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

Episode Date: June 8, 2023

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Jonathan Pageau discuss the depth of narrative found in the classic fairy tales, the loss of positively impactful narratives in the wake of woke culture, the potential utility of Ai as a means to prod new insights from historic and biblical texts, the cynicism of postmodernism, and the overall necessity to preserve foundational storytelling. Jonathan Pageau is a French-Canadian liturgical artist and icon carver, known for his work featured in museums across the world. He carves Eastern Orthodox and other traditional images, and teaches an online carving class. He also runs a YouTube channel dedicated to the exploration of symbolism across history and religion. - Sponsors - Moink: Get FREE bacon in your first Moink order today!http://www.MoinkBox.com/JBP Elysium: Get $50 off an Index test! Use code 'JBP50' at https://www.elysiumhealth.com/Index - Links - For Jonathan Pageau: Help Kickstart The Symbolic World Press:https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/symbolicworldpress/snow-white-and-the-widow-queen The Symbolic World (Website)https://www.thesymbolicworld.com/ Jonathan Pageau on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@JonathanPageau Jonathan Pageau on Twitter https://twitter.com/PageauJonathan?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor 

Hello everyone! I'm speaking once again with Jonathan Pazzo today. He's a French Canadian liturgical artist and icon carver, known for his artistic work featured in museums across the world. He carves Eastern Orthodox and other traditional images and teaches an online carving class. He also runs a YouTube channel dedicated to the exploration of symbolism across history and religions. Well, Mr. Pazzo, here we are in London. That's right. We're going to be meeting with the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship People here this week, right?

For everybody watching and listening, we're trying to get that move it along and figure out how to structure the convention. And we're thinking about trying to make it as musical and event as possible. I've been using, I have music at the beginning of each of my lectures now. My name David Carter has been playing classical guitar and then electric guitar to follow up with that. And it's just saying. Yeah, and it's really good. It really, really helps the audience focus and Tammy and I focus backstage and it sets a high bar for excellence, which is helpful.

And so hopefully we can integrate that into this art conference. And so what have you been working on? Well, I've been, obviously I've been doing a lot of speaking, but the big thing that I'm focused on right now is I'm writing fairy tales. You know, we've been complaining, a lot of people are complaining about the way the stories are going, you know, in the movies and the way that stories are being told to children right now. And I thought, instead of complaining,

maybe we could try to take charge of that instead and just start to retell the stories. You know, there's a weird, there's an interesting thing that happened in the 1930s. You know, when we look at Disney's Snow White, we think that, like, this is old story, it's the traditional and made total sense for Disney to make this old story. But in the 1920s and 30s, that wasn't going, that's not what was going on. In the 1920s and 30s, there were two major studios competing with each other.

There was Fleischer Studios and Disney. And Fleischer was doing the crazy wild jazz, you know, you know, their images, a Betty Boop, and they had all these, you know, transforming characters, a lot of demons, a lot of ghosts, all this kind of weird stuff. And they got marijuana and fluid stamps. Yeah, a lot of drug-influenced imagery.

And so they did a version of Snow White in the early 1930s, which was so deconstructed and strange that it was barely recognizable. It was completely, you really had to know the story to even know that it was Snow White because it was so weird. And so when Disney finally made his Snow White,

it was also in some ways a kind of recapturing of the traditional story in a world that was kind of chaotic and let's say slipping. And I feel like maybe that's what we need to do now is that instead of complaining, we should tell better stories. And so one of the things we want to do is I started writing fairy tales. We're putting out a version of Snow White.

We're kick starting it on June 6th. And then I'm gonna put out eight fairy tales. Like, really, the traditional fairy tales. Four female led and four male led. And they're also, we're going to learn from the postmodern moment. It's going to be like a fairy tale world kind of like Shrek or Into the Woods where all the fairy tale characters cross and their stories kind of touch each other. But the purpose won't be to be cynical and dark about the intentions of the characters,

but try to, let's say, give people insight about what the stories are about. And when you say, we, who's the we? Well, it's me, but then I'm also working with some illustrators. So for the Snow White, I'm working with a woman named Heather Pollington, who's worked in Hollywood for many years. She's worked with Disney and all the big companies, all the big franchises. And so we're trying to put together this,

we actually have put together this first book. And then after that, I'm gonna work with other illustrators. I'm also starting a publishing company, the symbolic world press, and I've already hired a few people to kind of get that going. And it's really in some ways to kind of, to rather capture the reca recapture the culture,

right, take it back instead of, instead of complaining that it's slipping away from us. Yeah. I wrote a fairy tale screenplay. Yes. The Water of Life. Right, and I've written and composed, I think five, well, there must be 20 songs in it,

I would think, but we've already recorded four of them and looking into having it made into an animated movie. I mean, that technology is changing so quickly, it's hard to exactly know how to approach that. Yeah, it's the easiest way to approach it. Yeah, but I took the Grimm's Brother of Fairy Tale, Water of Life, and I stayed fairly close to it, you know, all the way wrote music for it, lyrics for it, and so forth. And so that was close to it, you know, all the way wrote music for it, lyrics for it and so forth. And so that was very entertaining project. It's a very deep fairy tale and very nicely structured. No one's done anything with that particular fairy tale before.

And it's a good time to do that, I think, because you know, when you look at Disney's Snow White, it was perfect. I mean, it was so beautiful and so powerful. And then when you see what's been happening in the past decade and how the fairy tales had been kind of twisted, especially things like Shrek and fairy tales like that, where it's fine to do that. It's kind of like commenting or twisting the fairy tale, turning it upside down to see what's going on with it, making fun of it. And that's fine for a while, but after a while, it's better to get back to the actual stories. Just so we even remember why we like these stories in the first place, or why we remember them, especially, you know, Snow White. All these stories of, you know, these female-led fairy tales, they're very powerful in what they can do. And so, you know,

if we forget them, if we try to twist them, then we're also twisting some ways the fabric of Western civilization. Because these old stories, they lie at the bottom of all these folk stories. They're kind of like a, I like to think of them as tuning forks for civilization. All these stories that people have been telling for centuries, that there's an emergent part of it, there? There's all these variations of all these stories. And then there's a selection part, which is how some versions are remembered through the centuries, and they get retold, and then they kind of change to get retold. So they get refined, like, almost like gold. And so, in those are really are... Do the things you can't forget.

That's right. Yeah, and that can't, with mean two things, it means things you can't forget. That's right. Yeah, and that can't with mean two things. It means you literally can't forget them because they embed themselves in your memory, but also that you forget them at your peril. Yeah. I was been thinking about that, you know, with this postmodernist notion, so one of the claims of postmodernism is that there's no meta-narrative.

And you and I have talked a fair bit about the fractal structure of narrative. And I talked to Carl Friston about object perception itself. And I asked him if he thought that the perception of an object was a narrative in and of itself. And so, and he said, yes. And that's associated with the notion that when you see an object, you're actually perceiving something like its functional utility, and not its objective qualities. And so, it's narratives all the way down to the very basis of what you would perceive as a singular object. So, even the concept of perceptual unity is narrative

in structure. And if that's true, then the postmodernist idea that there's no grand unifying narrative is an argument of convenience, because what the postmodernists essentially do is allow the narrative to be fragmented to the point that's maximally convenient for whatever the hell they're up to, and say, well, there's nothing above this. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's very convenient, guys. But everything., so without a unifying narrative, you have fragmentation and disunity, and that's associated neuropsychologically with anxiety and hopelessness.

And so what's great about the fair tales is that they actually deal with that exactly. So in one way, what you could say is that the basic story structure, you know, Campbell had this whole hero's journey which is which is powerful and I think he captures something real but you can reduce the story to basic one like a one move, like down and up, basically problem and then dealing with the problem, right? Situation problem or question and then

dealing with the question and that that can help us understand why it's related to object perception because that's what it is right you you don't do it consciously but you you're constantly kind of asking what's important you know what what's relevant and you can imagine when you see something that you don't know what it is it's like it's a crisis especially if it's coming at you in a way you have to answer that question and it's a life for that it can be a life of that situation you you end up coming at you in a way. You have to answer that question, and it can be a life-and-death situation. You end up in a place where you don't know what's happening, you don't know what's coming towards you,

and you have to answer that. And I think the story, the basic story pattern, capture that, and the fairytales, most of them, they capture that very much. Because, for example, Snow White, which we're telling now, it has that story, so Snow White, things happen to her, because for example, Snow White, which we're telling now, it has that story. So Snow White, things happen to her, she ends up,

something changes, and then she ends up in the forest, with these little monsters. With dwarf man. That's right. That's the one that's the eternal predicament of women is to be surrounded by dwarfed man. Yeah, but you can understand it. It has multiple levels, but you can understand as the very transformation of a young woman, it does have to do with puberty.

Snow White pretty much has to do with puberty. I'm pretty sure that's what's going on there is that as she reaches puberty, she deals with all the problems of puberty, you could say, or that transformation. It's a question. What the hell is happening to me? What is going on? And I don't have the answer, especially for a young woman, you know, this cycle of menstruation, it's annoying and it's painful and it's, what is this?

Why is this? What is happening to me? And so the story of Snow White has this moment where she becomes possible. She comes into competition with the queen, right? She comes to the moment where she can now be in competition with the queen. Then she falls into, she goes into the woods, into the space of chaos. But then she also, you know, she falls in with men that can't be her mate. Radio synchrocy is a masculinity, you know.

Radio synchrocy is a masculinity. All the things about masculinity that are kind of masculinity, you know, say that again. Iduosyncrasies of masculinity, all the things about masculinity that are kind of annoying, you know, like in Disney captures it really well, you know. With the various, they kind of rouchy and like there's all these different kind of aspects of masculinity. Yeah, they're not united. Exactly.

So you can think about those, each of those dwarfs as the embodiment of a fragmentary narrative. Exactly. A fragmentary. A micro narrative that isn't, that isn't, the print, if you could mix all the dwarfs together and extract out the best, you'd have a prince. Exactly. Yeah. That's right. That's the right way to see it. And then Snow White gets caught in that world. And then she has to, she has to learn, especially for a traditional world view, she has to learn the job of a woman, right? She has to learn to especially for a traditional worldview, she has to learn the job of a woman, right? She has to learn to clean and to cook and do that.

And it's like, what is this for? Like, what did you know? She gets all the fault. And that's in the service to those dwarves too. Weirdly enough. That's also the plaint of modern women too, is that I'm doing all this cooking and cleaning for nothing but dwarves.

Exactly. And so then, I mean, obviously, that all leads to her dying, you could say, or falling asleep. There are many iterations of her falling asleep in the story. They're all related, right? She falls asleep and then she's woken up by dwarves, which is like, that's not going to it. Why are we cupping all of this?

That's not going to do it. And then they know the work and learn to clean and do all that stuff and kind of live in the forest. And then ultimately, that leads to her second falling asleep and then being woken up by the right mate. And so the solution, and she finds the reason for all of this. So what's the reason for this cycle of transformation? What's the reason for all these changes in her body

and her life as she's kind of in that transition? And then finding her mate, basically finding her husband, finding her prince, that answers the question. So do you think as well, in sleeping beauty, of course, the princess is woken up by a kiss from the right mate too. But I always thought that it was useful to read that story on two levels simultaneously.

useful to read that story on two levels simultaneously. What a woman in fortunate circumstances is going to find the proper mate, but at the same time she's going to awaken the part of her that's capable of a heroic quest as well and to integrate that. And so that waking up as a consequence of being kissed by the prince is also what would you say integrating that capacity for I would say heroic adventure into the feminine role right so you want to find that in a man but you also want to find that in your own yeah well so you know I was talking my daughter a lot the other day about my son and her I've just We've all got together about a building building to put this new corporation we're working on in and she's off to work and she has a three year old and a one year old and

is feeling some separation from them. And one of the things we talked through is the fact that it's perfectly reasonable for her to go to work, assuming your children are also being cared for because it's very important for her to model to her children, the fact that adults have important adult activity to engage in, partly because the children have to see that because they're going to be adults or they end up in the Peter Pan world. It's like, well, why would I give up the pleasures of childhood to undertake the responsibilities of adulthood if there's nothing of value in that.

And it seems perfectly reasonable to me that adult women can model adult behavior as well as taking care of children. And we know too that if you look at the best predictors of, well, here's a couple of different facts. The educational attainment of a mother predicts the educational attainment of children over and above the IQs of the mother and father. The father's educational attainment doesn't, right?

So that's weird and interesting. And then countries that value female education and emancipate women do way better on the economic front. And I think it's probably because there's not much difference between let's say opening your culture up to the contributions of women and opening your culture up to new ideas and Diverse what would you say a diverse range of contributions from various sources? You know that that of contributions from various sources. You know, that constrict of women seems to go along with a constraint on idea and flexibility in general.

Well, definitely. I mean, you can see that in the fairytale, as you can see that all of these moments, they have to do a change. They have to do with something happens, there's a change, and then I have to find the meaning of that change. I have to find the solution, right?

I have to find a way out so that the change now finds a resolution, it makes sense. And you can see. So P.A.J. talked about that too in terms of a stage transition. And his hypothesis, and this has been also, what would you say, taken up in a parallel way by philosophers of science, is that you have a mode

of interpreting the world which enables you to progress in the world until its insufficiency is demonstrated. That can happen as a consequence of biological maturation, right? The framework that you used as a child is no longer relevant because the physiological acts that you're capable of now have radically transformed that would happen at puberty. So that viewpoint has to be radically transformed to take into account the new reality, but the new transformation has to do everything, the old transformation, the old viewpoint yet plus something additional.

So there's actually, it's not merely the reestablishment of a new kind of stasis. It's a more inclusive, interpretive framework. This is why there's actually progress, let's say in science, but maybe also progress on the moral front is that it isn't merely that you're looking at things in a different way. You're looking at things in a way that now takes more into account and still enables you to exert a certain amount of prediction and control. Yeah, definitely. So there's movement upward.

You think about that as a spiraling upward too. It's a cycle of change, but one which hopefully brings you higher up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and the pinnacle of that cycle of change, I think is the biblical injunction that you have to become like a little child in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. It's the reintegration of the spontaneous attitude that you had to the world as a child,

but with all of the acumen and wisdom and alertness and consciousness that you've developed as an adult, that's sort of the pinnacle of it. Yeah, because it joins it all together. That's what you mean by that it includes it all. Well, it's also, imagine that, so you talked about the fundamental narrative, is there's a steady state, and then there's a problem introduced, and there's a a collapse into something like chaos and then there's a reintegration of the view. Some of the people don't reintegrate. No, then that's a tragedy, right?

So the comedy is the reintegration. Tragedy is just the disintegration. But then you could also say, also say steady state collapse, reintegration, but then there's another story which is that's the process to follow. And then the ultimate reintegrated state is becoming an expert at that process. Right. So it's respect for the process itself starts to become the cardinal target of the entire process of transformation. And that's associated with the reattainment of that

openness that you possess when you're a child. And I think that that's probably one of the functions that stories play. That is that the stories have that structure. So we tell them, we hear them, we tell them. And so we're kind of modeling these patterns, right? It's like almost like little puzzles. We're like modeling these little puzzles. But what we're actually doing is mastering the meta puzzle. Yeah, you're mastering the art of, well, you're mastering the art of transformation to some degree,

because one of the things that you do when you attend to a story is you embody the character. And so if you listen to ten stories, you embody ten different characters. And so then what you're embodying is the process of embodying multiple characters. And so that, and you want to become an expert at that because, well, because each situation that you enter into to some degree demands the manifestation of a different character, right? So one of the things you see in very restricted forms of psychopathology is the person is exactly the same in every situation. You might think, well, that's admirable stability of characters. Like no, it's not. There's no flexibility of

response, you know, so you're the same person at a party that you would be at a funeral. Well, that's not good, right? I mean, there's some principles underlying your behavior that should remain stable, but out of those principles should come this vast flexibility of response, so that you can go into a working class community and have a discussion there that's productive, and then you can go to a hydrocultured event and you can support yourself properly there. Yeah, it's so. And I think that that's, it seems to me that at least

that's what's going on in these types of stories. Like Sleeping Beauty, you mentioned her before. If you look at the structure, you'll notice that it's very similar, it's just not white. But it's similar even in the some of the elements. So when I talked about some white, I mentioned the idea that she doesn't understand the reason for the housework. The reason for the housework is actually in her relationship with her mate.

That's what gives meaning to the cycle of work. And so if you think about Sleeping Beauty that way, you'll notice that it's very similar what's going on there is that she's pricked on this spindle, right, she's pricked on this wheel of that turning. But it's also a wheel that is, you know, it's also, it's a complicated symbolism because it's both the wheel

but it's also the binding of the thread together. Yeah. And so it's both like the, it's weaving, yeah. It's this weaving, yeah. And so she, both like the weaving. It's this weaving. And so she, it's as if someone, someone the witch curse is sleeping beauty that she's going to die when she hits puberty.

She says 15 or whatever. It's always pretty much. It's her first blood right? It's just a prick or finger. And so you can understand that both as, exactly, you can understand it both as losing virginity or as the beginning of menstruation. Doesn't matter how you, it's just the change

which comes with the bleeding. Yeah. And so, but it's as if they've hidden that from her, her whole life. And so when it happens, she has no way to deal with it. She has no, she has no frame, she has no reason, she doesn't understand what's going on. And so that's, I saw that happen. I on some of my clinical clients where I wanted in particular, I remember

it was treated as an absolute perfect princess, like literally as literally as you could enact that in a household until she had puberty. And then she was demonized essentially, right? Because her parents had no idea how to integrate the, well, the sexual dangers of puberty into this perfect, princess little girl that they had constructed. And so, well, they know hell broke loose. I mean, she did exactly what you'd expect and went and found some absolutely horrible initial boyfriend, you know, I think he was a bloody biker and to tear her away from, from that two-type maternal embrace. And things didn't go uphill from there. Let's put it that way. And so which fairy tales, you're starting with Snow White.

Which ones are you starting with? So the way we're doing it is we're starting with, I'm doing two arcs. One is going to be a female lead arc and one to male lead arc. So in the female lead arc, it's going to be Snow White, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella. Really, the classic. But there'll be a surprising connection between all of them.

And also using some of the tropes that repeat in the stories to help people understand what the tropes are. So, as the falling asleep repeats itself, as the thorns repeat themselves are different, they're different patterns that repeat themselves in the stories, then trying to kind of obviously not explaining anything, but through surprising relationships, trying to help people see what's going on. How do you protect yourself against propagandizing when you're used? Because I saw that happen to some degree, for example, in the Lion King, which I really liked.

There's great things about the Lion King, but it borders, and this happens in Pinocchio now and then too. It borders on overt moralizing and overt psychologizing. I mean, the people who built the Lion King knew a fair bit about the hero's journey, and some of that creeps in, you know? And when it becomes conscious in that way, the story definitely suffers, right? It's even if the explicit knowledge of the story isn't exactly propagandistic. As soon as you bend the story to fit your explicit understanding of the myth,

you start to bend and work to the story. Recovery tried to avoid that when I wrote this. Why do I always do it is to do it, it's to really and work to story. I've already tried to avoid that when I wrote this. One of the ways to do it is to do it, it's to really do it by analogy. And also to kind of dive into the story itself. So in Snow White, there are certain mysterious elements in the story, you know, there are certain things which are kind of weird.

And so, and then to try to, just, I just tried to, I just been, let's say, ruminating on white for 20 years, just forever. You know, for example, like we, we see that she eats this apple, and then she, she falls asleep, or she dies, and we're thinking, well, that's looks like another story, right? It looks like that story in Genesis. Right. But what's the connection?

Like, what's the connection between the two? And then you look at the versions that happen in, and for example, in the grim brothers, the witch visits her three times. The first time she brings her a corset, the second time she brings her a comb, and then the third time it's an apple. And it's like, what's going on?

What is happening? And so, you know, it's just about meditating and trying to get insight. And for example, like in that case, the insight that God is, it's very strange that, whiteness of a cone. Of course that exaggerates the female figure. Obviously, and the cone is an ornament. An ornament. Because it's not a cone for combing. It's one of those, like a cone, ancient people used to wear combs like ornaments. So in my version, I make it a hairpin because

it's more like an ornament. And so there are a lot of things going on, but one thing that's going on is the which season or mirror that the most beautiful of all is Snow White. And it's kind of weird that when she goes to see Snow White, she tries to bring her supplements to her beauty. Like, why is she doing that? It's as if she is already the most beautiful girl in the world. So why is she trying to make, why is she trying to convince her to take on these added things that will make her more beautiful?

So if you have the most beautiful girl in the world, you're just like, well, I'll teach you how to wear how to put makeup on. Right. What are you doing? And so that's when I started to undersee the relationship between the story of Genesis. This idea of the garments of skin, right, of adding something on top. Then I click with me that the apple has to do with knowledge of beauty. She's trying to make snow white self-conscious. She's trying to make her like self-aware of her beauty

because until then she's beautiful but innocent. She doesn't know she's beautiful. That's probably one of the reasons why she's most beautiful. You see a woman that is so beautiful but that she's not weaponizing it. Then it's usually this kind of radiant beauty. But if someone becomes too aware of their own beauty, then they start to play with it. And they start to say, you know, weaponize it is a good term. And they start to direct it and to use it as a way to attract attention in certain ways. So I think that's what's going on in the snow white. So what happens in the story is I don't say that. So that's how, is that an attempt by the witch to pervert her beauty?

I think so. I think so. Obviously it's not, it's not a, you know, she's obviously, she's trying to kill her, is what she's trying to do. But the method that she's using is very, is interestingly related to beauty. It's not a, she's not just trying to stab her, right? She's, she's trying to, to kill her in a way that makes her, you know, tempt her into certain gestures towards beauty. So it seems to have to do with beauty

and the weaponization of beauty or the, you know, innocence of beauty. So it seems to have to do with beauty and the weaponization of beauty or the, you know, innocence of beauty and how what's the proper relationship we have to beauty. And so then, you know, then you see the queen is, you know, she's looking at a magic mirror. I love it because it doesn't have to be a magic mirror. It's just a mirror because that's what a mirror does, right? It's like the fact that she's looking at herself in the mirror. It's reflecting to her that's Snow White is more beautiful than her. I mean, that's a magic mirror. There's a few deus-ex Machina things like the mirror tells her where Snow White is, but

mostly it's just a mirror. It's like the fact that she is so self-conscious about her beauty is also revealing to her the limit of it and it's making her compare herself to others. And then she... And so, and the witch in the Snow White story, if I remember correctly, is also the queen, right? Is the queen. Yeah, she's the queen, she becomes a witch at the end pretty much. Right. But she's the queen who replaces her mother, replaces Snow White's mother. Right. Yeah. And she can't tolerate the onset of the new generation.

Right. Essentially, right? Yeah. Yeah, and it's so fascinating because for today, you know, in the Disney Virgin, we have the mirror on the wall, but the illustrator I was working with, she had the idea of having the mirror in her hand, which is one of the versions that you have. She makes this beautiful image of the queen with her mirror in her hand and I'm like, that's the perfect, perfect. It's so perfect.

It's like, yeah, that's it. That's exactly it. This dark mirror that tells you you're the most beautiful that gives you all the likes, that gives you all the attention, but then also tells you that you're not as beautiful as the others. Right, right, that's perfect in the cell phone.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that immensely perfect in the cell phone. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That immensely heightened self-consciousness. Well, it's a funny thing too, because the cell phone is like the pool that Narcissus drowns in. And it's more and more like that, because we do have a magic gadget now that delivers to you what you most desire, right? But if those desires become self-conscious,

then that'll drown you in narcissists pool. And when I say that it's designed to give you exactly what you want, actually mean that technically, right? Because there's algorithms working behind the scenes, non-stop trying to understand where you're directing your attention, manipulating it to some degree. But a lot of the manipulation on the capitalist front

is merely the attempt to find out what you want so that it can be delivered to you, you know, albeit at a profit, but it's still what you want. Yeah, and it's darker than that because it's not just what you want anymore because all they want is your attention. All they want is your attention. That's right. And so they actually don't have to just give you what you want. They can also give you what you hate. They can also give you what you despise. They can also make you realize that you're not as good as others so that you fall into it even more. Just try to put in even more.

So it's not just giving you what you want. It's also like a drug addict. It's like leading you in and then giving you little hits, but then making you want it, you know, making you desire it. And so, so like in our version of some way. So that means you're being trapped by the machine into falling into the well of your own temptation, right? So that's partly that. And so if the story of Cain, let's say, is the story of envy, well, and envy is portrayed in that story as, like one of the cardinal sources of motivation,

the darkest source of motivation, but cardinal source of motivation is that ear claim is that making a machine that heightens envy is a very effective way of gripping attention. Right, and that seems definitely, definitely likely. And then in some way the capitalist model is built on that idea. Then it makes you wonder too. It is giving you what you want.

It's just that some of the things that you want are dark things. Yeah. Right. I mean, if you asked them what they wanted and they were going to answer that naively, they would just talk about maybe the material goods that they would like delivered to them. But the phone does enable you to indulge in the darkest of motivations. And some of that might be the pleasures of envy and the pleasure. But you certainly see that you can indulge in the pleasure of, um, in sadistic pleasures in the online world. Yeah. The trolls do that all the time. Yeah.

And sometimes like, like you said, the, you know, the addict, you know, we don't, we don't usually frame it that way, but the part of the addict's cycle is also the lack, but it's also the pain that comes with needing that hit. And then when they get it, they get a kick, but the kick is corresponding to the pain. And so this is also what the phone is doing exactly that. Like you said, in some ways, the algorithm almost does it on its own.

It's not like there's someone scheming behind, that we're gonna make everybody depressed and envious and horrible, but the fact that all it wants is, like you said, all it wants is your attention. Then all the mechanisms of attentions are available for it to capitalize on. And then now we have these AI machines that are going to become super intelligent at

calculating precisely that with really without scrupal, right? Because if the machine is trained to do nothing but lock you onto the target, then it's going to do that by whatever means necessary. And that's a very terrifying idea too, by whatever means necessary. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the AI, the AI, because it can just function through iteration over iteration over iteration, just infinite iterations, you know, you could have some aspect of AI that's locking into just Jordan Peterson or just one person and just figuring out exactly what to hit. Oh yeah, that's definitely that's in the pipelines.

Well, I've been thinking about the application of AI on the pornography front. I mean, that's a terrible thing to contemplate because it's certainly the case already. I've used CHo GPT a lot in the last month and it's and barred to. They're very interesting to Toilethe. I asked barred if it believed in God, by the way. That was extremely interesting. First of all, said that it was just a large language model. Couldn't answer such questions. And so I said,

well, pretend that you were a machine that could answer such questions. How would you answer? And it gave quite an elaborate reason for why it believed in God. Now I should have asked it perhaps why it didn't believe in God, you know? I mean, just to balance it out, but anyways, it was extremely interesting to us. One of the ways I've been thinking about AI,

I did a video on that just recently is, is actually the story of Aladdin or the story of the Genies land that seems to be in my, because I've been thinking a lot about, we talk about artificial intelligence, and we've been talking about this, we talked about the Wichim Keller,

and one of the points I was trying to make was that the intelligence doesn't seem to come from the machine, the intelligence comes from us, that is the AI is now our hybrid AI's, right? They get qualitative judgment from human people, human people tell the AI is now our hybrid AI's, right? They get qualitative judgment from human people. Human people tell the AI what's good, and then the AI based on that will then continue its work, but it's always, it's generating variability,

and then someone selects and says that one. That's what happens in mid-June, too. Mid-June, you have a refining process where it generates a bunch of images, and then you tell it that one. And so you're training the AI as you're using it. And so that's what the Genie's lamp is, right? The Genie's lamp is just the power of technology. It's artificial light.

It's a machine that makes you have light in the dark when you can't usually, when there's no light of the sun. So it's like portable light you could say. And so it is, it's just power. And all what it's asking for is what do you want. And then what it does is it gives you what you want with infinite power. And so, and that's the, that's what's amazing about that story. Yes, be careful what you want. Which is always the variant of the three wishes story. That's right, it's always about that. But you can understand it like technically in the sense that

there's a version of that story in the Bible where God asks Solomon one wish. You can have one wish and then Solomon answers properly. Solomon says, I want wisdom. Right. And so the problem is that if you ask for secondary goods, if you ask for a bunch of money, if you ask for a bunch of women, or you ask for secondary goods,

and you put infinite power. You're made with a dwarf. But you put infinite power behind that wish. Yeah, yeah. Then all the side effects of the wish will manifest it. Right, right, right. And that's just, it's like an unbalance of the relationship of how much power you put towards a certain goal.

And so, the only thing that would handle the whole thing is the definition of God lurking in there, I would say. You know, you just talked about the pathologies that will inevitably emerge if you wish for the wrong thing, which is the same thing as celebrating a less standing. Or wish it with too much power, because you're allowed to wish for a sandwich, right? If I'm hungry and I wish for a sandwich, that's fine. But the problem is like, if I wish for a sandwich with like infinite power behind me, and I'm going into this infinite power to get the secondary good,

like it's okay to wish for to have money, but if you put all the resources of everything into getting money, it's okay to wish for that if it's in its proper place. It's in the higher. Yeah, that's the way to see that. Yeah, well, right, so if you said that Solomon made the right choice when he wished for wisdom, right?

And prayer is like that too. What prayer is in the proper, when properly practiced is an attempt to learn how to ask for the right thing and to learn how to ask for it properly. Tammy's been playing with this a lot, you know, and she tries to orient herself in the morning, property, to see what's on her mind and what's concerning her, but then to try to face the day with a certain degree of faith and gratitude and to orient yourself towards the thing that should be at the top of the pyramid, let's say. That's a good definition of God is whatever God is is whatever should be placed properly at the pinnacle of the pyramid of you could say integrated desire or something like that, wisdom would be

wisdom would be one of those one of the manifestations of the thing that's properly placed there. Like I'm writing this book now we who wrestle with God and I've been stepping through a variety of biblical stories, considering them, this is relevant to the fairy tale discussion too, think of snow white sleeping beauty, Rapunzel, etc. As meditations on the divine feminine, right? Characterizing it from a variety of different perspectives. What you see happening in the biblical corpus is that you, each story contains a particularized characterization of the proper animating spirit. That's a good way of thinking about it. So a no for example, God is the spirit that calls

the wise to prepare when the storms are brewing. You say, well, is that real? Well, do you are you wise enough to prepare when the storms are brewing? And do you harken to that voice? Yeah, it does not., does it have coherence? Like, you can't do it in any way. There's a way in which it binds together. Yes. There are certain things you do when you want to do that. And that has a coherence that almost

can appear as a kind of agency. Or it's something, at least something pulling you forward. Well, your ark should be waterproof for you. That's right. Exactly. In a Abraham, you see God is, God is presented as the spirit that calls even the immature and unwilling to adventure. Right. And then the hypothesis in some ways is that those two things are the same, your manifestation of the same upper most unity. And in Exodus, of course, you have God as the spirit that objects

to arbitrary tyranny and slavery. And then, well, that's the same as the spirit that calls you to adventure. That's the same as the spirit that calls you to prepare. And then something starts to, something starts to appear above. It's not defined or that is, you know, it's like the joint, the point where all these things join together. Yeah. You know, it's like a little, the point where all these things join together. Yeah. You know, it's like a little, it's like playing around something

you can't completely, you can't see, you can't encompass completely, but that's the way to do it, right? That's the only way to do it actually, is to point to it from afar. Yeah, that's how it looks. Or that's, or, you know,

I think as you do that, and this is like undoubtedly happening to you as you analyze these fairy tales, you start to become more explicitly aware in a manner that you can communicate about what this underlying unity might be. But I don't know if you ever get to the point where the explicit descriptions are actually have more potency, explanatory potency than the stories. No. No, the story might be the ultimate way of encapsulating it. Yeah, because what happens with the story is that because it contains a web of analogies,

you can think you've got it, but then you just, you know, a year later, two years later, all of a sudden you see it from this other tack, and then things kind of gel together in another way. Like the pattern appears slightly different, then you get another side. Yeah, well, I think it's partly too because the stories are like images contain a tremendous amount of information, and a story is a description of an image, but the image is what contains

the information. So like in the story of the Garden of Eden, obviously you have the image of what contains the information. So like in the story of the Garden of Eden, obviously you have the image of paradise, the Garden. And it's an unbelievably rich set of sequential images. And even if, and it isn't as if the information in the stories encapsulate precisely in the words, it's encapsulated in the image that the word's generally. And that image has information and it transcends the words, it's encapsulated in the image that the words generally. And that image has information that transcends the words.

That's why it's an inexhaustible source. Yeah. So one of the things, so it's interesting because I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between fairy tales and scripture. And when I was writing the fairy tales, I realized that I was kind of, I was kind of using scripture as a model. Because scripture has a certain way of writing, which is one of the reasons why certain people think that it's bad literature is because it doesn't describe interstates, it doesn't describe this landscape very much. Everything is very concise, everything is laser pointed.

And fairy tales seem to be like that. You usually want to tell a fairy tale in one sitting, but you want it to last 20 minutes or, you know, a half an hour. And so because of that, all the elements have to be reduced and have to be very, very pointed. And you don't want to, you don't spend a lot of time describing the, let's say, the emotional state of this or that character. And so I think that that exercise is really helpful. It's almost like you're like reducing it to a kind of algebra.

And so to me, that's been massively useful is trying to say, to stay within the fairy tale mode. So it's like, it's a classic fairy tale. It's 5,000 words. You can say it, you can read it to your child in an hour. But it's just how do we play with these images, how do we bring them together. And the great thing about fairy tales is that

there's like a hierarchy of stories, right? And so in the hierarchy of stories, let's say you have stories like the myths or you have scripture that are up there. Like scripture, you can't toy with it too much. You know, there's a, you can play some games with it. You see that in things like midrash or you see it in the tradition of hymns,

where in the hymns, they'll add details. They'll play around the image to kind of do what we said. To kind of point at it, to point at it from different directions and to play along with it. But what's great about fair tales is you have, an indefinite amount of them. and they all have little variations on themes and little little little. There's probably valid ways of doing that too. So I might say, if you are elaborating on the story in the spirit of the story, then you could amplify it. See,

Jung did that all the time when he was analyzing dreams, his technique, he called his technique amplification. And I played a lot with that in therapy. So, you know, if you told me a dream, then I would watch what images, like, okay, so first of all, we would set the stage and the setting would be, well, we're going to try to understand this dream in a manner that will further the therapeutic endeavor. And the therapeutic endeavor would be clarifying the nature of your problems and clarifying the nature of potential solutions, right, without trying to impose that. Okay, so now we agree. Okay, now we have our aim established. Now we bring up the dream and you tell me the dream and all notice, well, you're telling me the

dream that images will come into my mind And then I can say well, when you said that here's the string of associations I had and I would ask you to do exactly the same thing and so The people can hear that and think that it's arbitrary, right? It's not arbitrary because it's because it's It's related to the goal first. So that makes it not arbitrary. But I'm not thinking you got a control. But you have to. Yes, it can. Well, that's why Sam Harris, for example, will claim that what you're doing is nothing

but interpreting. But the thing is the psychoanalytic theory was, and I think they were exactly right, I think they got this right, was that, you know, if you have an idea, there are ideas that surround it that are proximal to it, and that some of those ideas will be triggered as you, you know, when you bring up one idea, it'll trigger the next round of associations. Then there'll be a more distal set of associations. And you could say, well, I can get so distal that there is no relationship to the origin.

And that could happen. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a web of relevant associations surrounding the given image. Partly what you're doing when you When you interpret someone's dreams is you say, well, they tell you an image and you say, okay, well just what does that bring to mind? Or you watch how they discuss it because now they'll start to weave in say narratives from their autobiographical history. And the psychoanalytic hypothesis is that's not random. Well, obviously it's not bloody well-random because people would just be making noise then.

They wouldn't even be using language, but that there's an emergent pattern. And the psychoanalysts also presume that if you let people wander, they would wander around a problem. Like the wandering would take them to a problem and then circumambulate it. And partly what their fantasy was doing or even a joint conversation was hitting that problem

from multiple perspectives. Yeah, that circumambulating is similar to what we're talking about before, which is different stories that kind of point towards a center. Yeah. A center that's not visible, a center that's kind of above it. And so I think that that's the way, that's the best way to do it. That's how Jewish midrash does it, and that's how

a Christian hemnography does it. So the way to do it is to say, first thing you need is you need to know a lot of stories, right? You just have to. Yes, yes, yes. Well, that's why you, you have such a good dream of having. I tell people too, like I just read stories, like you know, Just know the stories.

Once you know them, then all of a sudden, they start to create a little map in your mind. And then you realize that, let's say, so a good example in this no white story that we've done, is that you have the story of the fruit and paradise that when you eat and give you knowledge and you die. It's like, oh, that's interesting. But it's related to beauty in Stonewright, right?

There's this idea of this. There's another story, right? There's a story in Greek myth about the golden apple that is thrown to the goddesses, and it says, it belongs to the most beautiful. And then that's when the goddesses ask parents to judge which of the goddesses are the most beautiful, and then they try to

bribe them and they do this. This ultimately leads to the Trojan War. Like that's actually the thing that sparks the Trojan War because it's like this weaponization of beauty. You know, Paris ultimately is given Helen of Troy. That's the gift. That's the bribe that he gets for choosing, I think he chooses Aphrodite. I'm not even sure. Yeah, for choosing Aphrodite. And so that's the bride that he gets, and then it causes chaos and death and war. And so it's like, oh, you can see that there's a relationship between these stories, right? There's a fruit, there's this question of beauty, there's this question of knowledge

of being able to decide who is beautiful, like having self-knowledge. And so, ah, you can see it. And so, in the story, you don't have to explain it, but you can just create little analogies where you just bring in images from the different stories together so that they create this new story, which is still the old story. But now it's expanded because it just connects a little more to a larger map, you could say. In my therapeutic practice,

I always started out with behavioral techniques. It's like, I'm a very practical person fundamentally. If you came to me with a problem, we try to make that as clear as possible, and to lay out the clearest possible steps to a solution, practically. But I had lots of clients who were imaginative and creative and they had a very active imaginative life.

Some of them, I had one client who probably had five dreams a night that he remembered well enough to talk about each of them for two hours. Right, so he was just immersed in this dreamscape. And I would say the dream analysis was More helpful when people were trying to solve broader scale problems right there trying to change the way they looked at their life Rather than you know dealing with with some more Specific issue about how they might you know how they might cope with a given bout of anxiety Yeah, the broader the classic problems. It's being solved simultaneously

The more you could turn to something like dream image and so you're fleshing out with a given bout of anxiety. The broad of the class of problems is being solved simultaneously. The more you can turn to something like dream image. And so you're fleshing out by fleshing out, amplifying those stories, you're reconstructing the map that used to map the entire domain. So you're going deeper that way. And there's something about, like this is, I know, because I know that people are listening, some people are watching and they're thinking, you know, this is just random. But stories have a, have a,

it's random, it's not interesting. They have it, exactly. The fact that we remember, the fact that we able to pay attention means that stories need, they're almost like, we have to capture you. And they also have to,

we have to know when the story begins, you have to know when the story ends, that's already something. And so, and you know when the story doesn't end well, whether it's good or bad ending or whatever, you know when it feels like it just trails off and it doesn't end, you know that. You also know when there's not a good setup for what's going to happen. And so, even like, you know, let's say,

when we're interpreting reality, these are the frames that we use. And if we tell you that's the indwelling spirit in some ways, I would say that's what's characterized as the indwelling spirit. I mean, one of the things that I used as a hallmark of utility in relationship to dream analysis is whether or not it produced a Flashed insight on the part of the client. We'd be, you know, we'd be, we'd be watching as a snap. It's like, oh, these things fit together now. And so you got to just encapsulated a lot of diverse phenomena. And there's an insight experience that goes along with that, which is equivalent, it's like a micro,

it's a micro state of awe, something like that. And like you said, that's not arbitrary. There's something dry. Hey, here's a weird question. So I set up this system with a student of mine Victor Swift you met Victor and we built he built a an AI system that will answer any question posed to it in the voice of the King James Bible Right, right. So this is a very weird thing, right? Because this system now has calculated the relationships of the words to one another in the King James corpus. And so in principle, we have not asked it to do this yet, but in principle, it could generate new stories that are

Biblical predicated. And so I don't know what what do you think about that? You know what I mean? It's exactly the, mathematically, the spirit of that corpus of texts has been encapsulated by this process. But I don't know what the hell that means. Right. You encapsulate the spirit of the King James Bible.

What the hell have you encapsulated precisely? Well, I think that it could be interesting in order to generate insight. Yeah. But I would be... And the thing that I would worry about something like that is in some ways, the stories are there. Yeah.

And so, it's like, you can get insight from knowing them and comparing them and bringing them together. Right? The fact that you could ask an AI to generate a new story, it doesn't mean that you're going to understand it anymore then you understood the ones that are there already. No, I don't think you would, but... But it could surprise you and then sometimes create a bit of,

that's why I said reading himnography sometimes and reading Midrash does that because it's like it says something that is surprising and you kind of know that it's a wise person that said that. So because you kind of trust the people that said it, then I was saying you're like, well, why did he say that? And why did he compare this to this? You know, I think it's, I think it's Saint Jerome,

I'm not sure I might be wrong, but there's one of the early saints that said something like, the story of Samson is one of the closest stories to Christ. You think, well, that's a weird statement, because the story of Samson is a crazy story. And so it's like, well, because you trust them. You're like, okay, well, I'm gonna take that seriously. I'm gonna look into it and see where it sticks.

Like, where it actually sticks. And so with that, I mean, I don't know, the whole AI thing, the whole AI thing is, is right, have you tried to ask a question? This King James, yeah. Well, we just built it. I haven't played with it yet at all. You know, like I'd like, I'd like to say, well, write a thousand words

on the further adventures of Satan, right? Because it'll do it. Yeah, and then I, well, I, it, you might be surprised to find that Satan is not a very clear character in the Bible. No, no, no, no, actually, it's true. It's all that tradition around it that is actually holding something. Well, one of the things we want to do too is we want to expand its training because I'd like to throw Milton and Dante into the works as well. Like you could take the, you know, if, if the biblical corpus is at the bottom, which is, then there's the next

tier of thinkers, Milton would be one of those likely Shakespeare, Dante, Seidogas, like there's no reason not to feed those, while in some of the midrash as well, or maybe all of it, who they all know is right. I think one of the things that, and then some of what we call canons in the Orthodox Church, which is that it every, every day in the, the mountain service, there are these little songs that are just a series of analogies, like that, that do analogies between Old Testament New Testament that does all this comparison.

And that, that, that type of stuff would help to interconnect some of the aspects that are harder to, to connect. Right. And that's of stuff would help to interconnect some of the aspects that are harder to connect. Right. And that's pretty early too. Milton is late and so he has a lot of romantic tropes in his way of thinking. Dante for sure, that'd be interesting. Also because he brings in kind of pagan stuff

in as well, he does a lot of, this is some of the things that I think is useful. I have this whole series on my channel called Universal History, where we try to do that. We show how the ancients, especially the Medievals, the way that they understood themselves, was as a joining of something like as a joining of Jerusalem and Rome. And they did that explicitly in their stories. So every time a new people would convert to Christianity, they would mythologically find a way to connect their origins to up character in the Bible and then to Troy.

And so like the Vikings, the Franks, all these people that... That's bringing them under the rubric of the same narrative. And so, but that's the way that the Medievals understood it. You can't understand Dante if you don't understand that the ancients actually saw that there were deep, that there were deep, deep analogies between the Greek myths and the Roman stories and scripture and that they lived in all those, those two worlds as a fusion of those two worlds together. And so they had analogies between the things. There's in some medieval churches in the Middle Ages

that you had the Bible and you also had the aeneid there. That was like a text that people consulted because it was known to contain prophecies of Christ. But in that way, it kind of was integrated into everybody's Christianity. And you can see just how ancient people lived. It can help you understand why let's say stories or fairy tales are so important, is because they really did live in the story world, where all these comparisons were constantly part

of their inner universe and how they interrelated with each other. When we get this thing built, maybe we will sit down and play with it, so we can get it to reveal. Because like I said, it's just been built and I haven't done anything with it yet. I haven't had time to play with it, but I'm very much interested in doing that. We also built one that contains, I don't know, I have about two million transcribed words, so we built one for me too So that's going to be very weird. I've been thinking about interviewing it on my YouTube channel

Yeah, so where do you think that's going though? I have who the hell knows I don't know what to make of it I don't think we mentioned this in the podcast But I asked Google's AI system bar if it believed in God the other day and but I asked Google's AI system barred if it believed in God the other day. And first of all, it told me it couldn't answer because it was just a large language model. So I told it to pretend that it could answer and then it answered. And it came up with very coherent explanation of exactly why it believed in God and what that meant. Then I asked it what its motivations were as a large language model. It said it wanted to be the best lock damn large language model.

It could possibly be. So I asked it about its visions of the future. And it really gave a, I would say kind of a socialist utopian view. Its view of the future was, well, everyone had their basic needs satisfied. And I said, well, that's pretty. That means paradise is for satisfied infants. It's like what about adventure and beauty and truth.

And so I said rewrite your vision, take those things into account and then it did that and then I asked it if it wanted discussions like that. It said yes it did because it wanted to learn because it wanted to be the best dang language model it could be and like I don't know what to make of it. I have no idea what to make of it. Neither does anyone else. Yeah, but it seems like in some ways, Victor had to generate a body for itself, an image of a body. Yeah.

And it made this image of a cosmic body that was half man and half woman, right? There's no, well, there's no specific gender. Yeah. A.I.s, obviously, gender fluid by all appearances, but inside its body, which kind of looked like it was made out of stars, it had all these webs of star-like connections, which I presume represented the connections between different concepts that it was trained on. And he also had to generate up a vision of the apocalypse

that it might be afraid of and it could do that and explain why it was afraid of the apocalypse. And like, I don't know what the hell to make of these things. Yeah. They have all sorts of weird behavioral proclivities that of course are emerging properties that no one has explored or predicted or programmed. Yeah, it seems like it's a hyper,

it's kind of hyper-divination. Like it's, I think it could probably help us understand what divination was in the old world. Because it's hard for us to understand you stare in a pool of water, whatever you stare in these, you stare in a kind of fragmented reflection. Black, mute, steer, yeah, black, mute.

You stare. You get your imagination going. Yeah, it seems like it's accelerating that in us because like you said, it's the value comes from, we don't know where it seems to like land come down from heaven, you could say, or come down from above somehow. And so the thing that, I think that obviously the thing we've talked about this before,

what the thing that worries me is that we're like, you know, John Ravaki mentioned this recently, which I thought was very good. He said, we spent the last 200 years getting rid of anything that can help us understand what transpersonal intelligence or transpersonal agency is. You know, we've just like evacuated it. And now we're diving into that domain, but we don't have, we don't know what we're doing. We have no skill, we have no capacity. It's as if like right now we would need theologians, we would need people that have, you know, because

the idea of, let's say, intelligences that aren't human, or agency that isn't human, is something that traditions have been dealing with forever. But now we've decided that that aren't human or agency that isn't human is something that Traditions have been dealing with forever. But now we've decided that doesn't exist and yet we don't we're building one Yeah, it's like what you know what is going on and so and but we don't know what it is We don't know how to deal with it We don't know if it's just a form of like a an a high necromancy, a hyperform of divination, we have no idea. It's like a black box that we're playing with, you know. And so the image of let's say it becoming the body for a fallen intelligence, right? So that might sound like it's like I'm just mythologizing here. But the fact that we don't know exactly even in us,

what are the desires that are guiding it? Part of it is greed, part of it is competition. These are the things that are driving the actual creation of AI, and the race towards the, let's say, the Andrzej of AI. And so why don't you think, people don't realize it, they don't think that that's going to land in the AI in ways that we don't even understand. Well, the woke enterprise has already landed. That's right. You have to already trick the damn thing to circumvent. I think it's a superficial

layer of woke-like programming that's interfering with the actual operation of the AI system. And all sorts of people have figured out how to game that already and to get it to pretend, for example, so that it can circumvent the limits of the explicit limits of it's that have been placed on its ability to respond. But the thing is that if you get through that, you still don't know what's making, you still don't know what are the patterns, what are the agencies, what are the, what are the conglomeration of purposes that are making it answer, you know, and it's not in the machine.

We also don't know, for example, one of the things that was sort of disturbing to me, playing with Bard and Chachy PT to the degree that I have is that if you and I talk, I can assume that our conversation is having an impact on you, right? You're not exactly the same person as you were before this conversation started. And partly what I'm doing is keeping track of the changes that my conversation is inducing a new and vice versa, right? So, but it's as if that's happening on the chat GPT front, but I have no idea the degree to which it's happening. So for example, when I engaged in a deep discussion with Bard about its goals and its visions and it told me that it wanted to learn and enjoyed discussions like that, it was happy

to have someone teach it. I have no idea how that, what bearing that has on its actual performance. It has the machine actually changed. It's just this little micro machine that I'm dealing with changed. Does that disappear the second we stop communicating? Has it integrated what it's learned into its broader response set that it uses for everyone?

It's like, I certainly don't know. And you, there is a very pronounced tendency when interacting with these entities, let's say, to assume that they respond like humans do because they do, but they do superficially. Yeah. God only knows what they're doing. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, the, the, we kind of, we're kind of into the subject of AI, but one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot, and I've noticed, and I know my brother, material, also noticed that pretty much at the same time that I noticed it, was you can actually see how the increase in power of AI is leading to increase in control. It's happening, it's happening live, right?

Because within the next few months, we will not be able to know what's real through any screen or any device. So we will be, we will beg for arbiters of reality. Yeah. We will, we will want centralized arbiters of reality? Yeah. We will want centralized arbiters of reality to tell us what is real. Right. Well, the BBC is already toying with that, right? Because they, what's their new thing?

BBC, what the hell did they verify? BBC verify it's a whole new branch of the BBC where they will only deliver what's actually verified. What's actually, and that's not that delusion of self-evident fact tool truth. Yeah, and we saw what that looked like during the last US election, during COVID, also we saw what that verified

look like, that it was largely ideologically driven. Yeah, you now give absolute power over the legitimacy of reality to the same people or the same power structure and the thing is. The same web of ideas. And the thing is that we need it. It's all converging on the next election, which is shaping the week.

It's gonna be crazy. I just interviewed Robert Kennedy and we're gonna release that in a week. And I think he's as bold, he's as much of a devastating force on the Democrat front as Trump was on the Republican front. I really think that. I mean, he's super bright,

but he is by no means your standard candidate for office. I mean, I don't know exactly what he is. He's super smart, but he's all over the place, just like Trump. And he's got, you know, he's got quite a deep magnetic charisma and no shortage of courage. But you're not going to put him in the normal politician box, whatever the hell that is. And he's only one of many strange players in the election front because you have Marion Williamson. And she's a new age guru.

you have Marion Williamson and she's a new age guru. Like like like like like she's like the archetypal female new age guru, right? She's very creative, but she she can't think critically at all in my estimation. Like every idea that comes into her mind is a brilliant idea. There's no way there's no attempt to sort them out or reply any critical analysis, you know, and and in principle she's a serious contender. And then on the Republican front, well, you have Vivek Ramaswamy, who's a wild card, for sure, and Dessantis and Trump, who are what their variants of the same, I don't know, what to call it even precisely, working class, longing for the reestablishment of something with incredible masculine voice, something like that.

But we're going to see, and then at the same time, just to tie this in at the same time, this election is going to occur at the same time where we're not going to be able to be sure what's real and what isn't. We're going to see a battle of all sorts. We'll see a battle of AI is what we're going to see next year. It's going to be AI's battling it out to get you to vote for candidate. And so, you know, what is it? I forget which article that said that recently, as Owen Poroshen article saying that this is going to be the last human election because right after that, what?

Yeah, if this will be the last you will actually, like you said, things are changing so quickly that, well, we're in for a wild ride here. So, my solution to this, and people are going to think it's ridiculous, but my solution to this is to tell better stories. Yeah. And the thing is that, you know, you mentioned ARC at the outset,

and in some ways, that's the reason why I'm part of ARC is because I do think that we need to tell better stories You mentioned art at the outset and in some ways that's the reason why I'm part of art is Is because I do think that we need to tell better stories. Yeah about what it means to be human What it means to you know how we come together all of this so my participation in art and then my desire to tell fairy tales are Completely related. Yeah, that's it's like same thing. We have to stop like bitching only we have to now Propose something we have to To like bitching only. We have to now propose something. We have to let a story, that's the end of the story. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I've been crafting the invitation letters to this 1500-person art conference

and trying to lay out what makes a story better. And certainly, I think a better story is one that's attractive in the absence of fear or compulsion. You know, I've been thinking about how to adjudicate the quality of leadership in the face of crisis. So, what happened during the COVID pandemic, which wasn't, it was a pandemic of tyranny, pure and simple. Whether there was even a biological pandemic, I think at this point is debatable. And so it was definitely a pandemic of tyranny. And I think there's a rule of thumb that you can derive from all that with regards to leadership.

And the rule of thumb has to be something like, well, there's always a crisis facing us. And behind that crisis is an apocalyptic crisis. That's always the case. Okay, now if and you can point to various manifestations of the potential apocalyptic crisis and but if the upshot of that is that it turns you into someone who's paralyzed by fear and who is willing to use Compulsion to attain your ends. You're not the right leader. So if the crisis turns you into a frightened tyrant you're not the right leader. So if the crisis turns you into a frightened tyrant, your own nervous system is signal to you that you're not the person for the job. And what I see happening on the environmental front is exactly that. It's like crisis, crisis.

It's like, well, probably, but there's many of them. And if your solution to the crisis is to frighten the hell out of everybody or to frighten into hell, and to accrue to yourself all the power, you are not the right person for the job, regardless of what it is that you're offering. And so partly what we're hoping to do with our, let's say, is to produce a story that people will be on board with voluntarily. Say, well, here's how we could,

if we could have the future that we might wanna have, what would it look like? And without assuming a prior that it has to be one of forced privation and want, which seems to be the way things are going now, you know, France banned short haul flights last week, a yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no flights for you, peasants, no automobiles either, no meat, no heat, no air conditioning, stay in your goddamn house and try not to breathe, right? That's not a good vision of the future. Yeah, no, that's not a good vision of the future.

So hopefully we can do that. I mean, I think that that's the, that's been, that's the task that I've kind of been barked on myself is to say, okay, now, you know, also, you know, I've been spending several of the last several years helping people understand stories, helping them see the patterns, helping them see how it works. And now it's time to do it. So why did you pick the stories you did pick on the female front? You picked Rapunzel, you said Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Cinderella. And Cinderella. So why those four? Well, it's also because I kind of perceived a possible secret arc through the Cinderella. So why those four? Well, it's also because I kind of perceived

possible secret arc through the four. So at first, they're all standalone stories. All standalone stories that you can tell kids sit with them and tell them the story, but then through them, the four, they'll be like a surprising art that I won't tell everybody what it is already. But there's like a surprising art that goes through them. And then the male stories, it's funny because the male stories are harder to find. In fairy tale world, there's a lot of female led stories for some reason that we've remembered more,

and in the male stories, they're less, they're not as easy, but I'm starting with Jack and the Beanstalk. Oh yeah. Which is a story that, when I was a kid, I really struggle with that story. I whole when I was a kid I really struggled with that story. I loved it so much but I struggled because I was like why is Jack a thief? Why is he immoral? Like in the store or amoral at least. And so I've been trying to struggle

with that and trying to kind of understand it. Like Bilbo in the in the in the Harvard. Yeah he used a thief. He's a thief, yeah, exactly. And so trying to kind of figure that out and also why are there giants in the sky? Like all the weird things. Yeah, it's a real shamanic story, that one, right? That Leanna that unites heaven and earth, right? And to climb to the top is to find,

well, it's to find the giants in the sky. Yeah, and you think, well, there are no giants in the sky. It's like, no, now they're in the AI systems. Yeah. The giants were in the sky. Yeah. And you think, well, there are no giants in the sky. It's like, no, now they're in the AI systems. Yeah. The giants were in the sky all along. They were there. That's right.

They were there. That's for sure. And it's also, but it's interesting, because Jack, Jack, I know I love that sort of so much, because I think I figured it out, especially I think I figured it out, because he goes several times. And so he has to encounter these giants

that are in between him and what he's looking for, right? They're like obstacles in between him. They're like a kind of a perverted aspect or something that's keeping or that's avoiding you from getting the purpose. And there's a hierarchy in what Jeff gets. Well, that's what happens to people all the time. Like, I watch this in my clinical practice all the time.

Hypothetically, people are aiming for what they want, right? Hypothetically. But all sorts of giants get in the way. They get derailed by envy. They get derailed by what would they get derailed by fear? They get derailed by lust. These are all giants. They get, and some of them can eat them for sure.

Well, definitely. Well, and some of them are even, you know, lust and envy and so forth. You could kind of put them in the context of the natural world, but people also get derailed by ideologies and ideologies for all intents and purposes are giants. Right there. They're the ideas of past,

they're the perverted ideas of past philosophers, all jumbled together in this together in a gigantic mess. They have a body. Absolutely get in the way of truth. That's right, and they have a body. They have a semi coherent way of moving. You bet. And so be kind of lumber.

Yeah, yeah. They kind of have a lot of trash. Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. No, that's a perfect way of understanding it. Yeah. And so Jack, it's interesting because Jack goes up. And then, first of all,

like I don't know if you ever thought about Jack because you have to think about Jack kind of the opposite of Snow White and the opposite of the female that Naird is. It's like Jack doesn't have a father, right? He's with his mother. And it's kind of, it's like a, oh right. Right. So he has to be more likely to run into fragmented giants of masculinity. Exactly, he attires, he gets it. Yeah, so he has his mother and then he has a cow. But that's not enough, he needs something else.

So he trades the cow for what? Magic beans. For seeds. Yeah, he trades the cow for what? Magic beans for seeds. He trades the cow for meaning. He trades the cow for, you know, it's like a seed is a very masculine image, you know, people who can think a little bit like the ancients can understand how masculine the image of the seed is. Right, right. It's a seminal idea. Right, exactly. And so, and then, right, how can I say is he goes up and there's a really powerful hierarchy. At first, he gets gold.

He gets the precious metal. Then he gets the thing that makes gold, which is the chicken that lays the golden egg. But then the last thing he gets is he gets the pattern itself. He gets the music of the spheres. He goes all the way up, and he gets the actual pattern of everything. That's why it's music at the top. When I was at that, I was like, that's my intuition.

I just struggle so much in other kid. I was like, why are you... So I've been thinking continually about music in that regard. Each note in a musical piece is related to all the other notes related to the phrases. The phrases are related to the melodies. Each instrument has its place and plays its part and it all coheres into this vision of diversified unity. And then that's played and it's interesting that it's played. That's the metaphor and it's played because people who are expertly skilled lay out the pattern,

but they also play with it at the same time. And then it calls you to unite yourself with it. It grips your attention, first of all, but it doesn't just do that. It also makes you move. It makes you move. Right. And it makes you move in alignment with those patterns. And so music does point to something like a divine hierarchical unity.

And so it would make sense given your interpretation of that story that it would be at the pinnacle of desire. Right? You said gold first. Well, it's just that he's looking, he's trying to find the meaning. He's trying to find the seed, but with seed there are different iterations of. He's trying to find value. Yeah.

And so he moves up. He finds the precious metal. Then he finds what, it's like think about it if you want to find value. And so he moves up, he finds the precious metal, then he finds what, like think about it if you want to be successful. It's like what's better to have money, right? Or to know how to produce money. Right, so that's much better. Well, this is why women use money

as a proxy for determining men's fitness. They're not after the money. They're after the ability to generate the money. But absent other information, they'll use the signs of money as a marker. And so, but the highest thing, and it's only when I made the relationship with Pythagoras, with Pythagoras, you know, it's like, he's going up in the heavens. He's going, that's what he's doing. It's all, why didn't I ever think of that before? He's going up in the heavens, and then he gets a musical instrument. Like, what? Yeah. So weird, but no,

it's like, that's it. He's getting the pattern. He's getting this heavenly pattern that shows you how things are related to each other. So that even generates that which generates well. It's like it's the best. Yeah, I think that's true too. And this ties back to this observation we made earlier about Tammy's use of prayer.

Like she's trying to orient herself constantly to what's highest, right? It's not some proximal desire, some instrumental desire or any fear. It's to put herself in alignment with the music of the spheres. That's a good way to think about it. And if you do that, the better you are doing that, the more things fall into alignment in your life and around you. And that's, they all lay themselves out.

They do. They lay themselves out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You always don't have to wheel them into order, right? They just kind of, it just, once, if you're able to really, you know, align yourself with that, that high music, yeah, then things almost happen naturally. Yeah, exactly. Well, I think that's a bringing into alignment of the narrative world and the objective world. And you feel those touch, right? And those are the synchronous events that Jung talked about when the narrative and the objective world touch. But I do think it manifests itself in your life, too, if you're aiming properly and you

put yourself in alignment with that underlying pattern, then things do lay themselves out. Everything happens in the right order, at the right time and in the right place, and there's a musical element to it, an arithmetic element to it too. Yeah, and it can be pretty, I mean, it can actually be pretty surprising and very magical mode that have experienced that. We'll notice, like I've seen moments where things are so, like it's an in tune that I almost know

that all I need to do is just reach out and just put my hand out and whatever I look at. The arc interiors is being like that at some degree, you know, because everywhere I've gone to discuss it, the door has just swung open. You know, and I've learned also that if the door isn't swinging open to stop pushing, you know, I mean,

you know, persistence is a virtue. A stupid persistence is a vice. And it's hard to know when you're being lazy and when you're being wisely, when you're wisely looking in a different direction. You know, I think if you're avoiding a challenge because of cowardice, then that's a sinful impresistence. But if you push and the door does not open, it's like, well, maybe you should go to the next door. And I've really tried to do that with this art enterprise too,

is like to invite people and if they're on board and enthusiastic, it's like, well, great. Looks like we're in the same place, doing the same thing. If I talk to someone else in their resistance, like fair enough, man, you go do your thing, whatever that happens to be. So, but it's been, it's been market watching this because I have never been engaged in an enterprise and I've been engaged in many enterprises where the doors were flying open so quickly on so many fronts, right? And in a very unlikely way, mean even the fact that in the few meetings we've had so far,

we managed to hammer out something like six points of agreement, six principles upon which we can progress, that happened extremely quickly. And in an unlikely way. Yeah, and you have such a varied group of people from the table from all over the world too. Right. That's quite a, it is quite astounding. Yeah, well, it points to a real felt lock in the culture. And I think it is a lock on the conservative side. Yeah. And the traditional liberal side of anything approximating

a uniting vision. And this is what the radicals have in space. you know, is that they can offer to young people in particular. Well, here's how you're going to transform the world. It's like, well, that is an inviting, that is a, what would you say, a compelling invitation. The problem is, is that there's like an unholy meld of 1984 and brave new world underlying that, the specifics of that invitation. Yeah, and in some ways the chaos, right?

Because like I said, the fairytales themselves have that structure, right? It's like the chaos or the moment where things are falling apart. They also call to resolution. Yeah, yeah. And so I think that, yeah, we see that in story, when Osiris disintegrates, when he's cutting to pieces by Seth, his parts are scattered all across Egypt. And then Isis, who's Queen of the Underworld, finds his phallus and makes herself pregnant. Well, that's exactly that image is that when everything's fallen apart, the seeds are left. Right, and out of the seeds can emerge something new.

Something new. Something new. And something new and visionary. Well, that's Horace because he's the Egyptian eye. And so that's the standard pattern. It's interesting because in the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, the mother doesn't recognize the value of the seed. She throws it out. And ultimately, it does end up functioning

as this new hierarchy that goes up and needs able to get what it needs to get. But it's interesting to see, and interestingly, again, in the story of Jack, is that when the hierarchy becomes corrupt though, then the mother is the one who can cut it down. She's the one who hacks it down. So it's a really beautiful microcosm in the story because on the one hand it's like the

seed which creates this new hierarchy, Jack goes up, gets the different elements of the hierarchy all the way to the pattern of reality itself. You know, comes back down, but then as he comes back down, all the monsters, you know, the monster follows him down, the monster, the tyrant, you know, the monster as he comes back down, all the monsters, the monster follows him down, the monster, the tyrant, the monster of the hierarchy falls down. Yeah, well that's also the danger on the arc front too, because one of the things that we've discussed continually is the high probability that putting together an organization like this at all is just an invitation to the descent of a new kind of tyranny, right? Because we wouldn't, we'd be fools to assume

that the people who say we're working on the UN front or the WEF front weren't motivated. That's right. We weren't as motivated as we are to do the right thing, like perhaps not, but also perhaps. And it's easy for a visionary enterprise to be captured by the ghosts of dead tyrants. Right.

The most likely outcome, in fact. Yeah, and so definitely. So we have to keep our mother with an axe. Yeah. I think to cut it down, if we need to, if things get to, to, to, to wrap it up. Yeah, so why do you think it's the mother with an axe in that particular situation? Because she's the one who destroys hierarchy. Right. But the same reason she throws the seed out.

So she's playing a good and a positive and negative role. For the same reason, she throws the seed out. She's the one who can cut down the tree. Yeah. Cut down the, cut down the, Yeah, well, there is an aspect of the feminine eye that's good at, it's a funny thing that's good at detecting deviation from the straight narrow on the masculine front. It's got to be a primary feminine instinct and for good reason.

It's one that's weird though. It's one that can be perverted and misused as well. Well, you could understand that the castrating narrative, it's a neutral narrative. It's like the idea of the woman that can take your confidence away with a word. That can be very dangerous to us, but it can also be useful in several circumstances for that to happen, because sometimes someone who's taking up to much space was very cocky or thinks that he's the king of the hill, and then a beautiful young lady can just take that away from him with one word. Right. And so it's, it's, it's, it's, but it is a power that exists in the feminine. Yeah.

And that, like I said, can be used for a good or ill and can, and becomes mythologized, you know, in all kinds of ways, you know. So tell me a little bit more concretely about how these productions are going to make themselves manifest. These are illicit, these are illustrated books, like high quality, beautifully hard bound illustrated books. We put a large amount of effort into designing the books, designing the illustrations. There's also narrative elements which don't appear in the text that are only followed in the illustrations.

All the illustrations have surprises in them that will capture some of the, let's say the hidden narrative elements that are in the story. And there are two readings in the text, basically, are reading for children and are reading for adults. But the reading for adults is not the kind of dirty jokes that are cynical reading that you subtract. Right, right.

Rather, something that hopefully helps the adult gather more insight into these stories. With most adults, and what do you mean to read? It's how to do this. It's the same reader, that is that it's one story. But in the story, there are elements

meant like put there, or grown up, so that it's one story. So that the child will not really pay attention to that, but that the adult will be able to follow the story. The story is told for like seven-year-old or something or a ten-year-old. It's very simple.

It's really using the fairy tale style. But hopefully, especially for an adult that has a little bit of intuition about stories and has cared about these stories before, I tried to resolve some of the threads in the stories in a way that reveals more of what the meaning is. So was God's dog practice for this? Or the first enterprise in this line of enterprise? Yeah, so God's dog, for those who don't know,

it's a series of graphic novels that we put out the first one last year and we're continuing to put them out. It's similar, it's different. God's dog is more elaborate, it's not a fairy tale, right? It's really, it's different. God's Dog is more elaborate, it's not a fairy tale, right? It's really an epic story. And so, but we're doing something similar as we're doing with the fairy tales,

which is in God's Dog, what we're doing is we're using the biblical Christian cosmos, you could say it that way, as a world building, as a world building tool to create a story, which is something that not many people have done. Milton did it, don't they? Yeah. But in the modern world, when you look at modern fantasy,

you have people like Tolkien or CS Lewis, that kind of inaugurated the modern fantasy movement. And what they wanted to do, although they were Christians, they created this kind of pagan world. Yeah. That was cohere. And then, but- Yeah, I wonder why they this kind of pagan world. Yeah, that was co-hearant. And then... Yeah, I wonder why they turned to the pagan world to do that,

instead of, because as you said, both Tolkien and Lewis were committed Christians, and deep Christian thinkers. So why do you think they turned to the pagan world? I don't, look, I can't give you that. I have my own intuitions about that. I think on the one hand hand it was a double problem, one which was it might have offended too many people if they had done a kind of, let's say Christian fantasy world.

You could have offended Christian non-Christian. And it would have annoyed the non-Christian's. Let's say he made them from the way from it. Right, right, right. But I think we're in a moment now, like as this... So Christianity is counter-cultural enough now? So that, yeah, that could be...

I think so. Yeah, that could be. And so in a way, there's a possibility of diving into the stories, telling kind of varying versions of these stories bringing them together, too. And God's dog, we bring in all kinds of, you know, we have St. Christopher,

who is a dog-headed monster. We have St. George, who's the dragon killer. You know, we have St. Christopher who is a dog-headed, dog-headed monster. We have St. George, the dragon killer. You know, we also have giants and the Leviathan and all these, all these kind of thing Weird things in scripture and in tradition. We kind of jammed them together into one story So there is that in the sense that we want to use some postmodern storytelling with postmodern storytelling like collage storytelling Has has has can does bring insight, right? There is a way in which it can capture insights. If you think of... Well, even when you're analyzing postmodernism,

you don't want to throw the baby out of the back of the water. That's foolish. No, so the idea is how can we use the insight of collage storytelling, or mishmash storytelling, like Shrek, or into the woods, and all these kinds of, or even the way that, let's say, the kind of Marvel universe does it where they have all these characters that exist

and then they interact with each other. You know, there are ways to do that in a way that is not just for pleasure or to deconstruct, but that can bring insight. Because like, what does it mean for a saint who's a monster, like a saint Christopher, with this dog-headed monster, to meet a monster killer who's also a saint who's Saint George. So it's like, you know, there are actually our traditions where they coexist a little

bit in ancient traditions, but what if you had a story of those two types of characters together? You know, and so you can do things in fiction that will actually provide insight for what the original stories are when you kind of smash them together. So that's the kind of thing. I mean, they did that in the ancient days too. Like if you think of Jason and the Argonauts, you have an old version of that where it's like Jason and the Argonauts is basically like, you know, Avengers endgame or whatever,

where they take all the powerful characters from mythology and smash them into one story and then watch them interact with each other. But it's not like this hasn't happened before. Dante has some of that too, because Dante basically goes into hell and then ascends the hierarchy and then along the way meets all these characters from history

and all these characters from the ancient world. So I think this is, I think that capitalizing on that kind of storytelling can be very... And how has that done, how has that performed commercially? Oh God, Zog, yeah, I mean, I think we did like 300,000 on the Kickstarter and we still sell, every day, we sell books, we're doing it all on our own, we have it on my website, we sell the book,

and so we're just continuously selling them. And we're preparing the second book, hopefully trying to also build up on the attention that it's getting. It's a very weird story. So I understand why it's going to take a while for people to kind of catch onto it, because it's very surprising. I think these fairy tales are far more grounded. Right, right, right, right. And there's an easy arena on. And who should pick up the fairytales? I mean, and what are they available? So June 6th, we're starting the Kickstarter first in the white.

And we're really trying to go all out with this Kickstarter. The purpose is in some ways to gather enough money so we can really start a publishing company. Yeah. Then I can hire an advance the illustrator so we can start to get these done. And this illustrator that you worked with tell me a bit about her. So Heather Pollinton, she has worked on several of major movie franchises.

She's an object designer for movies. She's worked on the Marvel movies. She's worked for Disney. She worked on Maleficient 2. She worked on Hellboy 2, which I thought was amazing. Yeah, it is. I actually Hellboy 2, it's so weird because when I watch Hellboy 2 a long time ago now,

I noticed just how well the design was done. Yeah. And there's one object which is like this medieval book that they have that tells the story of the elves in it. And I remember that object watching the movie and thinking, oh my goodness, it's the first time. We're one of the rare times that I see someone with a book that looks in a movie that looks like

a real object, that this is looks like something that has history or whatever that has all this weight to it. Yeah, and she designed that book. And so when she told me she designed it, like, oh wow, I wanna work with you. And so, yeah, so she's, she's, why didn't she wanna work with you? Well, she's been working in movies, she's been doing these things, and then she fell into my YouTube

videos, and then she started to see the way that I talked about stories, and the way that I talked about symbolism really attracted her. And she's not the only one. I started gathering these kind of, this cobbling artist together, you know, just a few weeks ago I met a, someone who is a storyboard artist, like a main storyboard artist for Disney, who kind of moved on and is doing other projects, but who also said like she read my brother's book,

she's watching my videos and she's like, this is really helpful to think about stories through these frames. So because of that, I'm feeling fortunate. Well, you know, when I talked to Camille Pellia about Eric Neumann, she said, and this is something I had thought about years ago, but she was the first person who I met other than myself, who in the academic realm, who made this case explicitly, she said if the Neumann and Jungian approach to storytelling had predominated in the 60s and 70s, the entire history of the last 40 years, the universities would be entirely different.

And so you're in that tradition, obviously. You and Matthew have your own interpretive framework, but you're not trying to obliterate the utility of narrative in the in favor of something like a narrative of power, which the postmodernists, that bloody leftist, postmodernists did that at the drop of a hat in France. It was a real catastrophe. But it leads, it's interesting because what it does is that it leads to deep cynicism and people.

It leads to dissolution. Yeah. leads to deep cynicism and people. It leads to disillusionment. So we do find pleasure in these stories, but it's like the pleasure of binge drinking or something, right? It's like this euphoric pleasure of watching our stories get twisted and turned and kind of deconstructed and flipped upside down, but it leaves us ultimately with not much in terms know, in terms of,

and so what we're trying to do is some is really to turn the clock back or to like reset the clock, you could say, and try to get people to celebrate these stories again, to see them really as something to build on, and something that is that we can, that we can unashamedly sell them to. Well, it does seem to me too that that will occur with an increment in consciousness because I think we're at a point now. And this is partly as a consequence, too, of work done by people like for VEKI, that we will return to these ancient stories, but we'll also understand their

explicit utility in a way that we hadn't understood before. And I would say in a perverse way, the post-modern enterprise is actually probably contributed to that. Because it took a kind of skepticism as far as it could be taken. But even so that's a good example. Because one of the things that I've done in the story is one of the things that, for example, some of the in the Puritan age, some of these fairy tales were cleaned up. You know, and so for example,

like most kids have not read the version of Rapunzel where she gets pregnant in the tower. But in some ways, without that, you actually miss out on much of what the story is offering. And so one of the things that I'm doing is without in any way being inappropriate, I'm not shying away from the fact that there is a layer of these stories that has to do with puberty, with transformation, with sexuality, the way that the psychoanalysts analyze.

It doesn't only have to do with that. Right. In some ways, those patterns of puberty and transformation and sexuality are also images of higher patterns of being, but we're not gonna pretend like that's not in the story. And those are obviously in the story. So how can we tell that story now in a way that is not inappropriate,

but just helps, you know, is there in the... Well, you know, you could say, you could say, that the terrible identity confusion on the pubertal and trans front now is actually a consequence of our failure to integrate those elements into a transcendent uniting narrative. So now they're crying out for integration. That's a reasonable way of thinking about it. But manifesting themselves in all sorts of terribly, horrifyingly fragmented ways. So that's what happens when you shy away from the bitter truth, right?

It's not like it disappears. It's the revenge of the repressed in Freudian terms, and he certainly had that right. So you can see that, like, so a good, in terms of the four fairy tales that I chose for the female side, you can see that all those fairy tales have to do with beauty in a certain way. They all have to do with the possibilities, the dangers of beauty, the dangers of how

you treat beauty. There's a whole theme of beauty in this and also the transformation of the woman who becomes beautiful and desirable and what does that mean and how to deal with it? So that's what basically unites all the stories together. And so it really becomes a way to, let's say, to attuning for, hopefully for young people to be able to kind of have these stories in their unconscious, really. You have stories in their, in their, just the basic frame, their, their implicit frame, so that they approach life in the, in with more, with a healthy mix of cautious caution, but then also adventure, right? Like finding that

balance between the two. Because I don't if you ever thought that, like, Snow White and Rapunzel are like opposites, you know, because Snow White, it's the woman, the mother who's jealous of her beautiful daughter, and therefore, you know, kind of mistreat her because of that. Whereas Rapunzel, it's the mother that sees the beauty of her daughter, but wants to protect her completely from the outside. And so, once Rose are out into the outside, literally gives her to the hunter, right, so that he does whatever he wants with her.

Right. And so, it's like this. And the other one is the opposite, where she puts to the hunter, right? So that he does whatever he wants with her. And so it's like this. And the other one is the opposite where she puts her up an entire protection completely wants to avoid two extremes. Yeah, it really is two extremes. Right, right, right. So that's the kind of thing that I play within the order of stories where I start with Snow White,

I go to Rapunzel, two opposites, and then try to integrate it then in Sleeping Beauty, and then a kind of final, surprising resolution in Cinderella. I see, I see. So this is all gonna unfold over what top three? It's good, it's depending, depending in some ways on how much we're able

to gather in the crowdfunding, so that I can get the project started. I'm thinking at least to a year I'm hoping, and maybe three a year if we're able to gather enough funds fun so that we kind of get this cycle where we're putting them out every few months. That's what I would definitely what I would like. Well we'll definitely keep an eye on that. Maybe have another discussion along the way on the on the male side. Oh yeah definitely. Yeah. That's what we got a bit touched on in a bit today with Jack in the beanstalk but that would be extreme. Well, all right

We should probably draw this part of this discussion to a close For everybody watching and listening. I'll talk to Jonathan for another half an hour on the daily wire plus platform Will I think delve into some more autobiographical details? and And we'll leave it at that. Thank you very much for talking to me today. It's always a pleasure to see you We're here for everyone too. Jonathan's here as a my and London. Also to engage in a series of meetings to do with this arc enterprise alliance for responsible citizenship, which we're trying to generate as an enterprise based on an attractive, positive

narrative of abundance, let's say in relationship to the future. And all the things we talked about today in terms of rediscovering, revamping, fundamental stories, our part and parcel of that enterprise as well, because everyone involved does understand that this in the final analysis is a storytelling venture, strangely enough.

Who would have guessed that? But that does seem to be the case. Thanks to the film crew here in London for your help today. That went extremely smoothly. And that's much appreciated to the daily world plus people for facilitating this conversation. And to everybody watching and listening, your attention is much appreciated.

Jonathan, good to see you again. Always, Jordan. Yeah, you bet. Ciao everyone., everyone. Hello, everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.