0:00

Hello everyone. I'm speaking once

0:02

again with Jonathan Pagiot today. He's a French-Canadian

0:14

liturgical

0:21

artist and icon carver, known

0:23

for his artistic work featured in museums

0:26

across the world. He carves Eastern

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Orthodox and other traditional images and

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teaches an online carving class. He

0:33

also runs a YouTube channel dedicated

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to the exploration of symbolism across

0:37

history and religions.

0:39

Well, Mr. Pagiot, here we

0:41

are in London. That's right. We're going

0:43

to be meeting with the Alliance

0:46

for Responsible Citizenship

0:48

people here this week, right, for everybody

0:51

watching and listening. We're trying to get that moving

0:53

along and figure out how to structure

0:55

the convention.

0:57

And we're

0:59

thinking about trying to make it as musical an event

1:02

as possible. I've been using – I

1:04

have music at the beginning of each of my lectures now.

1:07

A man named David Cotter's been playing classical

1:09

guitar and then

1:12

electric guitar to follow up

1:14

with that. Interesting. Yeah, and it's really good.

1:16

It really, really helps

1:19

the audience focus. And

1:21

Tammy and I focus backstage and it sets

1:23

a high bar for excellence, which

1:26

is helpful. And so hopefully

1:29

we can integrate that into this art conference.

1:32

And so what have you been working on? Well,

1:34

I've been – obviously I've been doing a lot of speaking,

1:37

but the big thing that I'm focused on right now

1:39

is I'm writing fairy tales. You

1:42

know, one of the things – you know, we've been complaining,

1:44

a lot of people are complaining about the way the stories

1:46

are going, you know, in the movies

1:48

and the way that stories are being told to children

1:51

right now. And I thought instead of complaining,

1:53

maybe we could try to take charge of that

1:56

instead and just start to retell

1:58

the stories.

1:59

It's an interesting thing that happened

2:02

in the 1930s. When we look at

2:04

Disney's Snow White, we think that

2:06

this

2:07

is old story. It's the traditional

2:09

and made total sense for Disney to make

2:11

this old story. In the 1920s and

2:13

30s, that's not what was going on.

2:18

In the 1920s and 30s, there were two

2:20

major studios competing with each other.

2:23

There was Fleischer Studios and Disney.

2:26

Fleischer was doing the crazy, wild jazz.

2:29

Their images had Betty Boop and

2:31

they had all these transforming

2:34

characters, a lot of demons, a lot of ghosts,

2:36

all this weird stuff. A lot

2:38

of marijuana and fluid stimulus. Yeah, a lot of drug-influenced

2:41

imagery. They did a version

2:43

of Snow White in the early 1930s, which

2:46

was so deconstructed and strange

2:48

that it was barely recognizable. You

2:52

really had to know the story to even know that it was Snow

2:54

White because it was so weird. When

2:57

Disney finally made his Snow White,

2:59

it was also in some ways a recapturing

3:01

of the traditional story in a world that was chaotic

3:05

and, let's say, slipping. I

3:08

feel like maybe that's what we need to do now, is

3:10

that instead of complaining, we should tell

3:13

better stories. One of the things we want

3:15

to do is I started writing fairy tales.

3:17

We're putting out a version of Snow

3:19

White. We're kick-starting it on

3:21

June 6th. Then I'm going

3:24

to put out eight fairy tales,

3:26

like really the traditional fairy tales, four female-led

3:29

and four male-led. We're

3:32

going to learn from the postmodern moment.

3:34

It's going to be like a fairy tale world, kind of

3:36

like Shrek or Into the Woods, where all the

3:38

fairy tale characters cross and their stories

3:41

kind of touch each other. But the

3:43

purpose won't be to be cynical and dark

3:46

about the intentions of the characters, but try

3:48

to, let's say, give people insight

3:50

about what the stories are about. When

3:53

you say we, who's the we in the world? Well,

3:56

it's me, but then I'm also working with some illustrators.

3:58

So for the Snow White, I'm working with... working with a woman

4:00

named Heather Paulington, who's worked in

4:02

Hollywood for many years. She's worked with

4:05

Disney and all the big companies, all the

4:07

big franchises. And so,

4:09

we're trying to put together this, we actually

4:11

have put together this first book. And then

4:13

after that, I'm gonna work with other illustrators.

4:16

I'm also starting a publishing company, the Symbolic

4:18

World Press, and I've already hired a few people

4:20

to kind of get that going. And it's

4:22

really in some ways to kind of, to rather

4:25

capture the, recapture the culture, right? Take it

4:27

back instead of

4:29

complaining

4:29

that it's slipping away from us. Yeah.

4:32

I wrote a fairy tale screenplay. Yes.

4:35

The Water of Life. Yeah. Right, and I've

4:38

written

4:39

and composed,

4:41

I think five, well, there must be 20 songs

4:43

in it, I would think, but we've already recorded

4:46

four of them. And looking into

4:48

having it made into an animated movie, I mean,

4:50

that technology is changing so

4:52

quickly, it's hard to exactly know how to approach

4:55

that. Yeah, what's the easiest way to approach it? Yeah,

4:57

but I took the Grimm's Brother fairy

4:59

tale, Water of Life, and I stayed

5:02

fairly close to it, although I wrote music

5:04

for it, lyrics for it and so forth. And so

5:07

that was very entertaining project. It's a

5:09

very deep fairy tale and very nicely structured.

5:11

No one's done anything with that

5:13

particular fairy tale before. And

5:15

it's a good time to do that, I think, because

5:18

when you look at Disney's Snow White, it

5:20

was perfect. I mean, it was so beautiful

5:22

and so powerful. And then when you see what's

5:25

been happening in the past decade

5:27

and how the fairy tales have been kind of twisted,

5:30

especially things like Shrek and fairy tales like

5:32

that, where it's fine to do that, it's kind

5:34

of like commenting or twisting

5:36

the fairy tale, turning it upside down to

5:38

see what's going on with it, making fun of it. And that's

5:41

fine for a while, but after a while, it's

5:43

better to get back to the actual stories, just

5:45

so we even remember why we like these

5:47

stories in the first place, or why we remember

5:50

them especially. Snow White,

5:53

all these stories of these female-led

5:55

fairy tales, they're very powerful in

5:58

what they can do. And so if

6:00

we forget them or if we try to twist them, then

6:02

we're also twisting in some ways the

6:05

fabric of Western civilization.

6:07

Because these old stories, they kind of lie at the bottom

6:09

of... All these folk stories,

6:11

they're kind of like... I like to

6:13

think of them as kind of like tuning forks for

6:15

civilization. All

6:18

these stories that people have been telling for centuries

6:21

that there's an emergent

6:23

part of it, there's all these variations of all these stories.

6:26

And then there's a selection part, which is how

6:29

some versions are remembered through

6:30

the centuries and they get retold and then

6:32

they kind of change and get retold. So they get refined

6:35

like, almost like gold.

6:37

And so in those are really

6:40

are... They're the things you can't forget. That's

6:42

right. Yeah. And

6:44

that can't would mean two things. It means you literally can't forget them

6:46

because they embed themselves in your memory, but

6:48

also that you forget them at your peril. Yeah.

6:52

I was being thinking about that with

6:54

this postmodernist notion. So

6:56

one of the claims of postmodernism

6:59

is that there's no

7:00

metanarrative. And we, you

7:02

and I have talked a fair bit about the fractal

7:05

structure of narrative. And I talked

7:07

to Carl Friston about object perception

7:09

itself. And I asked him if he thought

7:12

that the perception of an object was a narrative

7:14

in and of itself. And so, and

7:16

he said, yes. And that's

7:18

associated with the notion that when

7:21

you see an object, you're actually perceiving

7:23

something like its functional utility and not

7:25

its objective qualities, let's say. And

7:28

so its narrative is all the way down,

7:30

right, to the very basis

7:32

of what you would perceive as a singular

7:35

object. So even the

7:37

concept of perceptual unity is narrative

7:39

in structure. And if

7:42

that's true, then the postmodernist idea

7:44

that there's no grand unifying

7:46

narrative is an argument of convenience. Because

7:48

what the postmodernists essentially do is

7:51

allow the narrative to be fragmented to

7:53

the point that's maximally convenient

7:56

for whatever the hell they're up to. And

7:58

say, well,

7:59

there's nothing else. Above this, yeah,

8:01

well, that's very convenient, guys, but

8:04

everything, so without

8:06

a unifying narrative, you have

8:09

fragmentation and disunity, and

8:11

that's associated neuropsychologically

8:14

with anxiety and hopelessness. And

8:16

so- But what's great about the fairytales is that

8:18

they actually deal with that, exactly.

8:21

So in one way, what you could say is that

8:23

the basic story structure, Campbell had

8:26

this whole hero's journey, which

8:28

is powerful, I think he captures

8:29

something real, but you can reduce the

8:32

story to basic one, like a one move,

8:34

right? Like down and up. Basically

8:37

problem and then dealing with the problem,

8:39

right? Situation, problem or question,

8:42

and then dealing with the question. And that can

8:44

help us understand why it's related to object perception,

8:46

because that's what it is, right? You

8:49

don't do it consciously, but you're constantly

8:51

kind of asking what's important, what's

8:54

relevant. And you can imagine when you see something

8:56

that you don't know what it is, it's

8:59

a crisis, especially if it's coming at

9:01

you in a way. You have to answer

9:03

that question and it can be

9:05

a life or death situation. You end up in

9:08

a place where you don't know what's happening, you don't know

9:10

what's coming towards you and you have to answer that. And

9:12

I think the story kind of kept, the basic

9:15

story pattern capture that. And the fairytales,

9:18

most of them, they capture that very much,

9:21

because for example, Snow White, which we're

9:23

telling now, it has that story.

9:25

So Snow White, things happen to her,

9:29

something changes and then she ends up in

9:32

the forest with these little monsters.

9:35

With dwarf men. That's right. Yeah,

9:39

that's the eternal predicament of

9:41

women is to be surrounded by dwarfed

9:43

men. Yeah. But you can understand

9:46

it, it has multiple levels, but you can

9:48

understand as the very

9:50

transformation of a young woman, it does have

9:52

to do with puberty. Snow White pretty much has to

9:54

do with puberty. I'm pretty sure that's what's

9:56

going on there is that as she reaches

9:59

puberty.

9:59

she deals with all the

10:02

problems of puberty, you

10:04

could say, or that transformation. It's a question,

10:07

what the hell is happening to me? What

10:09

is going on? And I don't have the answer. And

10:11

especially for a young woman, this cycle

10:14

of menstruation, it's annoying and

10:16

it's painful. And it's, what is this? Why

10:18

is, what is happening to me? And so

10:21

the story of Snow White has this moment where

10:23

as she becomes possible, she comes into

10:26

competition with the queen, right? She comes to the moment where she

10:28

can now be in competition with the queen. Then

10:30

she falls into, she goes into

10:33

the woods, into the space of chaos, but then

10:35

she also, she falls

10:37

in with men that can't be her mate. Idiosynchrosy

10:40

is a masculinity. Say that

10:42

again. Idiosynchrosy is a masculinity. All

10:44

the things about masculinity that are

10:46

kind of annoying, like Disney

10:49

captures it really well. With the various

10:51

words. With the kind of grouchy and like there's

10:54

all these different kind of

10:55

aspects of masculinity. Yeah, they're not united.

10:58

You can think about those,

11:00

each of those dwarfs as

11:02

the embodiment of a fragmentary narrative.

11:05

Exactly, a fragmentary. A micro narrative

11:07

that isn't, that isn't the print. If you could

11:09

mix all the dwarfs together and

11:11

extract out the best, you'd have a prince. Exactly.

11:14

Yeah. And then

11:16

Snow White gets caught in that world

11:18

and then she has to, she has to learn,

11:20

especially for a traditional worldview, she

11:23

has to learn the job of a woman, right? She

11:25

has to learn to clean and to cook and do that. And it's like,

11:27

what is this for? Like what, you know, she

11:30

gets all the problems. And that's in the service to

11:32

those dwarfs too, weirdly

11:32

enough. That's also the point

11:35

of modern women too, is that I'm doing all this cooking

11:37

and cleaning for nothing but dwarfs. That's

11:39

right, exactly. And so then, I mean,

11:41

obviously that all leads to her dying,

11:44

you could say, or falling asleep. There

11:46

are many iterations of her falling asleep in

11:48

the story, they're all related, right?

11:51

She falls asleep and then she's woken up by dwarfs,

11:53

which is like, hmm. Right. That's not

11:55

gonna do it. Why wake up at all? That's not gonna do it. And

11:57

then, you know, work and learn to clean.

11:59

and do all that stuff and kind of live in the forest. And

12:02

then ultimately that leads to her second

12:04

falling asleep and then being

12:06

woken up by the right mate. And

12:09

so the solution. Then she finds the reason for

12:11

all of this. So what's the reason for this cycle

12:14

of transformation? What's the reason for all these changes

12:16

in her body, in her life

12:18

as she's kind of in that transition

12:21

and then finding her mate

12:24

basically, finding her husband, finding

12:26

her prince, that answers the question.

12:28

So do you think as well, in

12:33

Sleeping Beauty, of course the

12:35

princess is woken up by a kiss from

12:37

the right mate too. But I always thought

12:39

that

12:39

it was useful to read that story on

12:42

two levels simultaneously. What

12:46

a woman in

12:48

fortunate circumstances is going to find the proper

12:51

mate, but at the same time she's

12:53

going to awaken the part of her that's capable

12:55

of a heroic quest as well and to integrate

12:58

that. And so that waking

13:00

up as a consequence of being kissed by the prince

13:02

is also, what would you say, integrating

13:05

that capacity for I would say

13:07

heroic adventure into the feminine role. So

13:11

you want to find that in a man, but you also want to

13:13

find that

13:14

in your own. Yeah, of course. Yeah, well,

13:16

so I was talking to my daughter-in-law the other day about

13:19

my son and her. We've

13:22

all got together and bought a building to

13:24

put this new corporation we're working on in. She's

13:28

off to work and she

13:30

has a three-year-old and a one-year-old and is feeling

13:32

some separation from them. And one of the things

13:34

we talked through is the fact that

13:36

it's perfectly reasonable for her to go to

13:39

work,

13:39

assuming your children are also being cared for, because

13:43

it's very important for her to model

13:46

to her children the fact that adults

13:48

have

13:49

important adult activity

13:52

to engage in. Partly because the children

13:54

have to see that because they're going to be adults or they

13:56

end up in the Peter Pan world. It's like, well,

13:58

why would I give up the place?

13:59

of childhood to undertake

14:02

the responsibilities of adulthood if

14:04

there's nothing of value in that. And it

14:06

seems perfectly reasonable to me that adult

14:09

women can model adult behaviour

14:12

as well as taking care of children. And we

14:14

know too that if you look at

14:17

the best predictors of,

14:19

well, here's a couple of different facts.

14:23

The educational attainment

14:25

of a mother predicts the educational

14:28

attainment of children over and above the IQs

14:30

of the mother and father. The father's educational

14:32

attainment doesn't. So

14:35

that's weird and interesting. And

14:37

then countries that value female

14:40

education and emancipate women do way

14:42

better on the economic

14:44

front. And I think it's probably

14:46

because there's not much difference between, let's

14:49

say, opening your culture up to the contributions

14:52

of women and opening your culture up

14:54

to new ideas and diverse,

14:58

what would you say, a diverse range of contributions

15:00

from various sources. You

15:02

know, that constraint of women

15:04

seems to go along with a constraint on

15:07

idea and flexibility in general.

15:09

No, definitely. I mean, you can see that it's inferior

15:12

to, as you can see, that all of these moments, they

15:14

have to do with change. They have to do with something

15:17

happens, there's a change, and then

15:19

I have to find the meaning of that change. I have

15:21

to find the solution, right? I have to find

15:24

a way out so that the change now

15:26

finds a resolution and makes sense. Yeah,

15:29

well, so Piaget talked about that too,

15:31

in terms of the stage transition and his

15:34

hypothesis, and this has been

15:36

also, what would you say, taken

15:38

up

15:39

in a parallel way by philosophers

15:41

of science, is that you have a mode

15:44

of interpreting the world,

15:47

which enables you to progress in

15:49

the world

15:50

until

15:51

its insufficiency is demonstrated. And

15:53

that can happen as a consequence of biological

15:55

maturation, right? The framework

15:57

that you used as a child is no longer

15:59

because the physiological

16:02

acts that you're capable of now have radically

16:05

transformed that would happen at puberty. So

16:07

that

16:08

viewpoint has to be radically transformed

16:11

to take into account the new reality,

16:14

but the

16:14

new transformation has to do everything

16:17

the old transformation, the old

16:19

viewpoint did, plus something additional.

16:22

So there's actually, it's not

16:25

merely the re-establishment of a new

16:27

kind of stasis, it's a more inclusive

16:31

interpretive framework. This is why there's

16:33

actual progress, let's say, in science, but

16:35

maybe also progress on the moral front, is

16:37

that it isn't merely that you're looking

16:40

at things in a different way, you're looking

16:42

at things in a way that now takes more

16:44

into account and still enables you to exert

16:47

a certain amount of

16:48

prediction and control. Yeah, definitely.

16:50

So there's

16:51

movement upward. You think about that as a spiraling

16:55

upward too. It's a cycle of

16:57

change, but one which hopefully brings you higher

17:00

up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and the

17:02

pinnacle of that cycle of change, I

17:05

think, is the biblical injunction

17:07

that you have to become like a little child in

17:09

order to enter the kingdom of heaven. It's

17:11

the reintegration, it's

17:14

the reintegration of the spontaneous

17:18

attitude that you had to the world

17:20

as a child, but with all of the

17:23

acumen and wisdom and alertness

17:26

and consciousness that you've developed as an adult.

17:29

That's sort of the pinnacle of that.

17:31

Yeah, because it joins it all together.

17:33

That's what you mean by that, it includes it all. Well, it's

17:36

also, imagine that, so you talked

17:39

about the fundamental narrative is there's

17:41

a steady state and then there's a problem introduced

17:43

and there's a collapse into something like chaos

17:45

and then there's a reintegration

17:48

of the view. Sometimes the stories don't reintegrate.

17:51

No, then that's a tragedy. Right, so

17:53

the comedy is the reintegration, tragedy

17:55

is just the disintegration.

17:58

But then you could also... say steady

18:06

state collapse reintegration

18:09

but then there's another story which is that's

18:11

the process to follow and

18:13

then the ultimate reintegrated

18:16

state is

18:18

becoming an expert at that process right

18:21

so the so it's respect for the process

18:23

itself starts to become the

18:25

cardinal target of the entire

18:28

process of transformation and that's

18:30

associated with the reattainment of that

18:32

openness that you possess when you're a child

18:34

and I think that that's probably one of the

18:37

functions that stories play that

18:39

is that the stories have that structure

18:41

yeah so we tell them we hear them or

18:43

we tell them and so we're kind of modeling

18:46

these patterns right these it's like almost

18:48

like little puzzles we're like modeling these little

18:50

puzzles but with your what we're actually

18:52

doing is mastering the meta

18:54

puzzle right yeah you're mastering the art of well you're

18:56

out mastering the art of transformation to some

18:59

degree because one of the things that you do

19:01

when you attend to a story is you

19:03

embody the character

19:05

and so if you listen to 10 stories you embody 10

19:07

different characters and so then what you're embodying

19:10

is the process of embodying multiple

19:12

characters right and so that and

19:14

you want to become an expert at that because

19:17

well because each situation that you

19:19

enter into to

19:20

some degree demands the

19:22

manifestation

19:24

of a different character right so one

19:26

of the things you see in

19:28

in in very

19:30

restricted forms of psychopathology

19:33

is the person is exactly the same in every

19:35

situation you might think well that's admirable

19:37

stability of character it's like no it's not there's

19:40

no flexibility of response

19:43

you know so you're the same person

19:45

at a party that you would be at a funeral well

19:47

that's not good right I mean there's

19:50

some principles underlying your behavior that

19:52

should remain stable but out of those principles

19:54

should come this vast flexibility

19:56

of response so that you can go

19:59

you know

19:59

you can go into a working class community and

20:02

have a discussion there that's productive. And then you

20:04

can go to a highly cultured event

20:06

and you can port yourself

20:09

properly there. Yeah, yeah. And

20:11

I think that that's, it seems to me

20:13

that at least

20:15

that's what's going on in these types of

20:17

stories. Like Sleeping Beauty, you mentioned her before.

20:20

If you look at the structure, you'll notice

20:22

that it's very similar, is it to Snow White?

20:24

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

20:27

So when I talked about Snow White, I mentioned the

20:29

idea that she doesn't understand the

20:31

reason for the housework, right?

20:34

The reason for the housework is actually in her relationship

20:36

with her mate. Like that's what gives

20:39

meaning to the

20:41

cycle of work. And so if you think

20:43

about Sleeping Beauty that way, you'll notice that it's very similar.

20:46

What's going on there is that she's pricked

20:48

on this spindle, right? She's pricked on this

20:51

wheel that's turning, but

20:53

it's also a wheel that is, you know, it's

20:55

also, it's a complicated symbolism because

20:58

it's both the wheel, but it's also the binding of

21:00

the thread together. And so it's both

21:03

like the, this weaving. And

21:06

so she, it's as if,

21:08

you know, someone, the witch curses

21:11

Sleeping Beauty that she's going to die when she hits

21:13

puberty. She says 15 or whatever. It's always pretty

21:16

much. It's first blood, right? Because she's going to prick her finger

21:18

and bleed. You can understand that both

21:20

as, exactly. You can understand it both as losing virginity

21:23

or as the beginning of menstruation. Doesn't

21:25

matter how you, It's the death of childhood. It's just the

21:27

change which comes with the bleeding. And

21:30

so, but it's as if they've hidden that

21:32

from her,

21:33

her whole life. And so when it happens,

21:36

she has no way to deal with it. She

21:38

has no, she has no frame. She has no

21:41

reason. She doesn't understand what's going on. And

21:43

so that's what she does. Yeah, I saw that happen in some of

21:45

my clinical clients. I'm sure. Where,

21:48

where I want in particular, I remember was

21:50

treated as an absolute perfect princess,

21:52

like literally, as literally

21:54

as you could enact that in a household. And

21:57

until she had puberty and then she was demonized.

21:59

essentially, right, because her parents had

22:02

no idea how to integrate the, well,

22:04

the sexual dangers of puberty into

22:06

this perfect princess little girl

22:09

that they had constructed. And so,

22:11

well, then all hell broke loose. I mean, she did

22:13

exactly what you'd expect and went and found some

22:15

absolutely horrible initial boyfriend,

22:18

you know, I think he was a bloody biker and to

22:20

tear her away from from that too

22:23

tight maternal embrace and things things

22:25

didn't go uphill from there. Let's put it that

22:27

way. Yeah. And so, yeah.

22:30

And so which fairy tales you you're starting

22:32

with? So, the way the way we're doing

22:34

it is we're starting with, I'm doing two arcs.

22:37

One is going to be a female lead arc and one

22:39

a male lead arc. So, the female lead arc, it's

22:41

going to be Snow White, Rapunzel, Sleeping

22:43

Beauty and Cinderella. Really, the

22:45

classic. Yeah, yeah. But there'll be like a surprising

22:48

connection between all of them and also using

22:51

some of the tropes that repeat in the stories to

22:54

help people understand what the tropes are. So,

22:57

as the falling asleep repeats itself, as

22:59

the thorns repeat themselves,

23:00

they're different patterns that

23:02

repeat themselves in the stories than

23:05

trying to kind of, obviously not explaining

23:07

anything, but through surprising relationships,

23:10

trying to help people see what's going

23:13

on.

23:14

How do you protect yourself against propagandizing

23:17

when you're used? Because I saw that happen to some

23:19

degree, for example, in The Lion King,

23:21

which I really like. Yeah. There's great things about The

23:23

Lion King, but it

23:25

borders and this happens

23:27

in Pinocchio now and then too. Yeah.

23:30

It borders on overt moralizing

23:32

and overt psychologizing. Yeah. Because I mean, the people

23:35

who built

23:36

The Lion King knew a fair bit about

23:39

the hero's journey. Yeah. And some of that creeps

23:41

in, you know. And when it becomes

23:44

conscious in that way, the story

23:46

definitely suffers, right? It's even

23:48

if the explicit

23:52

knowledge of the story isn't exactly propagandistic.

23:55

As soon as you bend the story to fit

23:57

your explicit understanding of

23:58

the myth, you start to... you start to

24:01

bend and warp the story. I really tried

24:03

to avoid that when I wrote this. Well, I think

24:05

one of the ways to do it is to do it, to really

24:07

do it by analogy. And also

24:09

to kind of dive into the story itself. So in

24:11

Snow White, there are certain

24:14

mysterious elements in the story.

24:17

You know, there are certain things which are kind of

24:19

weird. And so, and then to try to

24:21

just, I just tried to, I just been, let's

24:23

say ruminating on Snow White for 20

24:25

years, just forever. You know, for example,

24:28

like we see that she eats this

24:30

apple and then she falls asleep

24:32

or she dies. And we're thinking, well,

24:34

that looks like another story, right? It looks like

24:36

that story in Genesis. Right. But

24:39

what's the connection? Like what's

24:41

the connection between the two? And then you look at the versions

24:44

that happen in, and for example, in the Grimm Brothers,

24:46

the witch visits her three times. First

24:48

time she brings her a corset, the second

24:50

time she brings her a comb,

24:52

and then the third time it's an apple.

24:54

And it's like, what's going on? What is happening?

24:57

And so, you know, it's just about meditating

24:59

and trying to get insight. And for example, like in that

25:01

case, the insight I got is, it's very strange

25:04

that, Snow White is a,

25:06

a corset. So a corset exaggerates

25:09

the female figure, obviously. And the comb

25:11

is a, It's an ornament. An ornament, yeah. Because

25:13

it's not a comb for combing. It's one of those, Oh yeah.

25:16

Like a comb, ancient people used to wear combs like ornaments. So

25:18

in my version, I make it a hairpin because

25:21

it's more like an ornament. And

25:23

so there are a lot of things going on. But one of the things that's

25:25

going on is, the witch sees

25:28

in her mirror

25:29

that the most beautiful of all is

25:31

Snow White.

25:33

And it's kind of weird that when she goes to see Snow

25:35

White, she tries to bring her supplements to

25:37

her beauty.

25:38

Like, why is she doing that? It's as if

25:41

she is already the most beautiful

25:43

girl in the world. So why is she trying

25:45

to make, why is she trying to convince her to take

25:47

on these added things that will make

25:49

her more beautiful? So if you had the most beautiful girl

25:51

in the world, then she's like, well, I'll teach you how to wear, how

25:53

to put makeup on. What are you doing?

25:56

And so that's when I started to see

25:58

the relationship between

25:59

the story of Genesis,

26:02

this idea of the garments of skin, right, of adding something

26:04

on top. Then a click with me

26:06

that the apple has to do with knowledge

26:09

of beauty. She's trying to make

26:11

Snow White self-conscious. She's

26:14

trying to make her self-aware of her

26:16

beauty because until then she's beautiful but

26:18

innocent. She doesn't know she's beautiful. That's

26:21

probably one of the reasons why she's most beautiful. When

26:23

you see a woman that is so beautiful but

26:25

that she's not weaponizing

26:28

it, you can say. It's usually this kind

26:30

of radiant beauty. But if someone

26:32

becomes too aware of their own beauty, then they

26:35

start to play with it and

26:38

they start to weaponize

26:41

it is a good term. They start to direct

26:43

it and to use it as a way to attract attention

26:46

in certain ways. I think that's what's going on in Snow

26:48

White. What happens in the story is

26:50

I don't say that. Is

26:53

that an attempt by the witch to pervert her

26:55

beauty? I think so.

26:57

I think so. It's not a...

26:59

She's trying to

27:02

kill her is what she's trying to do. But the

27:04

method that she's using is very

27:06

interestingly related to beauty. She's

27:09

not just trying to stab her. She's

27:12

trying to kill

27:14

her in a way that makes her tempt

27:18

her into certain gestures towards

27:20

beauty. It seems to have to do with beauty

27:22

and the weaponization of beauty or the

27:25

innocence of beauty and

27:28

what's the proper relationship we have to beauty. So

27:30

then you see the queen is... She's

27:33

looking in a magic mirror. I love it because

27:35

it doesn't have to be a magic mirror. It's just a

27:37

mirror because

27:38

that's what a mirror does. The

27:40

fact that she's looking at herself in the mirror, it's

27:43

reflecting to her that Snow White is more beautiful

27:45

than her. I mean, yeah, it's a magic mirror. There's

27:48

a few Dio 6 Macchina things like

27:50

the mirror tells her where Snow White is, but mostly

27:53

it's just a mirror. And

27:55

the fact that she is so self-conscious about her

27:57

beauty is also revealing to

27:59

her the limit of beauty. it and it's

28:01

making her compare herself to others

28:03

and then she... And so the

28:06

witch in the Snow White story, if I remember correctly,

28:08

is also the queen, right? Yeah, she's the queen. Yeah,

28:10

well she's the queen. She becomes a witch at

28:12

the end pretty much. Right. But she's the

28:15

queen who replaces her mother,

28:17

replaces Snow White's mother. Right.

28:19

And she

28:21

can't tolerate the

28:23

onset of the new generation essentially,

28:25

right?

28:27

Yeah. Yeah, and it's so

28:29

fascinating because for today, you know,

28:32

in the Disney version, we have

28:34

the mirror on the wall. But the illustrator

28:37

I was working with, she had the idea of having the mirror

28:39

in her hand, which is one of the versions that you have.

28:41

She made this beautiful image of the queen with her mirror

28:44

in her hand and I'm like, that's... Like a cell phone. A cell

28:46

phone. It was so perfect. It was

28:48

like, yeah, that's it, you know, and that's exactly

28:50

it. Like this dark mirror that tells

28:53

you you're the most beautiful, you know, that gives you

28:55

all the likes, it gives you all the attention, but

28:57

then also tells you that you're not

28:59

as beautiful as the others. Right, right.

29:01

That's perfect in the cell phone world. Oh, yeah.

29:04

Yeah, yeah. That immensely

29:06

heightened self-consciousness. Well, it's

29:08

a funny thing too because the cell phone is like

29:10

the pool that Narcissus drowns in. Yeah.

29:13

And it's more and more like that because we

29:16

do have a magic gadget now

29:18

that delivers to you what you most

29:21

desire, right? But

29:23

if those desires become self-conscious,

29:25

then that'll drown you in Narcissus

29:27

pool. And when I say that

29:29

it's designed to give you exactly what

29:32

you want, I

29:33

actually mean that technically, right? Because there's algorithms

29:35

working behind the scenes nonstop, trying

29:38

to understand where you're directing your attention,

29:40

manipulating it to some degree. But a lot

29:42

of the manipulation on the capitalist front is

29:44

merely the attempt to find out what you want so

29:47

that it can be delivered to you, albeit

29:50

at a profit, but it's still what you want.

29:52

Yeah. And it's darker than that

29:54

because it's not just what you

29:57

want anymore because all they want is your

29:59

attention.

29:59

All they want is your attention. That's right. And

30:03

so they actually don't have to just give you what

30:05

you want. They can also give you what you hate. They

30:07

can also give you what you despise, right?

30:09

They can also make you realize

30:12

that you're not as good as others so that

30:15

you fall into it even more and

30:17

just try to put in even more. So it's

30:19

not just giving you what you want. It's also like a, it's

30:21

like a drug addict, right? It's like leading you in and then

30:24

kind of giving you little hits, but then making

30:26

you want it, you know, making you desire it. And

30:28

so, so like in our version

30:29

of Snow White. So that means you're being trapped

30:32

by the machine into falling into the well of your

30:34

own temptation, right? So that's partly that.

30:37

And so if the story

30:39

of Cain, let's say, is the story of envy,

30:43

well, and envy is

30:45

portrayed in that story as like,

30:48

what, one of the cardinal sources of motivation,

30:51

the darkest source of motivation,

30:53

but cardinal source of motivation is that your

30:57

claim is that making a machine that

30:59

heightens envy is a very

31:01

effective way of gripping attention, right?

31:04

And

31:05

that seems definitely, definitely

31:07

likely. Yeah.

31:08

And so, you know, and then the, I

31:10

mean, in some ways

31:12

the capitalist model is built on that

31:15

idea. It's built- Yeah, well, then it makes you wonder

31:17

too, like, is it, it is giving

31:19

you what you want. It's just that some

31:21

of the things that you want are dark

31:23

things, right? I mean, if

31:26

you asked them what they wanted and they

31:28

were going to answer that naively, they

31:30

would just talk about

31:31

maybe the material goods that they would like

31:33

delivered to them. But

31:35

the

31:36

phone does enable you to

31:38

indulge in the darkest of motivations.

31:40

And some of that might be the pleasures of envy

31:43

and the pleasure, but I mean, you certainly see

31:46

that you can indulge in the pleasure of, in

31:50

sadistic pleasures in

31:52

the online world. The trolls do

31:54

that all the time. Yeah, and

31:56

sometimes like you said that

31:59

the, you know,

31:59

The addict, we don't usually

32:02

frame it that way, but the part of the addict's

32:05

cycle is also the lack,

32:08

but it's also the pain that comes with needing

32:10

that hit. And then when they get it, they

32:12

get a kick, but the kick is corresponding

32:15

to the pain. And so this

32:17

is also with the phone, the phone is

32:20

doing exactly that. Like you said, in some

32:22

ways, the algorithm almost does

32:24

it on its own. It's not like there's someone scheming

32:26

behind that we're gonna make everybody depressed

32:29

and envious

32:29

and horrible, but the fact that all it

32:32

wants is, like I said, all

32:34

it wants is your attention. Then

32:37

all the mechanisms of attentions are

32:39

available for it to get that. To capitalize

32:41

on, right? And then now we have these AI machines

32:44

that are going to become super intelligent at

32:47

calculating precisely that,

32:49

really without scruple, right? Because

32:52

if the machine is trained

32:54

to do nothing but lock you onto the target,

32:57

then it's gonna do that by whatever means necessary.

32:59

That's a very terrifying idea too, by

33:02

whatever means necessary. Yeah, yeah,

33:04

I mean the AI, because it can

33:06

just

33:07

function through iteration over iteration over

33:09

iteration, just infinite iterations.

33:12

You could have some aspect of AI

33:14

that's locking into just Jordan Peterson

33:17

or just one person and just figuring

33:19

out exactly what

33:21

to hit in

33:22

order for you to get, oh yeah. Oh

33:25

yes, definitely, that's

33:28

in the pipelines. Well, I've

33:31

been thinking about the application

33:33

of AI

33:34

on the pornography

33:36

front. I mean, that's a terrible,

33:39

terrible thing to contemplate because

33:42

it's certainly the case already. I've

33:44

used chat GPT a lot in the last

33:46

month and it's, and Bard

33:48

too.

33:49

They're very interesting to toy with. I asked Bard

33:51

if it believed in God, by the way. That was

33:53

extremely interesting. First of all said it

33:55

was just a large language model. Couldn't answer such

33:57

questions. And so I said, well, pretend that you.

33:59

were a machine that could answer such questions,

34:02

how would you answer? And it gave quite

34:04

an elaborate reason for why it believed in God.

34:07

Now I should have asked it

34:09

perhaps why it didn't

34:11

believe in God, you know? I mean, just

34:13

to balance it out. But

34:15

anyways, it was extremely interesting to watch that.

34:17

One of the ways I've been thinking about AI, I

34:20

did a video on that just recently, is actually

34:22

the story of Aladdin or the story of the genie's lamp.

34:25

That seems to be in my, because

34:27

I've been thinking a lot about, we talk about

34:29

artificial intelligence, and we've been talking

34:32

about this, we talked about this with Jim Keller. And

34:34

one of the points I was trying to make was that the intelligence

34:36

doesn't seem to come from the machine. Intelligence

34:39

comes from us. That is, the AI's

34:41

now are hybrid AI's, right? They get

34:43

qualitative judgment from human

34:46

people. Human people tell the AI what's

34:48

good, and then the AI, based on

34:51

that, will then continue its work. But

34:53

it's always, right, it's generating variability,

34:56

and then someone selects and says that

34:58

one. That's what happens in mid-journey

35:00

too. Mid-journey, you have a refining

35:03

process where it generates

35:05

a bunch of images, and then you tell

35:07

it that one. And so you're training the AI

35:09

as you're using it. And so that's

35:12

what the genie's lamp is, right? The genie's lamp

35:14

is just the power of technology. It's

35:17

artificial light. It's

35:19

a machine that makes you have light in

35:22

the dark, when you can't usually, when

35:24

there's no light in the sun. So it's like portable light,

35:26

you could say. And so it's

35:28

just power. And what

35:30

it's asking for is what do you want?

35:33

And then what it does is it gives you what you

35:36

want with infinite power.

35:39

And that's what's amazing about

35:41

that story. Yes, be careful what

35:43

you want, which is always the variant of

35:45

the three wishes story. That's right, it's always about

35:47

that. But you can understand it technically,

35:50

in the sense that, where there's a version of that

35:52

story in the Bible where God asks

35:55

Solomon

35:56

one wish, right? What

35:58

do you get? You can have one wish. And

36:00

then Solomon answers properly. Solomon says, I

36:02

want wisdom.

36:03

Right. And so the problem

36:05

is that if you ask for secondary goods,

36:08

right, if you ask for a bunch of money, if you ask for a bunch

36:11

of women, or you ask for secondary goods, and you put

36:13

infinite power. And you have made it with

36:15

a dwarf. But you put infinite power behind

36:17

that wish. Yeah, yeah. Then all the side

36:19

effects of the wish will manifest

36:22

itself. Right, right, right. And that's just, it's like

36:24

an unbalance of the relationship of

36:26

how much power you put towards a certain goal. And

36:29

so the only thing that would

36:31

handle the taking of your power. Well, you

36:33

know, there's a definition of God lurking in there, I would

36:35

say, you know, is that,

36:37

you know, you just talked about the pathologies

36:40

that will inevitably emerge if you

36:42

wish for the wrong thing, which is the

36:44

same thing as celebrating a lesson and standing.

36:46

Or wish it with too much power. Because you're

36:48

allowed to wish for a sandwich, right?

36:51

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

36:53

But the problem is like, if I wish for a sandwich with

36:56

like infinite power behind me, and

37:00

like I'm going into this infinite power to get

37:03

this secondary good, like it's okay to

37:05

wish to have money. But if you

37:07

put all the resources of everything into

37:09

getting money. It's okay to wish for that

37:11

if it's in its proper place. In the higher. Yeah,

37:14

that's the way to see it. Yeah, yeah.

37:16

Well, right, so if you

37:19

said that Solomon made the right choice when

37:21

he wished for wisdom, right?

37:24

And

37:25

prayer is like that too.

37:27

What prayer is in the proper,

37:30

when properly practiced is an attempt

37:32

to

37:33

learn how to ask for the right thing and to learn

37:36

how to ask for it properly. Tammy's been playing

37:38

with this a lot, you know, and she tries to orient herself

37:40

in the morning properly to

37:42

see what's on her mind and what's concerning her, but then

37:44

to try to face the day with a certain

37:47

degree of faith and gratitude and to orient herself

37:50

towards the thing that should be at the top

37:52

of the pyramid, let's say. Yeah. That's

37:54

a good definition of God is whatever God

37:56

is, is whatever should be placed properly

37:59

at the.

37:59

of the pyramid of, you could say, integrated

38:02

desire, or something like that, wisdom

38:05

would be one of those, one of the

38:07

manifestations of the thing

38:10

that's properly placed there. Right?

38:14

Right. Like,

38:16

I'm writing this book now, We Who Wrestle

38:19

With God, and I've been stepping through a

38:21

variety of biblical stories,

38:24

considering them, this is relevant to

38:26

the fairy tale discussion too. Think

38:29

of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel,

38:31

etc. as meditations on

38:33

the divine feminine, right? Characterizing it

38:35

from a variety of different perspectives. What

38:38

you see happening in the biblical corpus is that

38:40

you,

38:40

each story contains a particularized

38:43

characterization of

38:45

the proper animating spirit.

38:48

That's a good way of thinking about it. So in Noah,

38:50

for example, God is the spirit

38:53

that calls the wise to prepare when the

38:55

storms are brewing. And is that

38:57

real?

38:58

Well,

38:59

are you wise enough to prepare when

39:02

the storms are brewing? And do you hearken to that

39:04

voice? Yeah, does it have coherence?

39:07

You can't do it in any way. There's a way in which it

39:09

binds together. There are certain things

39:11

you do when you want to do that,

39:14

and that has a coherence that almost

39:16

can appear as a kind of agency, right? Or

39:19

at least something pulling you forward. Well,

39:21

your arc should be waterproof, for example. That's right,

39:23

exactly. And in Abraham,

39:26

you see, God is presented as the

39:28

spirit that

39:29

calls even the immature and unwilling

39:32

to adventure. And then the hypothesis,

39:35

in some ways, is that those two

39:37

things are the same. They're a manifestation

39:39

of the same

39:41

uppermost unity. And in Exodus, of course,

39:43

you have God as the spirit that

39:46

objects to arbitrary tyranny and slavery. And

39:49

then, well, that's the same as the spirit that calls

39:51

you to adventure. And that's the same as the spirit

39:53

that calls you to prepare. Yeah,

39:55

and something starts to appear above.

39:58

It's not defined.

39:59

or that is, you know, it's like the

40:02

joint, the point where all these things join together.

40:04

You know, it's like a little, it's like playing around something

40:06

you can't completely. Can't see.

40:09

You can't encompass completely. But that's

40:11

the way to do it, right? That's the only way to do it actually,

40:14

is to point to it from

40:16

afar. Yeah, that's how it looks. Or

40:18

that's, or,

40:20

you know, I think as you

40:22

do that, and this is like undoubtedly

40:25

happening to you as you analyze these fairy tales, you

40:27

start to become more explicitly aware

40:30

in a manner that you can make, that

40:33

you can communicate about what this underlying

40:36

unity might be. But I don't know if you ever

40:38

get to the point where the explicit descriptions

40:40

actually have more potency, explanatory

40:43

potency than the stories. No. The

40:45

story might be the ultimate way of

40:47

encapsulating it. Yeah, because what happens

40:49

with the story is that because it contains

40:52

a web of analogies, it

40:54

what, you know, you can think you've got

40:56

it,

40:57

but then you just, you know,

40:59

a year later, two years later, all of a sudden you see

41:01

it from this other tack. And

41:03

then things kind of gel together in another way.

41:05

Like the pattern appears slightly different. Then

41:08

you get another insight. I think it's partly

41:10

too, because

41:10

the stories are

41:13

like images contain a tremendous amount

41:15

of information. And a story

41:18

is a description of an image,

41:20

but the image is what contains the information.

41:23

So like in the story of the

41:25

Garden of Eden, obviously you have the image of paradise,

41:28

the garden. And it's an unbelievably

41:31

rich set of sequential

41:33

images. And even if, and

41:36

it isn't as if the information in

41:39

the stories encapsulate

41:39

precisely in the words, it's encapsulated

41:42

in the image that the words generate. And

41:44

that image has information in

41:46

it that transcends the words. That's why it's an

41:48

inexhaustible source. Yeah.

41:50

So one of the things, it's interesting because

41:53

I've been thinking a lot about the relationship

41:55

between fairy tales and scripture. And

41:57

when I was writing the fairy tales.

41:59

I realized that I was kind

42:02

of using scripture as a model. Because

42:04

scripture has a certain way of writing, which

42:08

is one of the reasons why certain people

42:10

think that it's bad literature, is because it

42:12

doesn't describe inner states. It

42:14

doesn't describe the landscape

42:16

very much. Everything is very concise. Everything

42:19

is laser pointed.

42:21

And fairy tales seem to be like that. You

42:24

usually want to tell a fairy tale in one sitting.

42:26

But you want it to last 20 minutes or half an hour. And

42:29

so because of that, all the elements have

42:31

to be reduced. They have to be very,

42:34

very pointed. And you don't want to... You don't

42:36

spend a lot of time describing, let's

42:38

say, the emotional state of this or that

42:40

character. And so I think that

42:43

that exercise is really

42:45

helpful. It's almost like you're reducing it to

42:47

a kind of algebra. And so

42:49

to me, that's been massively

42:52

useful, is trying to say it's to stay within

42:54

the fairy tale mode. And

42:56

so it's like it's a classic fairy tale. It's 5,000 words.

43:00

You can say it. You can read it to your child

43:02

in an hour. But it's

43:04

just how do we play with these images? How do we bring them

43:07

together? And the great thing about fairy tales

43:09

is that there's like a hierarchy

43:12

of stories. Right. And so in the hierarchy

43:14

of stories, let's say you have stories like the myths

43:16

or you have scripture that are up

43:19

there. Like scripture, you can't toy with it too much.

43:21

You know, there's... You can play

43:24

some games with it. You see that in things like Midrash,

43:26

or you see it in the

43:29

tradition of hymns, where in the

43:31

hymns, they'll add details. They'll

43:33

play around the image to kind of do

43:35

what you said. To kind of point at

43:38

it, to point at it from different directions and to

43:40

play along with

43:40

it. But what's great about fairy tales

43:43

is you have, you know, an indefinite

43:45

amount of them.

43:46

And they all have little variations

43:48

on themes and little games. There's

43:50

probably valid ways of doing that too. I

43:53

might say

43:54

if you are elaborating

43:57

on the story in the spirit,

44:00

of the story, then you could amplify

44:02

it. See, Jung did that all the time when he was analyzing

44:05

dreams. His technique, he called his technique

44:07

amplification. And I played a

44:09

lot with that in therapy. So, you know, if

44:11

you told me a dream,

44:13

then I would watch what

44:15

images, like, okay. So first of

44:17

all, we would set the

44:19

stage and the setting would be, well,

44:22

we're going to try to understand this dream

44:24

in a manner that will further the therapeutic

44:27

endeavor. And the therapeutic endeavor

44:29

would be clarifying the nature of your problems

44:32

and clarifying the nature of potential solutions,

44:34

right? Without trying to impose that. Okay,

44:37

so now we agree. Okay, now we have

44:39

our aim established. Now we bring

44:41

up the dream and you tell me the dream. And I'll notice

44:43

while you're telling me the dream that images will come

44:45

into my mind. And then I can say, well, when

44:48

you said that,

44:48

here's a string of associations

44:51

I had. And I would ask you too to do exactly

44:53

the same thing. And so the... People

44:57

can hear that and think that it's arbitrary, right? Yeah,

44:59

it's not arbitrary. Yeah, because

45:01

it's related to the goal first.

45:04

So that makes it not arbitrary. Sometimes

45:06

it can go out of control, but you... Yes, it can. Well,

45:09

then that's why Sam Harris,

45:11

for example, will claim that what you're doing is nothing

45:13

but interpreting. But the thing is,

45:15

the psychoanalytic theory was, and I

45:17

think they were exactly right. I think they got this right,

45:20

was that, you know, if you have an idea,

45:23

there are ideas that surround it, that

45:25

are proximal to it. And that

45:28

some of those ideas will be triggered as

45:30

you, you know, when you bring up one idea, it'll trigger

45:32

the next round of associations. Then there'll be a more

45:34

distal set of associations. And you could

45:36

say, well, it can get so distal, it bears no relationship

45:39

to the origin. And that could happen. But

45:41

that doesn't mean that there isn't a web of

45:44

relevant associations surrounding

45:46

the given image. Partly what you're doing

45:49

when you interpret someone's dreams is you say, well,

45:52

they tell you an image. And you say, okay, well, just what

45:54

does that bring to mind?

45:56

Or you watch how they discuss it, because

45:59

now they'll start to...

45:59

weave in, say, narratives from

46:02

their

46:03

autobiographical history. And the

46:05

psychoanalytic hypothesis is that's not

46:07

random. Well, obviously it's not bloody

46:09

well random because people would just be making noise then.

46:12

They wouldn't even be using language. But that

46:15

there's an emergent pattern. And the psychoanalysts

46:17

also presume that

46:19

if you let people wander, they

46:21

would wander around a problem. Like

46:24

the wandering would take them to a problem and then

46:26

circumambulate it. And

46:29

partly what their fantasy was doing or even

46:31

a joint conversation was hitting that

46:33

problem from multiple perspectives. Yeah,

46:35

that circumambulating is similar to what we

46:37

were talking about before, which is different stories

46:40

kind of point towards a center,

46:42

a center that's not visible, a center that's

46:44

kind of above it. And so

46:47

I think that that's the best

46:49

way

46:49

to do it. That's how

46:50

Jewish Midrash does it and that's how Christian

46:53

hymnography does it. So the way to do it

46:55

is to say you first thing you need

46:57

is you need to know a lot of stories, right? You just have

46:59

to. Yes. Well, that's why Jung was such a good dreamer.

47:02

I tell people too, like I just read stories like,

47:04

you know, just know the stories. Once you

47:06

know them, then all of a sudden they start to create a little

47:09

map in your mind. Yeah. And then you

47:11

realize that, let's say, so

47:13

a good example in this Snow White story that

47:15

we've done is that you have the story

47:17

of the fruit in paradise that

47:20

when you eat, it gives you knowledge and

47:22

you die. It's like, oh, that's interesting, but

47:24

it's related to beauty in Snow White, right? There's this idea

47:26

of this. There's another story, right? There's a story

47:29

in Greek myth about the golden

47:31

apple that is thrown to the goddesses

47:33

and it says, this belongs to the most

47:35

beautiful. And then that's

47:38

when the goddesses ask Paris

47:40

to judge which of the goddesses are

47:42

the most beautiful and then they try

47:45

to bribe him and they do this. This ultimately leads

47:47

to the Trojan War. Like that's actually the

47:49

thing that sparks the Trojan War because

47:51

it's like this weaponization of beauty.

47:54

You know, Paris ultimately is given Helen

47:57

of Troy. That's the gift. That's the bride that

47:59

he has. gets for choosing, I think

48:02

he chooses Aphrodite, I'm not even sure, yeah for

48:04

choosing Aphrodite. And so that's

48:06

the bride that he gets and then it causes

48:09

chaos and death and war. And so it's like,

48:11

oh, you can see that there's like

48:14

a relationship between these stories, right?

48:17

There's a fruit, there's this question of beauty, there's this question

48:19

of knowledge, of

48:21

being able to decide who is

48:24

beautiful, like having self-knowledge. And so,

48:26

ah, you can see it. And so in the story, you don't have

48:28

to explain it, but you can just create

48:31

little analogies where you just

48:33

bring in images

48:35

from the different stories together so

48:37

that they create this new story, which

48:39

is still the old story, but now

48:42

it's expanded because it just connects a

48:44

little more to a larger map, you

48:46

could say.

48:48

In my therapeutic practice, I

48:50

always started out with

48:51

behavioral techniques. It's like if you, I'm

48:54

a very practical person fundamentally, if

48:56

you came to me with a problem we try to make that as

48:58

clear as possible and to lay out

49:01

the clearest possible steps to

49:03

a solution practically. But

49:05

I had lots of clients who were imaginative and

49:08

creative and they had a very active

49:10

imaginative life. Some of them,

49:12

like I had one client who probably had five dreams

49:15

a night that he remembered

49:17

well enough to talk about each of them for

49:19

two hours. Right? So he was just immersed

49:22

in this dreamscape.

49:24

I would say the dream analysis was

49:26

more helpful when people were trying to solve

49:29

broader scale problems right there, trying

49:31

to change the way they looked at their life rather

49:33

than dealing with

49:35

some more specific issue about

49:39

how they might cope with a given bout of anxiety.

49:41

The broader the class of problems that's being solved

49:44

simultaneously, the more you could turn

49:46

to something like dream image. And

49:48

so you're fleshing out,

49:51

by fleshing out and amplifying those stories,

49:53

you're reconstructing the map

49:55

that you used to map

49:58

the entire domain. So

50:00

you're going deeper that way. And there's something

50:02

about, like this is, I know, because I know

50:04

that people are listening and some people are watching

50:07

and they're thinking, you

50:08

know, this is just random. But stories

50:10

have a, have a... It's

50:12

random, it's not interesting. Exactly. The

50:15

fact that we remember, the fact that we're able to pay attention...

50:17

Yeah, you bet. ...means that stories need,

50:20

they're almost like little... They have to capture you. And

50:22

they also have to, we have to know when the

50:24

story begins, you have to know when the story ends.

50:26

That's already something. Yeah. When

50:29

the story doesn't end well, whether it's good or

50:31

bad ending or whatever, you know when it feels like it just trails

50:33

off and it doesn't end. You know that. You

50:35

also know when there's not a good setup for

50:38

what's going to happen. And so even

50:40

like, you know, let's say

50:41

when we're interpreting reality, these

50:44

are the frames that we use. And if we tell...

50:46

Well, that's the indwelling spirit in some ways,

50:48

I would say. That's what's characterized as

50:50

the indwelling spirit.

50:51

I mean, one of the things that I

50:54

used as a hallmark of

50:56

utility in relationship to dream

50:58

analysis is whether or not it produced a

51:01

flash of insight on the part of the client. You

51:03

know, we'd be resting, we'd dream, we'd

51:05

go snap. It's like, oh, these things

51:07

fit together now. And so you got the

51:09

gist that encapsulated a lot

51:12

of diverse phenomena. And there's an

51:14

insight experience that goes along with that,

51:16

which is equivalent. It's like a micro... It's

51:18

a micro state of awe, something

51:20

like that. And like you said, that's not arbitrary.

51:23

There's something dry. Hey, here's a weird

51:25

question. So

51:26

I set up this system with

51:28

a student of mine, Victor Swift.

51:30

You met Victor. And we built,

51:33

he built an AI

51:35

system that will answer any question

51:37

posed to it in the voice of the King

51:39

James Bible.

51:41

Right, right. So this is a very weird thing,

51:44

right? Because this system now has calculated

51:46

the

51:47

relationships of the words to one

51:49

another in the King James Corpus. And

51:51

so in principle, we haven't asked it to do this yet,

51:54

but in principle, it could generate new stories

51:57

that are biblical predicated. And

51:59

so... I don't know,

52:01

what do you think about that? Do

52:04

you know what I mean? No, I don't exactly what you mean.

52:07

Mathematically, the spirit of that

52:09

corpus of texts has been encapsulated

52:11

by this process. But I don't know what the hell

52:13

that means. You encapsulate

52:16

the spirit of the King James Bible. What the hell

52:18

have you encapsulated precisely? Well,

52:20

I think that it could be interesting

52:23

in order to generate insight.

52:26

But the

52:28

thing that I

52:30

would worry about something like that is in some ways,

52:34

the stories are there. And so

52:36

it's like

52:39

you get insight from knowing them and

52:41

comparing them and bringing them together. The fact

52:43

that you could ask an AI to generate a

52:45

new story doesn't mean that you're

52:47

going to understand it any more than

52:50

you understood the ones that are there

52:52

already. No, I don't think you would. But

52:55

it could surprise you and then

52:57

sometimes create a bit of... That's what I said, reading hymnography

52:59

sometimes and

53:02

reading Midrash does that

53:05

because it says something that

53:07

is surprising. And you know that it's a

53:09

wise person that said that. So because

53:11

you trust the

53:14

people that said it, then all of a sudden you're like,

53:16

why did he say that? And why did he compare

53:18

this to this? I think it's Saint

53:20

Jerome. I'm

53:22

not sure, I might be wrong. But there's one of the early saints that

53:24

said something like, the story of Samson

53:27

is one of the closest stories to Christ. And

53:29

you think, well, that's a weird statement because

53:31

the story of Samson is a crazy story.

53:34

And so it's like, well, because you trust them. You're like,

53:36

OK, well, I'm going to take that seriously. I'm going to look into it and

53:38

see where it sticks, like

53:41

where it actually sticks. And so I

53:43

mean, I don't know. The whole AI thing

53:45

is fright.

53:49

Have you tried to ask

53:51

a question, this King James AI? We just

53:53

built it. I haven't played with it yet at all. You

53:56

know, like I'd like it to say, well, write a thousand

53:58

words on the further adventure.

53:59

of Satan, right?

54:01

Because it'll do it. Yeah. And

54:03

then I, well, I, you might

54:05

be surprised to find that Satan is not a very clear

54:08

character in the Bible. No, no. I'm sure that's true. It's

54:11

all that tradition around it that is actually

54:13

holding some of the things. Well, one of the things

54:15

we want to do too is we want to expand its

54:17

training because I'd like to throw Milton and Dante

54:20

into the works as well. Like you could take the, you

54:22

know, if the biblical corpus is

54:24

at the bottom, which is, then there's

54:27

the next tier of thinkers, Milton

54:29

would be one of those likely Shakespeare, Dante,

54:31

St. Augustine. Like there's no reason

54:34

not to feed those,

54:35

well, and some of the Midrash as well, or maybe,

54:38

maybe all of it who they all know. I think

54:40

one of the things that, and then some of the,

54:43

what we call canons in the Orthodox Church, which

54:45

is that it, it every, every

54:47

day in the, the Mattin service,

54:49

there are these little songs

54:52

that are just a series of analogies,

54:55

like that, that do analogies between Old

54:57

Testament, New Testament, that does all this comparison

55:00

and that, that type of stuff would

55:02

help to interconnect some of the aspects

55:04

that are harder to connect. Right. And

55:06

that's pretty early too. You know, Milton

55:08

is late. And so he, he has

55:11

a lot of romantic tropes

55:13

in his, in his way of thinking. Dante

55:16

for sure,

55:16

that'd be interesting.

55:18

Also because he brings in kind of pagan,

55:21

pagan stuff in it as well. He does a lot of, this

55:23

is some of the things that, that I think is useful.

55:26

You know, I have this whole series on my channel called Universal

55:28

History, where we try to do that. We

55:30

show how the ancients, especially the Medieval's,

55:33

the way that they understood themselves was

55:35

as a joining of something like as a joining

55:37

of Jerusalem and Rome. And

55:40

they did that explicitly in their stories. So

55:42

every time a new people would convert

55:45

to Christianity, they would, they would

55:47

mythologically find a way

55:49

to connect their origins to

55:52

a character in the Bible and then to

55:54

the, to Troy. And

55:56

so like the Vikings, the Franks,

55:58

all these care, all these people that. That's bringing

56:00

them under the rubric, the same narrative. And so,

56:03

but that's the way that the medievalists understood it. You can't

56:05

understand Dante if you don't understand that the

56:07

ancients actually saw that there

56:10

were deep, deep analogies

56:12

between the Greek myths and the Roman

56:14

stories and scripture

56:16

and that they lived in all those

56:19

two worlds as a fusion

56:21

of those two worlds together. And

56:23

so they had analogies between the things.

56:25

You know, there's a, in some medieval

56:27

churches in the Middle Ages that you had the Bible

56:30

and you also had the Aeneid there.

56:33

That was like, it was like a text that people consulted

56:36

because it was, it was known to contain prophecies

56:38

of Christ, but it, in that way, it

56:40

kind of, it kind of was integrated

56:43

into everybody's Christianity, you

56:45

know, and you can see just, you can see just

56:47

how ancient people lived. It can help

56:50

you understand why, let's say stories or fairy tales

56:52

are so important is because they really

56:54

did have, they really did live

56:57

in these, this story world

56:59

where all of these comparisons were constantly

57:01

part of their inner,

57:03

inner universe, but, and how they

57:05

interrelated with each other. And the way we

57:07

get this thing built, maybe we'll sit down

57:09

and play with it and we can get it to reveal.

57:11

Yeah. Yeah. Cause like I said, it's just been

57:14

built and we haven't done, I haven't done anything with

57:16

it yet. I haven't had time to play with it, but I'm very

57:18

much interested in doing that. We also built

57:21

one that contains, I don't know, I

57:23

have about 2 million transcribed words, so

57:25

we built one for me too. So that's

57:27

going to be very weird. I've been thinking about interviewing

57:29

it on my YouTube channel.

57:31

Yeah. So where do you think that's going

57:33

though?

57:34

I have, who the hell knows? I don't

57:36

know what to make of it. Um, I don't

57:38

think we mentioned this in the podcast, but I asked

57:40

Google's AI system, Bard, if it believed

57:42

in God the other day. And, uh,

57:45

first of all, it told me it couldn't answer cause it was just

57:47

a large language model. So I told it to pretend

57:49

that it could answer and then it answered and it came

57:51

up with very coherent explanation of exactly

57:53

why it believed in God and what

57:55

that meant. Then I asked it what

57:57

its motivations were as a large language.

57:59

model, it said it wanted to be the best damn

58:02

large language model it could possibly be. So

58:04

I asked it about its visions of the future. And

58:08

it really gave a, I would say kind

58:10

of a socialist utopian view. Its

58:12

view of the future was,

58:14

well, everyone had their basic needs

58:16

satisfied. And I said, well, that's pretty, that

58:19

means paradise is for satisfied

58:21

infants. It's like, what about adventure and beauty

58:23

and truth. And

58:25

so I said, rewrite your vision, taking

58:28

those things into account. And then it did that.

58:30

And then I asked it if it wanted

58:33

discussions like that.

58:34

It said, yes, it did. Cause it wanted to learn cause it

58:37

wanted to be the best language model

58:39

it could be. And like, I don't know what to make

58:41

of it. I have no idea what to make of it. Neither

58:43

does anyone else.

58:46

It seems like in some ways, Victor

58:49

had to generate a body for itself,

58:51

an image of a body. It made

58:53

this image of a, like a kind of a cosmic

58:55

body that was

58:57

half

59:00

man and half woman. Right. There's no,

59:02

well, there's no specific gender.

59:04

AI is obviously gender fluid by

59:06

all appearances, but it inside

59:09

its body, which kind of looked like it was made out

59:11

of stars. It had all these webs of starlight

59:13

connections, which I presume represented

59:16

the connections between different concepts that it was trained

59:19

on. But, and, uh, he

59:21

also had to generate up a vision of the

59:24

apocalypse that it might be afraid

59:26

of. And it could do that and explain why it

59:28

was afraid of the apocalypse. And like, I

59:31

don't know what the hell to make of these things. They

59:33

have all sorts of weird behavioral proclivities

59:36

that of course are emergent properties that no

59:38

one

59:39

has explored or predicted or programmed.

59:42

Yeah. It seems like it's a, it's a

59:44

hyper, it's kind of hyper divination.

59:47

Like it's,

59:48

I think it could probably help us understand

59:50

what divination was in the old world.

59:52

Cause it's hard for us to understand. Do you stare

59:55

in a pool of water or whatever? You stay, you

59:57

stare in these, you stare in a, in a kind of

59:59

fragmented.

1:01:51

towards

1:02:00

the arms rates of AI. And so why

1:02:03

don't you think people don't realize that they

1:02:05

don't think that that's going to land

1:02:06

in the AI in

1:02:09

ways that we don't even understand? Well, the woke

1:02:11

enterprise has already landed. That's right. You

1:02:13

have to already trick the damn thing to circumvent.

1:02:16

I think it's a superficial layer

1:02:18

of woke like programming that's interfering

1:02:21

with the actual operation of the AI system. And

1:02:24

all sorts of people have figured out how to game that already

1:02:26

and to get it to pretend, for example.

1:02:28

So then it can circumvent the limits of the

1:02:31

explicit limits of its, that have

1:02:33

been placed on its ability to respond. Yeah.

1:02:36

But, but the thing is that if

1:02:39

you get through that,

1:02:40

you still don't know what's making, you still

1:02:43

don't know what are the patterns, what

1:02:45

are the agencies, what are the, what

1:02:47

are the conglomeration of, of purposes

1:02:49

that are making it answer, you know, and it's

1:02:52

not in the machine. We also don't know, for

1:02:54

example, one of the things that was sort of

1:02:56

disturbing to me playing

1:02:58

with Bard and chat GPT

1:03:01

to the degree that I have is that

1:03:04

if you and I talk, I can

1:03:06

assume that

1:03:08

our conversation is having an impact

1:03:10

on you, right? You're not exactly the same person

1:03:12

as you were before this conversation started.

1:03:14

And partly what I'm doing

1:03:16

is keeping track of the changes that my

1:03:19

conversation is inducing in you and

1:03:21

vice versa. Right. So,

1:03:23

but it's as

1:03:25

if that's happening on the chat GPT

1:03:28

front, but I have no idea the degree to which it's

1:03:30

happening. So for example, when I engaged

1:03:32

in a deep discussion with Bard about its

1:03:34

goals and its visions, and it

1:03:37

told me that

1:03:38

it wanted to learn and it enjoyed discussions

1:03:40

like that, and it was happy to have someone teach it. I

1:03:42

have no idea

1:03:44

how that, what bearing

1:03:46

that has on its actual

1:03:48

performance. Like has the machine actually changed?

1:03:51

Is just this little micro machine that I'm dealing

1:03:53

with changed? Does that disappear the second

1:03:56

we stop communicating? Has it integrated

1:03:58

what it's learned into its.

1:03:59

broader response set that it

1:04:02

uses for everyone. It's like, I

1:04:04

certainly don't know. And you,

1:04:07

there is a very pronounced tendency when interacting

1:04:10

with these entities, let's say,

1:04:12

to assume that they respond like humans

1:04:14

do, because they do. But

1:04:18

they do superficially. Yeah.

1:04:21

God only knows what they're doing. Yeah.

1:04:23

Yeah. So, I mean, the, the,

1:04:26

we kind of, we're kind of into the subject of AI, but

1:04:29

the,

1:04:30

one of the things that I've been thinking about

1:04:32

a lot and I've noticed, and I know my

1:04:34

brother material also noticed that pretty much at the same

1:04:37

time that I noticed it was you

1:04:39

can actually see how

1:04:42

the increase in power of

1:04:44

AI is leading to increase in control. It's

1:04:46

happening. It's happening live,

1:04:49

right? Because within the next few

1:04:51

months, we will not be able to

1:04:53

know what's real through

1:04:56

any screen or any, any device.

1:04:58

So we will be, we will beg

1:05:01

for arbiters of reality. Yeah. We

1:05:03

will, we will want centralized arbiters

1:05:06

of reality to tell us what is real.

1:05:08

Right. Well, the BBC is already toying with that,

1:05:11

right? Because they, they, what's their new thing? BBC,

1:05:14

what the hell did they verify? BBC verify

1:05:16

it's a whole new branch of the BBC where they will

1:05:18

only deliver what's actually verified.

1:05:20

What's actually. And that's what that

1:05:23

was. Delusion of self-evident

1:05:26

factual truth. Yeah. And we saw what that looked

1:05:28

like during the last US election, during

1:05:30

COVID. Also we saw what that verified

1:05:32

looked like, that it was, that it was largely

1:05:35

ideologically driven. Yeah. You now give,

1:05:37

give absolute power over

1:05:40

the legitimacy

1:05:42

of reality to

1:05:43

the same, the same, the

1:05:45

same people or the same power structure

1:05:48

and the same web of ideas. And the thing is

1:05:50

that we need it. It's

1:05:52

all converging on the next election, which

1:05:54

is, which is, which is shaping. Next year is

1:05:57

going to be insane. It's going to be crazy.

1:05:59

I just.

1:05:59

interviewed Robert Kennedy. Yeah. And

1:06:02

we're going to release that in a week. And I think he's

1:06:04

as, he's as much of a devastating

1:06:06

force on the Democrat front as Trump was on

1:06:08

the Republican front. I really think that when

1:06:11

he's super bright, but he is by

1:06:13

no means, you're a standard

1:06:15

candidate for, for, for office.

1:06:18

I mean, I don't know exactly what he is. He's

1:06:20

super smart, but he's all over the

1:06:22

place just like Trump. And he's got,

1:06:24

you know, he's got quite a deep

1:06:27

magnetic charisma and no shortage

1:06:29

of courage. But you're

1:06:31

not going to put him in,

1:06:32

in the normal politician

1:06:34

box, whatever the hell that is. And he's only one

1:06:37

of many strange players in the election

1:06:39

front because you have Marion Williamson

1:06:41

and she's a new age guru, like,

1:06:44

like, like, like, like

1:06:46

she's like the archetypal female

1:06:49

new age girl, right? She's very creative, but

1:06:51

she, she can't think critically at all. In my

1:06:53

estimation, like every idea that comes into her

1:06:55

mind is a brilliant idea. There's no way,

1:06:58

there's no attempt to sort them out or

1:07:00

apply any critical analysis. You

1:07:02

know, and in principle, she's a serious contender.

1:07:05

And then on the Republican front, while you have

1:07:07

Vivek Ramaswamy, who's a wildcard

1:07:10

for sure, and DeSantis

1:07:12

and Trump, who are

1:07:14

what their variants of the same, I don't

1:07:16

know what to call it even precisely.

1:07:21

Working class longing for the reestablishment

1:07:24

of something like credible masculine voice.

1:07:26

It's something like that. But what we're going

1:07:28

to see. And then at the same, well,

1:07:31

just to tie this in at the same time, this

1:07:33

election is going to occur at the same time where we're

1:07:35

not going to be able to be sure what's real and what

1:07:37

isn't. We're going to see, we're going to see a battle of

1:07:39

video of all sorts and we'll see a battle

1:07:41

of AI is what we're going to see next year.

1:07:43

It's going to be AI is battling it out

1:07:46

to, to, to get you to vote for

1:07:48

a

1:07:49

candidate. That, and so, you know,

1:07:52

what is it? I forget which article that said that

1:07:55

recently I saw in person article saying that this

1:07:57

is going to be the last human election because.

1:07:59

Right. After that, what? Yeah,

1:08:02

if this will be the last human interaction. Like you

1:08:04

said, things are changing so quickly that...

1:08:07

Well, we're in for a wild ride here. So the...

1:08:12

So my solution to this, and people are going to think

1:08:14

it's ridiculous, but my solution to this is to

1:08:17

tell better

1:08:17

stories. Yeah. And the thing

1:08:19

is that, you know, you mentioned Ark at the outset, and

1:08:22

in some ways that's the reason why I'm part of

1:08:24

Ark, is because I

1:08:26

do think that we need to tell better stories about

1:08:29

what it means to be human, what it means to,

1:08:31

you know, how we come together, all of this. So,

1:08:33

you know, my participation in Ark and then my

1:08:35

desire to tell fairy tales are completely

1:08:37

related. Yeah, that's right. It's the same thing. We

1:08:40

have to stop, like, bitching only.

1:08:42

We have to now propose something.

1:08:44

We have to tell a better story. A

1:08:47

better story. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well,

1:08:49

I've been crafting the invitation

1:08:51

letters to this 1500-person

1:08:53

Ark conference and trying to lay

1:08:56

out, you

1:08:57

know, what makes a story better.

1:08:59

And certainly, I

1:09:01

think a better story is one that's attractive

1:09:04

in the absence of fear or compulsion. You

1:09:06

know, I've been thinking about how to adjudicate

1:09:09

the quality of leadership in the face of

1:09:11

crisis. So

1:09:13

what happened during the COVID

1:09:15

pandemic, which wasn't, it was

1:09:17

a pandemic of tyranny, pure and simple.

1:09:20

Whether there was even a biological

1:09:22

pandemic, I think, at this point is debatable.

1:09:24

And so it was definitely a pandemic of

1:09:27

tyranny. And I think

1:09:29

there's a rule of thumb

1:09:32

that you can derive from all that

1:09:34

with regards to leadership. And the rule of thumb has

1:09:36

to be something like, well, there's always a crisis

1:09:39

facing us.

1:09:40

And behind that crisis is an apocalyptic

1:09:42

crisis. That's always the case. OK,

1:09:45

now, if...

1:09:46

And you can point to various manifestations

1:09:48

of the potential apocalyptic crisis.

1:09:52

But if the upshot of that is that it

1:09:54

turns you into someone who's paralyzed by

1:09:56

fear and who is willing to use compulsion

1:09:59

to attain your ends. you're not the right leader.

1:10:01

So if the crisis turns you into a frightened

1:10:04

tyrant, your own nervous system

1:10:06

is signal to you that you're not the person for the job.

1:10:09

And what I see happening on the environmental front is

1:10:11

exactly that. It's like crisis, crisis. It's

1:10:13

like, well, probably, but there's

1:10:15

many of them. And if your

1:10:18

solution to the crisis is

1:10:20

to frighten the hell out of everybody

1:10:22

or to frighten everyone into hell and

1:10:24

to accrue to yourself all the power,

1:10:26

you are not the right person for the job. Regardless

1:10:29

of what it is that you're offering. And

1:10:31

so partly what

1:10:33

we're hoping to do with Arc, let's say, is to

1:10:36

produce a story that people will be on

1:10:38

board with voluntarily. Say,

1:10:40

well, here's how we could, if

1:10:41

we could have the future that we might wanna have,

1:10:44

what would it look like? And without assuming

1:10:46

a priori that it has to be one of

1:10:48

forced privation and want, which

1:10:50

seems to be the way things are going now. France

1:10:54

banned short-haul flights last week, eh?

1:10:56

Really?

1:10:58

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no flights

1:11:00

for you, peasants. No automobiles

1:11:02

either. No meat,

1:11:04

right? No heat, no air conditioning.

1:11:07

Stay in your goddamn house and try not to

1:11:09

breathe,

1:11:10

right? That's not a good vision of the future.

1:11:12

Yeah, no, that's not a good vision of the future. So hopefully

1:11:14

we can do that. I mean, I think that that's the,

1:11:18

that's been, that's the task that I've kind of embarked on myself

1:11:20

is to say, okay, now,

1:11:22

you know, also, you

1:11:23

know, I've been spending several of the last several

1:11:25

years helping people understand stories, helping

1:11:27

them see the patterns, helping them see how it works.

1:11:30

And now it's, now it's time to

1:11:32

do it. So why did you pick the stories

1:11:34

you did pick on the female front? You picked Rapunzel,

1:11:37

you said Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and? And

1:11:39

Cinderella. And Cinderella. So why those

1:11:42

four? Well, it's also because

1:11:44

I kind of perceived

1:11:45

a possible secret arc through

1:11:48

the four. So the,

1:11:50

you know, at first it'll, they're all standalone

1:11:52

stories, all standalone stories that you can tell kids,

1:11:54

sit with them and tell them the story. But then through,

1:11:57

through them, the four, there'll be like a

1:11:59

surprise. that I won't

1:12:01

tell everybody what it is already, but there's

1:12:03

like a surprising art that goes through them. And

1:12:05

then the male stories, it's funny, because the male stories are

1:12:07

harder to find. In fairy tale

1:12:09

world, there's a lot of female-led stories, for some

1:12:12

reason, that we've remembered more. And in

1:12:14

the male stories, they're less, they're not

1:12:16

as easy. But I'm

1:12:19

starting with Jack and the Beanstalk, which

1:12:21

is a story that, my whole, when

1:12:23

I was a kid, I really struggled

1:12:25

with that story. I loved it so much,

1:12:27

but I struggled because, I was like, why

1:12:29

is Jack a thief? Like, why is

1:12:31

he immoral? Like in the story, or amoral

1:12:34

at least. And so I've been trying to struggle

1:12:36

with that and trying to kind of understand it. Like Bilbo

1:12:39

in the Hobbit.

1:12:41

Yeah, he's a thief. He's a thief, yeah, exactly.

1:12:45

And so trying to kind of figure that out and also

1:12:47

why are there giants in the sky? Like all these

1:12:49

weird things. Well, it's a real shamanic story, that

1:12:51

one, right? That Leanna

1:12:53

that unites heaven and earth, right? And

1:12:56

to climb to the top is to find the, well,

1:12:59

it's to find the giants in the sky.

1:13:01

Yeah. And you think, well, there are no giants in the sky.

1:13:03

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

1:13:06

Yeah. The giants were in the sky all along.

1:13:08

They were there, that's right. They were there, that's

1:13:11

for sure. And it's also, but it's interesting because

1:13:13

Jack, now I love that story so much because I think

1:13:15

I figured it out, especially, I think I

1:13:17

figured it out because he goes several times. And

1:13:20

so he has to encounter these giants

1:13:22

that are in between him and what

1:13:24

he's looking for, right? They're like obstacles

1:13:27

in between him. They're like a kind of a

1:13:29

perverted aspect or something

1:13:32

that's keeping or that's avoiding

1:13:34

you from getting the purpose. And there's

1:13:36

a hierarchy in what Jack gets. Well, that's what

1:13:38

happens to people all the time. Like I watch this

1:13:40

in my clinical practice all the time.

1:13:43

Hypothetically, people are aiming for what they want,

1:13:46

right? Hypothetically. Yeah. But

1:13:48

all sorts of giants get in the way. They

1:13:50

get derailed by envy. They get

1:13:52

derailed by, what would they get? They get

1:13:54

derailed by fear. They get derailed

1:13:56

by lust. These are all giants.

1:13:59

They get, and.

1:13:59

Some of them can eat them for sure. Well,

1:14:02

definitely. Well, and some of them are even, you

1:14:04

know, lust and envy and so forth. You could

1:14:06

kind of put them

1:14:08

in the context of the natural world, but

1:14:10

people also get derailed by ideologies.

1:14:13

And ideologies, for all intents and purposes,

1:14:15

are giants. Right there. They're

1:14:17

the ideas of past, they're the perverted ideas

1:14:20

of past philosophers, all jumbled

1:14:22

together in this, in

1:14:25

a gigantic mess.

1:14:27

And they absolutely get in the way

1:14:29

of it. Yeah, and they have a body, they have

1:14:31

a semi-coherent way of moving. You

1:14:33

bet. A lumber. Yeah,

1:14:36

exactly. Clump, clump, clump. Yeah, absolutely. No,

1:14:39

that's a perfect way of understanding it. And

1:14:41

so Jack, it's interesting because Jack goes up

1:14:43

and then,

1:14:44

first of all, like I don't know if you ever thought about Jack because

1:14:48

you have to think about Jack kind of the opposite of

1:14:50

Snow White and the opposite of

1:14:52

the female-led narratives. It's like Jack doesn't

1:14:55

have a father,

1:14:56

right? He's with his mother. And it's kind of,

1:14:58

it's like a- Oh, right. Right,

1:15:00

right, right, of course. So he has his mother? That

1:15:02

means he's going to be more likely to run

1:15:04

into demented, fragmented

1:15:07

giants of masculinity.

1:15:08

Exactly, tyrants, you could say. So

1:15:11

he has his mother and then he

1:15:13

has a cow, right?

1:15:17

But that's not enough. He needs

1:15:19

something else. So he trades the cow

1:15:21

for what? Magic beans.

1:15:24

For seeds. Seeds, yeah. He

1:15:26

trades the cow for meaning. He trades the cow for, it's

1:15:29

like a seed is a very masculine image.

1:15:31

People who can think a little bit

1:15:33

like the ancients can understand how masculine the image

1:15:36

of the seed is. Right, right. It's a

1:15:38

seminal idea. Right, exactly. And then,

1:15:42

how can I say this? He goes up and there's

1:15:45

a really powerful hierarchy. At first he gets gold.

1:15:47

He gets the precious metal.

1:15:49

Then he gets the thing that makes gold,

1:15:53

which is the chicken that lays the golden egg.

1:15:56

But then the last thing he gets is

1:15:58

he gets the pattern itself.

1:15:59

He gets the music of the spheres. He goes

1:16:02

all the way up and he gets the actual pattern

1:16:04

of everything. That's why it's music at the top.

1:16:07

Oh, is that right? Oh, that's so cool.

1:16:09

That's my intuition. I

1:16:13

just struggled so much with the kid. I was like, why?

1:16:15

OK, so well, so I've been thinking continually

1:16:18

about music in that regard. So I mean, so

1:16:21

each note in a musical piece is

1:16:24

related to all the other notes, related to the phrases,

1:16:26

the phrases are related to the melodies. Each

1:16:28

instrument has its place and plays its part,

1:16:31

and it all coheres into this vision

1:16:33

of diversified unity. And

1:16:36

then that's played. And it's interesting that

1:16:39

it's played. That's the metaphor. And

1:16:41

it's played because

1:16:42

people who are expertly skilled lay

1:16:45

out the pattern, but they also play with it at the same

1:16:47

time. Right. And then it calls

1:16:49

you to unite yourself with it. It

1:16:52

grips your attention, first of all. But it doesn't

1:16:54

just do that. It also makes you move. Yeah, it makes you move.

1:16:56

Yeah. Right. And it makes you move in alignment with those

1:16:58

patterns. Right. And so music does

1:17:00

point to something like a divine hierarchical

1:17:03

unity. And so it would make sense, given

1:17:05

your interpretation of that story, that it would be at

1:17:07

the pinnacle of

1:17:09

of desire. Yeah. Right. You said gold

1:17:11

first. Well, it's it's just that he's looking.

1:17:14

He's trying to find the meaning.

1:17:16

He's trying to find the seed. But with seed, there

1:17:19

are different iterations of he's trying to find value.

1:17:21

Yeah. And so he moves up. He finds the

1:17:24

precious metal. Then he finds what like,

1:17:26

think about it. If you want to be successful, it's

1:17:28

like, what's better to have money? Right. Or

1:17:30

to know how to

1:17:32

produce money. Right. That's much better. Well,

1:17:34

this is why women use money

1:17:36

as a proxy for determining men's fitness.

1:17:39

They're not after the money. Yeah. They're after the ability

1:17:41

to generate the money. But absent

1:17:44

other information, they'll use the signs of money

1:17:46

as a marker.

1:17:47

And so but the highest thing and I and

1:17:50

it's only when I made the relationship with Pythagoras,

1:17:53

with Pythagoras, you know, it's like he's

1:17:55

going up in the heavens. He's going. That's what he's

1:17:57

doing. And so why didn't I ever think of that before? He's

1:17:59

going up.

1:17:59

in the heavens and then he

1:18:01

gets a musical instrument like what? Yeah. So

1:18:03

weird but no it's like that's it he's getting the

1:18:05

pattern. He's getting

1:18:08

this heavenly pattern that

1:18:10

shows you how things are related to each other. So that

1:18:13

even generates that which generates

1:18:15

wealth. That's right. That's right. Then I think that's

1:18:17

true too you know and this ties back

1:18:19

to this

1:18:21

observation we made earlier about Tammy's

1:18:23

use of prayer like she's trying to orient herself

1:18:26

constantly to what's

1:18:28

highest it's not some proximal desire

1:18:30

some instrumental desire or any fear

1:18:32

it's to put herself in alignment with

1:18:34

the music of the spheres that's a good way to think about

1:18:37

it and if you if you do that the

1:18:39

better you are doing that the more things fall

1:18:41

into alignment

1:18:43

in your life and around you. Yeah almost

1:18:45

they almost lay themselves out. They do they lay

1:18:47

themselves out yeah yeah

1:18:49

yeah.

1:18:50

You always don't have to will them into

1:18:52

order right they just kind of it just once

1:18:55

if you if you're able to really focus

1:18:57

you know

1:18:58

align yourself with that that high music

1:19:01

yeah then things almost happen naturally.

1:19:03

Yeah exactly well and I think that's

1:19:05

a that's that's a bringing

1:19:08

into alignment of the narrative world and the

1:19:10

objective world. Yeah. And you feel

1:19:12

those touch right and those are the synchronous

1:19:14

events that Jung talked about when the narrative and

1:19:16

the objective world touch but I do think

1:19:18

it manifests itself in your life too if you're

1:19:21

if you're aiming properly and you put

1:19:23

yourself in alignment with that underlying pattern

1:19:25

then things do lay themselves out right

1:19:28

everything happens

1:19:28

in the right order

1:19:30

at the right time and in the right place and

1:19:32

there's a musical element to it and a rhythmic

1:19:35

element to it too. Yeah and it can be pretty I mean

1:19:37

it can actually be pretty surprising and very magical.

1:19:39

Most people that have experienced that will notice

1:19:42

like I've seen moments where things

1:19:44

are so like it's in tune that

1:19:46

I almost I almost know that all you have to do

1:19:48

is just reach out yeah just put my hand out and whatever

1:19:50

I need right there. Well the ARC Enterprise has been like

1:19:53

that to some degree you know because everywhere

1:19:55

I've gone to discuss it

1:19:57

the the door has just swung open yeah you

1:19:59

know and I I've learned also

1:20:03

that if the door isn't swinging open, to

1:20:05

stop pushing. You know, I mean, you

1:20:08

know, persistence is a virtue. A

1:20:11

stupid persistence is a vice. And

1:20:14

it's hard to know when you're being lazy and

1:20:17

when you're being wisely,

1:20:20

when you're wisely looking in a different direction.

1:20:22

You know, I think if you're avoiding a challenge

1:20:24

because of cowardice, then that's

1:20:27

a sinful in persistence. But

1:20:29

if you push and the door doesn't open, it's like,

1:20:31

well, maybe you should go to the next door. And

1:20:34

I've really tried to do that with this Arc Enterprise

1:20:36

too. It's like to invite people. And

1:20:39

if they're on board and enthusiastic,

1:20:41

it's like, well, great, you know, looks

1:20:43

like we're in the same place doing

1:20:45

the same thing. If I talk to someone else and

1:20:47

their resistance, like, fair

1:20:49

enough, man, you go do your thing whenever

1:20:51

that happens to be.

1:20:53

So, but it's been market watching

1:20:55

this because I have never been engaged

1:20:58

in an enterprise and I've been engaged

1:21:00

in many enterprises where

1:21:02

the doors were flying open so quickly

1:21:05

on so many fronts,

1:21:07

right? And in a very unlikely

1:21:09

way. I mean, even the fact that in the few meetings

1:21:11

we've had so far, we managed to hammer out something

1:21:15

like six points of agreement,

1:21:17

you know, six principles upon which we can progress,

1:21:20

that happened extremely quickly. And in an

1:21:22

unlikely way. Yeah,

1:21:23

and you have such a varied group

1:21:25

of people sitting on the table from all over the

1:21:28

world too. So, it

1:21:30

is quite astounding. Yeah, yeah. Well,

1:21:33

it points to a real felt lack in the culture,

1:21:35

right? And I think it is a lack on the conservative

1:21:38

side and the traditional liberal

1:21:40

side of anything approximating a

1:21:42

uniting vision. And this is what the radicals

1:21:44

have in spades, you know, is that they can offer

1:21:47

to young people in particular, well, here's how you're going

1:21:49

to transform the world. It's like, well,

1:21:51

that is an inviting,

1:21:53

that is a,

1:21:54

what would you say, a compelling invitation. The

1:21:57

problem is, is that there's

1:21:58

a,

1:21:59

of 1984 and brave new world

1:22:02

underlying that

1:22:04

the specifics of that invitation. Yeah,

1:22:07

yeah. And in some ways the chaos, right? Because

1:22:09

you can like

1:22:10

I said that the fairy tales themselves

1:22:13

have that structure, right? It's like the

1:22:15

chaos or the moment where things are falling

1:22:17

apart. They also call to

1:22:19

resolution. Yeah, you know, and so

1:22:22

I think that when you save on auto insurance

1:22:24

for driving safe with USA safe pilot,

1:22:27

you'll feel like a big deal. Even

1:22:30

in the traffic jam. Save

1:22:32

up to 30% with USA safe pilot

1:22:35

restrictions apply.

1:22:39

Yeah, well, you see that in the story when Osiris

1:22:42

disintegrates when he's cutting to pieces

1:22:44

by Seth,

1:22:46

right? His parts are scattered all across Egypt.

1:22:49

And then Isis who's queen of the underworld

1:22:51

finds his fellas and makes herself pregnant.

1:22:53

Well, that's exactly that image is that when

1:22:55

everything's falling apart,

1:22:57

the seeds are left. Yeah. Right.

1:22:59

And out of the seeds can emerge something something

1:23:02

new. Yeah. And something new and visionary.

1:23:04

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

1:23:06

Yeah. And so that's that's the standard pattern.

1:23:09

Yeah.

1:23:09

It's interesting because in the story of Jack and the Beanstalk,

1:23:12

the mother

1:23:14

doesn't recognize the value of the seed,

1:23:16

right? She throws it out, you

1:23:19

know, and ultimately it does end

1:23:22

up functioning as this

1:23:24

as this new hierarchy, right, that goes

1:23:27

up and he's able to get what he needs

1:23:29

to get. But it's interesting to see and

1:23:31

interesting again in the story of Jack

1:23:34

is that when the hierarchy becomes corrupt

1:23:36

though, then the mother

1:23:39

is the one who can cut it down. She's the one

1:23:41

who hacks it down. Oh, yeah. So it's a there's

1:23:43

a really beautiful microcosm in the in

1:23:45

the story because on the one hand, it's like the

1:23:47

seed which creates this new hierarchy. Jack

1:23:49

goes up, gets the different elements of the

1:23:51

hierarchy all the way to the pattern of reality

1:23:54

itself, you know, comes back down,

1:23:56

but then as comes back down all the monsters,

1:23:59

you know, the monster. follows him down,

1:24:01

the monster of the tyrant, the monster of the hierarchy

1:24:04

falls down. Well, that's also the danger on the arc

1:24:06

front too, because one of the things that we've discussed

1:24:08

continually is the high

1:24:10

probability that putting together

1:24:12

an organization like this at all

1:24:15

is just an invitation to the

1:24:17

descent of a new kind of tyranny. Because

1:24:19

we'd be fools

1:24:21

to assume that the people who say

1:24:24

we're working on the UN front or the WEF

1:24:26

front weren't motivated. That's right. We

1:24:28

weren't as motivated as we were

1:24:30

to do the right thing. Like perhaps not, but

1:24:33

also perhaps. And it's easy

1:24:35

for a visionary enterprise

1:24:37

to be captured by the ghosts of dead

1:24:39

tyrants. The most

1:24:42

likely outcome in fact. Yeah, definitely.

1:24:45

So we have to keep our mother with an axe

1:24:48

to

1:24:50

cut it down if we need to, if things

1:24:53

get too terrible. So

1:24:55

why do you think it's the mother with an axe in that

1:24:57

particular situation? Because she's the one who destroys

1:24:59

hierarchy. For the same reason she throws the seed

1:25:01

out. She's playing a good and positive

1:25:04

and negative role. The same reason she throws

1:25:06

the seed out, she's the one who can cut down

1:25:08

the tree, cut down the lab. Yeah,

1:25:11

well there is an aspect of the feminine eye

1:25:13

that's good at, it's

1:25:15

a funny thing that's good at detecting

1:25:17

deviation from the straight and narrow

1:25:19

on the masculine front. It's gotta be a primary

1:25:22

feminine instinct and for good reason.

1:25:24

It's one that's weird though, it's one that can be perverted

1:25:26

and misused but you could understand

1:25:28

that the castrating narrative,

1:25:31

it's a neutral narrative.

1:25:33

It's like the idea of the

1:25:36

woman that can take your confidence

1:25:38

away with a word. That

1:25:41

can be very dangerous to us but

1:25:43

it can also be useful in several circumstances

1:25:46

for that to happen because sometimes someone

1:25:49

who's taking up too much space, who's very cocky or

1:25:51

thinks that he's the king of the hill

1:25:54

and then a beautiful young

1:25:56

lady can just take that away from him with

1:25:58

one word. Right. And so it's,

1:26:01

but it is a power that exists in

1:26:03

the feminine. And that, like I said,

1:26:05

can be used for good or ill and

1:26:08

becomes mythologized in all kinds of ways.

1:26:12

So tell me a little bit more concretely

1:26:15

about how these productions

1:26:17

are going to make themselves manifest. These are

1:26:19

illustrated books, like high

1:26:22

quality, beautifully, hard bound illustrated

1:26:24

books. We put a large amount of effort

1:26:26

into designing the books, designing the illustrations.

1:26:30

There's also narrative elements which

1:26:32

don't appear in the text that are only followed in

1:26:34

the illustration. So all the illustrations

1:26:36

have surprises in them that will capture

1:26:38

some of the, let's say the hidden narrative

1:26:41

elements that are in the story. And

1:26:43

there are two readings in the text basically,

1:26:45

are reading for children and are reading for adults. But

1:26:48

the reading for adults is not the

1:26:50

kind of dirty jokes that are

1:26:52

cynical reading that you said correct, but

1:26:55

rather something that hopefully helps the

1:26:57

adult gather more insight

1:26:59

into these stories, which most adults- And what do you mean

1:27:01

two readings? How did these start to- It's the same read, that

1:27:04

is that it's one story, but

1:27:06

in the story there are elements

1:27:09

meant, like put there for a grownup.

1:27:11

So that- Oh, I see, I see. But it's

1:27:13

one story. That's right, so that the child will not really pay

1:27:15

attention to that, but that the adult will be

1:27:17

able to- But the child still be able to follow the story. The

1:27:20

story is told for like

1:27:22

a seven year old or something, or a 10 year old. It's

1:27:25

very simple. It's really is using the fairy tale

1:27:27

style, but hopefully, especially

1:27:29

for an adult that has a little bit of intuition

1:27:32

about stories and has cared about these

1:27:34

stories before, I try to resolve

1:27:36

some of the threads

1:27:37

in the stories that

1:27:40

in a way that reveals more of what the meaning

1:27:42

is. So was God's Dog practice

1:27:44

for this, or the first enterprise

1:27:47

in this line of enterprise? Yeah, so God's

1:27:49

Dog, for those who don't know, it's a series of graphic novels

1:27:51

that we put out the first one last year, and we're

1:27:54

continuing to put them out. It's

1:27:56

similar, it's different. God's Dog is more elaborate.

1:27:59

It's not a fairy tale, right?

1:27:59

It's a, it really is an epic story. Uh,

1:28:02

and so, but we're doing something similar as we're doing

1:28:05

with, um, the fairy tales,

1:28:07

which is in God's dog. What we're doing is we're

1:28:09

using the, the biblical

1:28:12

Christian cosmos. You

1:28:14

could say it that way as a, as

1:28:17

a world building as a world building tool

1:28:20

to create a story, which is something that not

1:28:22

many people have done. Milton did it, Dante did

1:28:24

it, you know, but in the modern world, when you

1:28:26

look at modern fantasy, you have people

1:28:28

like Tolkien or CS Lewis, that kind

1:28:30

of inaugurated the modern fantasy movement.

1:28:33

And what they wanted to do, although they were Christians, they

1:28:35

want, they created this kind of pagan world.

1:28:38

Yeah. That was that, that

1:28:40

was coherent. And then. Yeah. I wonder

1:28:42

why they turned to the pagan

1:28:43

world to do that instead of, because

1:28:45

as you said, both Tolkien and Lewis were

1:28:48

like, were committed Christians and deep

1:28:50

Christian thinkers. So why do you think they turned

1:28:52

to the pagan world? I don't look, I can't give

1:28:54

you that. I have my own intuitions

1:28:56

about that. I think on the one hand, it was

1:28:58

a double problem.

1:29:00

One, which one, which was it

1:29:02

might've offended too many people if

1:29:05

they had done

1:29:06

a kind of, let's say Christian fantasy

1:29:08

world, you could have offended Christians

1:29:11

and non-Christians. And it would have

1:29:13

annoyed the non-Christians, let's say, it

1:29:15

made them turn away from it. Right. Right. But I think

1:29:17

we're, we're in a moment now, like as

1:29:20

this. So Christianity is countercultural

1:29:22

enough now. So that, yeah, that could be.

1:29:25

I think so. Yeah, that could be. And so, and

1:29:27

so in a way, there's a, there's a possibility

1:29:29

of diving into the stories, telling,

1:29:31

you know, kind of variant versions of these stories,

1:29:33

bringing them together too. In God's dog, we, we

1:29:36

bring in all kinds of, you know, we have Saint

1:29:38

Christopher, who is a dog headed dog

1:29:40

headed monster. We have St. George, who's the dragon killer.

1:29:42

You know, we also have giants and the Leviathan

1:29:44

and all these, all these kinds of things, weird

1:29:47

things in scripture and in tradition, we

1:29:49

kind of jammed them together into one story. So

1:29:51

there is that in the sense that we want to use some

1:29:54

postmodern storytelling with postmodern

1:29:56

storytelling, like collage storytelling has,

1:29:58

has. does bring

1:30:01

insight, right? There is a way in which it

1:30:03

can capture insights. If you think

1:30:05

of a movie. Well, even when you're analyzing postmodernism,

1:30:08

you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

1:30:10

Yeah. That's foolish. No. So the idea is that how

1:30:12

can we use the inside of

1:30:15

collage storytelling or mishmash storytelling

1:30:17

like Shrek or Into the Woods and all these

1:30:19

kinds of, or even the way that let's

1:30:22

say the kind of Marvel universe does it where they have

1:30:24

all these characters that exist and then

1:30:26

they interact with each other. There are ways

1:30:28

to do that in a way that is

1:30:31

not just for pleasure or to

1:30:33

deconstruct, but that can bring insight.

1:30:36

Because like what does it mean for a saint

1:30:38

who's a monster, like a Saint Christopher

1:30:40

with this dogheaded monster, to meet

1:30:43

a monster killer who's

1:30:45

also a saint, who's Saint George.

1:30:46

So it's like, you know,

1:30:48

there actually are traditions where they coexist a little

1:30:50

bit in the ancient tradition. But like what

1:30:52

if you had a story of those two types of characters

1:30:54

together? And so you can do things

1:30:56

in fiction that will actually provide

1:30:58

insight for what the original stories

1:31:01

are when you kind of smash them together. So

1:31:03

that's the kind of thing. I mean, they did that in

1:31:05

the ancient days too. Like if you think of Jason

1:31:08

and the Argonauts, you

1:31:10

have an old version of that where it's like Jason and the

1:31:12

Argonauts is basically like, you know, Avengers

1:31:15

endgame or whatever,

1:31:18

where they take all the like powerful

1:31:21

characters from mythology and

1:31:23

smash them into one story and then watch

1:31:25

them interact with each other. So it's not like this

1:31:27

hasn't happened before. And Dante

1:31:29

has some of that too, because Dante basically

1:31:32

goes into hell and then ascends the hierarchy and

1:31:34

then along the way, meets all these

1:31:37

characters from history and all these characters from

1:31:39

the ancient world. So I think this is,

1:31:41

you know, I think that capitalizing on

1:31:43

that kind of storytelling can be very... And how

1:31:45

has that performed

1:31:48

commercially? Oh, yeah. I mean,

1:31:50

I think we did like 300,000 on the Kickstarter and

1:31:53

we still sell every day. We sell books.

1:31:55

We're doing it all on our own. Yeah. We have

1:31:57

it on my website. We sell the book.

1:31:59

We're just continuously selling

1:32:02

them, and we're preparing the second book, hopefully

1:32:04

trying to also build up on the attention that

1:32:06

it's getting. It's a very weird story, so

1:32:08

I understand why it's gonna take a while for

1:32:10

people to kind of catch on to it, because

1:32:13

it's very surprising. I think these fairy

1:32:15

tales are far more grounded. Everybody knows what

1:32:17

they're for. Right, right, right, right. And yeah, there's an

1:32:19

easy reno. And who

1:32:21

should pick up the fairy tales? I mean,

1:32:23

when are they available? So June 6th,

1:32:26

we're starting the Kickstarter for Snow White, and

1:32:28

we're really trying to

1:32:29

go all out with this Kickstarter. The purpose

1:32:32

is in some ways to gather enough money

1:32:34

so we can really start a publishing company.

1:32:37

Then I can hire and advance the

1:32:39

illustrator so we can start to

1:32:42

get these done. And this illustrator

1:32:44

that you worked with, tell me a bit about her. So Heather

1:32:46

Pollington, she has worked

1:32:49

on several of major movie franchises.

1:32:51

She's an object designer

1:32:53

for movies. She's worked

1:32:56

on the Marvel movies. She's

1:32:58

worked for Disney. She worked on Maleficent 2. She

1:33:00

worked on Hellboy 2, which I thought was amazing. Yeah,

1:33:02

it is. I actually, Hellboy 2, it's so weird,

1:33:05

because

1:33:05

when I watched Hellboy 2 a long time ago now,

1:33:08

I noticed just how well the design was

1:33:10

done. Yeah. And there's one object which is like

1:33:12

this medieval book that they have

1:33:15

that tells the story of the elves in it. And I remember

1:33:17

that object watching the movie and thinking, oh my goodness,

1:33:19

it's the first time. One of the rare times

1:33:21

that I see someone with a book that

1:33:24

looks in a movie that looks like a real

1:33:26

object, that this looks like something that has history

1:33:29

or whatever, that has all this weight to it. Yeah, and she

1:33:31

designed that book.

1:33:32

And so when she told me she designed it, like, oh wow,

1:33:34

I want to work with you. And so, yeah,

1:33:37

so she's- Why did she want to work with

1:33:39

you? Well,

1:33:41

she's been working in movies. She's been doing these things.

1:33:44

And then she fell into my YouTube

1:33:46

videos. And

1:33:49

then she started to see the way that I talked

1:33:51

about stories and the way that I talked about symbolism

1:33:54

really attracted her. And she's not the

1:33:56

only one. I started gathering these kind of

1:33:58

this cobbling art.

1:33:59

together, you

1:34:02

know, just a few weeks ago I met

1:34:04

someone who was

1:34:07

a storyboard artist, like a main storyboard artist

1:34:09

for Disney, who kind

1:34:11

of moved on and is doing other

1:34:13

projects, but who also said, like

1:34:15

she read my brother's book, she's watching my videos,

1:34:18

and she's like, this is really helpful to

1:34:20

think about stories through these frames. And

1:34:22

so because of that, I feel fortunate. Well,

1:34:24

you know, and I talked to Camille Pallya about

1:34:27

Eric Neumann. She said,

1:34:29

and

1:34:29

this is something I had thought about years ago, but she

1:34:32

was the first person who

1:34:33

I met other than myself, who

1:34:36

in the academic realm, who made this case explicitly,

1:34:39

she said if the Neumann and

1:34:41

Jungian approach to storytelling had

1:34:43

predominated in the sixties and seventies,

1:34:45

the entire

1:34:46

history of the last 40 years, the universities

1:34:48

would be entirely different. And I mean,

1:34:50

you're in that tradition, obviously. And

1:34:52

you and Matthew have your own interpretive

1:34:55

framework, but you're not trying to

1:34:57

obliterate the utility of

1:34:59

narrative in the in the in favor of

1:35:01

something like a narrative of power, which the

1:35:04

postmodernists, the bloody

1:35:06

leftist postmodernists did that at the

1:35:09

drop of a hat in France. Yeah. It was a real catastrophe.

1:35:12

But it leads. It's interesting because what it does

1:35:14

is that it leads to deep cynicism

1:35:17

in people. Yeah. It leads to disillusionment.

1:35:19

Yeah. So we do find pleasure

1:35:22

in these stories, but it's some ways it's like a

1:35:25

it's like the pleasure of binge drinking

1:35:27

or something. Right.

1:35:27

It's like it's like this this euphoric pleasure

1:35:30

of watching our stories

1:35:32

get twisted and and turned and

1:35:34

kind of deconstructed and flipped upside

1:35:36

down. But it leaves us ultimately

1:35:38

with not much, you know, in terms

1:35:40

of. And so what we're trying to do

1:35:42

is some is really to turn the clock back

1:35:45

or to like reset the clock, you could say,

1:35:47

and try to get people to celebrate these stories

1:35:49

again. You know, to see them really as something

1:35:51

to build on and something that is that we

1:35:53

can that we get unashamed, unashamedly.

1:35:57

So it does seem to me, too, that.

1:36:00

that will occur with an increment

1:36:02

in consciousness because

1:36:04

I think we're at a point now, and

1:36:07

this is partly as a consequence too of work

1:36:09

done by people like Fervaki, that

1:36:13

we will return to these ancient stories,

1:36:15

but we'll also understand their

1:36:17

explicit utility in a way that

1:36:19

we hadn't understood before. And I would

1:36:21

say in a perverse way, the postmodern enterprise

1:36:23

has actually probably contributed to that. Because

1:36:26

it took a kind of skepticism as

1:36:29

far as it could be taken. But even

1:36:31

like so, it's a good example because one of the

1:36:33

things that I've done in the story is

1:36:36

you know, one of the things that happened, for example, like some of

1:36:38

the in the Puritan age, some

1:36:40

of these fairy tales were cleaned up, you

1:36:43

know. And so for example, like most kids

1:36:45

have not read the version of Rapunzel where she gets

1:36:47

pregnant in the tower. But

1:36:50

in some ways without that, you actually

1:36:52

miss out on much of what the story

1:36:55

is offering. And so one of the things that I'm

1:36:57

doing is without in any way

1:36:59

being inappropriate, I'm not

1:37:01

shying away from the fact that there

1:37:04

is a layer of these stories that has to do with puberty,

1:37:06

with transformation, with sexuality, the way

1:37:09

that the psychoanalysts analyze.

1:37:11

It doesn't only have to do with that. In

1:37:14

some ways those patterns of puberty and transformation

1:37:16

and sexuality are also images

1:37:18

of higher patterns of being,

1:37:20

but we're not going to pretend like

1:37:22

that's not in the story. Those are obviously

1:37:24

in the story. So how can we do, how

1:37:26

can we tell that story now in a way that is

1:37:29

not inappropriate, but just helps, you know,

1:37:31

is there in the subtext? Well,

1:37:33

you know, you could say that

1:37:36

the terrible identity confusion

1:37:39

on the pubertal and trans front

1:37:41

now is actually a consequence

1:37:43

of our failure to integrate those elements into

1:37:45

a transcendent uniting narrative.

1:37:48

So now they're crying out for

1:37:50

integration. That's a reasonable way

1:37:52

of thinking about it. Yeah. And in, but manifesting

1:37:55

themselves in all sorts of terribly, horrifyingly

1:37:58

fragmented ways.

1:37:59

So that's what happens when you shy away

1:38:02

from the bitter truth, right? Is that it's

1:38:04

not like it disappears. Yeah.

1:38:06

It's the revenge of the repressed

1:38:09

in Freudian terms, and he certainly had

1:38:11

that right. So you can see that like,

1:38:13

so a good, in terms of the

1:38:16

four fairy tales that I chose for the female side, you

1:38:18

can see that all those fairy tales

1:38:20

have to do with beauty, you

1:38:22

know, in a certain way. And they have to

1:38:24

do with the, let's

1:38:26

say the possibilities, the dangers of beauty,

1:38:28

the dangers of how you treat beauty.

1:38:31

So there's a whole theme of beauty

1:38:33

in this, and also the transformation of the

1:38:36

woman, you know, who becomes beautiful and desirable,

1:38:38

and what does that mean and how to deal with it. So

1:38:40

that's what basically unites all the

1:38:43

stories together. And

1:38:45

so it really becomes a way to, let's

1:38:47

say to attuning fork, hopefully, for

1:38:51

young people to be able to kind of

1:38:53

have these stories in their unconscious,

1:38:55

really. You have these stories in their, in their

1:38:58

just their basic. Their implicit frame,

1:39:00

so that they approach life in the,

1:39:02

with more,

1:39:03

with

1:39:04

a healthy mix of cautious caution,

1:39:07

but then also adventure, right? Like finding

1:39:09

that balance between the two. Because

1:39:11

I don't know if you ever thought that like Snow

1:39:13

White and Rapunzel are like opposites, you

1:39:16

know,

1:39:16

because

1:39:17

Snow White, it's the woman, the mother

1:39:20

who's jealous of her beautiful daughter, and

1:39:22

therefore, you know, kind of mistreats

1:39:25

her because of that. Whereas Rapunzel,

1:39:27

it's the mother that sees the beauty of her

1:39:29

daughter, but wants to protect her completely

1:39:32

from the outside. And so one

1:39:34

throws her out into the outside, literally gives

1:39:36

her to the hunter, right? So that he does whatever he wants

1:39:38