Let's Find Out - Interview with MemeAnalysis on what ASMR is...

Episode Date: February 17, 2020

We discuss what ASMR tells us about our nature, psychology, and society.

I just got off a video call with my buddy Chris from meme analysis, another YouTube channel analyzing memes, as you might expect. It's very smart, very perceptive and useful, I think, to analyze the role that memes play in our evolving culture. We tried to keep it about ASMR. That was the original topic, of course, because it's relevant, but we couldn't help. but taking wide swerves and veers and tangents into much deeper territory. But we always ended up trying to circle back around to the topic at hand. And, you know, I think we both tried to just keep it casual, familiar, conversational, and attempt to look at the phenomena of ASMR through the lens of not just memes,

but on a much deeper level. Chris in particular is very knowledgeable about psychoanalysis. and its relationship to history and spirituality and science. I mean, he is very cross-interdisciplinary, I guess, in that respect. And that's why I really enjoy him in his channel and what he's doing over there. And I wanted to have him on to kind of sort of interview, but an interview-turned conversation. So I had a good time.

I really enjoyed talking to him. I learned a lot. He was very accommodating to all of my. my questions I berated them with. So I hope you guys get something out of it too. It's not specifically ASMR itself, but we tried to again keep it very casual. And I thought it was fun.

And hopefully I can start, you know, doing more podcast like content in the future on this channel. If you guys enjoy it and, because I know I did. So let me know what you think. I'll let it roll. from here enjoy okay cool I think we're good awesome so yeah I'd I personally just interested in what what you got going on over at the meme analysis

channel so yeah if you want to just do a quick intro you just give people an idea of what you're attempting to do with the channel I guess so with meme analysis I found that it's extremely important to pay attention to the little things in our lives. And that's like one of the great observations from Young is that these little meaningless fantasies and dreams, even the tiniest, most ridiculous things, have a great deal of significance. And since I'd been reading that stuff, I found that the internet was a place where a lot of meaningful stuff was happening and not a lot of people were paying attention to it.

or if they did it was really just to make fun of it. They weren't really interested in why certain people posted certain things. And I'm very interested as to just generally, why do people post what they post? Why is it that, you know, we've all come together to laugh at these certain images, these memes or certain videos are able to become popular for millions of people? Never in the history of mankind have we had,

such immediately popular images and images that eventually, you know, they fall right back down. They're only popular for a brief amount of time. And so they must be significant in that time and then lose it. So I'm very interested in why that is the case. And do you, so like have you thought about this, like doing this for a while? Have you, was there a first major set of memes or something like that that maybe, got you thinking this was a pretty important phenomenon. Back in 2014 is when I really started to think about those things

because I started to read philosophy and psychoanalysis. And I'd thought about it for a while, but it was only in, I'd say, 2016 during the election when Pepe and Wojack became very front and center that I realized, oh, these matter. They have a lot of significance. And so I put videos out back then, and then I wrote about it back then, but I only really started doing it regularly in 2018.

But I have been doing it for a while. So the distinction, that made me think of a question of whether or not, what's more important in your mind in regarding memes, like, Because I guess we'll eventually segue into ASMR specifically, but like people's intentional, you know, intentionally making memes, or do you think it's more like, it's more of an emergent phenomenon that's more important than the actual, anyone in particular, you know, specific intention behind it? I think it's definitively emergent. People that intentionally make memes tend to make very boring memes.

If you're trying to make something popular, you fail, you have to have, I think, at least what I find is that it tends to be an unconscious phenomenon. People will make a meme and they don't know why they've made it. Just like art. They get caught up in inspiration and they produce it. And that's why, at least in my analyses, I found that many memes contain symbolism from ancient myths. and, you know, these ancient symbols are surviving very well in the form of ridiculous internet jokes. That's so fascinating.

And yeah, that's actually kind of like a good segue because I do want to get into the deeper evolutionary, you know, aspects. And again, ultimately, I think ASMR, I think we both kind of agree it's tied in pretty intimately to our evolutionary, you know, tendencies, and whatever instincts we might have. So, like, you said you were reading philosophy and psychoanalysis, and as far as, like, the archetypes Young's major idea, was there any, like, pre-internet things that you kind of see as just a continuity of, or the memes being a continuity of,

like cartoons or something or comics? I think that specifically we go with the ones that Nietzsche found in Dionysus and Apollo, and you see that music has been the vector of an archetypal drive and sculpture, and I find that ancient Greek sculpture of gods and heroes has kind of become action figures and figurines. So a lot of products are archetypal in nature. Music, entertainment, and art tends to be the realm of the archetypes. because they have bright colors, they're dreamlike. And humor has always contained a lot of the personal unconscious,

but only now as our audiences, or anybody using the internet, has become immense and vast. That is why the humor has taken on an archetypal turn. In the past, you can make a joke that would make your friend group laugh, your family laugh, your town laugh, but now we have jokes that make the entire world, or at least the entire Western world laugh. Ah, that makes so much sense.

And, like, do you think that lends credence to the validity, like, I guess the, yeah, the validity, the truth in regards to what it says about human nature, because it reaches, if, you know, memes that affect so many people, like, the sample size is, like, almost like the maximum, if you will, I guess. I definitely think it lends, and like, to Young's idea of the collective unconscious, that we do in fact share instinctual nature and that humor is what reveals it. The fact that we can all laugh at the same thing does show that we have a definite bond, an unconscious relation that is, I would say, most definitely something that we evolved to have. man that's yeah I feel like we have to pay attention to things that endure like that exist over the longest periods of time that that at least indicates I guess that's kind of a

pragmatic view maybe correct me if I'm wrong but that's like we you know all we can know is I guess you could you could probably explain it better than I could but yeah like things that exist for longest periods of time have to to have the claim of being the realist or truest, I guess. That's something Philip K. Dick says that I find to be very truthful. And he was asked by a student at a lecture, what is reality? And he said, reality is whatever doesn't go away when you stop believing in it. And that's what I find that these repeating and relatively eternal archetypes show.

They're things in culture that never go away. Right, yeah, they just keep popping up even from first principles or whatever, or like from, even if there isn't like a continuity of generational stories or something like that. Yeah, like what would you say or the most important, like the most, not important, but I guess, the deepest, the most universal archetypes? I think that we can find them primarily in the tarot with like the king and queen, the magician, which can all be emperor, empress, shaman. You know, there's these many different names.

There's, of course, the hero, which is made famous, the hero with a thousand faces, which is what led to Star Wars, you know, in Joseph Campbell. And Star Wars, I find, is like a really good proof, again. It's that a story so ancient can become, you know, arguably the most popular franchise, because it's the same exact story that appeals, to your primitive nature, your archetypal nature.

Yeah, definitely. So I'm going to, I'm trying to find a way to segue into ASMR, I guess, specifically, because obviously we want to talk about it at some point. Like, the idea of the shaman, I guess, is a good one. Because you actually said that, and I was reading the book I was telling you about the other day, the grooming gossip and evolution of language.

I'm recording. separately on my phone here too um but anyways yeah like how we um we have an instinct it's modern humans have been shown to actually have about a hundred to a very predetermined number like between 100 and 150 um acquaintances and close friends and it doesn't seem to ever really fluctuate too much out of that that range and this guy's hypothesis was that you know that evolved from our small tribal groups and our nature of that ties in with that being the maximum number of people we can have one-on-one, you know, grooming interactions before it evolved into gossiping, grooming and gossiping language and, and I guess that ties into, you know, ASMR being a very instinctual,

like, an instinct, a desire for us to have some sort of one-on-one connection in an intimate setting that's very, you know, in a secure environment, it gives you a sense of safety and a part of in-group security. You know, you kind of have someone being on alert and grooming you and looking out while you can, you know, use that time to relax. And then maybe in the future you'd reciprocate. And but yeah, as we apparently evolved language or at least maybe even music, I think I told you. I heard one guy say that. He thinks, you know, humming maybe even that, well, whatever its most primitive form might have been,

might have actually came before, you know, language per se, I guess, like actual definite, definite words. And so as we evolved the ability to be able to communicate with sound and reach, you know, multiple people at once through sound, we kind of, I guess we ratcheted up the cultural complexity of, you know, being able to communicate ideas much broader than just a one-to-one interaction. And so you were trying to say that you had an interesting idea about the ASMR tapping into the instinct for us all to listen to, you know, a shaman or something like that, right? I think that with the archetypal nature of those relationships, there's a part of archetypes that people tend to miss, which is something that Young calls mythological pleasure, so that when you are feeling ASMR, it's such a deep, instinctual pleasure. and I think that's likely why it has that sensual response. It's not just a kind of pleasure inside. It's something that comes out, you feel it.

And it's the same thing that happens in certain archetypal relationships in general. But with ASMR, you get this very, very deeply instinctual relationship. and what you said about music coming before language, I completely agree. Like birds have music. And it makes me think about how dinosaurs had music. If they're evolutionarily related, dinosaurs have music as well. And this is to say that all of our ancestors have likely had grooming rituals. And, you know, no matter how inhuman

physical contact is the most important aspect of a communal being. So when we feel ASMR, we feel a pleasure that every single ancestor, through the aeons, has felt. That is why these specific pleasures are just so deep, so important and vital. And I think that that shows kind of the spooky nature of the internet, that we can get that kind of pleasure from a machine, from the internet. It's no longer that you need a parent or a shaman or somebody to talk to you. We now have the internet. We can gain this almost spiritual, deeply meaningful pleasure out of something that you can buy at a store.

Right. Yeah, and of course that it can be is something that can be exploited too. It can be superficially recreated. And I loved your video on going into five below. I thought that was super interesting. And like you were saying that like the internet, well, I won't put words in your mouth, but you were essentially, I think, pointing to the popularity of slime and very tactile, tangible things as being kind of like a counterbalance to. the digital, you know, what was it, less intimate experience nowadays? People are delving into environments that literally lack any sensory nature. It's entirely a unconscious matrix. Just like somebody in the matrix, like in the film, anybody in the pod has literally never felt anything. They might have thought that they felt it, experienced it as if it was felt, but their own bodies have not developed. And children are almost becoming this way, where they experience everything through the video games, phones, friendships online entirely. They're missing out on the all-important nature of

sensation and tactile play. And, you know, this is why they're always talking about, like, oh, millennials killed toy stores, but it is in fact true. Toys are going out of style because they are catering to a need which the internet has already taken care of. That's why slime is so important because it's just sensory. There's no character or story. It's just a feeling. And there's, you know. Wow, it's so, yeah, it's so like base.

Like it taps right into your base. since I didn't even think about the, there's no anthropomorphism to it, like on most, you know, dolls and other things. No, no, I guess maybe there's gender if it's like one's pink and one's blue or something like that. But, yeah, the matrix analogy was really interesting too. It made me immediately, of course, they tried to evoke the image of being in a womb perpetually, I guess, because you literally are in like the amniotic fluid still, like, until you. And that's the root of matrix. is Matur. It's the, you know, the matrix is defined by its foreness, and four is the feminine

archetype as defined by Young. So you're literally within the womb when you're in the matrix. That's so interesting. And yeah, isn't that you just said matur, like isn't that the root, like mother is like the root of the word matter in matrix, I guess, too? And that, that shows us this bizarre inversion. Matrix used to be the world. The world was

built upon matrices and now it's the exact opposite. Now the fictional world is the

matrix and matter has been reduced to nothing. Matter is no longer important to people

or at least no longer important to people online. That's... Okay, that really just brought up

the idea of how I guess as recently as maybe 500 years ago before science really kicked in to its, you know, became an independent thing in history, how people used to, up until the late Middle Ages used to really see soul in everything, even inanimate objects, like rocks and things. Like is that your reading of history in general? And I certainly return to that idea a lot and specifically, In Young's book Synchronicity, he talks extensively about that idea and that even like a fingernail or a rock or a plant has the, has divinity in it because it's a microcosm of the macrocosm.

We are reflections of the heavens and of this divine order, which is not even necessarily by God. it's just a super a superseded order. And so I think it is important that we see that the material is vitally important to understanding the mental. It's not just like, and that's the real problem with Descartes, that we have separated life from material. Young and Reich are really trying to get back to this unity of being, which is super important. And that's even almost one of the main ideas in this book, The Re-enchantment of the World, which I think is Morris Berman.

And that seems to be one of his main points about how to reconcile the direction of science with religion. And it is a unity of body and mind. Oh, man, there's so many places I can go from here. So I was curious about the guy, Robin Dunbar again same same guy he has a pretty good TED talk I said I was gonna send you the link and I didn't sorry about that But he did have a section of that TED talk where heat Tried to relay

I don't want to go up on too much of a tangent but he was trying to incorporate laughter and how it's very contagious and that made me think of like all these other things that are very social things you know very things that that give us a sense of pleasure and a sense of community and and and how he was saying they did controls where people would watch stand-up videos in a lab experimental setting. They would watch them stand-up comedians alone and then with a group. And it was 100% of the time the group would always invoke more laughter from each individual than just a person watching it by themselves. And, I mean, you know, yawning.

I mean, there's, of course, millions of things I'm sure we can point out that are very contagious on a group level but that's uh i don't really know where to where to tie it in i guess the asmr is what you know i'm trying to yeah that lent it it lends itself to asmr in that so many of these integral human pleasures are experienced by communities and groups and that my mission and yours are not so different is seeing something ancient and doing something ancient with the internet like you are catering to ancient pleasures just like I'm trying to understand jokes the laughter which is contagious is the same as this communal feeling which is contagious you know people in you know throughout all of

history we will adopt others if we don't kill them but we do we adopt others into communities and that is through this this rich these rituals which make us comfortable with other people laughing, yawning, sleeping together, and grooming. And that's another aspect of ASMR. And it shows just how unconsciously pleasant it is. Something that you noticed talked about a lot and that everybody shares is that at night

we tend to get a bit more sad or that we tend to start thinking deeper. And so a lot of times, you know, people regret at night. night. They look back on their lives and feel regrets. But the fact that people at night listen to ASMR shows like it's not something artificial, that it is something that is very deeply pleasurable. Otherwise they wouldn't use it. You know, that's kind of like a litmus test. Like, can I listen to this at night? If so, it's certainly something that I feel is meaningful. So the fact that it's already unconsciously accepted,

I think is very important. But I still think it lends itself to a sad image of modern life where we need artificial, digital jokes, grooming, sexual relationships. It's all through this digital inhuman vector. And what we've talked about a few times is the idea of, like, bleeding the stone lending itself to bleeding the screen, that when we try to get emotion out of something very cold and impossible, that is the dynamic of the individual trying to get pleasurable,

excuse me, pleasurable sensations out of the internet. They're trying to get emotions from something cold and inhuman. And so, because, you know, it's technology is being integrated further and further into our lives so of course it can't replicate it can transmit community can transmit ideas and communicate ideas much faster than we previously could you know over a telephone call or or what have you but so I guess it's never going to give us the depth of communication as an intimate you know physical interaction but I mean do you see it as I guess you don't see it as all bad

your channel is based on internet memes. I mean, you think like we're in just a very chaotic period right now. We're kind of up in the air as far as which trajectory we can go, whether it's just all becomes trivial in vain, or we actually use this technology for something, I don't know, like revolutionary as far as how we view ourselves in a global community now is what you're trying to do kind of like sort out exactly what

what memes actually mean for our culture and where our trajectory is? As for how good things can get, I often return to a little talk that Young gave and he was lamenting giving it because it was being recorded And he said, I am very anxious about my voice becoming separate from my body, that this recording of me will outlive my body forever.

So in a way, we are all, you and I especially, and people who make videos of themselves, we are giving ourselves up to an eternity in the digital. So as to whether or not this is good for our world, world, I really think it depends on degrees and depth. How much, you know, are we one toe in the pool or are we drowning? You know, I think it really depends on what the Internet is used for. And a lot of people seem to think that the Internet is becoming more and more a capitalist, that it's becoming more and more of a product and not so much. of a great forum where everybody can kind of share their ideas, but rather a few big ideas and everybody flocks to them. So I think that it really does depend on people's day-to-day

lives, and if our day-to-day lives were more fulfilling or more meaningful, we might not have the danger of the internet. I think it is due to a crisis of meaning in the modern world, that the internet has become a threat. I'm sure that there are certain times in history where the internet would be a very good tool and just a tool. It's solely due to this great crisis and turmoil that's in everybody that we find people who give themselves entirely to a fantasy and more and more people doing this. So if a person lives a meaningful life, I don't think that the internet is a threat at all. So that's really what it comes down to.

Are you swimming or are you drowning? And it could, okay, so it could in that sense almost be just an amplification of what our human, our existing human nature, just as we already are. It just holds a mirror up to us because it, yeah, it records for however long these are going to last. You know, this digital imprint or fingerprint of ourselves is going to last. We can use it to come upon a, you know, arrive at just a stasis. And, and, or we can use it to, as a mirror to be, to judge our future selves against, I guess.

We can, yeah, I don't know. It's, I don't even know what to think about that, I guess. It's just so new. And so, I think I told you before, the idea that this is another Gutenberg revolution is, fascinating one to me because I don't see it slowing down at all and you know I definitely see you know our nature just being amplified basically like it's just showing us so much more about our human nature than we ever realized before we ever had access to so it's it's interesting in that sense as a as a mirror of

what we are and that's why my tagline on the channel is that memes matter if we remain safe and deny things and say no memes are ridiculous and meaningless. We say that about human nature. You know, we're getting such a clear picture. Oh no, but that if we, just that if we say that memes are meaningless, we say that our own human nature is meaningless. We deny ourselves. This is why you it's really dangerous when we attribute human behavior online to bots or to governments. It's almost a conspiratorial thinking to escape from tragedy. And that tragedy is the essence of humanity and of our conflicts.

If we deny the worst part of people, we deny everything about people. And that's why we need to pay attention to everything on the internet. Not just memes and not just YouTube videos, but pornography. And these various communities for people that other people might think of as very weird or very wrong and perverse, that is where we are getting such a snapshot of humanity. We can't say no to that. We can't say no to ourselves. That's something Peterson talks about and Young talks about.

if you can't see Hitler in yourself, you are denying your ability to be evil. And we can all be evil. We all have evil in us. Yeah, that's a really good point. I'm fascinated by that point of like, you know, well, I guess it ultimately comes back to Young's idea of the self and how you can't reach, you know, if you conceptualize, you know, our being, our psychic being as a tree, the branches can't reach heaven unless the roots have tapped, you know, reached hell equally as a, I guess it's a balance of forces.

I'm just, I'm not really sure where to take that from here. I think, but I think that's a good point about imbalance, especially. Inbalance is what we need to understand. Like, ASMR used as a way to get to sleep and as a way to be comfortable, is not necessarily imbalanced at all, but somebody who uses it as a way to avoid real relationships, that would be an imbalance. Or somebody who, and this is something I notice a lot,

is that a lot of young people only talk in memes. They just text each other memes. They don't have any real conversations. That is imbalance. There's a moderation to it all. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I'm, you know, I'm trying to be, I think my instinct is to be optimistic. Maybe I just haven't read enough to be overly cynical about the world or anything.

But in that vein, I'd like to think that the access, again, it's what we do with the information, where I read this book years ago by James Glyke called, it's called The Information. It's just about, it's more science and technology focused. but it's essentially about how the value of things in the future is going to be measured by how it filters information for us because it's not about the quantity of information. It's going to be more about the quality in the future. And I think people like you definitely, and I guess myself I'm trying, what I'm trying to do is be a filter, act as a filter to project what I'm,

I think is useful information for people to ultimately be for, I guess, fundamentally to be more good than bad as far as an influence on the culture. Something that I found really interesting from a magician's page that I follow, he talks about the difference between a vertical relationship and a horizontal relationship, and the internet is almost entirely horizontal. Everybody's on equal footing. All information is on equal footing.

Complete fictions, lies are just as popular as truths and facts. It's becoming more and more difficult to determine the difference between these things. That is why real human beings

and in a way magicians who are taking all of these threads, all of these different things and putting them together into something that you can understand, that is certainly the horizontal thing. You take all these things that are flat and clashing, and you bring it together into something that makes sense for people. And that's really, we need to make sense.

We need to make meaning very badly out of something that is apparently meaningless. But we're getting into very out-there territory. We should get back to that root of parental pleasure. As to why all this happened, it's all in the family, and the family is why we have ASMR. My girlfriend was telling me about how she remembers times in school, being read stories at nap time and feeling ASMR. and feelings of being told stories at night.

I know that was integral to my developing my love of reading and even love of speaking. A lot of it has to do with those night times. You know, these are such meaningful times in people's lives. And the fact that there's a huge Internet community of people who, you know, love that feeling and are looking for that feeling is very impressive. yeah yeah I definitely agree I remember hearing one of your live streams you said that you

had close relationships with your grandparents as a kid because I just could relate to that it made me think of I used to like read books with my grandma and I don't know it was because she was older so she couldn't move as fast but she was always very slow but deliberate and methodical and graceful and I think that's you know characteristic of again I guess going into the concept of an authority, our appeal to authority, you know, it appeals to our instinct for having an authority to be in the presence of something about someone who's very competent and knowledgeable and you know you're evolutionarily, they're in your in-group, when you go to an ASMR channel, you know a series of things right up front, you know they're

not going to be loud, not going to be abrasive. Ideally, there's minimal ads. So it's a very, yeah, it's a surrogate for a secure setting. And that's tapping into our, yeah, I guess our instinct for that familial belonging in that connection. So I'm definitely interested in the instinct for for for as a as a as a as a surrogate for yeah just that that personal interaction that that we all seen you know that was one of the one of the first comments on my videos was that it was like a friend simulator because my videos are very like open and I'm very you know I'm not rambunctious like a lot of YouTubers and I think that the internet is such a rambunctious chaotic place in itself, that these little places where we can have a calm are just so

rejuvenating and that, you know, that is in a way much more authoritative and powerful as being quiet and calm and clear without all the show, without all of the spectacular stuff that's used in a lot of popular YouTubers videos. You know, they're very loud, abrasive. The thumbnails are really loud as well. And we need these calms. We can't be excited all the time. You know, that is kind of the, with a Western ideal as being excited all the time,

never resting, never being calm. And I think that that has a lot to do with, like, why in our culture there is not a lot of authority left. There's not a lot of people who are solemn, calm, and deliberate. it's all excited rambunctious chaotic loud all the way up right yeah okay so in that that brought me to i think our first discussion when um i mentioned the again i guess going to the balance of that is like the joe rogan experience being a three hour plus podcast and people used to think and he he says it all the time because it's a boon to his channel that um you know we we used the the market research

when we had minimal television cable bandwidth where you know it was you do things in a certain amount of minutes or you're going to lose the viewer. Nowadays, it's because we're all on that level horizontal playing field. If people are interested in the quality of the content, they'll sit and listen for hours on end. You know, audiobooks is a big one like you just referred to earlier. People are, you know, I have too many ideas going on at once. I was thinking about the, you know, evolutionary tradition of us being very well, adapted to listen to stories and narratives, much more so than the more recent invention of

like reading, you know? So I think it's, yeah, it seems like ASMR and, you know, more realistic personas like yourself are just tapping into something that we have a deep, deep, you know, desire for is just, I want to listen to this person because, A, I enjoy their ideas but B we're always tacitly absorbing parts of their personality when we listen to someone you know especially someone we look up to you know it's because they're the way they carry themselves or the way they react to certain ideas you know so I know it's it's as much as of a source of information of ideas as it is for just that instinctive social nature of ours to want to learn more about how other people carry

themselves and mimic, you know, behaviors. A transmission of behavior, I guess, is another thing that's interesting. And that's what's so fascinating about memes is that it's very different from genetics. Meme-edics are mental genes. And whereas genes can take, you know, millions of years to catch on, and memes, and this is what really matters, and this is that importance of the horizontal, or it might be the importance of the vertical,

is that one vertical individual can spread memes throughout the entire horizontal. And it's really interesting you brought up that speaking is more ancient than writing. Though writing has dominated academia and politics for a long time, That's almost the modern turn is a regression. And you see it in the Italian poet and kind of politician Gabrielle D'Enanzio. He is the one who directly influenced Mussolini and Hitler to rely on speeches, not on writing.

He is the first to make politics theater in a really important way. So in that sense, we are down. definitely making a big return to the voice as the fundamental thing. And we certainly know as YouTube channels, you know, the Internet when it first was created was solely for written words. It was just message boards. As images and as voices became important, things changed drastically. And this is not to say that we're... My bet. Just not to say that we're fascists, but just that we also utilize the voice as the

important thing. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, again, it can be exploited for nefarious purposes, but ultimately, it's just a tell of our true human nature. I was interested in Jordan Peterson's comment when he was saying he was watching Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins to discuss the meme that, you know, Dawkins, was he the first one to, uh, he coined that term? And you know, when he had coined it, it was criticized because it was too similar to young, idea of an archetype. And so I'm taking it back. That's so interesting because it really is, it itself was a viral idea. It was a very the meme, the idea of meme was memetic, extremely memetic. So yeah. And I find that's such a testament to something unbelievable.

The fact that an academic, a scientific term is the term for this phenomenon. Like the fact that everybody uses the word meme even though it's something that Dawkins a stuffy intellectual thought of that is very impressive yeah yeah very much so like i feel like he was uh yeah it um i was just curious like yeah like he was approaching it from such a i read the book years ago but i i don't know he never seems like someone that was very you know stereotypically creative in an artistic way. He was creative in a very conscientious, scientific, rigorous way. But the fact that

he came up with that idea, which you know, I'm sure like all ideas it had some origins he grabbed from whether consciously or unconsciously from people prior to him, but I'm curious if he ever read young or even heard about archetypes or, you know,

something like that, it gave him the idea for the... Well, I think that's the benefit of science. I do think it was discovery I don't think that memes were just thought up. I think that he saw the same nature in humanity that Young saw and just gave it a different name. Wow. Yeah, it's the...

So I guess if we want to get... I'll take it real deep real quick. I don't know how much longer you have if you want to do another 10 minutes. or another half hour, it doesn't matter. All right, cool, cool. Completely up to you. I just wanted to get your opinion real quick because we're going in that direction

of archetypes in their source and, you know, whether or not we know about a metaphysical being that created all of being, the idea that that exists and how that's shaped our behavior over what is potentially, you know, in religion's most prototypical, I guess, of the word form,

for you know maybe a 500,000 years ago for really stretching it back what do you think about that and what does that say about like the truthful the truth of of that idea if it's so memetic excuse me and so viral you know and it's so um it has such perseverance over time you know the idea of god i guess is what i'm what i'm getting that well i find that young has the best answer to this, and that it's almost identical with Wilhelm Reich and Nietzsche's answer, which is that, and this is directly from the Bible, that God is love, and that love is energy, love is drive, and that Reich and Nietzsche show us that the same drives that influence just our slightest creative act every time that we make love or have sex. or do anything sexual. It is the same drive that created the world. That we see that there is a essentially dual,

and in that duality, a singular energy. Nietzsche calls this a monster of energy and a ring, which is eternally self-creating and eternally self-destroying. That we perceive these flows of energy in our minds, our minds, our bodies. bodies and in the world as God, and that we're not wrong, that there is that energy, which is what science is ultimately reduced to. It claims energy as the source of these things and as the drive behind things. This is identical to the psychologist, to the religious person. It's all

hinting at this creative and destructive energy. So that, to me, is why everybody has some form or another of God. So it's, um, so whatever we want to call it, it's, it is a universal impulse that is like one of our, if not the fundamental impulse, like will, will to power, I guess. Do you think it's, um, it supersedes that Nietzsche's will to power? Well, that, that, it's the will itself and power itself. That is that drive, that monster of energy. That is Wilhelm Reich's Orgonne, Freud's libido and thanatos,

Young's psychic energy and love. These are all the same thing. Fluidic currents of energy. This is what every magician after Levi is dealing with as well. What Schopenhauer is dealing with. That, to me, is what's super important. And a brief tangent. Nick Land has this idea of accelerationism, and that the internet and technology are accelerating time and human nature to its brink.

This is why all the techno-humanist stuff is happening, why people are trying to become machines. He sees the engine of this acceleration as death drive, as the destructive energy, and that we have a human history has a motor. And history itself has a motor in the form of that energy moving. So even just our conversations on the digital and on the Internet are dealing with this as well. And I always fear that that mistake is made when people hear, oh, energy, God, love, that it's something that's very alien and intangible. But with Young's idea of archetypes, like the archetypes, that are repeating would not repeat without the energetic flow behind them.

We would not be able to move. We would not be able to get out of bed without there being an energy to do so. Like when I talk about energy or God or the will to power, I'm not just talking about big supernatural events. I'm talking about the reason we're talking to each other, the reason that this computer was made, the reason that water's flowing through our pipes and so on. It's what keeps the world going.

Yeah. Oh man, that's That holds really true in my experience Just the The ubiquity of love And it's funny because I was just watching I'm big into watching Like movie reviews and criticisms online

Which is interesting in itself, I guess But someone was saying interstellar They're actually making a case For at the very end Have you seen that movie? Interstellar? Oh, well, I don't want to spoil it for you then if you if you no sorry you can spoil it right spoiler alert um at the very end um the the whole movie is set up to be this big scientific spectacle about how humans uh we've you know they don't

explain why but for some reason the earth's ability to um yield plants you know for our consumption is just it's just a universe worldwide drought or something like that so we have to look to the stars and um we go through this black hole that's mysteriously appeared in our solar system. And so they think it's a higher being directing us to a new planet to continue living. And at the very end of the movie, Matthew McConaughey goes into the black hole. And again, it's set up to be this very scientific movie. And the pinnacle of the movie is him going into the black hole

and realizing he slipped into the fifth dimension and love is the universal, fundamentally like the missing part and, all the equations for you know how we're trying to sync was it synthesize the quantum mechanics with gravity that's like our current big mystery in the field of science is like how do we how do we fuse the brilliant ideas of Einstein's general relativity with which is on a macro scale which directs the universe with the quantum mechanical on the other end of the you know length of the length spectrum on this microscopic level, these equations that work impressively, you know, every time to an extreme degree of accuracy, though the one missing link was love. That was the

whole thesis of the movie essentially. At the very end, they hit you with, you know, kind of builds you up to say, oh, you know, science is our only route to continue thriving as a species. At the very end they say, no, it's actually at the core of it all. you can have all this technology you want, but it's love that is the fundamental impulse to keep living and communicate. So anyways, it was... I think that that speaks a lot to young and synchronicity. Like, so many people don't realize that nearly every major mathematician, physician, and scientist

of the past and now ultimately is religious. They, in the end of their life, return to being religious. They might have a period of disbelief, but they end up seeing order in the universe. And Jung is giving us one of the most brilliant pictures of life when he is describing synchronicity. His work with Polly is fundamental to quantum physics. the very idea that when we observe something, the thing changes.

That is radical, a very radical idea, and it came directly from his work with Young. Like, we cannot reduce science to something that is not spiritual, not unconscious. It's not objective at all. We need to, you know, take in our human nature to understand anything. And especially an unconscious one, which really indicates that telepathy and ghosts and these things,

they all have a common root in the collective unconscious. Yeah, I think the impulse, again, like the Internet as an emergent phenomenon, a collective snapshot of our culture, like you said, is, you know, a lot of, like on Facebook I know it was shown to have this bias towards aggressive, violent content because that was the most viral type of things but at the same time again

the impulse to have content like yours and mind thoughtful content with a just a more personal you know honest portrayal of like of personalities is is the antithesis

to that. It's like people are like walking through by candy, you know, walking by candy bars in the checkout line, we have that impulse and we react to it a lot of times. But at the other end of it, if we actually take time to sit down, what we choose

to actually focus on ends up being more thoughtful, more spiritual content, I guess, in a way. You know, content that evokes a sense of a good and wonder and awe in the universe like that's why I'm fascinated by your channel because you you pick up on the

you know kind of these underlying just these these intangible non-rational non-cold and calculated and like dead ideas your your work is very much focused on what's alive and what memes say about what is really at the core of the content we produce on the internet.

So I think it's a good indicator. In other words, I'm optimistic about what it means. And I think that what we have to look at, especially with that candy bar and with that violent content, is Freud's idea of the compulsion to repeat. And, you know, a lot of people, their only stimulus is those things. They don't have the experience with greater or more intellectual or separate things. So they just go back to doing the same thing.

I think that like the research is like 90% of internet traffic is pornography. So that's literally just a repetition of that same act. They're only interested in that. You know? So the key is really like growing past that repetition and getting help. and getting healthier, new habits, and new ways of living and thinking, because we will very happily remain stuck in patterns and in repetitions because it's unconsciously pleasurable, even though it ultimately hurts us.

So that is what I think really good content can do. It can hook you in and draw you towards new ways of doing things. you know, I'm sure that a lot of people don't look at the same content now that they did when they first started using the internet. They've certainly gone down new paths, so it's not as if everybody's going to be stuck at the very first stage forever.

You know, everybody can grow past their initial thoughts and desires. And that actually makes me think of the what makes me want to ask you what your thoughts are on the actual the age bias of people who use the internet in general because I would guess that it's obviously younger it skews much to the younger and what that actually says about what we might what characteristics we might glean from you know trying to interpret what what's on the internet

well they've all it's always been said by like psychic researchers that young people have the greatest connection to the psychic realm, which is really the unconscious. So we get the most clear, undiluted picture of modern humanity in the internet due to that childish age, whereas older people, and you find that this is, and this is like a good thing, I think. I'm not saying this is a bad thing,

but like I go on some, like, record player forums when I'm trying to fix stuff or certain hobbies, they have a higher age group, and it's so much more, it's so different from other websites. Like, everybody speaks differently. Everybody uses even, like, emojis, like smiley faces or frowns very differently. It's very, very, and this is why, like, it's funny to see old people that post memes or old people that, you know, do this or that online. It is, I think that it has to do with, with, I'm trying to find the right, oh, like, you know, Yoda, the Lego Yoda, where he is crazy and he's an old character, but he's doing all these crazy stuff, like Yoda doing ketamine and that sort of thing.

It shows, especially to young people, the image of old people, the image of boomers is one that is very, very ridiculous. they don't understand the internet at least not their part of the internet they might understand forums but they certainly don't understand the young people's internet yeah yeah I definitely think there's like a bias in that respect but it is interesting like you said the I guess would you say it's a more pure access into human consciousness just the younger you are like as a rule of thumb I guess the less it would be like a nature versus nurture type of thing the less access to cultural

conscious cultural content do you think the collective unconscious is more present in in the youth in general I think that's the difficulty with the internet we can't see that as well because the internet is so full of content that the child's mind is very quickly clouded and filled with stuff like on one hand you get a very clear look I think mechanisms and drives, but not so much like the clarity behind them. It gets clouded, and that's why my work is necessary. Like, if a child was posting directly from their spirit, not through the clouded vision, like children's dreams and children's little jokes and games before there's television,

that is important. is what gives us the clear look. Yeah, definitely. That makes a lot of sense. I heard one analogy one time. It was probably Jordan Peterson. It was about like, I'm probably going to get it slightly wrong, but the general ideas that our mind is, of course,

many different impulses and drives. It's not just one uniform thing all the time, but a lot of competing personalities inside us. which is a fascinating idea in and of itself, but it helped me visualize my inability to stick to, you know, a rigid discipline or, you know, whatever it might be eating, working out, as looking at our mind as like a cargo ship with a tiny little rudder in the back. And if you don't, again, like the Titanic, you're going to hit the iceberg.

If you don't, of course, correct, enough in advance, you know. And so, of course, the older we get, maybe the more cargo we put on, so the harder it is to make that that turn but it just I guess the general idea of our our minds not you know our consciousness I guess was the amount to complete the analogy our consciousness was the rudder and everything else in our mind that it were kind of unconscious of or dilly dimly aware of is that huge ship that we're you know trying to control with this tiny rudder that's very music because I find it I find that that is, or I guess if we say that the ocean is the unconscious as well, or the ocean is drive, and the motor is drive, I'd agree.

But that's just a little point. But I think it's also really important that we look at Young's idea, and people often don't know that Young came up with this. But the midlife crisis, the midlife crisis is when that ship has a mutiny, midway on its journey and just gets rid of tons of the cargo. We're like, this is no longer coming along with us. We're getting rid of this and we're going to keep going. There are these critical points where we realize like, oh, that was not supposed to happen. This is not who I am. And we get rid of that hopefully and stick to something more honest and truthful.

The problem is that we have like automotive companies and motorcycle companies catering to this. They are selling you an image like, oh, your relationships, your spirituality is at stake, your suffering, by a boat, buy a car, by a motorcycle, as if that would change anything.

And this is not to say that going out in a boat ride or going on a cross-country trip is not going to give you experience and give you wisdom, just that that's not a cure to meaninglessness. Right, yeah. And it's okay, tying, I guess, dovetailing into your idea of Dostoevsky's underground man.

And essentially, this was a guy who was just seething with Nietzsche's Rissantamant, right? And he just never, I guess he was in a way maybe having a midlife crisis, or because he was just too much of a coward to actually act on the impulses he knew to be right. I think what I find a lot in these Russian characters is that they were never truly confident in what they were doing there was always a great dis-ease there was always a great suffering that led and it's just compiling and compounding where doing the wrong thing again and again and again are eventually just choosing to do something that is really the source of the story like

you know the underground man always fantasizes about getting beaten up he wants to just go to a bar and get beaten just to feel anything and this kind of reminds me of a blade runner where

here's a little a spoiler itself Roy Batty as he's dying he's coming very near to the he's a machine he's a replicant he's going to shut down but in his last few

moments of life. He chooses to take a nail and shove it through his hand so that he can have an intense feeling. So I think that that has a lot to do with why we do bad things or strange, radical things

when we feel meaningless, when we feel meaninglessness. Right, yeah. And that's like it seems indicative of like something we can avoid as some sort of dystopia if we you know obviously the more we integrate digital you know whatever technology into our lives the more tempted we will be to not do exactly just that live very sheltered virtual lives and

not actually activate the potential that we actually have you know so the that's a very interesting concept to me is is that to truly get the deepest sense of meaning in life, we have to, like you've suggested before, go out and be in contact with reality. Because we are not just our brains, but we are actually our senses, you know, and our touching, feeling, taste, smell. Like those all matter just as much as visual and audio, I guess. And that's Nietzsche's idea of The Last Man,

is somebody who only wants to be comfortable. They're only interested in comfort. They do drugs for comfort, like a bit of poison now and then for pleasant dreams, and lots of poison for a pleasant death. They love warmth. They're afraid of going out into nature to be cold. They huddle up against each other.

They need each other. This is what he fears the most, that there will come a time when there is no energy in people left. He sees the energy in people often as a bow, as a bow that's being strung, and that one day, that bow will never be strung again. We will never loose another arrow. We will never dream a dream. That one day it will just be stationary and comfortable.

We'll never go farther again. And that's his huge fear. So I was actually, maybe like a year ago now, I was taking, I was taking, requests like a year and a half ago and the last very last one that I haven't gotten to yet but was on the concept of utopia versus dystopia and the more I looked into it the more I realized I was ignorant about what what would that even mean because I had this very juvenile concept of just like you know I don't know just like a very mechanical oppression you know not I didn't really factor in the psychological effects of being uh over saturated

with pleasure or at least very shallow pleasures, you know, so in that sense. And that seems like ultimately that's the true dystopia is being oversaturated and what by our own shallow impulses and not ever achieving anything meaningful and enduring with our lives. That's why I love Huxley's Brave New World and, you know, the severe dangers of meaningless pleasure and meaninglessness in general

and almost it's very you know darkly funny but that I forget the characters and I haven't read it in a while but the character who is raised on a

kind of reservation for native people to live like normal people he's brought into the world and can't bear it in the end And then we have an image of a dystopia in the Odyssey with the Lodophages who eat lotuses to feel pleasure and do nothing. And now that's a severe danger. And we near that more and more as physical, meaningless pleasures become the center of it all.

And this is my own little conservative fear. Like, if marijuana becomes entirely legalized and popular, think about how much creativity will be sapped. And like I said, moderation allows that to be a good thing. You know, any drug can be positive. It's just, and as Paracelsa says, the poison is in the dose. So that is my worry, is anything that leads to meaninglessness. any preoccupation with entertainment above substance and matter. Definitely, yeah.

I actually recently was in Seattle where it's legalized, and my friend's brother was saying that he noticed a lot of the younger kids don't even look at weed as anything to really try to partake in because it's legal. It lost the luster, the appeal of rebellious teenagers' instincts, you know. So that's an interesting debate is, you know, whether or not making anything, everything legal, you know, I guess the, you know, the, you know, the, where do we draw the line in the sand as far as what we can and cannot do, which makes me think of, I got, I got, was it, Terrence McKenna's book about mushrooms, food of the gods? I heard you reference McKenna before. Yeah, I'm curious that makes me think

like what are your thoughts on the, I guess, any sort of benefits as far as insight into our psychic nature through hallucinogens, if any? So, you know, a lot of the people, like Alistair Crowley, who is the guy that I primarily use for magic and occultism, he used drugs heavily to gain

insight. Huxley, he died using LSD. Like he chose to, he was dying and he chose to have an LSD drip to have, you know, a heightened spiritual experience. And Young, young talks about drugs actually. He talks about mescaline. And I completely agree with his picture of it, which is that it gives us a radical, clear insight into our unconscious minds. The question is just, if you are ready, I would say the vast majority of people are not ready, and this is why we have the image of the stoner or the burnout. They witnessed the truth, and it destroyed a part of them. It prevented them from growing. So I think that, like, I don't think that drugs are bad.

I think that, especially if there was a shamanistic individual who would, would help the person. Like, if it was a physical, like, in a shamanistic or physician sense, it could be good. But it certainly should not be for entertainment and recreation.

You know, it's something that's just as horrific and terrifying as a nightmare or a dream, which gives us insight into the unconscious. It should not just be for pleasure, I think. Right, definitely.

Yeah, I feel like there's a skewed perception of drugs, you know, as party and festival drugs and all that. And I think that's the exact antithesis of what, you know, that's just the opposite of what I think they could potentially have the potential to, you know, be used in like a very hospitable clinical setting, I think would be awesome. And I've heard about some institutes doing MDMA in a very, you know, clinical setting that's probably conducive to, you know, just self-transformation positive in a positive way. I was, because I just wrote two things down about, you know, trying to keep this on about ASMR. But, you know, I guess my channel in general isn't a typical ASMR channel. That's why I called it, let's find out. because I believe in the ASMR concept in general, like even beyond specific like triggers and tingles,

I just liked the idea of content that was, you know, suited for just being more conducive to it, to a relaxing, engaging experience rather than just a trivial, superficial, loud, just, you know, just a, just a, a fake image of just more focused on the information and less about the spectacle. And so I was curious about the idea, like you said, of a mentorship. And I think that's another piece of it tying in. Again, like when we engage, the reason I like Joe Rogan and a lot of the guests he has on

is because they seem like they're very willing to confront new ideas in an honest manner. you know, to the extent they're not always perfect, but, and we all got our biases and all that. But the idea of a mentor as one who shows you how to confront new ideas and, you know, what to do in the place of, you know, the Youngian idea, you know, the Petersonian idea, Jordan Peterson's idea of chaos in order, and how the Yin Yang symbol is symbolic of the way, the correct way to live in life, being walking that line having one foot in chaos one foot in order and my final point i guess is just it's interesting that um the the concept i'm fascinated by is the concept of taking on problems your size like being what we're interested in are issues that we are our mind perceives as being possible to actually confront. So I don't worry about, you know, global takeovers and conspiracy theories because I just

personally, I can't do anything about them. And so it would be a waste of my energy at this point, even though it's fascinating. You know, I was a younger guy who went down those rabbit holes. But it's very engaging and meaningful, it seems, as I get a little older to recognize that confronting issues my size and then ratcheting up every time, you know, you're just trying to get better and better and tackle progressively larger problems so that I don't get overwhelmed by trying to address too big of an issue for me. And what that says, you know, about like your meme analysis channel is it's just very perceptive, very interesting, and you address very specific memes.

And I kind of like that because you do tie it into much broader concepts. but the you just not only the content but you as a person addressing these memes shows a lot of people how they can approach you know memes and new new ideas and apply it to their everyday life

so you as a mentor is a fascinating concept I think that's why I'm engaged in your content I think that something that Freud talks about really shows was what is good about this is like he was going to go to America to deliver a lecture. And it was very important because he had to make psychoanalysis popular in America. And so he says, you know, I'm going to go. I'm going to deliver this wonderful lecture on psychoanalysis to the most important

psychologists in America. And I'm going to see a porcupine. he had a way to not overthink and over worry. Like, anytime we take on something, we can't go too big. We can't take on something that is beyond us. We have to grow to get there. And that can be done by acknowledging the small things along the way. And having, you know, these sorts of...

Like, that to me, and what you're describing with this willingness to take on new ideas and think and take a balanced approach, to me the opposite of that is Twitter. And I am reminded of the Odyssey where the souls of the dead are described as twittering. so it's like you know all these endless voices and ghosts speaking and speaking and trying to be heard and none of it you know

is physical none of it makes contact other than when one chooses to listen as Odysseus goes down but that is super important to me the fact that there are solid voices there are real voices but one just has to find them

we should not get caught up in this endless array of voices. It's something that is talked about in a Genesis album on The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, which is like an album about Young, essentially. And there's a thing,

a song called The Chamber of 32 Doors. And all these people are like, oh, get in my door. Come this way. Come this way. This is the truth. And there's only one right way. Interesting. And so that makes me think when you said Twitter, you know, people trying to solve the world's, or claiming to, you know, have all the solution to the world's problems in 160 characters. The opposite of that, I'm curious on your take on like just the Western canon, like I've asked you before in your last live stream. Because for me, I was, I went to college for engineering and so I, I didn't expose myself to a lot of great works. of literature and history and I'm kind of doing that retrospectively or retroactively I guess now

because I want to see the great ideas and thinkers and philosophers that informed civilization, you know, Western civilization now. So do you think, I mean, I don't know, I guess, I guess I'm sure you agree that it has a lot of value. But as far as what, you know, how that conflicts with the Internet and the age, of, you know, very impulsory content. What, and maybe, I guess, I guess to put it in a question, what do you see as the solution to that? I mean, just, like, how do we gain as much value from it

in the age of, you know, 10-minute YouTube videos? I think it is getting yourself familiar with meaning and meaningful things. This is why I think, like, myths are. so great and so important because you read them as stories or fairy tales you read them as stories but they contain all of the great wisdom of the past and so if you if you have a child who is raised with mythology and has like a very solid understanding of it they are already set to understand things they just need to

kind of unlock it and read about what it really meant you know there's the secondary level. But if we raised everybody with mythology, even with like Christian stories, if you ever, if everybody had read the Bible, the Quran, Talmud, and Greek and Roman myth, Norse myth and so on, if you had all these stories circling around children's heads, it'd be very easy because they would see patterns. They would see the dynamics of humanity in these myths. So to me, there is infinite means. in ancient literature, but especially in mythology. I mean, I like Shakespeare a lot, but I can understand the language barrier for a lot of younger people.

But I do think that it would be a boon to raise people with more theater, more entertainment that is meaningful. Like, this is something my girlfriend talks about a lot. Like, we give the worst things in life to kids, like the worst food, worst food, like chicken nuggets and craft mac and cheese, that is what we give to kids. The worst, most, you know, insulting, stupid television, it's for kids. You know, kids are raised with low-quality stuff now, and I think that that is a really big hypocrisy. Like, oh, you know, we want our kids to learn well and to be smart and to do great things.

Then why are you giving them a foundation of garbage? and it's a foundation that lasts. You see kids are still preoccupied with the entertainment that they had as children. People are still stuck with that because it was made to be effective. It was made to addict. So I think that's a big problem.

Like, I didn't have computers or video games when I was younger. I mean, I had toys and television and stuff, but not nearly as much as some others. I was raised with a lot of stories, I think that that lent itself to my later development. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, I guess that's a fascinating part, is to develop as early as possible,

the capacity for critical thinking, and a long attention span, I guess, is crucial to that. And so that's definitely one of our struggles going forward in the age of just instant access to everything. That's going to be an issue, is um but you know again like i audio books and these not you know non 10 hour and youtube lecture series are very very popular so it makes me optimistic that um if we have enough people promoting just the best ideas of the past you know it will reach more years than ever before

and so you know hopefully that's uh that's where it goes I think that the attention span thing with children is a red herring. I mean, you ever talk to a kid? They could talk for hours about something they care about. They don't have short attention spans. They're just bored with meaningless garbage. We need to give children good food, you know, good mental food. They would love it.

They would talk endlessly about it. So I think that that's what it comes down to. It's not a short attention span, it's not a child's problem. The school system and the public education system, and education generally, tends to fail children. Parents tend to fail children. There's a healthy way of raising children physically and mentally, and I don't think it's even that difficult, you know? It's really bizarre that we've gotten to this point, which is the whole conspiratorial element,

like, is it not intentional to get dumb consumers? Right, yeah. Yeah, it's probably just some exploited aspect of a capitalist economy, but probably, yeah, probably not a conscious, you know, worldwide conspiracy. That makes me think of one of the ideas I'm interested in as far as, you know, what this new technology, the internet in particular means for our future is, you know, Peterson's idea of responsibility being very proportional, directly proportional to the amount of meaning and purpose we feel in our lives. And so the, I'm curious about your take, like, what's your take on the

fact that we're inundated with so much information about the world? You know, as before we might have lived in a small town, an insular town. We didn't really know much about the crime rates in the world or the poverty existing elsewhere so we didn't have that kind of guilt you know and i'm curious if like we need to um alluding to what you said you know give children more credit and and the human mind more credit in general and saying listen we're actually a lot more capable of dealing my dogs dogs having a dream right now interestingly enough um we need to uh yeah essentially like allow children or as young as possible the opportunity to take on as much responsibility as we think you know they can now that we have access to so much information and education you know i think to a

large extent people realize that a lot of what is going on in the world is meaningless psychically it is not real what is real is what we have like um like like like i mentioned very early on what Philip K. Dick said that reality is whatever doesn't go away when you stop believing in it. And we have to be honest about object permanence. Like, there's not a lot that is real psychically, other than what's in our day-to-day lives. Like, that is what we have to kind of get to. And I don't mean to be apolitical, because I'm not into politics at all. But just that does it really affect my life? If not, what does it mean?

We cannot survive based... A lot of artists say, oh, I can't survive on just exposure alone. Politics is just exposure. There's nothing material to it for the majority of people. Or maybe not. Maybe that's not fair. But generally, a lot of ideas which have no subsets.

take up people's minds, especially people that are depressed, or especially people who have a great deal of anxiety, they will make these social problems the source of their anxiety, even though it's personal. And people criticize Peterson a lot for that idea. I find that that is one of his most true, though, that we have to deal with our own room. We have to deal with our own life before we move out into the world. It's just, you know, that I think is true. Yeah, so true. So true. And I really think it just makes a lot more sense to be able to, it seems to me like it,

it says a lot about our, a possible positive aspect of, you know, what ASMR means for reconnecting and having that feeling of connection on a, again, a personal level and how before we can fix an entire nation, maybe you think about fixing your room, and if you're able to do that, maybe we can help your local community out. And, you know, I think a big project that speaks to, like, the importance of a big project being finding communities again in the age of the, you know, access to people across the world. You know, me and you are, you know, a thousand miles apart, and this is amazing, but at the same time, my physical community, you know, me feeling like I have my, you know, feet on the ground, so to speak, outside is going to bring a lot of meaning, you know, to build up our local neighborhoods and then maybe communities is, I think it's going to be a very meaningful goal, you know, a direction to orient ourselves towards in the age of, like, you can hop up. online and just zone out because there's so much static, so much information coming at you, you don't know where to begin. Well, yeah, that's where I think it's, you know, to have skin in the game in your local area is probably really meaningful, you know, most meaningful.

Absolutely. And I do that a lot. I'm very involved in the local arts community and I put on concerts and make films and try to be involved as much as I can. that's really cool man that's that's awesome um well uh yeah i'm i'm definitely uh i just just recently purchased the house so i'm i'm definitely uh you know rooted becoming more and more rooted in my community here and uh hopefully i'll be starting a family soon and in uh next year or so that's definitely my great yeah i think thank you i appreciate that and it's uh um yeah it seems like that's where i'm going to find the most meaning not to just keep myself in a bubble and just only worry about my family but you know to slowly again face issues at face

issues that are our size you know not to try to take on and solve the world's problems try to solve my own problems and then maybe I can help my family and then maybe I can fortify them to help you know the community and just make the world a little bit better than you know how we entered it so that's uh that's kind of where I absolutely it yeah that's where that's that's really what I think think ASMR is kind of just tapping into is like people just need a sense of uh they just need an anchor and you know to again go to the i think in the red book young um or maybe it was i on but it was the only two books i've read of his but he he makes an analogy of like needing an anchor um you know like a harbor to find refuge in and when the the collective unconscious the sea and our own unconscious

even becomes, you know, storm hits, you know, because occasionally storms will hit. And you have to be anchored so that you don't get, you know, ripped out to sea and lost. Absolutely. And, yeah, I think it does. It comes down to that fundamental comfort security. Yeah. So, well, man, this is great. It's been like over an hour and a half now.

I don't want to take up to... Yes. No, I think that's... But I think this has been awesome. This has been really fun for me, and I'm curious to see what kind of engagement and, you know, criticism or comments we get on the video. Definitely.

Thanks for having me on. Yeah, man, this is great. And, of course, you put it on your channel, too, so it works both ways. But for people watching it from my channel, if there's anything, you want to, any links or areas, as far as your online presence, you want to direct them to? Probably just, I'll send them over about my channel, you know, just the YouTube channel and art that I, art that my girlfriend and I do, we have comics out and that sort of thing.

But that's pretty much it. Because you, yeah, you said that you, YouTube published a comic book, right? Yep. What's, what's, do you do? By it, man. What's, can you explain what, like, that might be about or something, or your impulse to do it? We follow. Yes. It's actually based on a sculpture that I made. I made a sculpture of Saturn, the god. And especially in conspiracy theories today, he's depicted as a black cube. And this is in fact an ancient aspect of a symbol. Young talks about it in ion. And I've been thinking a lot about my own creative process and about. the problems with comic books being very formulaic and boring.

So I thought, what better way to put it than just a head, which is the ego, in a box, a panel in a comic book? There's only boxes. And it's just kind of this look at, it's certainly not a super happy one. Kristen, her comic, my girlfriend's comic, is a much more driven. I would say. Hers is called the owls, but the one that we did together is much more drifting and much more, I would say, like, experiential. It's my work at trying to make a new kind of comic, something very different from superheroes. And that is called Black Sun. Black Sun, very cool. Did I hear you say, I don't know which one it was, because you were in Jersey, the home of Kevin Smith,

Silent Bob himself. You guys are at. his you have your comics in his store yes we do and i actually was in a movie with kevin i portrayed a young kevin smith in a movie about the making of clerks yeah crazy enough yeah no it's out it's out it's called shooting clerks it's on on oh man i got to look at that now i got to look that up that is awesome oh that's so cool that's so cool man man this has been this has been an absolute pleasure for me it's it's fun talking to you because you have yeah i don't know you just i'm fat i'm glad that you're i guess we're just uh you know fascinated in a lot of the same topics and this is cool that we're just you know

two random people with a phone and an internet connection and we can make this happen so um absolutely i wish you nothing but the best uh you know in your life and your channel and maybe we can do this again soon absolutely all right it's been good to talk to you are you as well and all right you take care bye