The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast - November 25, 2023


The Importance of Stories and Living Properly | Jonathan Pageau


Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 4 minutes

Words per minute

192.97

Word count

12,357

Sentence count

227

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

10

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 It's just unbearable, like it's crap. 0.99
00:00:02.480 Bad quality, bad writing, Disney held children's attention. 0.99
00:00:07.380 For a while, they were good stewards of that attention.
00:00:10.040 Like a lot of the entertainment industry, they've become captured by ideology.
00:00:13.900 And ideology makes for boring stories.
00:00:15.820 You always have to kind of look twice at what your kid is reading.
00:00:18.580 You know, it's so insipid, there's people just trying to get into your child's mind.
00:00:22.200 sadly disney was just dropping these fairy tales they were like we don't want these
00:00:31.600 you know we actually don't like them anymore and so i thought this would be a great time to do this
00:00:36.480 jonathan pageau welcome to my podcast it's great to see you again michaela how much do you think
00:00:43.820 um social media has to play in the last decade of weirdness like i feel like in 2012
00:00:51.020 there were there were some like i was in university and you could kind of see some of the woke stuff
00:00:56.740 coming into play but because there wasn't such a strong online social media following for these
00:01:03.340 things they didn't blow up as fast do you think that's why we're seeing such ups and downs and
00:01:08.700 chaos and politics and things because like everybody can suddenly get kind of a one certain
00:01:15.160 idea and one way of thinking and they're just spammed with that information that's right i think
00:01:19.520 that's the right way to see it is that, you know, in a normal, in a normal, let's say just 30 years
00:01:25.300 ago or 20 years ago, you could watch the news and be funneled into a certain idea, you know,
00:01:31.520 or you could even be manipulated. I mean, it's not like propaganda is a new thing. It's something
00:01:35.140 that's existed for a very long time. And so you could get kind of dragged into propaganda, but
00:01:40.100 then, you know, that would last a certain amount of time and you would move away from that. And
00:01:44.020 then you would encounter other people and you would live your life. And there'd be a kind of
00:01:47.740 organic reality where you're constantly surrounded by people that have different opinions, different
00:01:52.080 ideas, different things that they value. But now what happens with the online world is that in some
00:01:57.020 ways, again, like what I said before, is you can fall into one thread and then you can have massive
00:02:03.600 reinforcement in that thread. You can find yourself surrounded by people online. You can
00:02:09.720 find yourself surrounded by people who only agree with you and are completely in line with this one
00:02:14.800 thing that you are aiming towards so that's true for as it's as true for kind of weird
00:02:20.620 fetishistic thing or little people who get obsessed by certain cultural you know cultural
00:02:25.880 let's say cultural niches but then it also becomes true for political ideas as well where
00:02:32.360 people just get dragged into something and it's people have become way easier to manipulate now
00:02:37.180 with social media for sure how do you specifically avoid being manipulated by social media like do
00:02:43.580 ever find yourself thinking one way a little too strongly and you're like maybe i need to see the
00:02:48.640 other side or do you use like a moral compass how do you figure it out i probably am manipulated
00:02:55.480 sometimes you know that is i'm not i wouldn't be surprised if that happened what i hope is that
00:03:01.980 in some ways similar to some of the things that your father has developed that if you have a sense
00:03:08.160 of how reality has a left and a right hand you could say and how you know every movement in one
00:03:13.460 direction hides something, you know, a kind of ignorance of another movement in another direction.
00:03:19.280 I think I kind of have an internal clock where when I see things going too far, when I see
00:03:24.360 things getting pushed, my mind immediately reverts to asking, you know, a question from
00:03:29.960 the other perspective. And that is, you know, on the one hand, it is definitely, I think,
00:03:35.300 something valuable. It can sometimes work against you because people will accuse you of not taking
00:03:41.320 strong positions on certain things that they think are important. And because that I tend to do that,
00:03:46.520 that I always tend to look at a story and then try to embody it within the story, the different
00:03:52.040 characters and see things from different perspectives. It means that, you know, I often
00:03:57.200 don't, I don't take as strong positions as others have, you know, in certain even political
00:04:03.420 situations. Yeah, I can see that. Sometimes you actually need people who just see one direction.
00:04:09.160 like that's that's something that's very useful sometimes because you know when critical problems
00:04:15.140 arise you have to be able to filter out the other position and you have to just be able like you
00:04:20.020 know if you're being robbed on the street you you it's that's not the time to ask yourself you know
00:04:24.120 if you can understand the world through the position of the person robbing you you kind of
00:04:27.940 have to react very quickly uh so so i think that that there is value in be in not being able to do
00:04:34.160 that but myself i tend to do that all the time yeah i think i tend to do that as well um which
00:04:41.500 and i think i get that wrong sometimes by seeing the other side's position a little bit too well
00:04:46.880 being like well i can see how they got there and like it doesn't sometimes it doesn't really matter
00:04:51.040 how they got there or what the reasons are behind it if the place you end up is not a good place
00:04:56.120 happy thanksgiving forget my gravelly voice i'm getting over the plague given to me by
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00:06:10.940 your Thanksgiving was wonderful. Mine was. My parents are staying with us. So that's been fun.
00:06:16.580 Enjoy the rest of this episode. Yeah, ideally, that would be the best would be the best would
00:06:21.700 be to be able to play it out. And once you've played it out is to say, I can I think I can
00:06:26.420 see all the positions of this and now I think this is the morally superior this is the best
00:06:30.560 position to to hold I mean I think that during during the COVID stuff you know at some point I
00:06:36.400 I could understand how people got caught up in the narrative and got caught up in the story and just
00:06:40.820 got but at some point I was like no like this is you know it's like when the truckers came out
00:06:45.300 I'm like I'm sorry I'm going to Ottawa you know it's like I I just I just have to take a position
00:06:50.980 even though it's not popular and even though I can understand why others are still in this in this
00:06:55.900 kind of mind the circle but I had to take a position at that point did you actually go so
00:07:01.000 you were there you saw the protests yeah I didn't know that it was really it was great and it it
00:07:06.600 just reinforced my vision that the media is absolutely corrupt in every way you know this
00:07:12.280 is something that actually started with me with Jordan with your father it was the first time in
00:07:17.920 2016 that I was faced with you know the narrative of someone I knew and that I talked to and that
00:07:24.600 I exchanged with and that I had a sense of. And then seeing what the media were saying at the
00:07:28.900 same time and thinking, they're lying. Like, they're just lying. They're just not telling
00:07:33.980 the truth. And then since then, I've become more and more suspicious. And of course,
00:07:39.800 you know, during COVID, it just became insane. And when I was at the trucker protest,
00:07:44.900 you know, I mean, it was a protest. Obviously, it was a protest. But it's funny that the media
00:07:49.820 portrayed it so in such a crazy vision when just a few years before at the beginning of covid we
00:07:56.780 literally had cities burning in the united states people breaking down things you know during the
00:08:02.020 george floyd protest and now we had this this protest with maybe a few things went wrong maybe
00:08:07.260 a few people exaggerated but the media were were were showing them as basically a bunch of psycho
00:08:13.380 nazis which was hilarious because that's not what was there yeah yeah wild uh i was i was
00:08:21.280 i mean i haven't trusted the media i think i think my mind changed too when i started seeing
00:08:26.680 like dad portrayed as a really evil person i was like whoa that's yeah that's not even a twist on
00:08:33.320 reality that's just falsehood which which is scary but um i think all the media institutions
00:08:42.260 are going to fade away into oblivion anyway, unless they adapt, which they don't seem to be.
00:08:47.480 So they're probably old news. Yeah. They seem to have taken,
00:08:51.200 tried to take on, like, you know, you watch these news institutions try to take on
00:08:55.360 just a detail, just a blip. It's like, oh, this little comedian doing a podcast. It's just
00:09:02.060 hilarious that they're so blind to what's actually happening. Yeah. Okay. So I watched some clips
00:09:09.240 from the recent debate it was the republican debate and i don't know how up to date you are
00:09:15.160 on american politics are you at all i did not okay i just watched i just watched the popular
00:09:21.100 ones that were circulating around instagram i didn't actually watch the debate but i've i've
00:09:26.240 seen quite a bit of what um rfk is talking about and he seems to be the person that's like in the
00:09:33.620 middle which is probably how i've what my political stance is more than conservative or liberal and so
00:09:42.340 i was watching a clip he did saying you know the left has gone too far the right has gone too far
00:09:46.640 and you know they're it's just part of the same monster with two heads and they're fighting each
00:09:50.980 other and it's going to lead to the downfall of the u.s if we don't end up somewhere in the middle
00:09:55.700 uh and then so i was like yeah i could stand behind that but then do you think because of the
00:10:05.480 situation we're in in the u.s and in canada there needs to be more pushback from the right to
00:10:11.880 counteract what's happening with the left or do you think it's possible for somebody to come up
00:10:16.440 in the middle and say hey you guys are both part of the problem let's try and go forward in the
00:10:22.040 middle yeah i don't want to be a doomsayer but i think it's i think it's too late yeah at some
00:10:30.900 point it's like there's when the pendulum starts to swing at some point you could say well i wish
00:10:36.340 it was just stable but it's coming at you and so it's difficult because on the one hand the one
00:10:41.820 side is pushing really hard for things that have become totally crazy you know and you know when
00:10:47.980 we talk about the whole problem of, you know, of, of mutilating children with the, with the whole 0.93
00:10:54.420 transgender question, you know, at some point you think, well, you know, we have to, we have to push 0.99
00:10:59.420 back, you know, just for the sake of the, the, the life of these, these people. But then on the 0.99
00:11:04.040 other side, they really feel like they're saving lives when they're doing it. So you have this,
00:11:09.340 you have this pendulum that's swinging and these things that are kind of going at full force at
00:11:13.520 each other and it's difficult to compromise you know it's very difficult to compromise so
00:11:18.020 i don't i can't see in the short term how it's going to settle i think that there's a desire
00:11:29.140 possibly and this is sad and tragic to pull the attention away from this into something exterior
00:11:37.500 like a war let's say because that does it like if you have a war then you bring people together
00:11:44.160 um but that is also a very sad state of affairs so i i don't see a good way out of this and and
00:11:51.520 i do feel like that's what's happening is that you know that there's a desire for war so that
00:11:57.380 we can find some kind of median and so or at least some kind of common purpose that will
00:12:02.400 prevent us from just ripping each other apart that's interesting i i haven't considered that
00:12:09.500 that seems right though because it is i guess when there's something as terrible as war then
00:12:14.680 people come together and go okay although the current war you know the most recent one it's
00:12:20.840 dividing it's dividing everybody it's insane i've never seen anything like it it's not
00:12:25.300 yeah it's not a it's not it's not going to work you know there was this idea that we could all
00:12:30.920 get behind Ukraine and if we could just all get behind Ukraine uh then we'll be united there's
00:12:36.220 also you know that's one of the reasons for the environmental apocalypticism is also this 0.89
00:12:42.620 you know it's like I think a lot of it is a lot of it is anti-human and ridiculous but you can
00:12:50.840 kind of understand the drive behind it because people say well if we could just all agree that
00:12:54.860 we have to save the earth then maybe we could just get along you know like this this we could
00:12:59.280 come together as a globe you know you hear globalists say things like that that you know
00:13:03.820 this is ways to clump together as a globe we i recently heard from a wf panel where the the
00:13:10.620 a woman was talking about how the next crisis will or maybe should be about water because we can all
00:13:17.000 agree on water right if like there was a water crisis that's what we want we would all then we
00:13:21.700 would all come together and then we would you know we would come together as a globe uh and you know
00:13:26.760 even if you want to push it even stranger in the stranger directions uh do you know do you have
00:13:32.620 you ever heard of watchmen the graphic novel watchmen that came out in the 1980s well that
00:13:37.220 in that graphic novel is a great idea which was if you could fake an uh extraterrestrial attack
00:13:44.080 then you would all come together you know and so it's like you just need something outside of you
00:13:51.020 that is like a common point of attention that that joins you together and you know and in some
00:13:56.560 ways you know that is in some ways what hopefully people worshiping God should be doing right that's
00:14:04.640 what that should be for is the idea that there's something beyond you that is able to capture your
00:14:10.020 attention and that is able to to be something that we can all have in common sadly it has not
00:14:15.520 always played that role as we know but that is ultimately what that should be for yeah I agree
00:14:22.840 how do you go to people so i i only started believing in god maybe two years ago and we
00:14:31.580 had a conversation since then uh and before that i couldn't wrap my head around it i didn't
00:14:36.680 understand what it was and i didn't understand what people meant when they said they believed
00:14:40.740 in god it's like i don't even know what that means have you found a way to talk to people who
00:14:46.580 are like agnostic or atheist might be even too far but like agnostic who are trying to grasp the
00:14:54.000 concept of god have you figured out how to kind of explain what you see i don't know if i've
00:15:00.080 yeah i don't know if i've figured it out i think it's true that a lot of the work that i've been
00:15:04.500 doing especially on youtube or you know the podcast has been with that goal is to help to
00:15:10.160 bridge the gap and to help people understand not just secular atheist people but even some people
00:15:15.920 who kind of believe in God, sometimes they do so with a normal kind of naive, but not a naive,
00:15:24.420 but something like a very simple intuition, you know. And because of that, sometimes because they
00:15:31.460 do it with a simple intuition, when they try to explain it to other people, they end up sounding 0.96
00:15:36.940 ridiculous. Like they end up saying things that freak people out. And so, you know, one of the
00:15:43.680 hopes that I've had is that some of the things that I say are able to help people who believe
00:15:47.880 with that kind of simple intuition formulated better and help atheists also understand what
00:15:53.800 it is that's going on. And there are different ways to do it. You know, for example, I just did
00:15:59.420 this speech at ARC about the idea of the good, right, in the Platonic sense, like of the capital
00:16:07.800 g good and the idea that you know we have to have something which transcends our desires and it
00:16:14.480 transcends all the things that we think are good you know like we have things that we think are
00:16:18.540 good you know like safety or family or you know or success or there's all these things that we
00:16:24.220 think are good and you know usually that's fine but as soon as we treat any of those things as the
00:16:29.720 very highest good then all of a sudden it becomes something like a like a tyrant over us you know
00:16:35.960 And that's obviously what someone who becomes, I don't know, becomes an alcoholic is. It's like, yeah, you can drink with friends and it's pleasant and it's fun. But if all of a sudden you start to submit your whole world to that feeling that you get when you're drinking, then something which is fine, like which is a good becomes a tyrant over you that starts to rule over you.
00:16:52.020 And, you know, that can happen for food, it can happen for sex, it can happen for anything, like anything, even things that we find virtuous, like success or whatever. And so, you know, I try to help people say, like, that's the idea. One of the ideas that religious people have is that the good is ineffable, right? The good is something which is beyond everything you can imagine.
00:17:11.240 and what that does is it's like just don't think that whatever you're aiming at now is it because
00:17:17.720 you can always know that it's it's it has to be embedded in something else even if you don't know
00:17:22.560 what that is even if you can't identify it even if you don't go you know if you don't you know
00:17:27.840 believe that God exists it doesn't matter as long as you cannot hold on to something and think like
00:17:32.240 you know if I could just have that then everything will be settled and you know that's not true
00:17:37.160 because once you get it, you know, either it kind of rules over you
00:17:40.160 because you have to keep feeding it or it disappoints you
00:17:44.320 and then you fall into despair.
00:17:46.380 Yeah.
00:17:47.600 It's also the chase, I think, that gives people more, you know,
00:17:52.260 dopamine for lack of a better word than actually getting to the goal.
00:17:58.260 Just chasing the goal.
00:17:59.380 But that's why the idea of ineffable good, like the idea that if you could,
00:18:03.060 like because people would think that if I could just get that,
00:18:05.340 You have you. Yeah, yeah. All the time. I'm like that sometimes. The worst thing that could happen. Yeah. Oh, yeah. But the worst thing that could happen is that you get it right. It's like if you think that your life will be solved once you get a million dollars, then, yeah, let's talk when you get that, because you're going to you're probably going to be pretty depressed because it's not going to solve your problems.
00:18:25.100 you'll still be the same person everything but you know it won't change anything it'll just
00:18:28.580 increase actually your uh possibly increase the problems that you had at the outset you know
00:18:34.780 and so uh and so this idea that at least you know like that whatever it is that you desire that
00:18:41.260 you're going after is not the highest thing that you always have to balance it out with other goods
00:18:46.580 and that you have to aim it towards higher and higher goods ultimately you know that's love
00:18:51.240 that's good, that's true, that's beautiful.
00:18:53.540 This is what the West has identified
00:18:54.980 as what we call the transcendentals.
00:18:58.620 And that if we can kind of aim ourselves that way,
00:19:01.260 then things will get better.
00:19:03.180 And I'm hoping that people,
00:19:05.220 atheists and agnostic can kind of understand now
00:19:07.420 why you need this ineffable thing at the top, right?
00:19:10.300 You need something which transcends everything
00:19:12.380 that you can understand,
00:19:13.760 transcends everything that you can grasp
00:19:15.540 or that you can control,
00:19:17.080 maybe even is a good way to say it.
00:19:18.420 Like you can't control the infinite, you know?
00:19:20.600 so how do you describe that other than the good is there do you use words like truth and love
00:19:27.080 yeah is that what people should be aiming for as opposed to and then how do you separate the
00:19:32.920 difference between goal setting which is important but making sure that you still have this aim
00:19:39.380 towards truth and love and good at the top okay because goal setting is great trying to achieve
00:19:45.020 things that aim vaguely upward but you don't well that's what that would be the case the case is
00:19:51.220 that you if you make sure that your goal setting is is aimed upward then that will you know that
00:19:58.060 will help like if you're if your goal is to buy a lamborghini then that's not going to do much for
00:20:05.100 you like i'm sorry to say you will get it maybe you'll get it but then what is it going to do but
00:20:09.440 If your goal is to accomplish something, you know, for example, to, you know, to be able to let your family have cohesion, right, to have loving relationships with others, to be able to help those that you see that are in need, and that, you know, you know that you have to have a certain amount of success.
00:20:25.800 Or if you want to spread a message that you think is powerful and meaningful and can help others, all these goals can be something, like you said, that can give you that dopamine, like can give you that energy to continue to keep going.
00:20:37.900 but then what will happen hopefully is that there's never there's never uh first of all you
00:20:43.620 never reach it right it's like if the idea for example having a loving relationship with your
00:20:47.880 friends or with your family it's like that's a goal but it's not a goal that has an end point
00:20:52.100 it's like it's actually an infinite goal it's something that recedes as you move towards it
00:20:56.220 and you kind of love that because it's you know you can always be surprised by people and kind
00:21:00.340 of be stimulated and that ultimately is the idea of you know of a relationship with god is that god
00:21:06.440 pulls you into higher and higher states of virtue you know states of peace you know all of these
00:21:13.840 things that these are the goals we should we should want and material goals are they're fine
00:21:18.560 but they they won't bring you what you what you think sometimes yeah so going after success for
00:21:24.260 material goods is probably a hedonistic way of living and probably not going to get you where
00:21:29.200 you want but going after success so that you can do something that benefits people as a whole
00:21:35.400 that's a different form of success.
00:21:38.020 Yeah. And also, I mean, if you, for example, if you understand that you want to be an example for
00:21:42.460 your children, you want to be an example for people around you. And so you want to be disciplined,
00:21:46.680 you want to do things right. You know, all of these things are definitely good. They're all
00:21:53.980 good things. And even like you said, like if you want to succeeding in business, all these things
00:21:58.040 can be great, just as long as they're embedded in higher things. If they're just for their own sake,
00:22:04.940 then then then you'll then you'll just be disappointed you know because they don't have
00:22:09.640 enough to to you know it's it says it's it's very you people can understand it like in lower terms
00:22:16.260 like if you if your entire goal in life is eating is eating is eating good food then you'll always
00:22:23.200 be empty because it's not enough to sustain you as a human being it's enough to maybe sustain the
00:22:28.000 machine but you'll find yourself lacking and and and always either trying to increase your
00:22:33.880 you know your pleasure like trying to find more and more rare more and more subtle things to
00:22:39.000 enjoy but at some point that runs out and you you you become yeah you'll just you'll find yourself
00:22:45.060 in a sad position how did you introduce these concepts to your kids have you been talking
00:22:51.780 about these kind of pursuing higher goods since they were little yeah but i mean if you raise your
00:22:58.260 kids i think if you raise your kids in a christian vision and with with christian values if and if
00:23:04.960 you do that understanding that it's not just about some sectarian theological thing that you have to
00:23:09.880 believe but it's really a way of living then then ultimately i think those things will kind of set
00:23:15.540 themselves into your kids uh on on their own you know for example like a simple thing is something
00:23:22.000 like that truth is important right just that because truth if you say truth is more important
00:23:27.600 than your immediate needs so it's not justified to lie to get what you want it's not justified
00:23:33.560 to trick others or to you know to to act in this in a dishonest way then you're already setting
00:23:39.840 your kids on the on the right path just just even that is is a lot so that they so that they see but
00:23:47.100 obviously saying it is one thing that doesn't do much but living it that's the way to go because
00:23:53.820 your kids they watch you they don't listen to you yeah they really well they listen they listen too
00:23:58.700 but they mostly watch and they'll they'll so the best thing you can do as a parent is actually
00:24:03.520 embody the things you believe are are the best rather than just teach them i think when i my
00:24:09.740 my dad obviously like was very big on that like tell the truth there's nothing worse than lying
00:24:16.320 whatever lie you come up with is just going to bite you in the future and it turns your life
00:24:21.520 into hell like he was but um i didn't really understand the impact of lying when i was little
00:24:27.060 because sometimes i get in trouble for doing something and then it was easier at the time to
00:24:32.140 lie to not get in trouble yeah and so uh scarlet recently she did something she wasn't even going
00:24:39.700 to get in trouble like she i don't she doesn't really get in trouble um she's she's pretty easy 0.99
00:24:45.280 kid but she and i could tell she was lying she just lied about something small because she thought
00:24:50.620 i was going to be mad and i had to explain that's that's still not an excuse to lie but um i've also
00:24:58.160 decided for like parenting style that i don't get mad really um and maybe it's because she's little
00:25:06.100 she's six and so maybe you don't get mad at like kids under six because they're children and i
00:25:12.900 don't know if anger is the right emotion for a little kid yeah it's more like why did you do
00:25:18.420 that what exactly is going on and why are you acting that way not like anger um but what do
00:25:25.920 you think about that uh that reaction like is there a is there a time and place for like anger
00:25:32.360 for kids because i do feel like if you have an angry parent then they end up lying to not get
00:25:37.700 punished which is like you don't want to teach a kid that that's the way to get away with things
00:25:42.180 hey guys just popping in to remind you of air purifiers you obviously know i talk about how
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00:27:16.680 time. Links in the comments. Enjoy the rest of this episode. I would say that anger is important.
00:27:25.020 This is going to be controversial for people, but there is a reality to a certain extent in which
00:27:31.560 people have to learn to have a certain amount of healthy fear of their authority, right? In the
00:27:41.660 So if a police officer comes to arrest you, you have to know that you cannot resist arrest.
00:27:47.040 Like you have to know that you have to be polite and you have to follow along with what the authority tells you.
00:27:52.700 And this is something that you learn when you're very young.
00:27:55.440 So I think that with children, one of the things you can do, for example, is to reserve anger for very rare things.
00:28:06.180 Because, of course, the problem that you have is that if you get angry all the time, that at some point it's just noise and you see that.
00:28:12.640 Like you've seen parents are just always screaming at their kids.
00:28:15.800 And basically the kids have just like, they've learned to tune it out and they just don't care and they just don't listen anymore.
00:28:21.340 And so I think that, you know, if you are usually very calm and very, you know, just very peaceful with your kids and try to explain things and to do things.
00:28:31.320 I think that once in a while, if they really step out of bounds, if you raise your voice, if you just show that you're angry, then the effect of it will be very strong.
00:28:43.760 And the kid will, you know, because they know that this is not a normal thing.
00:28:46.660 And if it happens, it means something really serious has happened.
00:28:50.460 Yeah.
00:28:51.120 No, I think that's the right approach.
00:28:53.060 I think I've usually reserved those situations for like, you're about to do something that's going to harm you.
00:28:58.060 That's usually a thing.
00:28:59.260 like playing with a mirror that's gonna fall on them yeah or like or like a you know child running
00:29:04.300 into the street yeah and you see the car coming it's like that's a moment to scream and to like
00:29:08.660 pick take your child shake them a little bit and be like don't do not like this is you cannot do
00:29:14.220 this like you have to be scared of that of this moment i have to scare you into not killing
00:29:18.940 yourself basically yeah yeah i think that's right okay so originally i invited you on because you
00:29:26.940 put out Snow White, which is so cool. So can you talk about why, why did you decide to rewrite a
00:29:36.840 fairy tale, reillustrate it and put out this beautiful book? Well, you know, I love fairy
00:29:42.900 tales. I've loved fairy tales forever, you know, since I was a kid. And then I rediscovered the
00:29:47.600 fairy tales when I was reading the fairy tales to my children. And what I would do is I read them,
00:29:52.560 but at some point I memorized them. And then I would kind of tell them, tell them the fairy
00:29:56.660 tales and try to find ways to tell them that were interesting for them and several years ago when my
00:30:02.520 kids were homeschooling I wrote a version of Snow White as a little play that the kids were gonna
00:30:08.480 put on and I really enjoyed it and I also found I had some insights about the story about some of
00:30:14.920 the things that are a little mysterious in the in the narrative and so I that just kind of stayed
00:30:20.260 on the shelf for a while and then recently when I saw to what extent you know sadly Disney was
00:30:26.500 just dropping these fairy tales like just basically dropping them they were like we don't
00:30:30.260 want these we you know we actually don't like them anymore and so i thought okay well this is great
00:30:34.900 because these stories are you know they don't own them the the original stories obviously they have
00:30:40.160 their version but they don't own them they're amazing they're beautiful they're powerful and
00:30:44.820 you know at some point there's a saturation of cynicism you could say right and so one of the
00:30:50.240 things that's happened is if you think of shrek for example where they take these fairy tale mashups
00:30:55.640 and they turn them on their head
00:30:56.760 and they're very cynical about them
00:30:58.140 and they make, you know,
00:30:59.180 they have like the kids watch them,
00:31:00.560 but there's also all these like dirty jokes
00:31:01.960 in them for adults and stuff.
00:31:03.500 So this like real cynical take on fairy tales.
00:31:07.220 So all of that runs out at some point
00:31:09.300 because at some point you even forget
00:31:11.440 why you cared about the story in the first place.
00:31:13.700 Like why are you even cynical about it
00:31:15.300 after 10 years of making weird versions
00:31:17.900 and, you know, versions where the, you know,
00:31:21.000 Snow White is this or that strange,
00:31:23.000 you know uh incarnation of of her and so and so i knew that disney was going to make
00:31:30.080 a version of snow white for the 100th anniversary i kind of heard that through the grapevines that
00:31:34.680 was like more than two years ago and i thought this would be a great time to do this like to
00:31:40.340 just pick it up and to tell a beautiful insightful celebratory version of the story and so and so i
00:31:47.480 kind of put my i put my nose to that about two years ago started working hard on it and found
00:31:52.020 an amazing illustrator and uh and i think we did a i think i'm really proud of what we did i think
00:31:57.720 we did a great job of make telling the story in a way that's for kids but also that will provide
00:32:03.760 kind of insight for adults that's why it is that they love this story when they were kids like what
00:32:08.100 what is it that grabbed their attention um so that's it and but it's also it's also going to
00:32:12.980 be a book in a series so we're doing eight fairy tales so i'm going to take kind of the classic
00:32:17.020 fairy tales we're going to re-illustrate them and create like a also a narrative arc that runs
00:32:21.700 through all the books where like the characters will reappear and patterns will reappear and
00:32:26.280 there'll be like this kind of symphony of fairy tales I guess you could call it so that's what
00:32:30.580 I'm that I'm we're already working on the second and third book now so that is so cool uh when I
00:32:36.660 was in high school we had to I don't know for English I guess we had to bring in a piece of
00:32:41.800 written work to read to the class and I was going through Grimm's fairy tales and I'd never read
00:32:47.000 grim's fairy tales till high school and for anyone who hasn't read the real like grim's fairy tales
00:32:53.320 they are gnarly they're grim that's why we even have the word grim yeah they're it's insane like
00:33:02.020 what actually happens in um which one is it cinderella just all of them they're yeah they're
00:33:08.800 like gory they're intense and so i remember reading i think i read the entire class for the
00:33:14.160 entire class one of these random fairy tales i'd found because it was just like there's a lot going
00:33:18.320 on here so did you take the original fairy tales as opposed to kind of the versions disney put out
00:33:23.740 which are a lot nicer than the original ones well so yeah so one of the things that happened with
00:33:27.980 fairy tales i would say it started in the 19th century with kind of puritan a kind of puritan
00:33:32.220 approach to fairy tales is that people tried to asepticize these fairy tales you know in some
00:33:36.720 ways these were old stories that have been you know that people have been telling for centuries
00:33:41.240 like some old grandmother telling these kind of these edgy stories you know you can just imagine
00:33:46.700 the situation yeah you know and so so what happened in the in the 19th century especially
00:33:52.260 is that they kind of acepticized them removed a lot of the extremes and made them into like
00:33:57.160 simple morality tales uh but the reality is that they're more than that there's actually very deep
00:34:02.440 patterns like they're deep patterns in fairy tales are the closest thing i would say we have
00:34:08.100 to something like the patterns in scripture right they're not the same they're not equal to but in
00:34:13.340 terms of how much reality they they contain they're very similar to what you would find in the old
00:34:18.600 testament for example and so what i wanted to do is recapture as much as possible of the old fairy
00:34:26.600 tales without going overboard like without shocking people to the extent that now they can't pay
00:34:32.820 attention to the story anymore because they're too shocked at like you know some one of the
00:34:37.060 characters getting their eyes plucked out you know by a bird or something like some some of
00:34:41.020 the crazy stuff you know or at the end of snow white in the grins virgin they they make these
00:34:45.500 iron shoes that they heat up and they put them on the the queen so that she dances for the wedding
00:34:51.120 it's like oh my gosh it's just like insane like these crazy you know ending at the there's a lot
00:34:57.320 of like really intense stuff so i thought you know let's bring back as much as we can in the story
00:35:03.580 so a good example is there's obviously in fairy tales there's obviously references to
00:35:10.820 to sexuality and to sexual transformation especially the ones that deal with young
00:35:15.700 girls like a lot of this has to do with puberty like you can see it has to do with but you know 0.74
00:35:19.840 like so white reaches puberty she doesn't know what it means she doesn't know what's going on 0.58
00:35:23.220 all of a sudden her stepmother hates her this this man is this hunter is after her like what
00:35:28.040 the hell's going on you know she gets thrown into a loop where she has to kind of assimilate
00:35:32.960 this new world that she's thrown into so you know that's something that's really there and the the
00:35:38.840 modern fairy tale the puritan version tried to strip that out and a lot of the the cynical
00:35:44.220 post-modernists tried to sell tried to put it back in but like way you know at a higher level and
00:35:50.160 tried to say well these are only about sex these are only about about power dynamics and about
00:35:54.800 cynical you know uh kind of social dynamics and stuff and so what i wanted to do is to actually
00:36:01.260 integrated as much as possible to say there these stories do deal with this subject but it's not all
00:36:07.300 they deal with they deal with all kinds of other things you know like beauty is not just about sex
00:36:12.280 so the story of you know beauty does have something to do with sexuality but snow white obviously her
00:36:17.280 beauty has other things going on that is not cannot be reduced to that so trying to kind of
00:36:21.960 integrate all these patterns back into the story in a way that won't shock the reader but hopefully
00:36:26.820 at least for the grown-ups they'll be like oh that's why like oh that's why this is part of
00:36:31.620 the story right that's why she eats the apple that's why these things happen uh and so that's
00:36:35.980 that's the the goal let's say that's cool i'm looking forward to these that's that's really
00:36:41.220 fun well you're in the right place too like you've got you know your daughter is like just at the age
00:36:45.460 where this is going to be fun for her to to discover these so i'm i'm i can't wait to hear
00:36:49.240 what you think i know i well i wanted to read her i've been like waiting for the grimm's versions
00:36:53.740 but I remember the Grimm's version, Rumpelstiltskin.
00:36:56.500 He gets so angry at the end.
00:36:58.780 You probably know this.
00:36:59.880 He stamps his foot through the floorboards
00:37:01.960 and cuts himself in half.
00:37:04.180 I remember reading that in high school and being like,
00:37:06.920 okay, well, I haven't heard that part of the story.
00:37:09.780 Or it was Cinderella's stepsisters, 0.60
00:37:13.740 they cut off parts of their feet. 1.00
00:37:15.360 They cut off their toes, yeah.
00:37:16.360 I might keep that part in the story, actually.
00:37:18.720 Yeah?
00:37:19.300 Like one does the heel and one does the toes?
00:37:21.260 Yeah.
00:37:21.760 Oh.
00:37:22.040 I might keep that part of the story because of because especially because of the recent excess of a plastic surgery.
00:37:29.900 You know, it's like it's a it's a big thing in the culture.
00:37:32.400 And so I want to be I want people to be able to understand the dangers of it.
00:37:36.940 You know, like if you if you if you cut piece and even not just even in terms of, you know, in terms of cutting things off you in order to fit a certain mold, let's say, you know, you see that with mastectomies and all this kind of crazy things that are happening to young teenagers.
00:37:52.040 girls right now so I think having the the the stepsisters cut their toes off will be important
00:37:58.040 I'll have to find a way to do it so that it's not gory and and crazy but I think these things are
00:38:03.100 important you know so like there's a lot of these fairy tales there's a lot of things they can
00:38:06.580 communicate to us for example in Snow White you know the magic mirror there are some versions
00:38:11.340 where she had the magic mirror in her hand and that the illustrator that's working with me Heather
00:38:15.940 Paulington she's like we should use that version that she holds it in her hand and she made an
00:38:20.200 illustration of it and it's like she's holding a phone right she's just looking at herself and
00:38:24.880 taking a selfie you know and we're like yeah that's exactly it and so the phone that the mirror
00:38:31.060 is speaking to her and is comparing her to others and is telling her who's the most beautiful and is
00:38:36.740 pointing out her faults and her beauty and it's like yeah that's right that's the right time to
00:38:42.660 bring up these kind of these kind of story tropes oh that's creepy yeah well so are you putting a
00:38:49.920 modern spin on these then well so you could say that it yeah it's there i'm careful not to be
00:38:56.520 like we say these things i don't explain any of this in the story it's not like yeah i don't i
00:39:00.920 don't i don't want it to be didactic it's not uh but i would say that the the way that we make
00:39:07.280 certain elements of the story more prominent uh that's the way we do it so it's like you know
00:39:11.980 making the mirror prominent making these moments where she looks at herself and she kind of gets
00:39:16.340 feedback from it and she becomes obsessed at some point in my version where she's she actually she
00:39:21.020 can't stop herself from looking in the mirror and constantly asking it if it's and as she's doing
00:39:25.240 that she's kind of destroying herself you know she's making her she's destroying herself because
00:39:29.320 of her jealousy towards snow white and so it's like i'm hoping that people even if it's not
00:39:34.140 conscious will kind of gather they'll be able to gather those those insights into themselves and
00:39:39.780 children will see the pattern of behavior even if even though i never say that it's like a phone or
00:39:44.960 but I would never do something.
00:39:46.320 That would be horrible in a fairy tale.
00:39:47.820 It would just be so didactic.
00:39:49.800 The best versions of those fairy tales,
00:39:51.740 other than the Grimm's versions,
00:39:53.920 which are just horrifying,
00:39:56.160 are the Disney, the old Disney versions
00:39:58.000 from like, what is it, the 30s until...
00:40:01.200 Yeah, the Disney movie was amazing.
00:40:02.940 Like 90s.
00:40:03.800 Yeah.
00:40:04.100 Yeah, those are amazing.
00:40:07.120 The Disney Snow White, it's not just...
00:40:09.620 It's weird because the Disney story of Snow White,
00:40:12.380 it's really the beginning of a whole era
00:40:14.660 because people don't realize that it's the very first long form animated movie ever made is disney
00:40:21.540 snow white people didn't believe that it was possible people were like you can't make an
00:40:25.500 you can't make an hour and a half animation right animation should be 10 minutes or should be these
00:40:30.380 little clips but disney really took it on and made this amazing and invented all these technologies
00:40:36.080 all these new ways of animating in order to to to develop this movie um and so and and and people
00:40:43.420 were just amazed at it and it started a whole like an entire century where basically disney
00:40:49.160 held children's attention and kind of ruled over children's attention and for a while they
00:40:54.900 were good stewards of that attention because the stories they put out were very powerful and
00:40:59.840 beautiful and they also had that balance you know that that your father or that i talk about that
00:41:06.060 should be in a kind of mythical story where you have everything is there and kind of balanced out
00:41:11.160 but then you know they like all of a lot of the entertainment industry they've become captured by
00:41:16.560 ideology and ideology makes for boring stories so it's a it's actually and the same what happening
00:41:22.640 in books too i mean you have a child you know that you go into a bookstore to buy books for kids and 0.64
00:41:27.360 it's just unbearable like it's crap it's just bad quality bad writing ideology everywhere you know
00:41:34.260 it's like you you you have to you always have to kind of look twice at what your kid is reading 0.98
00:41:39.300 because you, you know, it's so insipid, there's people just trying to get into your child's mind
00:41:43.780 in order to convert them to their cause, that you have to be attentive to that. And so in some ways,
00:41:50.000 that's a horrible place that a lot of parents find themselves in, but it's also an opportunity
00:41:54.320 for people who want to tell good stories. Because in a moment of really bad, horrible, boring,
00:42:00.280 ideological stories, then good stories should shine brighter. And so I would say, encourage
00:42:05.500 people to it's okay to criticize i do it all the time but not just criticize but hopefully you know
00:42:11.580 take on the mantle yourself you know learn the stories tell them to your kids encourage people
00:42:15.760 that are doing it uh and i think that we could i think that we we're going to win in the end because
00:42:21.600 there's a reality to these stories that is objective that there's a reason why we care
00:42:26.800 for them there's a reason why we why we love them for centuries is because they have something
00:42:31.900 mysterious in them that is true to human attention that has that is true to what people care about
00:42:37.400 even if we don't understand what that is you know it's still there because we've been telling these
00:42:42.440 stories for centuries so if you try to go away from that to just push your ideological ideas
00:42:47.960 then people will just stop caring they'll just find it boring and that's what's happening
00:42:52.680 isn't it crazy how much jk rowling has been gone after in the last like four years isn't it insane
00:43:02.800 for a book that everybody who's going after her read and loves 15 and loves it's it's like that
00:43:13.560 really shocks me even like the response and twitter's well x now is such a weird and could
00:43:19.980 be toxic plaque platform but it just shocks me the response to jk rowling who wrote these stories
00:43:26.880 that are unbelievable yeah about it's interesting like this is this is what happens like even with
00:43:33.680 the this is what like this is what happened with snow white and this is what happened with harry
00:43:37.880 potter is that these stories have in them true patterns of human existence and those patterns
00:43:45.460 have certain structures, certain categories that just play themselves out. And if you catch them
00:43:51.000 right, then people love those stories. That's why people love Star Wars. That's why people love
00:43:55.380 these stories. But those are real, like they really do exist. And so the weird position
00:44:03.200 people find themselves in is loving Harry Potter, because it basically captures the patterns of
00:44:10.780 human attention, but then at the same time hating Harry Potter because they're caught up in their
00:44:16.160 ideological thing. And what they want is that they hope is that they could twist Harry Potter
00:44:20.940 to their will. Like they could make Harry Potter into something that would fit their ideology.
00:44:27.020 And obviously they're trying to do that with the author first. It's like, if we can just shame the
00:44:32.500 author into believing the things we believe and going along with what we think is true, you know,
00:44:37.600 then, then we'll win and we'll have Harry Potter on our side. But the problem is that the problem
00:44:43.200 is that the Harry Potter that would come out of that, you would hate it. You would find it boring.
00:44:47.600 You would find it annoying because it would just be propaganda. And so it's like this weird moment
00:44:54.000 that it's like the J.K. Rowling thing is a great example of how insane and contradictory this is,
00:44:59.560 you know, because it's like, you love Star Wars. And then you're like, oh, this is so cool. We're
00:45:04.760 gonna take it over and we're gonna we're gonna just make it fit in this beautiful political
00:45:08.880 thing and then why does everybody hate the movies why is it that these things are all failing you
00:45:13.740 know that's how it is it's just yeah it's funny it is funny um how do you feel so my husband grew
00:45:22.100 up in a very christian household and his family's really like a really good they're all really good
00:45:28.300 people which i and i feel like i didn't meet very many really good people weirdly enough i guess i
00:45:34.500 don't know if they're not very common or something i don't know what was going on or the schools i
00:45:38.780 was at or something so i was like surprised at how good they were but he didn't watch harry potter
00:45:42.600 growing up um because there was this and i remember hearing about this when i was in grade
00:45:47.640 two where it was like there's a subset of people that think harry potter's evil yeah like and
00:45:52.900 mostly like christian people that think you know it's witchcraft and that's evil um what are your
00:45:58.520 views on that and how do you well i know what my views are on that i probably know what your views
00:46:04.000 are on that but like how how come that got confused into oh that's evil instead of looking
00:46:09.480 at the overarching theme of like good versus evil that's in harry potter okay so christians don't
00:46:16.540 like witchcraft and don't like magic you know uh but those same christians would they'll read lord
00:46:24.660 of the rings and they'll love lord of the rings right and so yeah those same christians will read
00:46:28.660 c.s lewis and they'll love c.s lewis but in those books like in lord of the rings basically lord of
00:46:33.780 the Rings is the template for all fantasy fiction that we have. And so the idea of sorcerers and
00:46:40.460 all this kind of stuff that Tolkien was able to bring together crystallized a kind of medieval
00:46:46.080 mythology, you could say, of Merlin and all of these kind of characters that existed in the West
00:46:51.960 into modern narrative. And that became the background and the trope for everything
00:46:58.240 that came afterwards including Harry Potter and so it's like you like you like Gandalf but you
00:47:05.860 hate Dumbledore it's like I understand and so and so but I think it's it's so you could say that in
00:47:12.760 in in Lord of the Rings the magic is meant to serve a higher purpose right it's like the things
00:47:20.480 we do this power that we have is meant to serve higher and higher purposes and the problem with
00:47:26.320 kind of modern magic or occultist magic is that magic is meant to serve your will. And I think
00:47:34.320 that this is, in some ways, the problem that people face when they look at Harry Potter. It's
00:47:38.000 like magic is just like a bunch of technical things. It's just like an increase in power.
00:47:43.040 And it's not clear whether or not it is meant to serve the higher good. It's just like, here's a
00:47:50.880 power you have, you can develop it, and you can kind of develop all the technical skills around
00:47:54.620 it so i think that that's that's what's hiding behind that but on the surface it's just like you
00:48:00.080 know witchcraft is is devil worship and they they relate the occult to to you know to kind of
00:48:07.420 satanism or witchcraft the way that it was represented in the uh in in the 16th 17th century
00:48:13.340 in europe so i i understand people's aversion to to harry potter like i get it it's but i i think
00:48:20.520 that it's a little simple let's say you know i i still think that in general they're good stories
00:48:25.560 okay how do you feel about halloween then the end the aversion yeah that's just this is really i
00:48:30.680 think halloween's a good example of what you could call a puritan spirit taken too far which is this
00:48:38.100 is the same type of attitude that took all the weird stuff out of the fairy tales which is this
00:48:42.620 idea that everything has to have this kind of transparent purity to it. And everything has to
00:48:50.480 be, you know, objectively, how can I say this, like, objectively, always, like, like, I could
00:48:59.460 just say that transparently pure, right. But the reality is that the world doesn't, doesn't,
00:49:03.440 doesn't work that way. You know, it's like, it just, it just doesn't, it's, the world is more
00:49:07.840 complicated and more messy than you think and uh you know for carnivals and festivals of inversion
00:49:15.620 are everywhere and in every culture what's what's a festival a festival of inversion yeah an upside
00:49:22.100 down festival right so a carnival is something like that so think about uh you know during a
00:49:28.440 carnival you do things that you usually don't do you dress up you wear masks you you know you you
00:49:34.860 usually there's acrobatics involved, people spinning and turning upside down and making jokes
00:49:39.220 and pulling tricks and doing all these things that are not straightforward. It's like, you know,
00:49:44.800 you have things that are straightforward and directed towards purpose and identity. And then
00:49:49.060 you also have a kind of messiness and inversion and upside down behavior that you can notice on
00:49:55.220 the edge. And that's what carnivals of inversions are. And every culture has them. So usually like
00:50:01.180 before a fast you know if you before uh before lent for christians they would have something
00:50:06.880 called mardi gras which you've probably seen mardi gras parades you know obviously now they've become
00:50:11.520 crazy but they've always been a little bit like that they've always been a little you know a
00:50:16.760 little off color you know lewd maybe a little there's a bit of uh you know there's cross-dressing 0.86
00:50:23.120 and and uh and funny things that don't make sense you know people on stilts or you know all this
00:50:29.160 kind of aesthetic. You could call it an aesthetic of chaos or an aesthetic of inversion. And that
00:50:37.340 serves a function in a society, right? So basically you have order, right? You have the ordered world
00:50:42.640 that everything is ordered and purposeful and moving towards what it's supposed to be. But then
00:50:47.620 you know that those things exist, right? You know that there are messy, chaotic things, and there
00:50:53.860 are monsters and there are there are places where things don't fit and inversions and excesses and
00:50:59.560 all that you know and so carnival festivals basically take them out to play for one day
00:51:05.100 and then put them back right and what that does is it acts like a valve first of all to let some
00:51:11.880 of that stuff out because it builds up after a while and it also acts as a reminder of what's
00:51:16.160 normal it's like a counter example it's saying this is carnival all right let's have fun now
00:51:24.300 for a day and let's be a little wild and now let's go back to normal so it's like oh that's
00:51:28.820 what normal is and that's what not normal is so you kind of you kind of understand how that works
00:51:33.660 and and halloween that's what halloween is i mean halloween is basically you know the a day of the
00:51:40.480 dead where the dead walk the earth which is something that doesn't happen which is something
00:51:45.700 It means that all the broken, kind of monstrous, chaotic, you know, funny, slightly sexy, slightly, you know, like all the things that we don't usually put outside in the world.
00:51:59.300 Now, all of a sudden, they come out and we see them and we're like, wow, this is crazy.
00:52:03.340 This is wild.
00:52:03.940 It's kind of like going to a county fair and going on, you know, and looking at all the bright lights and all the people dressed up and the clowns and all that.
00:52:11.900 So that's what's going on.
00:52:12.740 and then it's like all right one day and then we go back to to normal and so you know this by the
00:52:17.860 way in the bible there's a feast called purim which is there it's a it's a it's a jewish feast
00:52:22.840 and jews still celebrate it today where one day a year they dress up and and costumes and do all
00:52:27.960 this kind of wild stuff and you know they spin around and they drink and they dance and they do 0.82
00:52:32.320 all these things but it's just it's just one day so so and that's something god has that some is
00:52:38.440 Is that something God's put in place for people?
00:52:40.960 That's what Purim is that exactly.
00:52:44.180 And that's what Marty...
00:52:45.100 So obviously you have to be careful on those days
00:52:47.960 because you could do something to compromise yourself
00:52:51.120 and you want to be careful.
00:52:53.160 In some ways it can also expose you.
00:52:55.120 It can expose your vices if you're not careful.
00:52:58.240 And so the idea is to basically kind of get a bit of wild out
00:53:02.740 so you can see it,
00:53:03.820 so you can kind of handle it in a way
00:53:06.460 that's not completely immoral or completely dangerous and then put it back and then move on
00:53:12.400 because if you don't do that what happens is at some point it breaks out and then it takes over
00:53:18.420 right if you don't know what the monsters look like and you don't understand what the chaos
00:53:23.100 looks like at some point it just it just basically sweeps in i think a lot of yeah that that i didn't
00:53:29.660 know what part of the bible is that in do you remember so the the feast of purim is established
00:53:34.540 it's it's complicated it's established in the book of esther oh the book of esther is a so the
00:53:39.700 book of esther is basically like a kind of most like a liturgical text for purim and so you know
00:53:44.780 in the in the i don't know exactly what date the feast of purim was established but it's you know
00:53:50.920 jews like i said jews still celebrate purim today most christians don't though most christians have
00:53:55.640 something like mardi gras or they've had in the past they've had something like the feast of fools
00:54:00.180 uh and then hallows eve right and so so if you want to look at how halloween functions what it
00:54:06.580 actually is it's actually a catholic it's the eve of all hallows right that's what halloween means
00:54:12.160 and so what it was in the past is that all hallows was the day that you celebrated that you prayed
00:54:19.340 for the dead right and then after that was all saints which is the day that you celebrated all
00:54:25.200 those that have passed that are now in God's presence. And so it was, and so then what ended
00:54:30.520 up being developed was before All Hallows, there was like a little carnival in some ways in which
00:54:37.460 the more chaotic aspects of death and the more kind of, you know, wild aspects of what death
00:54:44.140 brings and the strange and the weird and the trick and all of these things that, that kind of break
00:54:49.240 down order so that we can move towards something like a celebration of the holy saints that have
00:54:55.620 that have gone to to god so that was the usual order of things sadly now we just have halloween
00:55:00.960 but we can still understand its function if you can see how it lines up with those other feasts
00:55:05.800 and how it was like a kind of procession towards something glorious not just not just a feast of
00:55:11.540 the upside down i mean now the problem is that we basically live in halloween all the time
00:55:15.260 it's like our world is a carnival that's why people say it's clown world is because the
00:55:19.600 carnival has basically taken over yeah i i feel like i feel like a lot of people who aren't
00:55:26.260 christians are probably put off by the idea of christianity thinking that oh if the goal is to
00:55:31.900 never sin then i won't be able to do anything fun ever i like i can see that from an agnostic
00:55:39.300 perspective like it's a simple perspective but i don't think they understand that
00:55:44.040 like even factions of christianity that say don't drink ever because drinking is bad
00:55:51.080 or don't use electricity or you know who knows like what direction people can go in
00:55:56.600 but that's not what i got out of the bible anyway no i don't think so i i don't know how it's like
00:56:03.020 what you're talking about puritans it really is the idea that the joys we have and the pleasures
00:56:10.080 we have should always be aligned towards higher goods. And if we're not careful about that,
00:56:16.540 then we kind of fall into these cycles of addiction and these cycles of obsession. And so
00:56:23.060 the idea that in some way, and it depends how strict the different traditions are, but in some
00:56:30.360 way sexuality has to be aimed towards something higher. And so you meet someone and then the
00:56:37.260 pleasure is there and the joy is there but it's also towards the purpose of forming a bond forming
00:56:42.060 communion bringing a child into the world becoming a family seeing that beautiful relationship that
00:56:48.120 develops and being a little kind of microcosm of everything like being a little a little society
00:56:53.120 that you that you live in that's that's the highest that's moving towards highest and so it's
00:57:00.120 like if there's nothing wrong with with with sex and enjoying that as long as it's it's kind of
00:57:05.540 anchored in something more. If it's just for itself, then you have hookup culture and despair
00:57:10.100 and people who just kind of move from one partner to the other and then finally, you know,
00:57:15.180 basically ruin their lives and end up alone and lonely in their 40s or whatever. And I think,
00:57:23.060 and so that's just an example, but that's truth of everything, right? It's like the joys that we
00:57:27.500 have, it's a weird paradox, but the idea is that whatever joy you have, if you are willing to,
00:57:35.080 in some ways submit it to something higher sacrifice it for something higher then you get
00:57:40.060 it in its fullness right it's like a meal with friends in which you're enjoying each other's
00:57:46.540 presence will be more pleasurable right then then the best food you could have that you've you know
00:57:53.420 you got up at one in the morning out of an insane craving and you're like just eating the best food
00:57:58.720 in quotation marks, that will not provide you with a higher joy. But if you do it, if you're
00:58:06.320 with friends and it's like this thing that's kind of participating in higher goods, then
00:58:09.440 you'll get the most of it. And that's the paradox of pleasure, you could say.
00:58:14.520 What are your views on the like red pill bros push towards polygamy? Like I never, I didn't 0.91
00:58:22.120 even hear what polygamy was until I was like 15. Like I didn't even know people thought like that
00:58:27.980 anymore but i wasn't aware of like different cultures around the world i was much more naive
00:58:31.920 the idea of having several wives yeah why is this have you have you heard this it's in the red pill
00:58:37.580 community that they're like i'm sure it exists i'm not i wouldn't be i'm not surprised they would 0.96
00:58:41.480 exist these guys are all going to become muslim like they're just moving towards islam uh you 0.51
00:58:47.460 know christianity christianity is is has been from the beginning a monogamous uh a monogamous
00:58:54.160 thing. And it's there in the words of Christ that ultimately the joining of a duality, right,
00:59:01.260 the joining of two opposites together, that is the highest image of what, let's say, of the union of
00:59:08.000 the person with God. And so the marriage as two people coming together and becoming one, that
00:59:13.440 becomes an image of our relationship with God. And so, you know, the idea of polygamy, you know,
00:59:22.620 let's say, reduces the relationship of, let's say, reduces the relationship between men and
00:59:31.320 women as something like a master and servants, ultimately, is what that does. And I think that
00:59:38.060 that is, at least in the Christian vision, that is not what we're called to, right? It's like,
00:59:43.640 we're actually called, God is our master, but God is also seen as our lover, as seen as the one that
00:59:51.760 wants to bring our life into his that we can participate fully in his joy in his love and
00:59:58.840 and that's why christianity is monogamous because because it's not just a submit to the higher
01:00:05.140 principle thing although it's part of it but it's not just that it really is this this kind of dance
01:00:10.340 where we move into into a relate a true relationship and a true union with god does that make sense
01:00:17.040 said in some ways it yeah yeah yeah but it that's why that's why in certain that's why in certain
01:00:22.420 traditions it's still permissible and it's usually because that is the way they perceive reality and
01:00:28.700 that's the way they perceive god as well okay that makes sense i just thought it was funny that it's
01:00:33.900 kind of permeating into the red pill western culture like i would say most most people um
01:00:40.080 who have who consider them red-pilled on youtube what they preach is polygamy blatantly because
01:00:47.920 they said that's that's just the way of men who are very dominant it's to have 12 wives
01:00:54.080 or to have and that's just how it's supposed to be naturally from evolution that's what they say
01:01:00.760 yeah well you know and i think
01:01:03.480 so let's look at it objectively like let's look at it objectively the greatest even in terms of
01:01:11.720 total red pill let me take a red pill position here for a moment it's like the empires that
01:01:17.680 have been the most powerful and have lasted the longest and have had the most reach you could say
01:01:27.120 let's let's say rome for example rome was mainly was mainly monogamous in its in its structure
01:01:35.560 although there was a kind of practical polygamy where you know guys would probably sleep around
01:01:39.480 and stuff but like there was a there was a main monogamy in terms of social structure
01:01:44.340 and then christianity takes that even further and then you know let's say
01:01:49.920 there's a reason why the west expanded it to become almost a global a global influence and
01:01:59.040 monogamy is is part of that because it is ultimately the best the best bond and the best
01:02:06.340 way to to raise children that will have the strength and the capacity to to take over from
01:02:12.540 you if there is that strong that strong bond and that strong relationship at least that's what i
01:02:17.640 That's what I think. So I don't think I think that even in terms of, you know, the let's say that even in terms of the red pill bros that try to look at it just purely in terms of material causes, they should take into account the reason why the West developed in this direction and not think that it's purely accidental, that there are actual reasons why that happened.
01:02:39.320 They probably just put themselves at the top and they're like, no, I'm the outlier, though. I can do it.
01:02:45.020 thing that's the thing about all these guys that's hilarious is that is like you think that's right
01:02:49.920 but then then you think you're going to be the one with the 12 wives or you're just going to be the
01:02:53.960 eunuch who's castrated and is protecting the harem it's like that's not a you know it's not it's not
01:02:59.800 a great uh you know it's just funny that people always think that they're going to be at the top
01:03:03.900 when like you see that in a lot of people that are kind of that have a tendency towards monarchism
01:03:10.440 uh you know sometimes you talk to them and you realize it's because oh you think you're going
01:03:14.600 to be the king that's why you're that's why you have that position that's funny yes that's exactly
01:03:20.100 it though that's definitely it oh that's good okay well jonathan it was nice talking to you
01:03:28.020 i'm really excited about your books i think they'll be so good for people i'm definitely
01:03:32.260 getting them all oh thanks okay yeah i can't wait to hear what you think when you get them
01:03:36.620 i'll be i'll be i'll be wonderful i'm like where's the gore no just kidding no i'm sure it'll be good
01:03:43.540 it'll be good if i can read them to scarlet and there's not too much gore there's a little bit
01:03:49.240 of gore okay good not a lot just to keep things spicy just there's a there is blood you can't
01:03:53.460 have snow white without a bit of blood oh wow okay that sounds good well thank you again for coming
01:03:59.660 on thank you thanks for having me on