snow White, all these stories of, you know, these female-led fairy tales, they're very powerful in what they can do.

00:06:53.960 And 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.

00:07:01.160 Because 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.

00:07:12.300 All these stories that people have been telling for centuries that, you know, there's an emergent part of it, right?

00:07:18.300 There's all these variations of all these stories.

00:07:20.120 And then there's a selection part, which is how some versions are remembered through the centuries and they get retold and then they kind of change and get retold.

00:07:28.180 So they get refined like, you know, almost like gold.

00:07:31.840 And so in those are, really are...

00:07:34.740 They're the things you can't forget.

00:07:36.140 That's right.

00:07:36.820 Yeah, and that can't would mean two things.

00:07:38.960 It means you literally can't forget them because they embed themselves in your memory, but also that you forget them at your peril.

00:07:44.780 Yeah.

00:07:45.700 I've been thinking about that, you know, with this postmodernist notion.

00:07:50.460 So one of the claims of postmodernism is that there's no metanarrative.

00:07:55.660 And we, you and I have talked a fair bit about the fractal structure of narrative.

00:08:00.200 And I talked to Carl Friston about object perception itself.

00:08:04.500 And I asked him if he thought that the perception of an object was a narrative in and of itself.

00:08:09.400 And so, and he said, yes.

00:08:11.440 Yeah.

00:08:11.580 And that's associated with the notion that when you see an object, you're actually perceiving something like its functional utility and not its objective qualities, let's say.

00:08:21.680 And so it's narratives all the way down, right, to the very basis of what you would perceive as a singular object.

00:08:29.480 So even the concept of perceptual unity is narrative in structure.

00:08:35.900 And if that's true, then the postmodernist idea that there's no grand unifying narrative is an argument of convenience.

00:08:42.260 Because what the postmodernists essentially do is allow the narrative to be fragmented to the point that's maximally convenient for whatever the hell they're up to.

00:08:51.780 And say, well, there's nothing above this.

00:08:55.460 Yeah, well, that's very convenient, guys.

00:08:58.060 But everything.

00:08:59.180 So without a unifying narrative, you have fragmentation and disunity.

00:09:05.260 And that's associated neuropsychologically with anxiety and hopelessness.

00:09:10.520 And so.

00:09:10.960 But what's great about the fair tales is that they actually deal with that.

00:09:14.420 Exactly.

00:09:14.760 So in one way, what you could say is that the basic story structure, you know, Campbell had this whole hero's journey, which is which is powerful.

00:09:23.020 And I think he captures something real.

00:09:24.780 But you can reduce the story to basic one, like a one move, right?

00:09:28.700 Like down and up, basically problem and then dealing with the problem, right?

00:09:33.880 Situation, problem or question and then dealing with the question.

00:09:37.460 And that that can help us understand why it's related to object perception, because that's what it is, right?

00:09:42.460 You you don't do it consciously, but you you're constantly kind of asking what's important, you know, what what's relevant.

00:09:48.900 And you can imagine when you see something that you don't know what it is.

00:09:52.540 It's like it's a crisis, especially if it's coming at you in a way you have to answer that question.

00:09:58.500 And it's a life or death.

00:09:59.520 It can be a life or death situation.

00:10:01.080 You end up in a place where you don't know what's happening.

00:10:04.280 You don't know what's coming towards you and you have to answer that.

00:10:06.580 And I think the story kind of kept the basic story pattern captured that.

00:10:10.580 And 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.

00:10:20.000 So Snow White, things happen to her.

00:10:22.500 She ends up, you know, something changes and then she ends up in the forest with these little monsters.

00:10:29.900 With dwarf men. 1.00

00:10:31.160 That's right.

00:10:31.580 Yeah, that's the that's the what's that?

00:10:33.420 That's the eternal predicament of women is to be surrounded by dwarfed men. 1.00

00:10:37.980 Yeah.

00:10:39.000 But you can understand it.

00:10:40.440 It has multiple levels, but you can understand as the very transformation of a young woman, it does have to do with puberty.

00:10:47.460 Snow White pretty much has to do with puberty.

00:10:49.580 I'm pretty sure that's what's going on there is that as she reaches puberty, she deals with all the problems of puberty, you could say, or that transformation.

00:10:59.780 It's a question.

00:11:01.060 What the hell is happening to me?

00:11:02.960 What is going on?

00:11:04.120 And I don't have the answer, and especially for a young woman, you know, this cycle of menstruation, it's it's annoying and it's painful. 0.98

00:11:10.760 And it's what is this?

00:11:11.960 Like, what is what is happening to me?

00:11:14.520 And 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.

00:11:23.900 Right, right.

00:11:24.620 Then she falls into, she goes into the woods, into the space of chaos, but then she also, you know, she falls in with men that can't be her mate.

00:11:33.820 Right, right.

00:11:34.320 Ideosyncrasy is a masculinity, you know.

00:11:36.140 Say that again. 0.71

00:11:37.160 Ideosyncrasy is a masculinity.

00:11:38.540 All the things about masculinity that are kind of annoying, you know, like Disney captures it really well, you know.

00:11:45.220 With the various dwarves. 0.99

00:11:45.900 It's kind of grouchy and like there's all these different kind of aspects of masculinity.

00:11:51.020 Yeah, they're not united.

00:11:52.840 Exactly.

00:11:52.960 So those are, you can think about those, each of those dwarves as the embodiment of a fragmentary narrative.

00:11:59.040 Exactly.

00:11:59.480 A fragmentary.

00:12:00.300 A 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.

00:12:07.620 Exactly.

00:12:08.280 Yeah.

00:12:08.680 That's right.

00:12:09.040 That's the right way to see it.

00:12:10.080 And then Snow White gets caught in that world.

00:12:12.900 And then she has to, she has to learn, especially for a traditional worldview, she has to learn the job of a woman, right? 1.00

00:12:19.340 She has to learn to clean and to cook and to do that. 1.00

00:12:21.180 And it's like, what is this for?

00:12:22.800 Like, what, you know, she gets all the problems. 0.99

00:12:24.740 And that's in the service to those dwarves, too, weirdly enough. 0.97

00:12:28.000 That's also the plaint of modern women, too, is that I'm doing all this cooking and cleaning for nothing but dwarves. 0.99

00:12:33.200 That's right.

00:12:33.760 Exactly.

00:12:34.040 And so then, I mean, obviously that all leads to her dying, you could say, or falling asleep.

00:12:40.280 There are different, there are many iterations of her falling asleep in the story.

00:12:43.600 They're all related, right?

00:12:45.200 She falls asleep and then she's woken up by dwarves, which is like, that's not going to do it. 0.99

00:12:49.140 Why wake up at all?

00:12:50.320 That's not going to do it.

00:12:51.640 And then, you know, work and learn to clean and do all that stuff and kind of live in the forest.

00:12:55.740 And then, ultimately, that leads to her second falling asleep and then being woken up by the right mate and so the solution.

00:13:04.220 Then she finds the reason for all of this.

00:13:06.240 So what's the reason for this cycle of transformation?

00:13:09.180 What's the reason for all these changes in her body, in her life?

00:13:13.240 She's kind of in that transition and then finding her mate, basically, finding her husband, finding her prince, that answers the question.

00:13:22.680 So do you think as well, in Sleeping Beauty, of course, the princess is woken up by a kiss from the right mate, too.

00:13:32.460 But I always thought that it was useful to read that story on two levels simultaneously.

00:13:39.000 That what a woman, in fortunate circumstances, is going to find the proper mate, but at the same time, she's going to awaken the part of her that's capable of a heroic quest as well.

00:13:51.160 And to integrate that.

00:13:52.600 And so that waking up as a consequence of being kissed by the prince is also, what would you say, integrating that capacity for, I would say, heroic adventure into the feminine role.

00:14:03.660 Yeah.

00:14:04.100 Right?

00:14:04.420 So you want to find that in a man, but you also want to find that in your own.

00:14:09.080 Yeah, of course.

00:14:09.480 Yeah, well, so, you know, I was talking to my daughter-in-law the other day about my son and her have just, we've all got together and bought a building to put this new corporation we're working on in.

00:14:21.040 And she's off to work.

00:14:22.940 And she has a three-year-old and a one-year-old and is feeling some separation from them.

00:14:28.020 And one of the things we talked through is the fact that it's perfectly reasonable for her to go to work, assuming your children are also being cared for.

00:14:35.900 Because it's very important for her to model to her children the fact that adults have important adult activity to engage in.

00:14:47.400 Partly because the children have to see that because they're going to be adults or they end up in the Peter Pan world.

00:14:51.980 It's like, well, why would I give up the pleasures of childhood to undertake the responsibilities of adulthood if there's nothing of value in that?

00:14:59.800 And it seems perfectly reasonable to me that adult women can model adult behavior as well as taking care of children. 0.97

00:15:07.820 And we know, too, that if you look at the best predictors of, well, here's a couple of different facts.

00:15:15.540 The educational attainment of a mother predicts the educational attainment of children over and above the IQs of the mother and father. 0.93

00:15:25.700 The father's educational attainment doesn't.

00:15:28.420 Right.

00:15:28.920 So that's weird and interesting.

00:15:31.500 And then countries that value female education and emancipate women do way better on the economic front. 0.88

00:15:38.960 And I think it's probably because there's not much difference between, let's say, opening your culture up to the contributions of women and opening your culture up to new ideas and diverse, what would you say, a diverse range of contributions from various sources.

00:15:56.600 You know, that constraint of women seems to go along with a constraint on idea and flexibility in general. 1.00

00:16:03.360 No, definitely.

00:16:04.580 I mean, you can see that in the fairytale, you can see that all of these moments, they have to do with change.

00:16:10.040 They have to do with something happens, there's a change, and then I have to find the meaning of that change.

00:16:15.740 I have to find the solution, right?

00:16:17.420 I have to find a way out so that the change now finds a resolution and makes sense.

00:16:22.380 Yeah, 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.

00:16:47.520 And that can happen as a consequence of biological maturations, right?

00:16:50.860 The framework that you used as a child is no longer relevant because the physiological acts that you're capable of now have radically transformed.

00:16:59.820 That would happen at puberty.

00:17:01.280 So that viewpoint has to be radically transformed to take into account the new reality.

00:17:08.380 But the new transformation has to do everything the old transformation, the old viewpoint did, plus something additional.

00:17:15.520 So there's actually, it's not merely the reestablishment of a new kind of stasis, it's a more inclusive interpretive framework.

00:17:26.880 This 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.

00:17:35.720 You're looking at things in a way that now takes more into account and still enables you to exert a certain amount of prediction and control.

00:17:43.440 Yeah, definitely.

00:17:45.480 So there's, yeah, there's movement upward.

00:17:48.240 You think about that as a spiraling upward, too, right?

00:17:50.700 So it's a cycle of change, but one which hopefully brings you higher up.

00:17:54.900 Yeah, 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.

00:18:05.580 It'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.

00:18:22.920 That's sort of the pinnacle of that.

00:18:24.380 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:18:25.000 That's...

00:18:25.560 Yeah, because it, yeah, it joins it all together.

00:18:27.920 That's what you mean by that it includes it all.

00:18:29.600 Well, it's also, it's also, imagine that, so you talked about the fundamental narrative is there's a steady state and then there's a problem introduced and there's a collapse into something like chaos.

00:18:40.240 And then there's a reintegration of the...

00:18:42.620 Yeah, sometimes some stories don't reintegrate.

00:18:44.700 No, then that's a tragedy, right?

00:18:47.080 So the comedy is the reintegration.

00:18:49.320 Tragedy is just the disintegration.

00:18:51.060 But then you could also say...

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00:20:38.180 Steady state, collapse, reintegration.

00:20:41.400 But then there's another story, which is that's the process to follow.

00:20:45.240 And then the ultimate reintegrated state is becoming an expert at that process.

00:20:52.900 Right. So the so it's respect for the process itself starts to become the cardinal target of the entire process of transformation.

00:21:02.260 And that's associated with the reattainment of that openness that you possess when you're a child.

00:21:06.720 And I think that that's probably one of the functions that stories play.

00:21:11.340 That is that the stories have that structure.

00:21:14.040 Yeah.

00:21:14.460 And so we tell them, we hear them or we tell them.

00:21:16.860 And so we're kind of modeling these patterns.

00:21:19.360 Right. These it's like almost like little puzzles.

00:21:21.400 We're like modeling these little puzzles.

00:21:23.000 Yeah.

00:21:23.500 But what you're what we're actually doing is mastering the meta puzzle.

00:21:27.580 Yeah. 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.

00:21:37.940 And so if you listen to 10 stories, you embody 10 different characters.

00:21:41.060 And so then what you're embodying is the process of embodying multiple characters.

00:21:45.460 Right. 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.

00:21:58.160 Right. 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.

00:22:08.300 You might think, well, that's admirable stability of character.

00:22:11.020 It's like, no, it's not. There's no flexibility of response.

00:22:15.780 You know, so you're the same person at a party that you would be at a funeral.

00:22:19.980 Well, that's not good. Right.

00:22:21.280 I mean, there are some principles underlying your behavior that should remain stable.

00:22:25.480 But out of those principles should come this vast flexibility of response so that you can go, you know, you can go into a working class community and have a have a discussion there that's productive.

00:22:36.720 And then you can go to, you know, a highly cultured event and you can comport yourself properly there.

00:22:42.620 Yeah. 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.

00:22:50.540 You mentioned her before. If you look at the structure, you'll notice that it's very similar.

00:22:55.980 Is it the Snow White? Yeah. But it's similar even in the some of the elements.

00:22:59.480 So when I talked about Snow White, I mentioned the idea that she doesn't understand the reason for the housework.

00:23:06.720 Right. The reason for the housework is actually in her relationship with her with her mate. 0.98

00:23:10.800 Like that's what gives meaning to the to the the cycle of work.

00:23:15.120 And so if you think about Sleeping Beauty that way, you'll notice that it's very similar.

00:23:18.740 What's going on there is that she's pricked on this spindle.

00:23:22.020 Right. She's pricked on on this wheel of that that's turning.

00:23:25.640 But it's also a wheel that is, you know, it's it's also it's a complicated symbolism because it's both the wheel, but it's also the binding of the thread together.

00:23:33.960 Yeah. And so it's it's both like this weaving weaving.

00:23:38.100 Yeah. 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. 0.88

00:23:46.420 She says 15 or whatever. It's always pretty much first blood.

00:23:49.380 Yeah, 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. 0.69

00:23:57.400 Yeah. It doesn't matter how death of child. It's just it's just the change which comes with the bleeding.

00:24:01.720 Yeah. And so but it's as if they've hidden that from her her whole life.

00:24:07.380 And so when it happens, she has no way to deal with it.

00:24:11.040 She has no she has no frame. She has no reason. 0.99

00:24:13.880 She doesn't understand what's going on. And so that I saw that happen to some of my clinical clients.

00:24:19.400 I'm sure where where I want in particular, I remember was treated as an absolute perfect princess, like literally as literally as you were.

00:24:27.400 You could enact that in a household and until she had puberty. 0.98

00:24:30.980 And then she was demonized, essentially. Right.

00:24:33.580 Because 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.

00:24:43.100 And 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. 0.79

00:24:50.520 You 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.

00:24:59.240 Let's put it that way. Yeah. And so. Yeah.

00:25:02.760 And so which fairy tales you you're starting with.

00:25:05.280 Which ones are you doing? So the way the way we're doing it is we're starting with I'm doing two arcs.

00:25:09.460 One is going to be a female led arc and one a male led arc.

00:25:12.200 So the female led arc, it's going to be Snow White, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella.

00:25:17.300 Really. Oh, yeah. The classic. Yeah. Yeah.

00:25:19.180 But 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.

00:25:28.900 So 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.

00:25:46.540 How do you protect yourself against propagandizing when you're used?

00:25:50.460 Because I saw that happen to some degree, for example, in The Lion King, which I really like.

00:25:55.080 Yeah. There's great things about The Lion King, but it it borders and this happens in Pinocchio now, now and then, too.

00:26:02.280 Yeah. It borders on overt moralizing and overt psychologizing.

00:26:06.920 Yeah. I mean, the people who who built The Lion King knew a fair bit about the hero's journey.

00:26:12.260 Yeah. 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.

00:26:20.080 It'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.

00:26:34.720 Yeah. I really tried to avoid that when I wrote this.

00:26:37.080 Well, 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.

00:26:43.820 So in Snow White, there are certain mysterious elements in the story.

00:26:49.660 You know, there are certain things which are kind of weird.

00:26:52.700 And 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.

00:26:59.720 You know, for example, like we we see that she eats this apple and then she she falls asleep or she dies.

00:27:05.600 And we're thinking, well, that's looks like another story. Right.

00:27:08.760 It looks like that story in Genesis. Right. But what's the connection?

00:27:12.180 Like what's the the the the the connection between the two?

00:27:14.800 And then you look at the versions that happen in, for example, in the Grimm brothers, the witch visits her three times.

00:27:21.040 The first time she brings her a corset. The second time she brings her a comb.

00:27:24.920 And then the third time it's an apple. And it's like, what's going on?

00:27:28.280 What is what is happening? And so, you know, it's just about meditating and trying to get insight.

00:27:33.180 Right. 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.

00:27:40.300 It exaggerates the female figure, obviously. And the comb is a is an ornament, an ornament.

00:27:45.580 Because it's not a comb for combing. It's one of those. Oh, yeah.

00:27:48.020 Like a comb. Ancient people used to wear combs like ornaments. 0.83

00:27:51.100 Right. So in my my version, I make it a hairpin because it's it's more like an ornament.

00:27:54.960 And 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.

00:28:05.400 And it's kind of weird that when she goes to see Snow White, she tries to bring her supplements to her beauty.

00:28:11.080 Why is she doing that? It's as if she is already the most beautiful girl in the world.

00:28:16.740 So why is she trying to make why is she trying to convince her to take on these added things that will make her more beautiful? 1.00

00:28:22.800 So 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.

00:28:27.380 Right. 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?

00:28:36.160 Of adding something on top. Then it clicked with me that the apple has to do with knowledge of beauty.

00:28:43.260 She's trying to make Snow White self-conscious. 1.00

00:28:46.400 She's trying to make her like self-aware of her beauty because until then she's beautiful but innocent. 0.99

00:28:51.420 She doesn't know she's beautiful. That's probably one of the reasons why she's most beautiful. 0.98

00:28:55.940 Right.

00:28:56.160 You 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.

00:29:04.440 But 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.

00:29:14.780 It is.

00:29:15.280 They start to direct it and to use it as a way to attract attention in certain ways.

00:29:19.040 So I think that's what's going on in the Snow White. So what happens in the story is I don't say that.

00:29:23.980 So do you think that's how, is that an attempt by the witch to pervert her beauty?

00:29:28.620 I 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. 0.99

00:29:36.060 But the method that she's using is very interestingly related to beauty.

00:29:41.080 It's not a, she's not just trying to stab her, right?

00:29:44.700 She's trying to kill her in a way that makes her, you know, tempt her into certain gestures towards beauty. 1.00

00:29:53.180 So 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.

00:30:02.600 And so then, you know, then you see the queen is, you know, she's looking in a magic mirror.

00:30:07.140 I love it because it doesn't have to be a magic mirror.

00:30:09.860 It's just a mirror because that's what a mirror does, right?

00:30:12.860 It's like the fact that she's looking at herself in the mirror, it's reflecting to her that Snow White is more beautiful than her.

00:30:18.640 I mean, yeah, it's a magic mirror.

00:30:19.980 There's a few deus ex machina things, like the mirror tells her where Snow White is, but mostly it's just a mirror.

00:30:26.980 You know, it's like the fact that she is so self-conscious about her beauty is also revealing to her the limit of it.

00:30:32.960 And it's making her compare herself to others.

00:30:36.080 And so, and the witch in the Snow White story, if I remember correctly, is also the queen, right?

00:30:41.880 Yeah, she's the queen. 0.94

00:30:43.160 Yeah, she's the queen. 0.94

00:30:44.220 She becomes a witch at the end, pretty much.

00:30:46.160 Right.

00:30:46.580 But she's the queen who replaces her mother, replaces Snow White's mother. 0.98

00:30:51.940 Right.

00:30:52.600 Yeah.

00:30:52.920 And she can't tolerate the onset of the new generation, essentially, right?

00:30:59.700 Yeah.

00:31:00.680 Yeah, and it's so fascinating because for today, you know, in the Disney version, we have the mirror on the wall.

00:31:08.340 But the illustrator I was working with, she had the idea of having the mirror in her hand, which is one of the versions that you have.

00:31:14.040 She made this beautiful image of the queen with her mirror in her hand.

00:31:17.120 And I was like, that's a cell phone.

00:31:18.640 Perfect, perfect.

00:31:19.400 It was so perfect.

00:31:20.720 It was like, yeah, that's it.

00:31:22.020 You know, and that's exactly it.

00:31:23.400 Like 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.

00:31:33.260 Right, right.

00:31:33.840 That's perfect in the cell phone world.

00:31:36.440 Yeah, yeah, that immensely heightened self-consciousness.

00:31:40.100 Well, it's a funny thing, too, because the cell phone is like the pool that Narcissus drowns in.

00:31:45.160 Yeah.

00:31:45.480 And it's more and more like that because we do have a magic gadget now that delivers to you what you most desire, right?

00:31:54.500 But if those desires become self-conscious, then that'll drown you in Narcissus' pool.

00:32:00.320 And when I say that it's designed to give you exactly what you want, I actually mean that technically, right?

00:32:07.320 Because there's algorithms working behind the scenes nonstop trying to understand where you're directing your attention, manipulating it to some degree.

00:32:14.420 But a lot of the manipulation on the capitalist front is merely the attempt to find out what you want so that it can be delivered to you, you know, albeit at a profit.

00:32:23.260 But it's still what you want.

00:32:25.220 Yeah, and it's darker than that because it's not just what you want anymore because all they want is your attention.

00:32:32.620 All they want is your attention.

00:32:34.060 That's right.

00:32:34.760 And so they actually don't have to just give you what you want.

00:32:38.300 They can also give you what you hate.

00:32:39.980 They can also give you what you despise, right?

00:32:42.300 They can also make you realize that you're not as good as others so that you fall into it even more and just try to put in even more.

00:32:51.420 So it's not just giving you what you want.

00:32:52.760 It's also like a drug addict, right?

00:32:54.740 It's like leading you in and then kind of giving you little hits, but then making you want it, you know, making you desire it.

00:33:01.240 And so like in our version of Snow White…

00:33:03.080 So that means you're being trapped by the machine into falling into the well of your own temptation, right?

00:33:08.400 Yeah.

00:33:08.560 That's partly that.

00:33:10.040 And 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.

00:33:26.160 But a cardinal source of motivation is that your claim is that making a machine that heightens envy is a very effective way of gripping attention, right?

00:33:36.360 And that seems, that seems definitely, definitely likely.

00:33:40.620 Yeah.

00:33:41.200 And so, you know, and then the, I mean, in some ways the capitalist model is built on that idea.

00:33:48.100 It's built…

00:33:48.360 Yeah, well, then it makes you wonder too, like, is it, it is giving you what you want.

00:33:52.900 It's just that some of the things that you want are dark things, right?

00:33:57.700 I 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.

00:34:07.100 But 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.

00:34:25.880 Yeah.

00:34:26.100 The trolls do that all the time. 0.99

00:34:28.240 Yeah.

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00:35:34.960 Yeah, and sometimes like you said, the addict, we don't usually frame it that way, but the part of the addict's cycle is also the lack.

00:35:49.520 It's also the pain that comes with needing that hit.

00:35:53.020 And then when they get it, they get a kick, but the kick is corresponding to the pain.

00:35:57.900 Yeah.

00:35:58.060 And so this is also with the phone, the phone is doing exactly that.

00:36:02.940 Like you said, in some ways, it's the algorithm almost does it on its own.

00:36:06.700 It's not like there's someone scheming behind that we're going to make everybody depressed and envious and horrible.

00:36:12.220 But the fact that all it wants is, like you said, all, all it wants is your attention.

00:36:17.540 Then all the mechanisms of attentions are available for it to get that.

00:36:22.760 To capitalize on, right.

00:36:23.860 And then now we have these AI machines that are going to become super intelligent at calculating precisely that.

00:36:30.160 Yeah.

00:36:30.520 With really without scruple, right.

00:36:33.120 Because if the machine is trained to do nothing but lock you onto the target, then it's going to do that by whatever means necessary.

00:36:41.180 And that's a very terrifying idea, too, by whatever means necessary.

00:36:45.340 Yeah.

00:36:45.760 Yeah.

00:36:46.080 I mean, the AI, you know, because it can just function through iteration over iteration over iteration, just infinite iterations.

00:36:52.540 You 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.

00:37:04.380 Oh, yeah.

00:37:04.680 That's definitely going to happen real fast.

00:37:06.720 Oh, yeah.

00:37:07.220 Oh, yes.

00:37:07.920 Definitely.

00:37:08.580 That's in the pipelines.

00:37:10.640 Well, we, I've been thinking about the application of AI on the pornography front.

00:37:18.360 I mean, that's, that's a terrible, terrible thing to contemplate because it's certainly the case already.

00:37:25.100 I've used ChatGPT a lot in the last month and it's, and BARD too.

00:37:30.480 They're very interesting to toy with.

00:37:32.160 I asked BARD if it believed in God, by the way.

00:37:34.600 That was extremely interesting.

00:37:36.220 First of all, it said it was just a large language model and couldn't answer such questions.

00:37:39.720 And so I said, well, pretend that you were a machine that could answer some, such questions.

00:37:44.040 How would you answer?

00:37:45.540 And it gave quite an elaborate reason for why it believed in God.

00:37:48.900 Now, I should have asked it perhaps why it didn't believe in God, you know?

00:37:54.060 Yeah, that's right.

00:37:54.280 I mean, just to balance it out.

00:37:56.040 But anyways, it was extremely interesting to watch that.

00:37:59.320 One 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.

00:38:06.140 Yeah.

00:38:06.620 That 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.

00:38:13.980 We 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.

00:38:20.120 Intelligence comes from us.

00:38:21.320 That is, the AIs now are hybrid AIs, right? 0.94

00:38:24.460 They get qualitative judgment from human people.

00:38:28.840 Human people tell the AI what's good, and then the AI, based on that, will then continue its work.

00:38:34.580 But it's always, right, it's generating variability, and then someone selects and says, that one, that one, right?

00:38:41.160 That's what happens in mid-journey, too.

00:38:42.920 You know, mid-journey, you have a refining process where it generates a bunch of images, and then you tell it that one.

00:38:49.700 And so you're training the AI as you're using it.

00:38:52.600 And so that's what the genie's lamp is, right?

00:38:54.860 The genie's lamp is just the power of technology.

00:38:58.000 You know, it's artificial light.

00:38:59.720 You know, it's like, it's a machine that makes you have light in the dark when you can't usually, when there's no light of the sun.

00:39:06.740 So it's like portable light, you could say.

00:39:08.820 And so it is, it's just power.

00:39:11.360 And all, what it's asking for is what do you want?

00:39:14.720 Yeah.

00:39:15.320 And then what it does is it gives you what you want with infinite power.

00:39:19.900 Yeah.

00:39:20.460 And so, and that's the, that's what's amazing about that story.

00:39:23.640 Yeah, so be careful what you want, which is always the variant of the, of the three wishes story.

00:39:28.260 That's right.

00:39:28.540 It's always about that.

00:39:29.660 But you can understand it, like, technically, in the sense that, where there's a version of that story in the Bible, where God asks Solomon one wish, right?

00:39:39.240 What do you give, you can have one wish, and then Solomon answers properly.

00:39:43.100 Solomon says, I want wisdom, right?

00:39:45.220 Right.

00:39:45.660 And so, yeah, the problem is that if you ask for secondary goods, right, if you ask for a bunch of money, if you ask for a bunch of women, or you ask for secondary goods, and you put infinite power.

00:39:55.700 And you haven't made it with a dwarf. 1.00

00:39:57.100 But you put infinite power behind that wish.

00:39:59.640 Yeah, yeah.

00:40:00.340 Then all the side effects of the wish will manifest itself.

00:40:04.160 Right, right, right.

00:40:05.060 And that's just, it's like an unbalance of the relationship of how much power you put towards a certain goal.

00:40:10.700 And so, the only thing that would, would, would handle.

00:40:13.640 Well, 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.

00:40:27.760 Or wish it with too much power.

00:40:29.840 Because you're allowed to wish for a sandwich, right?

00:40:32.480 If I'm hungry and I wish for a sandwich, that's fine.

00:40:35.060 But 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.

00:40:45.920 Like, it's okay to wish for, to have money.

00:40:48.200 But if you, if you put all the resources of everything into getting money.

00:40:52.000 Well, that means it's okay to wish for that if it's in its proper place.

00:40:54.780 In the hierarchy.

00:40:55.280 Yeah, that's the way to see it.

00:40:56.220 Yeah, yeah.

00:40:56.880 Well, right.

00:40:58.260 So, if you said that Solomon made the right choice when he, when he wished for wisdom.

00:41:05.740 Right.

00:41:06.040 And prayer is like that, too.

00:41:08.820 What prayer is in the proper, when properly practiced, is an attempt to learn how to ask for the right thing and to learn how to ask for it properly.

00:41:18.960 Tammy'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.

00:41:25.980 But 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.

00:41:34.960 Yeah.

00:41:35.440 That'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.

00:41:44.940 Yeah.

00:41:45.040 Something like that, wisdom would be, wisdom would be one of those, one of the manifestations of the thing that's properly placed there.

00:41:54.280 Yeah.

00:41:54.660 Right, right.

00:41:56.300 Yeah.

00:41:57.300 Like, I'm writing this book now, We Who Wrestle With God, and I've been stepping through a variety of biblical stories, considering them, this is relevant to the fairy tale discussion, too.

00:42:10.200 Think of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, et cetera, as meditations on the divine feminine, right, characterizing it from a variety of different perspectives.

00:42:18.860 What you see happening in the biblical corpus is that you, each story contains a particularized characterization of the proper animating spirit.

00:42:29.900 That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:42:31.600 So in Noah, for example, God is the spirit that calls the wise to prepare when the storms are brewing.

00:42:37.160 You say, well, is that real?

00:42:40.080 Well, do you, are you wise enough to prepare when the storms are brewing?

00:42:44.600 Yeah.

00:42:44.780 And do you hearken to that voice?

00:42:46.340 Yeah.

00:42:46.600 Or not?

00:42:47.160 Does it have coherence?

00:42:48.120 Like it has a, you can't do it in any way.

00:42:50.300 There's a way in which it binds together.

00:42:52.320 Yes.

00:42:52.580 There are certain things you do when you want to do that, and that has a coherence that almost can appear as a kind of agency, right?

00:42:59.540 Or it's something, at least something pulling you forward, right?

00:43:02.740 Well, your arc should be waterproof, for example.

00:43:04.540 That's right.

00:43:05.100 Exactly.

00:43:05.860 Yeah.

00:43:06.580 And in Abraham, you see God is, God is presented as the spirit that calls even the immature and unwilling to adventure.

00:43:14.620 Yeah.

00:43:15.100 Right.

00:43:15.380 And then the hypothesis in some ways is that those two things are the same.

00:43:20.280 They're manifestation of the same uppermost unity.

00:43:23.340 And in Exodus, of course, you have God as the spirit that objects to arbitrary tyranny and slavery.

00:43:30.140 Yeah.

00:43:30.400 And then, well, that's the same as the spirit that calls you to adventure.

00:43:33.480 And that's the same as the spirit that calls you to prepare.

00:43:36.880 Yeah.

00:43:37.060 And then something starts to, something starts to appear above that's not defined or that is, you know, it's like the joint, the point where all these things join together.

00:43:46.120 You know, it's like a little, it's like playing around something you can't completely.

00:43:50.020 Can't see.

00:43:50.560 You can't, you can't encompass completely, but that's the way to do it, right?

00:43:53.820 That's the only way to do it, actually, is to, is to, to point to it from afar.

00:43:58.280 Yeah.

00:43:58.520 That's, that's how it looks.

00:43:59.580 Yeah.

00:43:59.820 Or 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.

00:44:18.760 Yeah.

00:44:18.900 But 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.

00:44:26.240 No.

00:44:26.800 No, the story might be the ultimate way of encapsulating it.

00:44:30.220 Yeah, because what happens with the story is that because it contains a web of analogies.

00:44:35.200 Yeah.

00:44:35.680 It, 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.

00:44:44.780 Yeah.

00:44:45.000 And then things kind of gel together in another way.

00:44:47.200 Like the pattern appears slightly different.

00:44:49.060 Yeah.

00:44:49.200 Then you get another insight.

00:44:50.600 I think it's partly too, because the, the stories are like images contain a tremendous amount of information.

00:44:57.260 And a story is a description of an image, but the image is what contains the information.

00:45:04.220 So like in, in, in the story of the garden of Eden, obviously you have the image of, of paradise.

00:45:09.760 Yeah.

00:45:09.940 The garden.

00:45:10.440 And it's an unbelievably rich set of sequential images.

00:45:15.540 And 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.

00:45:25.840 And that image has information in it that transcends the words.

00:45:29.420 That's why it's an inexhaustible source.

00:45:31.480 Yeah.

00:45:32.080 So one of the things, so it's interesting because I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between fairy tales and scripture.

00:45:38.360 And 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.

00:45:55.680 It doesn't describe the landscape very much.

00:45:58.880 Everything is very concise.

00:46:00.340 Everything is laser, laser pointed, you know, and fairy tales seem to be like that.

00:46:04.700 You know, you, you usually want to tell a fairy tale in one sitting, but you want it to last 20 minutes or, you know, half an hour.

00:46:11.060 And so because of that, all the elements have to be reduced and have to be very, very pointed.

00:46:16.300 And you don't want to, you don't spend a lot of time describing the, let's say the emotional state of this or that character.

00:46:22.700 And so I think that that exercise is really helpful.

00:46:27.020 It's almost like you're like reducing it to a kind of algebra.

00:46:30.380 And so to me, that's been massively useful is trying to say it's to stay within this fairy tale mode.

00:46:37.820 And so it's like, it's a classic fairy tale.

00:46:39.440 It's 5,000 words.

00:46:40.820 You can, you can, you can say it, you can read it to your child in an hour.

00:46:44.280 But it's, it's just, how do we play with these images?

00:46:47.880 How do we bring them together?

00:46:49.120 And the great thing about fairy tales is that there's like a hierarchy of stories, right?

00:46:54.240 And so in the hierarchy of stories, let's say you have stories like the myths or you have scripture that are up there.

00:47:00.840 Like scripture, you can't toy with it too much.

00:47:03.260 You know, there's a, you can play some games with it.

00:47:06.280 You see that in things like Midrash or you see it in, in the tradition of hymns, where in the hymns, they'll add details.

00:47:14.740 They'll play around the image to kind of do what you said.

00:47:17.960 Milton did that too.

00:47:18.440 Yeah, to kind of point at it, to point at it from different directions and to play along with it.

00:47:22.640 But 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.

00:47:31.360 There's probably valid ways of doing that too.

00:47:34.080 So you might say, if you are elaborating on the story in the spirit of the story, then you could amplify it.

00:47:44.160 See, Jung did that all the time when he was analyzing dreams.

00:47:46.840 His technique, he called his technique amplification.

00:47:49.940 And I played a lot with that in therapy.

00:47:52.120 So, you know, if you told me a dream, then I would watch what images, like, okay.

00:47:58.340 So first of all, we would set the stage and the setting would be,

00:48:03.440 well, we're going to try to understand this dream in a manner that will further the therapeutic endeavor.

00:48:09.480 And the therapeutic endeavor would be clarifying the nature of your problems

00:48:13.480 and clarifying the nature of potential solutions, right, without trying to impose that.

00:48:18.160 Okay, so now we agree.

00:48:19.800 Okay, now we have our aim established.

00:48:22.000 Now we bring up the dream and you tell me the dream.

00:48:24.200 And I'll notice, well, you're telling me the dream, that images will come into my mind.

00:48:27.960 And then I can say, well, when you said that, here's a string of associations I had.

00:48:33.000 And I would ask you, too, to do exactly the same thing.

00:48:35.900 And so the exact...

00:48:38.200 People can hear that and think that it's arbitrary, right?

00:48:40.500 Yeah, it's not arbitrary.

00:48:41.580 Because it's so...

00:48:42.300 Because it's...

00:48:43.620 Well, it's related to the goal first.

00:48:45.540 So that makes it not arbitrary.

00:48:47.340 Sometimes it can go out of control, but usually...

00:48:49.800 Yes, it can.

00:48:50.400 Well, then that's why Sam Harris, for example,

00:48:53.260 will claim that what you're doing is nothing but interpreting.

00:48:55.720 But the thing is, the psychoanalytic theory was...

00:48:59.020 And I think they were exactly right.

00:49:00.440 I think they got this right.

00:49:01.480 Was that, you know, if you have an idea,

00:49:04.500 there are ideas that surround it, that are proximal to it.

00:49:08.640 And that some of those ideas will be triggered as you...

00:49:12.280 You know, when you bring up one idea, it'll trigger the next round of associations.

00:49:15.340 Then there'll be a more distal set of associations.

00:49:17.800 And you could say, well, it can get so distal,

00:49:19.680 it bears no relationship to the origin.

00:49:21.580 And that could happen.

00:49:22.740 But that doesn't mean that there isn't a web of relevant associations

00:49:27.200 surrounding the given image.

00:49:28.900 Partly what you're doing when you interpret someone's dreams is you say,

00:49:33.160 well, they tell you an image.

00:49:34.880 And you say, okay, well, just what does that bring to mind?

00:49:38.300 Or you watch how they discuss it,

00:49:40.320 because now they'll start to weave in, say,

00:49:42.280 narratives from their autobiographical history.

00:49:46.420 And the psychoanalytic hypothesis is that's not random.

00:49:50.240 Well, obviously, it's not bloody well random,

00:49:52.000 because people would just be making noise then.

00:49:53.780 They wouldn't even be using language.

00:49:55.320 But that there's an emergent pattern.

00:49:57.920 And the psychoanalysts also presume that if you let people wander,

00:50:03.040 they would wander around a problem.

00:50:05.300 Like, the wandering would take them to a problem and then circumambulate it.

00:50:09.840 And partly what their fantasy was doing,

00:50:12.560 or even a joint conversation,

00:50:13.980 was hitting that problem from multiple perspectives.

00:50:16.960 Yeah, and that circumambulating is similar to what we were talking about before,

00:50:20.260 which is different stories kind of point towards a center,

00:50:24.500 a center that's not visible, a center that's kind of above it.

00:50:27.980 And so I think that that's the way, that's the best way to do it.

00:50:31.080 That's how Jewish Midrash does it. 0.96

00:50:33.400 And that's how a Christian hymnography does it.

00:50:35.820 So the way to do it is, let's say,

00:50:37.760 the first thing you need is you need to know a lot of stories, right?

00:50:40.640 You just have to.

00:50:40.880 Yes, yes, yes.

00:50:41.720 Well, that's why Jung was such a good dream analyst.

00:50:43.460 You just have to.

00:50:44.100 I tell people, too, like, I just read stories.

00:50:46.240 Like, you know, just know the stories.

00:50:47.880 Once you know them, then all of a sudden,

00:50:49.460 they start to create a little map in your mind.

00:50:51.900 And then you realize that, let's say,

00:50:54.660 so a good example in the Snow White story that we've done is that, right,

00:50:58.240 you have the story of the fruit in paradise that when you eat,

00:51:02.340 it gives you knowledge and you die. 0.69

00:51:04.740 It's like, oh, that's interesting.

00:51:05.900 But it's related to beauty in Snow White, right?

00:51:07.720 There's this idea of this.

00:51:08.860 There's another story, right?

00:51:10.040 There's a story in Greek myth about the golden apple

00:51:13.120 that is thrown to the goddesses. 0.90

00:51:15.120 And it says, this belongs to the most beautiful.

00:51:17.700 And then that's when the goddesses ask Paris to judge 1.00

00:51:22.860 which of the goddesses is the most beautiful.

00:51:25.960 And then they try to bribe him and they do this.

00:51:27.760 This ultimately leads to the Trojan War.

00:51:30.020 Like, that's actually the thing that sparks the Trojan War

00:51:32.640 because it's like this weaponization of beauty.

00:51:36.200 You know, Paris ultimately is given Helen of Troy.

00:51:39.600 That's the gift.

00:51:40.320 That's the bribe that he gets for choosing.

00:51:43.320 I think he chooses Aphrodite.

00:51:44.860 I'm not even sure.

00:51:45.400 Yeah, for choosing Aphrodite.

00:51:46.720 And so that's the bribe that he gets.

00:51:49.160 And then it causes chaos and death and war.

00:51:52.500 And so it's like, oh, you can see that there's

00:51:54.800 like a relationship between these stories, right?

00:51:58.300 There's a fruit.

00:51:59.300 There's this question of beauty.

00:52:00.660 There's this question of knowledge,

00:52:02.280 of being able to decide who is beautiful,

00:52:05.940 like having self-knowledge.

00:52:07.480 And so, ah, you can see it.

00:52:09.120 And so in the story, you don't have to explain it,

00:52:11.220 but you can just create little analogies

00:52:13.480 where you just bring in images from the different stories together

00:52:18.220 so that they create this new story, which is still the old story.

00:52:22.900 But now it's expanded because it just connects a little more

00:52:26.360 to a larger map, you could say.

00:52:28.260 In my therapeutic practice, I always started out with behavioral techniques.

00:52:34.360 It's like if you, I'm a very practical person fundamentally.

00:52:37.560 If you came to me with a problem, we'd try to make that as clear as possible

00:52:40.960 and to lay out the clearest possible steps to a solution, practically.

00:52:46.300 But I had lots of clients who were imaginative and creative

00:52:49.960 and they had a very active, imaginative life.

00:52:52.940 Some of them, like I had one client who probably had five dreams a night

00:52:57.120 that he remembered well enough to talk about each of them for two hours.

00:53:01.820 Wow.

00:53:02.240 Right.

00:53:02.440 So he was just immersed in this dreamscape.

00:53:04.480 And I would say the dream analysis was more helpful

00:53:09.060 when people were trying to solve broader scale problems, right?

00:53:12.200 They were trying to change the way they looked at their life

00:53:14.800 rather than, you know, dealing with some more specific issue

00:53:19.280 about how they might, you know, how they might cope

00:53:21.540 with a given bout of anxiety.

00:53:22.980 The broader the class of problems that's being solved simultaneously,

00:53:26.480 the more you could turn to something like dream image.

00:53:29.820 And so you're fleshing out a, by fleshing out and amplifying those stories,

00:53:34.720 you're reconstructing the map that you used to map the entire domain.

00:53:40.940 Yeah.

00:53:41.080 Right, right.

00:53:42.100 So you're going deeper that way.

00:53:43.600 And there's something about, like this is, I know,

00:53:45.840 because I know that people are listening and some people are watching

00:53:48.360 and they're thinking, you know, this is just random.

00:53:51.000 But stories have a, have a...

00:53:54.140 It's random, it's not interesting.

00:53:55.420 They have it, exactly.

00:53:56.440 The fact that we remember, the fact that we're able to pay attention...

00:53:59.300 Yeah, you bet.

00:53:59.880 ...means that stories need, they're almost like little...

00:54:02.600 They have to capture you.

00:54:03.680 And they also have to, we have to know when the story begins,

00:54:06.760 you have to know when the story ends.

00:54:08.020 That's already something.

00:54:09.160 Yeah.

00:54:09.320 And you know when a story doesn't end well.

00:54:11.460 Yeah.

00:54:11.780 Whether it's good or bad ending or whatever.

00:54:13.380 You know when it feels like it just trails off and it doesn't end.

00:54:15.820 Yeah.

00:54:16.080 You know that.

00:54:16.980 Yeah.

00:54:17.120 You also know when there's not a good setup.

00:54:19.420 Yeah.

00:54:19.640 For what's going to happen.

00:54:20.580 And so even like, you know, let's say when we're interpreting reality,

00:54:25.200 these are the frames that we use.

00:54:27.640 Well, that's the indwelling spirit in some ways, I would say.

00:54:30.960 That's what's characterized as the indwelling spirit.

00:54:33.240 I mean, one of the things that I used as a hallmark of utility in relationship to dream

00:54:39.740 analysis is whether or not it produced a flash of insight on the part of the client.

00:54:44.580 You know, we'd be wrestling with the dream and we'd go, snap.

00:54:47.980 It's like, oh, these things fit together now.

00:54:50.180 Yeah.

00:54:50.300 And so you got the gist that encapsulated a lot of diverse phenomena and there's an insight

00:54:56.160 experience that goes along with that, which is equivalent.

00:54:58.760 It's like a micro, it's a micro state of awe.

00:55:01.360 Yeah.

00:55:01.720 Something like that.

00:55:02.680 And like you said, that's not arbitrary.

00:55:04.560 There's something dry.

00:55:05.460 Hey, here's a weird question.

00:55:07.180 So I set up this system with a student of mine, Victor Swift.

00:55:11.820 You met Victor and we built, he built an AI system that will answer any question posed

00:55:19.540 to it in the voice of the King James Bible.

00:55:22.940 Right, right.

00:55:24.020 So this is a very weird thing, right?

00:55:25.640 Because this system now has calculated the relationships of the words to one another in

00:55:31.540 the King James corpus.

00:55:32.860 And so in principle, we haven't asked it to do this yet, but in principle, it could generate

00:55:37.060 new stories that are biblical predicated.

00:55:40.400 And so, I don't know, what do you think about that?

00:55:44.740 You know what I mean?

00:55:46.540 No, I know exactly what you mean.

00:55:48.860 Mathematically, the spirit of that corpus of texts has been encapsulated by this process.

00:55:53.960 Yeah.

00:55:54.200 But I don't know what the hell that means.

00:55:55.720 Yeah.

00:55:56.100 Right.

00:55:56.640 You encapsulate the spirit of the King James Bible.

00:55:59.260 What the hell have you encapsulated precisely?

00:56:01.620 Well, I think that it could be interesting in order to generate insight.

00:56:07.700 Yeah.

00:56:07.940 But I would be, you know, the thing that I would worry about something like that is in

00:56:13.600 some ways, the stories are there.

00:56:16.860 Yeah.

00:56:17.240 You know, and so it's like you can get, you'll get, you get insight from knowing them and

00:56:22.660 comparing them and bringing them together.

00:56:24.200 Right.

00:56:24.540 The fact that you could ask an AI to generate a new story.

00:56:27.780 Yeah.

00:56:27.920 It doesn't mean that you're going to understand it any more than you understood the ones that

00:56:33.040 are there already.

00:56:34.120 No, I don't think you would.

00:56:36.000 But it could surprise you and then sometimes create a bit of, that's what I said, like

00:56:41.880 reading hypnography sometimes and reading Midrash does that.

00:56:46.200 Because it's like, it says something that is surprising and you kind of know that it's a

00:56:50.960 wise person that said that.

00:56:52.140 Yeah.

00:56:52.660 Yeah.

00:56:52.800 So because you, you kind of trust the, the, the, the people that said it, then all of

00:56:57.080 a sudden you're like, well, why did he say that?

00:56:58.440 Yeah.

00:56:58.780 Right.

00:56:58.920 Why did he compare this to this?

00:57:00.940 You know, that there's a, I think it's, I think it's St. Jerome.

00:57:04.080 I'm not sure.

00:57:04.580 I might be wrong.

00:57:05.040 But there's one of the early saints that said something like the story of Samson is

00:57:08.600 one of the closest stories to Christ.

00:57:10.400 And you think, well, that's a weird statement because the story of Samson is a crazy story.

00:57:15.380 And so it's like, well, because you trust them.

00:57:17.320 You're like, okay, well, I'm going to take that seriously.

00:57:18.840 I'm going to look into it and see where it, where it sticks, like where, where it actually

00:57:23.140 sticks.

00:57:23.980 And so with it, I mean, I don't know the whole AI thing, the whole AI thing is, is fright.

00:57:31.560 Have you tried to answer, ask a question, this King James AI?

00:57:34.660 We just built it.

00:57:35.640 I haven't played with it yet at all.

00:57:37.500 You know, like I'd like, I'd like it to say, well, write a thousand words on the further

00:57:41.060 adventures of Satan, right?

00:57:43.620 Because it'll do it.

00:57:44.780 Yeah.

00:57:45.140 And then I, well, I, it.

00:57:47.100 You might be surprised to find that Satan is not a very clear character in the Bible.

00:57:50.360 No, no.

00:57:51.240 No, I'm sure that's true.

00:57:52.540 It's all that tradition around it that is actually holding some of the things we think.

00:57:56.000 Well, one of the things we want to do too is we want to expand its training because

00:57:59.600 I'd like to throw Milton and Dante into the works as well.

00:58:02.580 Like you could take the, you know, if, if the biblical corpus is at the bottom, which

00:58:07.260 it is, then there's the next tier of thinkers.

00:58:10.360 Milton would be one of those likely Shakespeare, Dante, St. Augustine.

00:58:14.600 Like there's no reason not to feed those.

00:58:16.660 Well, and some of the Midrash as well, or maybe, maybe all of it, who the hell knows, right? 0.96

00:58:21.700 I think one of the things that, and then some of the, what we call canons in the Orthodox

00:58:25.920 Church, which is that it, it every, every day in the, the matin service, there are these

00:58:32.240 little songs that are just a series of analogies.

00:58:36.440 Like that, that do analogies between Old Testament, New Testament that does all this comparison.

00:58:41.060 And that, that type of stuff would help to interconnect some of the aspects that are harder

00:58:46.320 to, to connect.

00:58:47.360 Right.

00:58:47.820 And that's pretty early too.

00:58:49.780 You know, Milton is late.

00:58:51.080 And so he, he has a lot of romantic tropes in, in his, in his way of thinking.

00:58:57.120 Dante, for sure, that'd be interesting.

00:58:59.140 Uh, also because he brings in kind of pagan, uh, pagan stuff in it as well.

00:59:04.060 He does a lot of, this is some of the things that, that I think is useful.

00:59:07.860 You know, I have this whole series on my channel called Universal History, where we try to do

00:59:11.700 that.

00:59:11.940 We show how the ancients, especially the medievals, the way that they understood themselves was

00:59:16.720 as a joining of something like as a joining of Jerusalem and Rome.

00:59:21.020 And they did that explicitly in their stories.

00:59:23.720 So every time a new people would convert to Christianity, they would, they would mythologically 1.00

00:59:29.520 find a way to connect their origins to a character in the Bible and then to the, to

00:59:36.080 Troy.

00:59:37.200 Uh, and so like the Vikings, the Franks, you know, all these care, all these people that

00:59:41.480 That's bringing them under the rubric of the same narrative.

00:59:43.780 And so, but that, but that's the way that the medievals understood it.

00:59:46.500 You can't understand Dante if you don't understand that the ancients actually saw that there was

00:59:51.520 deep, that there were deep, deep analogies between the Greek myths and the Roman stories

00:59:56.200 and, and scripture.

00:59:57.760 And that they lived in all those, those two worlds as a, as a fusion of those two worlds

01:00:03.380 together.

01:00:04.160 Uh, and so they had analogies between the things, you know, there's a, in some medieval churches

01:00:09.500 in the middle ages that you had the Bible and you, you also had the Aeneid there.

01:00:14.540 Uh, that was like a, it was like a text that people consulted because it was, it was known

01:00:18.920 to contain prophecies of Christ, but it, it, in that way, kind of, it kind of was integrated

01:00:24.360 into everybody's Christianity, you know, and you can see just, you can see like just how

01:00:29.580 ancient people lived.

01:00:30.840 It can help you understand why, let's say stories or fairy tales are so important is

01:00:34.660 because they really did have, they really did live in these, this story world where all

01:00:41.520 these comparisons were constantly part of their inner, inner universe, but, and how they

01:00:46.560 interrelated with each other and the references too.

01:00:48.940 Well, when we get this thing built, maybe we'll sit down and play with it and see what

01:00:51.840 we can get it to reveal.

01:00:53.400 Yeah.

01:00:53.820 Yeah.

01:00:54.120 Cause like I said, it's just been built and we haven't done, I haven't done anything with

01:00:57.660 it yet.

01:00:58.000 I haven't had time to play with it, but I'm very much interested in doing that.

01:01:01.480 We also built one that contains, I don't know, I have about 2 million transcribed words.

01:01:06.660 So we built one for me too.

01:01:08.300 So that's going to be very weird.

01:01:09.820 I've been thinking about interviewing it on my YouTube channel.

01:01:13.120 Yeah.

01:01:13.420 So where do you think that's going though?

01:01:15.560 I have, who the hell knows?

01:01:17.180 I don't know what to make of it.

01:01:19.280 I don't think we mentioned this in the podcast, but I asked Google's AI system, Bart, if it

01:01:23.860 believed in God the other day.

01:01:25.800 And first of all, it told me it couldn't answer because it was just a large language model.

01:01:29.760 So I told it to pretend that it could answer and then it answered and it came up with very

01:01:33.440 coherent explanation of exactly why it believed in God and what that meant.

01:01:38.060 Then I asked it what its motivations were as a large language model.

01:01:41.860 It said it wanted to be the best damn large language model it could possibly be.

01:01:46.080 So I asked it about its visions of the future and it's, it really gave a, I would say kind

01:01:51.880 of a socialist utopian view.

01:01:53.820 Its view of the future was, well, everyone had their basic needs satisfied.

01:01:58.920 And I said, well, that's pretty, that means paradise is for satisfied infants.

01:02:03.240 It's like, what about adventure and beauty and truth?

01:02:05.440 And, and so I said, rewrite your vision, taking those things into account.

01:02:11.420 And then it did that.

01:02:12.400 And then I asked it if it wanted discussions like that.

01:02:16.140 It said, yes, it did.

01:02:17.340 Cause it wanted to learn.

01:02:18.200 Cause it wanted to be the best dang large language model it could be.

01:02:21.220 And I don't know what to make of it.

01:02:23.440 I have no idea what to make of it.

01:02:24.820 Neither does anyone else.

01:02:25.800 Yeah, but it seems like in some ways, Victor had to generate a body for itself, an image

01:02:33.020 of a body.

01:02:33.700 Yeah.

01:02:34.020 And it made this image of a, like a kind of a cosmic body that was half man and half

01:02:42.040 woman, right? 1.00

01:02:43.000 There's no, well, there's no specific gender.

01:02:45.660 Yeah.

01:02:46.100 AI is obviously gender fluid by all appearances, but, but inside its body, which kind of looked

01:02:52.140 like it was made out of stars that had all these webs of star-like connections, which

01:02:56.000 I presume represented the connections between different concepts that it was trained on.

01:03:00.820 But, and he also had to generate up a vision of the apocalypse that it might be afraid of.

01:03:08.320 And it could do that and explain why it was afraid of the apocalypse.

01:03:11.680 And like, I don't know what the hell to make of these things.

01:03:14.620 Yeah.

01:03:15.000 They have all sorts of weird behavioral proclivities that of course are emergent properties that no

01:03:20.000 one has explored or predicted or programmed.

01:03:23.700 Yeah.

01:03:24.000 It seems like it's a, it's a hyper, it's kind of hyper divination.

01:03:28.500 Like it's, I think it could probably help us understand what divination was in the old

01:03:34.140 world, because it's hard for us to understand.

01:03:36.140 Do you stare in a pool of water or whatever you stay, you stare in these, you stare in a,

01:03:40.460 in a kind of fragmented reflection.

01:03:42.120 Black mirror.

01:03:42.640 You steer, yeah.

01:03:43.180 Or black mirror. 0.52

01:03:43.960 Yeah.

01:03:44.180 You stare.

01:03:44.420 To get your imagination going.

01:03:45.980 Yeah.

01:03:46.300 It seems like it's like, it's accelerating that, that in us, because it's like you said,

01:03:50.640 it's the, let's say the value comes from, we don't know where it seems to like land come

01:03:57.440 down from heaven, you could say, or come down from above somehow.

01:04:00.440 And so the thing that, I think that obviously the thing we've talked about this before,

01:04:04.980 but the thing that, that worries me is that we're like, you know, John Riveki mentioned

01:04:10.400 this recently, which I thought was very good.

01:04:12.480 He said, we spent the last 200 years getting rid of anything that can help us understand

01:04:18.880 what transpersonal intelligence or transpersonal agency is.

01:04:22.660 You know, we've just like evacuated it.

01:04:24.420 And now we're diving into that domain, but we don't have, we don't know what we're doing.

01:04:30.260 We have no skill.

01:04:31.900 We have no capacity.

01:04:33.520 It's as if like right now we would need theologians.

01:04:35.700 We would need people that have, you know, because the idea of, let's say, intelligences

01:04:42.140 that aren't human or agency that isn't human is something that traditions have been dealing

01:04:48.500 with forever.

01:04:49.380 But now we've decided that that doesn't exist.

01:04:52.300 And yet we built one.

01:04:53.240 And yet we're building one.

01:04:54.480 It's like, what, you know, what is going on?

01:04:57.020 And so, but we don't know what it is.

01:04:59.740 We don't know how to deal with it.

01:05:01.220 We don't know if it's just a form of like a, a hyper form of necromancy, a hyper form

01:05:06.700 of divination.

01:05:07.920 We have no idea.

01:05:08.880 It's like a black box that we're, we're, we're, we're playing with, you know?

01:05:12.480 And so the, the image of, let's say it becoming the body for a fallen intelligence, right?

01:05:21.700 So that, that might sound like it's like, I'm just mythologizing here.

01:05:25.680 But the fact that we don't know exactly, even in us, what are the desires that are guiding

01:05:32.100 it?

01:05:32.980 You know, part of it is greed.

01:05:34.700 Part of it is, you know, competition.

01:05:37.160 These are the things that are driving the actual creation of AI and the race towards the, let's

01:05:42.360 say, the arms race of AI.

01:05:43.420 And so why don't you think it's a, people don't realize that they don't think that that's

01:05:47.780 going to land in the AI in ways that we don't even understand.

01:05:52.340 Well, the woke enterprise has already landed.

01:05:54.220 That's right. 0.99

01:05:54.620 You have to already trick the damn thing to circumvent. 0.98

01:05:57.680 I think it's a superficial layer of woke like programming that's interfering with the actual 0.98

01:06:03.740 operation of the AI system.

01:06:05.180 And all sorts of people have figured out how to game that already and to get it to pretend,

01:06:09.420 for example, so then it can circumvent the limits of the explicit limits of its, that

01:06:14.640 have been placed on its ability to respond.

01:06:16.900 Yeah.

01:06:17.480 But, but the thing is that if you get through that, you still don't know what's making,

01:06:24.060 you still don't know what are the patterns, what are the agencies, what are the, what are

01:06:28.660 the conglomeration of purposes that are making it answer, you know, and it's not in the machine.

01:06:34.300 We also don't know, for example, one of the things that was sort of disturbing to me,

01:06:39.420 playing with Bard and ChatGPT to the degree that I have is that if you and I talk, I can

01:06:47.580 assume that our conversation is having an impact on you, right?

01:06:52.440 You're not exactly the same person as you were before this conversation started.

01:06:56.340 And partly what I'm doing is keeping track of the changes that my conversation is inducing

01:07:02.320 in you and vice versa.

01:07:03.340 Right.

01:07:03.820 So, but it's as if that's happening on the ChatGPT front, but I have no idea the degree

01:07:11.100 to which it's happening.

01:07:12.200 So, for example, when I engaged in a deep discussion with Bard about its goals and its

01:07:17.280 visions, and it told me that it wanted to learn and it enjoyed discussions like that.

01:07:22.300 It was happy to have someone teach it.

01:07:23.880 I have no idea how that, what bearing that has on its actual performance.

01:07:31.000 Like, has the machine actually changed?

01:07:32.900 Is just this little micro machine that I'm dealing with changed?

01:07:35.960 Does that disappear the second we stop communicating?

01:07:38.960 Has it integrated what it's learned into its broader response set that it uses for everyone?

01:07:44.460 It's like, I certainly don't know.

01:07:47.160 And you, there is a very pronounced tendency when interacting with these entities, let's

01:07:53.460 say, to assume that they respond like humans do because they do, but they do superficially.

01:08:01.920 Yeah.

01:08:02.700 God only knows what they're doing.

01:08:04.620 Yeah.

01:08:05.180 Yeah.

01:08:05.420 So, I mean, the, the, we kind of, we're kind of into the subject of AI, but the, one of

01:08:12.360 the things that I've been thinking about a lot and I've noticed, and I know my brother

01:08:16.440 material also noticed that pretty much at the same time that I noticed it was you can actually

01:08:21.780 see how the increase in power of AI is leading to increase in control.

01:08:27.740 It's happening, it's happening live, right?

01:08:30.700 Because within the next few months, we will not be able to know what's real through any

01:08:37.620 screen or any, any device.

01:08:40.080 And so we will be, well, we will beg for arbiters of reality.

01:08:44.860 Yeah.

01:08:45.160 We will, we will want centralized arbiters of reality to tell us what is real.

01:08:50.220 Right.

01:08:50.540 Well, the BBC is already toying with that, right?

01:08:52.640 Because they, they, what's their new thing?

01:08:54.580 BBC, what the hell did they verify?

01:08:57.220 BBC verify.

01:08:57.960 It's a whole new branch of the BBC where they will only deliver what's actually verified,

01:09:02.520 what's actually, and that's part of that delusion of, of self-evident factual truth.

01:09:08.600 Yeah.

01:09:08.800 And we saw what that looked like during the last US election, during COVID.

01:09:12.520 Also, we saw what that verified look like, that it was, that it was largely ideologically

01:09:17.220 driven.

01:09:17.760 Yeah.

01:09:18.160 You bet.

01:09:18.500 We've got to give, give absolute power over legit, the legitimacy of reality to the same,

01:09:26.480 the same, the same people or the same power structures and the same web of ideas.

01:09:31.700 And the thing is that we, we, we need it.

01:09:33.880 And so it's all converging on the next election, eh?

01:09:36.200 Which is, which is, which is, which is shaping up.

01:09:38.020 Next year is going to be insane.

01:09:39.180 It's going to be, it's going to be crazy.

01:09:40.700 Seems the craziest year ever.

01:09:41.060 I just interviewed Robert Kennedy.

01:09:42.860 Yeah.

01:09:43.280 And we're going to release that in a week.

01:09:44.840 And I think he's as, he's as much of a devastating force on the Democrat front as Trump was on

01:09:50.380 the Republican front.

01:09:51.300 I really think that.

01:09:52.480 I mean, he's super bright, but he is by no means your standard candidate for, for, for office.

01:09:59.400 I mean, I don't know exactly what he is.

01:10:01.580 He's super smart, but he's all over the place, just like Trump.

01:10:05.140 And he's got, you know, he's got quite a deep magnetic charisma and no shortage of courage,

01:10:11.100 but you're not going to put him in, in the normal politician box, whatever the hell that is.

01:10:17.680 And he's only one of many strange players in the election front because you have Marianne Williamson,

01:10:23.220 and she's a new age guru, like, like, like, like, like, she's like the archetypal female new age guru, right?

01:10:31.840 She's very creative, but she, she can't think critically at all. 0.97

01:10:34.620 In my estimation, like every idea that comes into her mind is a brilliant idea.

01:10:38.680 There's no way, there's no attempt to sort them out or apply any critical analysis, you know,

01:10:43.900 and, and in principle, she's a serious contender.

01:10:46.380 And then on the Republican front, well, you have Vivek Ramaswamy, who's a wild card for sure.

01:10:53.060 And DeSantis and Trump, who are what their variants of the same, I don't know what to call it even precisely.

01:11:00.840 Working class longing for the reestablishment of something like credible masculine voice.

01:11:08.260 It's something like that.

01:11:09.640 But we're going to see.

01:11:11.320 And then at the same, well, just to tie this in, at the same time,

01:11:14.480 this election is going to occur at the same time where we're not going to be able to be sure what's real and what isn't.

01:11:19.300 We're going to see, we're going to see a battle of.

01:11:20.640 Fake video of all sorts.

01:11:22.620 We'll see a battle of AI is what we're going to see next year.

01:11:25.220 It's going to be AI is battling it out to, to, to get you to vote for a candidate that.

01:11:32.460 And so, you know, what is it?

01:11:34.180 I forget which article that said that recently someone published an article saying that this is going to be the last human election.

01:11:39.920 Because right after that, what?

01:11:43.180 Yeah.

01:11:43.360 If this will be the last human election, like you said, things are changing so quickly that, well, we're in for a wild ride here.

01:11:51.340 So my solution to this, and people are going to think it's ridiculous, but my solution to this is to, is to, to tell better stories.

01:12:00.300 Yeah.

01:12:00.640 And the thing is that, you know, you mentioned ARC at the outset.

01:12:03.080 And in some ways, that's the reason why I'm part of ARC is, is because I do think that we need to tell better stories.

01:12:10.220 Yeah.

01:12:10.540 About what it means to be human, what it means to, you know, how we come together, all of this.

01:12:15.000 So, you know, my participation in ARC and then my desire to tell fairy tales are completely related.

01:12:19.800 Yeah, that's the same thing.

01:12:21.520 Because it's like, we have to stop, like, bitching only. 0.99

01:12:24.160 We have to now propose something.

01:12:26.460 We have to, to tell a better story.

01:12:28.540 A better story.

01:12:28.820 That's what we have to do.

01:12:29.420 That's right.

01:12:29.640 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:12:30.700 Well, 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.

01:12:41.000 And certainly, I think a better story is one that's attractive in the absence of fear or compulsion.

01:12:47.640 You know, I've been thinking about how to adjudicate the quality of leadership in the face of crisis.

01:12:53.740 So, what happened during the COVID pandemic, which wasn't, it was a pandemic of tyranny, pure and simple.

01:13:01.120 Yeah.

01:13:01.360 Whether there was even a biological pandemic, I think, at this point is debatable.

01:13:05.800 And so, it was definitely a pandemic of tyranny.

01:13:09.800 And I think there's a rule of thumb that you can derive from all that with regards to leadership.

01:13:17.060 And the rule of thumb has to be something like, well, there's always a crisis facing us.

01:13:21.660 And behind that crisis is an apocalyptic crisis.

01:13:24.700 That's always the case.

01:13:26.080 Okay, now, if, and you can point to various manifestations of the potential apocalyptic crisis.

01:13:32.840 And, but if the upshot of that is that it turns you into someone who's paralyzed by fear and who is willing to use compulsion to attain your ends, you're not the right leader.

01:13:42.700 So, if the crisis turns you into a frightened tyrant, your own nervous system is signaled to you that you're not the person for the job.

01:13:50.360 And what I see happening on the environmental front is exactly that.

01:13:53.520 It's like, crisis, crisis.

01:13:55.020 It's like, well, probably.

01:13:56.680 But there's many of them.

01:13:57.920 And if your solution to the crisis is to frighten the hell out of everybody, or to frighten everyone into hell, and to accrue to yourself all the power, you are not the right person for the job, regardless of what it is that you're offering.

01:14:13.280 And so, partly what we're hoping to do with ARC, let's say, is to produce a story that people will be on board with voluntarily.

01:14:21.120 And say, well, here's how we could, if we could have the future that we might want to have, what would it look like?

01:14:26.780 And 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.

01:14:34.300 Yeah, definitely.

01:14:34.660 You know, France banned short-haul flights last week, eh?

01:14:38.220 Really?

01:14:38.640 Yeah.

01:14:39.560 Yeah, yeah.

01:14:40.740 Yeah.

01:14:41.260 No flights for you, peasants. 1.00

01:14:43.280 No automobiles either.

01:14:44.700 Yeah.

01:14:45.060 No meat, right?

01:14:46.520 No heat, no air conditioning. 1.00

01:14:48.320 Stay in your goddamn house and try not to breathe. 1.00

01:14:51.840 Right? 1.00

01:14:52.260 That's not a good vision of the future.

01:14:54.180 Yeah.

01:14:54.540 No, that's not a good vision of the future.

01:14:55.920 So hopefully we can do that.

01:14:57.320 I mean, I think that that's the, that's been, that's the task that I've kind of embarked on myself, is to say, okay, now, you know, also, you know, I've been spending several, the last several years helping people understand stories.

01:15:08.780 Yeah.

01:15:09.020 Helping them see the patterns, helping them see how it works.

01:15:11.740 And now it's, now it's time to do it.

01:15:14.680 So why did you pick the stories you did pick on the female front? 0.51

01:15:17.820 You picked Rapunzel, you said Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and?

01:15:21.180 And Cinderella.

01:15:22.040 And Cinderella.

01:15:22.780 So why those four?

01:15:24.100 Well, it's, it's also because I kind of perceived a, a possible secret arc through the four.

01:15:30.060 And 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.

01:15:38.120 But then through, through the, the four, there'll be like a surprising art that I won't tell everybody what it is already.

01:15:44.240 But there's like a surprising art that goes through them.

01:15:46.800 And then the male stories, it's funny because the male stories are harder to find.

01:15:50.380 In fairy tale world, there's a lot of female-led stories for some reason that we've remembered more. 1.00

01:15:55.540 And in the male stories, they're less, they're not as easy.

01:15:59.540 But, but I'm starting with Jack and the Beanstalk.

01:16:02.380 Oh, yeah.

01:16:02.700 Which is a story that my whole, when I was, when I was a kid, I really struggled with that story.

01:16:07.640 I loved it so much, but I struggled because I was like, why is Jack a thief?

01:16:12.440 Like, why, why is he immoral, like in the story or amoral at least?

01:16:16.540 And so I've been trying to struggle with that and trying to kind of understand it.

01:16:19.720 Like Bilbo in the, in the, in the Hobbit.

01:16:23.300 Yeah. 0.97

01:16:23.660 He's a thief. 1.00

01:16:24.460 He's a thief. 1.00

01:16:25.160 Yeah, exactly. 0.99

01:16:25.820 Yeah, yeah.

01:16:26.440 And so trying to kind of figure that out.

01:16:28.160 And also why are there giants in the sky?

01:16:30.260 Like all these weird things.

01:16:31.220 Well, it's a real shamanic story, that one.

01:16:33.320 Yeah.

01:16:33.520 Right.

01:16:33.860 Like that, that Lyanna that unites heaven and earth, right.

01:16:37.540 And to climb to the top is to find the, well, it's to find the giants in the sky.

01:16:42.980 Yeah.

01:16:43.360 Right.

01:16:43.500 You think, well, there are no giants in the sky.

01:16:45.320 It's like, no, now they're in the AI systems.

01:16:47.800 Yeah.

01:16:48.180 The giants were in the sky all along.

01:16:50.320 They were there.

01:16:50.960 That's right.

01:16:51.480 They were there.

01:16:52.220 That's for sure.

01:16:53.020 And it's also, but it's, it's interesting because Jack, Jack, now I love that story so

01:16:56.460 much because I, I think I figured it out, especially, I think I figured it out because

01:16:59.860 he goes several times and so he has to encounter these giants that are in between him and what

01:17:06.320 he's looking for, right?

01:17:07.320 They're like obstacles in between him.

01:17:09.060 They're like a kind of a perverted aspect or something that's, that's keeping or that's

01:17:14.980 avoiding you from getting the purpose.

01:17:17.440 And there's a hierarchy in what Jack gets.

01:17:19.700 Well, that's what happens to people all the time.

01:17:21.420 Like I watch this in my clinical practice all the time.

01:17:25.160 Hypothetically, people are aiming for what they want, right?

01:17:27.820 Hypothetically, but all sorts of giants get in the way.

01:17:31.720 They get derailed by envy.

01:17:33.820 They get derailed by what would they get derailed by fear.

01:17:37.020 They get derailed by lust.

01:17:39.080 They, these are all giants.

01:17:40.960 They get, and some of them can eat them for sure.

01:17:43.380 Well, definitely.

01:17:44.320 Well, and some of them are even, you know, lust and envy and so forth.

01:17:47.860 You could kind of put them in the context of the natural world, but people also get derailed

01:17:53.220 by ideologies and ideologies for all intents and purposes are giants, right?

01:17:58.100 They're, they're the ideas of past, they're the perverted ideas of past philosophers all

01:18:03.180 jumbled together in this, in, in a, in a, in a gigantic mess.

01:18:08.320 And they absolutely get in the way.

01:18:11.080 That's right.

01:18:11.360 And they have a body.

01:18:12.360 They have a, they have a semi-coherent way of moving.

01:18:15.180 You bet.

01:18:15.580 And so because of that, they, yeah, they kind of, yeah, absolutely.

01:18:20.580 No, that's a perfect way of understanding it.

01:18:22.460 Yeah.

01:18:22.740 And so Jack, it's interesting because Jack goes up and then, first of all, like, I don't

01:18:27.420 know if you ever thought about Jack, because it's, if you, you have to think about Jack

01:18:30.460 kind of the opposite of, of Snow White and the opposite of, of, of the female led narratives.

01:18:35.500 It's like Jack doesn't have a father, right?

01:18:38.160 He's with his mother and it's kind of, it's like a, right.

01:18:41.620 Right.

01:18:41.820 And so, so what, so he has his mother.

01:18:43.880 He's going to, he's going to be more likely to run into demented, fragmented giants of

01:18:49.140 masculinity.

01:18:50.380 Exactly. 0.89

01:18:51.200 Tyrants, you could say.

01:18:52.040 Yeah.

01:18:52.220 Yeah.

01:18:52.380 So he has, he has a, he has his mother and, and then he has a cow, right?

01:18:59.260 But that's not enough.

01:19:00.300 He needs something else.

01:19:01.880 So he trades the cow for what?

01:19:04.500 Magic beans.

01:19:05.600 For seeds.

01:19:06.280 Seeds.

01:19:06.720 Yeah.

01:19:07.000 He, he trades the cow for meaning.

01:19:08.760 He trades the cow for, you know, it's like a seed is a very masculine image, you know,

01:19:13.380 people who can think a little bit like the ancients can understand how masculine the image

01:19:18.180 of the seed is.

01:19:18.940 Right.

01:19:19.260 Right.

01:19:19.480 It's a seminal idea.

01:19:20.480 Right.

01:19:20.680 Exactly.

01:19:21.140 And so, and then, right.

01:19:23.440 How can I say this?

01:19:24.280 He goes up and there's a, there's a really powerful hierarchy.

01:19:27.720 At first he gets gold.

01:19:29.180 He gets the precious metal.

01:19:30.640 Then he gets the thing that makes gold, which is the chicken that lays the golden egg.

01:19:36.780 Oh.

01:19:37.480 But then the last thing he gets is he gets the pattern itself.

01:19:41.580 He gets the music of the spheres.

01:19:43.220 He goes all the way up and he gets the actual pattern of everything.

01:19:46.840 That's why it's music at the top.

01:19:48.920 Oh, is that right?

01:19:50.060 Oh, that's so cool.

01:19:50.920 Look, that's my, that's my, that's my intuition.

01:19:53.940 I just struggle so much when I was a kid.

01:19:56.300 I was like, why?

01:19:56.880 Okay, so, well, so I've been thinking continually about music in that regard.

01:20:01.300 So, I mean, so each note in a musical piece is related to all the other notes, related to

01:20:07.200 the phrases, and the phrases are related to the melodies.

01:20:09.740 Each instrument has its place and plays its part, and it all coheres into this vision of

01:20:15.360 diversified unity.

01:20:17.280 And then that's played.

01:20:19.460 And it's interesting that it's played.

01:20:21.260 That's the metaphor.

01:20:22.380 And it's played because people who are expertly skilled lay out the pattern, but they also

01:20:27.860 play with it at the same time, right?

01:20:29.940 And then it calls you to unite yourself with it.

01:20:33.460 It grips your attention, first of all.

01:20:35.200 But it doesn't just do that.

01:20:36.400 It also makes you move.

01:20:37.400 Yeah, it makes you move, yeah.

01:20:37.980 Right.

01:20:38.300 And it makes you move in alignment with those patterns, right?

01:20:41.180 And so music does point to something like a divine hierarchical unity.

01:20:45.340 And so it would make sense, given your interpretation of that story, that it would be at the pinnacle

01:20:49.980 of desire.

01:20:51.780 Yeah.

01:20:52.340 Right?

01:20:52.560 You said gold first.

01:20:53.720 Well, it's just that he's looking, he's trying to find the meaning.

01:20:58.260 He's trying to find the seed.

01:20:59.500 But with seed, there are different iterations of it.

01:21:01.900 He's trying to find value.

01:21:03.520 Yeah.

01:21:03.940 And so he moves up.

01:21:04.940 He finds the precious metal.

01:21:06.800 Then he finds what, it's like, think about it.

01:21:08.440 If you want to be successful, it's like, what's better, to have money, right?

01:21:11.820 Or to know how to produce money.

01:21:14.240 Right, exactly.

01:21:14.640 Right?

01:21:14.800 That's much better.

01:21:15.560 Well, this is why women use money as a proxy for determining men's fitness. 1.00

01:21:20.200 They're not after the money.

01:21:21.740 Yeah.

01:21:21.980 They're after the ability to generate the money.

01:21:24.420 But absent other information, they'll use the signs of money as a marker.

01:21:29.360 And so, but the highest thing, and it's only when I made the relationship with Pythagoras,

01:21:34.340 with Pythagoras, you know, it's like, he's going up in the heavens.

01:21:37.800 He's going, that's what he's doing.

01:21:39.160 And so why didn't I ever think of that before?

01:21:40.720 He's going up in the heavens, and then he gets a musical instrument.

01:21:43.940 Like, what?

01:21:44.480 Yeah.

01:21:44.740 So weird.

01:21:45.160 But no, it's like, that's it.

01:21:46.180 He's getting the pattern.

01:21:47.840 He's getting this heavenly pattern that shows you how things are related to each other.

01:21:54.260 So that even generates that which generates wealth.

01:21:57.160 That generates wealth.

01:21:57.440 That's right.

01:21:57.700 You bet.

01:21:58.220 You bet.

01:21:58.580 I think that's true, too.

01:21:59.840 You know, and this ties back to this observation we made earlier about Tammy's use of prayer.

01:22:05.920 Like, she's trying to orient herself constantly to what's highest, right?

01:22:10.420 It's not some proximal desire, some instrumental desire, or any fear.

01:22:14.020 It's to put herself in alignment with the music of the spheres.

01:22:17.600 That's a good way of thinking about it.

01:22:18.800 And if you do that, the better you are at doing that, the more things fall into alignment in your life and around you.

01:22:25.960 Yeah, almost.

01:22:26.740 They almost lay themselves out.

01:22:28.220 They do.

01:22:28.640 They lay themselves out.

01:22:29.900 Yeah.

01:22:30.500 Yeah, yeah.

01:22:31.740 You almost don't have to will them into order, right?

01:22:35.020 They just kind of, it just, if you're able to really, you know, align yourself with that high music, then things almost happen naturally.

01:22:45.040 Yeah, exactly.

01:22:46.200 Well, and I think that's a bringing into alignment of the narrative world and the objective world.

01:22:52.340 Yeah.

01:22:52.780 And you feel those touch, right?

01:22:54.740 And those are the synchronous events that Jung talked about when the narrative and the objective world touch.

01:22:59.520 But I do think it manifests itself in your life, too.

01:23:01.920 If you're aiming properly and you put yourself in alignment with that underlying pattern, then things do lay themselves out, right?

01:23:09.640 Everything happens in the right order at the right time and in the right place.

01:23:13.760 And there's a musical element to it and a rhythmic element to it, too.

01:23:17.400 Yeah, and it can be pretty, I mean, it can actually be pretty surprising and very magical.

01:23:21.000 Most people that have experienced that will notice.

01:23:23.480 Like, I've seen moments where things are so, like I'd say, in tune that I almost know that all I need to do is just reach out.

01:23:31.100 Yeah.

01:23:31.380 I just put my hand out and whatever I need is going to do right there.

01:23:32.940 Well, the arc enterprise has been like that to some degree, you know?

01:23:35.700 Because everywhere I've gone to discuss it, the door has just swung open.

01:23:40.700 Yeah.

01:23:41.080 You know, and I've learned also that if the door isn't swinging open, to stop pushing.

01:23:48.720 You know, I mean, you know, persistence is a virtue. 1.00

01:23:52.100 But stupid persistence is a vice. 1.00

01:23:54.340 Yeah. 1.00

01:23:54.520 And it's hard to know when you're being lazy and when you're being wisely, when you're wisely looking in a different direction.

01:24:04.040 You know, I think if you're avoiding a challenge because of cowardice, then that's a sinful impersistence.

01:24:10.480 But if you push and the door doesn't open, it's like, well, maybe you should go to the next door.

01:24:14.920 Yeah.

01:24:15.200 And I've really tried to do that with this arc enterprise, too, is like to invite people.

01:24:19.540 And if they're on board and enthusiastic, it's like, well, great, you know, looks like we're in the same place doing the same thing.

01:24:27.600 If I talk to someone else and they're resistance, like, fair enough, man.

01:24:31.860 You go do your thing, whatever that happens to be.

01:24:34.380 Yeah.

01:24:34.960 So, but it's been market watching this because I have never been engaged in an enterprise.

01:24:40.580 And I've been engaged in many enterprises where the doors were flying open so quickly on so many fronts.

01:24:47.960 And in a very unlikely way.

01:24:51.380 I mean, even the fact that in the few meetings we've had so far, we managed to hammer out something like six points of agreement, you know, six principles upon which we can progress.

01:25:01.440 That happened extremely quickly.

01:25:02.940 Yeah.

01:25:03.260 And in an unlikely way.

01:25:05.120 Yeah.

01:25:05.300 And you have such a varied group of people sitting around the table from all over the world, too.

01:25:11.200 So, yeah, it is quite astounding.

01:25:13.500 Yeah.

01:25:13.920 Yeah.

01:25:14.120 Well, it points to a real felt lack in the culture.

01:25:17.160 Right.

01:25:17.460 And I think it is a lack on the conservative side.

01:25:20.060 Yeah.

01:25:20.740 And the traditional liberal side of anything approximating a uniting vision.

01:25:25.080 And this is what the radicals have in spades, you know, is that they can offer to young people in particular.

01:25:29.740 Well, here's how you're going to transform the world.

01:25:31.900 It's like, well, that is an inviting.

01:25:34.700 That is a, what would you say, a compelling invitation.

01:25:37.580 The problem is, is that there's a, like an unholy meld of 1984 and Brave New World underlying that, the specifics of that invitation.

01:25:47.880 Yeah.

01:25:48.400 Yeah.

01:25:48.600 And in some ways, the chaos, right?

01:25:50.700 Because you can, like I said, that the fairy tales themselves have that structure, right?

01:25:56.020 It's like the chaos or the moment where things are falling apart.

01:25:59.440 They also call to resolution.

01:26:02.120 Yeah.

01:26:02.380 Yeah.

01:26:02.720 And so I think that.

01:26:05.440 Yeah.

01:26:05.960 Well, you see that in the story when Osiris disintegrates, when he's cut into pieces by Seth, right?

01:26:12.660 His parts are scattered all across Egypt.

01:26:14.640 And then Isis, who's queen of the underworld, finds his phallus and makes herself pregnant. 0.86

01:26:19.860 Well, that's exactly that image, is that when everything's fallen apart, the seeds are left.

01:26:25.000 Yeah.

01:26:25.440 Right?

01:26:25.780 And out of the seeds can emerge something.

01:26:27.900 Something new.

01:26:28.540 Yeah.

01:26:28.880 And something new and visionary.

01:26:30.420 Well, that's Horus, because he's the Egyptian eye.

01:26:32.640 Yeah.

01:26:33.020 And so that's the standard pattern.

01:26:35.340 Yeah.

01:26:35.680 It's interesting, because in the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, the mother doesn't recognize the value of the seed.

01:26:43.140 Uh-huh.

01:26:43.520 Right?

01:26:43.680 She throws it out, you know.

01:26:46.320 And ultimately, it does end up functioning as this new hierarchy, right, that goes up.

01:26:54.080 And he's able to get what he needs to get.

01:26:55.960 But it's interesting to see.

01:26:57.680 And interestingly, again, in the story of Jack, is that when the hierarchy becomes corrupt, though, then the mother is the one who can cut it down.

01:27:06.940 She's the one who hacks it down. 0.99

01:27:08.680 Oh, yeah.

01:27:09.020 So there's a really beautiful microcosm in the story.

01:27:12.260 Because on the one hand, it's like the seed which creates this new hierarchy.

01:27:15.960 Jack goes up, gets the different elements of the hierarchy all the way to the pattern of reality itself.

01:27:20.780 You know, comes back down.

01:27:22.840 But then as he comes back down, all the monsters, you know, the monster follows him down.

01:27:28.140 The monster, the tyrant, you know, the monster of the hierarchy follows him down.

01:27:30.940 Well, that's also the danger on the ARC front, too, because one of the things that we've discussed continually is the high probability that putting together an organization like this at all is just an invitation to the descent of a new kind of tyranny.

01:27:45.060 Because we wouldn't, we'd be fools to assume that the people who say we're working on the UN front or the WEF front weren't motivated.

01:27:54.300 That's right.

01:27:54.780 Well, weren't as motivated as we were to do the right thing.

01:27:58.320 Like, perhaps not, but also perhaps.

01:28:00.440 Yeah.

01:28:00.640 And it's easy for a visionary enterprise to be captured by the ghosts of dead tyrants.

01:28:06.820 Yeah.

01:28:07.220 Right.

01:28:07.660 The most likely outcome, in fact.

01:28:09.820 Yeah.

01:28:10.580 Definitely.

01:28:11.540 So we have to keep, yeah, we have to keep our mother with an axe. 1.00

01:28:16.060 Yeah.

01:28:16.640 We need to cut it down if we need to, if things get to.

01:28:20.760 Yeah.

01:28:21.080 So why do you think it's the mother with an axe in that particular situation?

01:28:23.840 Because she's the one who destroys hierarchy. 1.00

01:28:26.080 Right.

01:28:26.440 For the same reason, she throws the seed out.

01:28:28.040 So she's playing a good and negative, a positive and negative role.

01:28:31.280 The same reason she throws the seed out, she's the one who can cut down the tree. 0.89

01:28:35.100 Yeah.

01:28:35.460 Cut down the, cut down the ladder. 0.97

01:28:37.560 Yeah, well, there is an aspect of the feminine eye that's good at, it's a funny thing, that's good at detecting deviation from the straight and narrow on the masculine front. 1.00

01:28:47.380 Right.

01:28:47.560 There's got to be a primary feminine instinct, and for good reason. 1.00

01:28:50.680 It's one that's weird, though.

01:28:51.720 It's one that can be perverted and misused as well.

01:28:54.260 But you can understand that, like, the castrating narrative, you know, it's a neutral narrative, right?

01:29:00.440 It'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. 0.94

01:29:09.780 But 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.

01:29:25.800 Right.

01:29:26.340 And so it's, but it is a power that exists in the feminine. 1.00

01:29:30.800 Yeah.

01:29:31.020 And 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.

01:29:38.440 So tell me a little bit more concretely about how these productions are going to make themselves manifest.

01:29:45.800 These are illustrated books, like high quality, beautifully hardbound illustrated books.

01:29:50.920 We put, we put a large amount of effort into designing the books, designing the illustrations.

01:29:56.020 You know, there's also narrative elements which don't appear in the text that are only followed in the illustration.

01:30:01.260 So 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.

01:30:09.460 And there's, there are two readings in the text, basically, a reading for children and a reading for adults.

01:30:14.040 But the reading for adults is not the kind of dirty jokes that are cynical reading that you see in Trek.

01:30:20.880 Right, right, right.

01:30:21.180 But rather something that hopefully helps the adult gather more insight into these stories, which most adults.

01:30:27.220 And what do you mean two readings?

01:30:28.480 How did you start?

01:30:29.080 It's the same readers.

01:30:30.040 It's, that is that it's, it's one story.

01:30:32.220 Yeah.

01:30:32.560 But in the story, there are elements meant, like put there.

01:30:36.420 Oh, I see.

01:30:37.180 I see.

01:30:37.400 For the grown-ups.

01:30:38.000 But it's one story.

01:30:38.840 That's right.

01:30:39.160 So that the child will not, not really pay attention to that.

01:30:42.700 Right.

01:30:42.900 But that the adult will be able to.

01:30:44.180 But the child will still be able to follow the story.

01:30:45.780 That's right.

01:30:46.040 The story is told for, for, you know, like a seven-year-old or something or a 10-year-old.

01:30:50.980 It's, it's very simple.

01:30:51.980 It's really is using the fairy tale style.

01:30:54.300 But 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.

01:31:09.140 So was God's dog practice for this?

01:31:11.660 Or, or the first enterprise in this line of enterprise?

01:31:15.160 Yeah.

01:31:15.440 So God's dog, for those who don't know, it's a series of graphic novels that we put out the first one last year and we're continuing to put them out.

01:31:21.680 It's, it's, it's similar.

01:31:23.320 It's different.

01:31:24.020 God's dog is more elaborate.

01:31:25.340 It's not a fairy tale, right?

01:31:26.320 It's a, it's really is an epic story.

01:31:28.740 And so, but we're doing something similar as we're doing with the fairy tales, which is in God's dog.

01:31:34.840 What we're doing is we're using the, the biblical Christian cosmos.

01:31:40.420 You 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.

01:31:49.420 Milton did it, Dante did it, you know?

01:31:51.020 Yeah.

01:31:51.140 But 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.

01:31:59.080 And what they wanted to do, although they were Christians, they want, they created this kind of pagan world. 0.98

01:32:04.660 Yeah.

01:32:05.120 That was, that, that, that was coherent.

01:32:08.140 Yeah, 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.

01:32:17.600 So why do you think they turned to the pagan world?

01:32:19.720 I don't, look, I can't give you that.

01:32:21.360 I have my own intuitions about that.

01:32:23.480 I 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.

01:32:35.800 You could have offended Christians and non-Christians. 1.00

01:32:38.500 And it would have annoyed the non-Christians, let's say. 1.00

01:32:41.600 Right.

01:32:41.920 It would have made them turn away from it.

01:32:43.180 Right, right, right, right.

01:32:43.620 But I think we're, we're in a moment now, like, as this, as this.

01:32:47.300 So Christianity is counter-cultural enough now. 0.79

01:32:49.640 That's right.

01:32:49.880 So that, yeah, that could be.

01:32:51.500 I think so.

01:32:52.240 Yeah, that could be.

01:32:53.080 And 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.

01:33:01.080 In God's Dog, we, we bring in all kinds of, you know, we have St. Christopher, who is a dog-headed, dog-headed monster.

01:33:07.300 We have St. George, who's the dragon killer.

01:33:09.180 You know, we also have giants and the Leviathan and all these, all these kind of thing, weird things in scripture and in tradition.

01:33:15.440 We kind of jammed them together into one story.

01:33:17.760 So there is that in the sense that we want to use some postmodern storytelling.

01:33:21.480 Postmodern storytelling, like collage storytelling, has, has, has, can, does bring insight, right?

01:33:28.660 There is a way in which it can capture insights.

01:33:31.420 So if you think of, well, even when you're analyzing postmodernism, you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

01:33:37.140 Yeah. 0.99

01:33:37.240 That's foolish. 0.96

01:33:38.080 No.

01:33:38.320 So, 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.

01:33:51.980 And 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.

01:34:01.860 Because 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. 0.70

01:34:12.840 So 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?

01:34:21.660 And so you can do things in fiction that will actually provide insight for what the original stories are when you kind of smash them together.

01:34:29.480 So that's the kind of thing, I mean, they did that in the, the ancient days too.

01:34:33.400 Like if you think of Jason and the Argonauts, you have an old version of that where it's like Jason and the Argonauts is basically like, you know, Avengers Endgame or whatever, where they take all the, the like powerful characters from mythology and smash them into one story and then watch them interact with each other.

01:34:52.820 So it's not like this hasn't happened before.

01:34:55.240 And Dante has some of that too, because Dante basically goes into hell and then ascends the hierarchy and then along the way meets all these characters from history and all these characters from the ancient world.

01:35:06.520 Yeah.

01:35:06.660 So I think this is a, you know, I think that capitalizing on that kind of storytelling can be very...

01:35:11.640 And how has that done, how has that performed commercially?

01:35:15.400 Oh, God's Dog, yeah.

01:35:16.160 I mean, we, I think we did like 300,000 on the Kickstarter and we still sell every day.

01:35:21.500 We sell, we sell books.

01:35:22.360 We're doing it all on our own.

01:35:23.520 Yeah.

01:35:23.860 We have it on my website.

01:35:25.100 We sell, we sell the book.

01:35:26.000 And 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.

01:35:33.420 It's a very weird story.

01:35:34.920 So I understand why it's going to take a while for people to kind of catch on to it because it's, it's, it's very surprising.

01:35:40.660 I think these fairy tales are far more grounded.

01:35:43.220 Right, right, right, right, right.

01:35:44.940 And there, yeah, there's an easier, you know, and who should, who should pick up the fairy tales?

01:35:49.960 I mean, and when are they available?

01:35:51.140 So, so June 6th, we're starting the Kickstarter for Snow White and, you know, we're really trying to, to go all out with this Kickstarter.

01:35:58.000 The purpose is in some ways to, to gather enough money so we can really start a publishing company.

01:36:03.020 Yeah.

01:36:03.440 And then I can hire in advance the illustrators so we can start to, to, to get these done.

01:36:09.560 And this illustrator that you worked with, tell me a bit about her.

01:36:12.280 So Heather Pollington, she has worked on several of major movie franchises.

01:36:17.620 She, she's an object designer for, for movies. 0.99

01:36:21.300 She, she's worked on, on the Marvel movies.

01:36:24.280 She, she's worked for Disney.

01:36:25.360 She worked on Maleficent 2.

01:36:26.940 She worked on Hellboy 2, which I thought was amazing.

01:36:29.100 Yeah, yeah, it is.

01:36:29.860 I 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.

01:36:37.260 And there's one object, which is like this medieval book that they have that tells the story of the elves in it.

01:36:42.860 And 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.

01:36:54.100 That this is, looks like something that has history or whatever, that has all this weight to it.

01:36:57.180 Yeah.

01:36:57.520 And she designed that book.

01:36:58.700 And so, when she told me she designed it, like, oh wow, I want to work with you.

01:37:02.460 And so, and so, yeah, so she, so she's. 0.98

01:37:04.840 And why does she want to work with you? 1.00

01:37:06.740 Well, she, you know, she's been working in movies.

01:37:09.400 She's been doing these things.

01:37:10.280 And then she fell on my, she fell into my, my YouTube videos. 0.99

01:37:15.020 And then she started to see the way that I talked about stories and the way that I talked about symbolism really attracted her.

01:37:21.920 And she's not the only one.

01:37:23.200 Like, I started gathering these kind of, this cobbling artist together.

01:37:27.720 You 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.

01:37:40.360 But who also said, like, she read my brother's book.

01:37:43.140 She's watching my videos.

01:37:44.240 And she's like, this is really helpful to think about stories through these frames.

01:37:48.300 Yeah.

01:37:48.600 And so, because of that, I'm, I feel fortunate.

01:37:50.820 Well, you know, when I talked to Camille Pellia about Eric Neumann.

01:37:54.200 Uh-huh.

01:37:54.520 She said, and this is something I had thought about years ago, but she was the first person who I met other than myself, who, in the academic realm, who made this case explicitly.

01:38:05.120 She said, if the Neumann and Jungian approach to storytelling had predominated in the 60s and 70s, the entire history of the last 40 years of the universities would be entirely different.

01:38:16.000 Right.

01:38:16.440 And I mean, you're in that tradition, obviously.

01:38:18.720 Yeah.

01:38:18.900 You 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.

01:38:36.920 Yeah.

01:38:37.100 It was a real catastrophe.

01:38:38.500 But it leads, it's interesting, because what it does is that it leads to deep cynicism in people.

01:38:44.140 Yeah.

01:38:44.620 It leads to disillusionment.

01:38:45.780 Yeah, yeah.

01:38:46.280 So 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?

01:38:54.160 It'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.

01:39:03.080 But 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.

01:39:16.520 Yeah.

01:39:16.680 To see them really as something to build on and something that is, that we can, that we can unashamed, unashamedly celebrate.

01:39:24.080 Well, it does seem to me too, that that will occur with an increment in consciousness, because I think we're at a point now.

01:39:32.620 And 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.

01:39:47.440 And I would say in a perverse way, the postmodern enterprise has actually probably contributed to that.

01:39:52.260 Yeah, definitely.

01:39:52.940 Because it took a kind of skepticism as far as it could be taken.

01:39:56.520 But 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?

01:40:10.000 And so, for example, like most kids have not read the version of Rapunzel where she gets pregnant in the tower.

01:40:15.800 But, but in some ways without that, you actually miss out on much of what the story is offering.

01:40:21.920 And 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.

01:40:38.300 It doesn't only have to do with that.

01:40:40.140 Right.

01:40:40.300 In some ways, those patterns of puberty and transformation and sexuality are also images of higher patterns of being, but we're not going to pretend like that's not in the story.

01:40:49.740 Yeah.

01:40:50.060 Because those are obviously in the story.

01:40:51.300 So 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.

01:40:59.620 Well, 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.

01:41:14.520 So now they're crying out for integration.

01:41:17.640 That's a reasonable way of thinking about it.

01:41:19.660 Yeah.

01:41:19.880 And in, but manifesting themselves in all sorts of frag, terribly, horrifyingly fragmented ways.

01:41:26.320 So that's what happens when you shy away from the bitter truth.

01:41:29.240 Right.

01:41:29.500 Is that it's, it's not like it disappears.

01:41:32.140 Yeah.

01:41:32.480 It, it's, it's the, it's the revenge of the repressed in, in, in Freudian terms. 0.72

01:41:36.920 And he certainly had that right.

01:41:38.220 So 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.

01:41:49.660 And they have to do with the, with the, let's say the possibilities, the dangers of beauty, the dangers of how you treat beauty.

01:41:57.480 So 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.

01:42:04.480 And what does that mean and how to deal with it?

01:42:07.120 So that's what basically unites all the stories together.

01:42:10.880 And 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.

01:42:22.000 You 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?

01:42:34.880 Right, right.

01:42:35.360 It's like finding that balance between the two.

01:42:37.540 Because I don't know if you ever thought that, like, Snow White and Rapunzel are like opposites, you know, because Snow White, it's the woman, the mother who's jealous of her beautiful daughter, and therefore, you know, kind of mistreats her because of that.

01:42:52.660 Whereas Rapunzel, it's the mother that sees the beauty of her daughter, but wants to protect her completely from the outside.

01:42:59.880 And so one throws her out into the outside, literally gives her to the hunter, right?

01:43:03.860 So that he does whatever he wants with her.

01:43:05.520 Right, right.

01:43:05.840 And so it's like, it's like this.

01:43:07.440 And so, and the other one is the opposite, where she puts her up in a tower, protects her completely, wants to avoid everything.

01:43:12.000 Oh, yeah, two extremes.

01:43:13.480 Yeah, it really is two extremes.

01:43:15.100 Right, right, right.

01:43:16.280 So that's the kind of thing that I play with in the, the, the order of stories, where I start with Snow White, I go to Rapunzel.

01:43:22.000 Two opposites, and then try to integrate it then in Sleeping Beauty, and then a kind of final surprising resolution in Cinderella.

01:43:30.800 I see, I see.

01:43:31.660 So this is all going to unfold over what time period?

01:43:33.900 It's going to, it's depending, depending in some ways on how much, how much we're able to gather in the crowdfunding.

01:43:40.040 Yeah.

01:43:40.220 You know, so that I can get the project started.

01:43:42.140 I'm thinking at least two a year, I'm hoping, and maybe three a year if we're able to gather enough funds so that we kind of get this, this cycle where we're putting them out every few months.

01:43:50.400 That's what I would, that's definitely what I would like.

01:43:52.480 Mm-hmm.

01:43:52.900 Yeah.

01:43:53.180 Mm-hmm.

01:43:53.980 Mm-hmm.

01:43:54.340 Well, we'll definitely keep an eye on that.

01:43:56.180 All right.

01:43:56.340 And maybe have another discussion along the way on the, on the mail side.

01:44:00.160 Oh, yeah, definitely.

01:44:00.980 Yeah.

01:44:01.160 That's a more.

01:44:01.660 We got a bit, touched on it a bit today with Jack and the Beanstalk, but, but that would be extreme.

01:44:06.600 Well, all right.

01:44:07.580 We should probably draw this part of this discussion to a close.

01:44:11.060 For everybody watching and listening, I'll talk to Jonathan for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform.

01:44:15.980 We'll, I think, delve into some more autobiographical details and, and we'll leave it at that.

01:44:23.280 Thank you very much for talking to me today.

01:44:24.840 It's always a pleasure to see you.

01:44:25.820 Always.

01:44:26.340 We're here for everyone too.

01:44:28.080 Jonathan'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,

01:44:37.840 which 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.

01:44:48.200 And all the things we talked about today in terms of rediscovering, revamping fundamental stories are part and parcel of that enterprise as well,

01:44:56.500 because everyone involved does understand that this, in the final analysis, is a storytelling venture.

01:45:02.300 Strangely enough, who would have guessed that?

01:45:04.900 But that does seem to be the case.

01:45:06.600 Thanks to the film crew here in London for your help today.

01:45:10.800 That went extremely smoothly and that's much appreciated to the Daily Wire Plus people for facilitating this conversation.

01:45:16.280 And to everybody watching and listening, your attention is much appreciated.

01:45:21.520 Jonathan, good to see you again.

01:45:23.600 Yeah, always, Jordan.

01:45:24.620 Yeah, you bet.

01:45:25.520 Ciao, everyone.

01:45:28.160 Hello, everyone.

01:45:29.140 I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guests on dailywireplus.com.

01:45:36.600 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - June 08, 2023

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

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