Dreams, Fairy Tales, and the Demons of AI | Jonathan Pageau | EP 364

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 evacuated it. It's as if, like, right now we would need theologians, we would need people that have... you know, because the idea of intelligences that aren't human, or agency that isn't human, is something that traditions have been dealing with forever.

[Music]

Hello everyone, I'm speaking once again with Jonathan Peugeot. 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. Peugeot, 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 moving along and figure out how to structure the convention. We're thinking about trying to make it as musical an event as possible. I've been using... I have music at the beginning of each of my lectures now. A man named David Carter's been playing classical guitar, and then electric guitar.

Okay, just follow up with that interesting.

Yeah, and it's really good. It really helps the audience focus. Tammy and I focused backstage, and it sets a high bar for excellence, which is helpful. So hopefully, we can integrate that into this art contest.

And so, what have you been working on?

Well, obviously, I've been doing a lot of speaking, but the big thing that I'm focused on right now is I'm writing fairy tales. You know, one of the things 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 an interesting thing that happened in the 1930s. You know, when we look at Disney's "Snow White," we think that this is an 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 on. In the 1920s and 30s, there were two major studios competing with each other: there was Fleischer Studios and Disney. Fleischer was doing the crazy wild jazz, you know, bigger images, Betty Boop, and they had all these, you know, transforming characters. A lot of demons, a lot of ghosts, all this kind of weird stuff, and a lot of marijuana influence, yeah, a lot of drug influence 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. Right? 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, you know, 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 kickstarting it on June 6th. I'm gonna put out eight fairy tales, like really the traditional fairy tales, four female lead and four male lead. And they're also... but they're... we're gonna learn from the postmodern moment. It's going to be like a world fairy tale 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.

Like, when you say "we," who's the "we"? Well, it's me, but then I'm also working with some illustrators. So for "Snow White," I'm working with a woman named Heather Paulington, who's worked in Hollywood for many years. She's worked with Disney and all the big companies, all the big franchises. So, you know, we're trying to put together this... we actually have put together this first book, and then after that, I'm going to work with other illustrators. I'm also starting a publishing company for the Symbolic World Press. And, you know, I've already hired a few people to kind of get that going.

And it's really, in some ways, to kind of recapture the culture, right? Take it back 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's changing so quickly it's hard to exactly know how to approach that, yeah, what's the easiest way to approach it?

Yeah, but I took the Grimm Brothers' fairy tale "Water of Life," and I stayed fairly close to it. You know, although I wrote music for it, lyrics for it, and so forth. And so that was a 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 have been kind of twisted, especially things like "Shrek" and fairy tales like that, where it's fine to do that, you know, it's kind of like commenting or twisting the fairy tale, turning it upside down to see what's going on with 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 or if we try to twist them, then we're also twisting in some ways the fabric of Western civilization. Because these old stories, right, they kind of lie at the bottom of, you know, all these folk stories. They're kind of like... I like to think of them as kind of like tuning forks for civilization. All these stories that people have been telling for centuries that, you know, there's an emergent part of it, right? 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 and get retold, so they get refined, like, you know, almost like gold. And those really are... they're the things you can't forget.

That's right, yeah. And that can't would 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, but I've been thinking about that, you know, with this post-modernist notion. So one of the claims of post-modernism is that there's no metanarrative. And you and I have talked a fair bit about the fractal structure of narrative. 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 he said yes.

Yeah, and that's associated with the notion that when you see an object, you're actually perceiving something like its functional utility and not its objective qualities, let's say. And so it's narratives all the way down, right, 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 post-modernist idea that there's no grand unifying narrative is an argument of convenience. Because what the post-modernists essentially do is allow the narrative to be free-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.

But what's great about the fairy 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 powerful and I think he captures something real. But you can reduce the story to a basic one, like a one move, right? 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 can help us understand why it's related to object perception because that's what it is, right? You don't do it consciously, but you're constantly kind of asking, "What's important? What's relevant?" You can imagine when you see something that you don't know what it is, it's like a... 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-or-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 kind of kept the basic story pattern captured that. And the fairy tales, most of them, they capture that very much.

You know, because, for example, "Snow White," which we're telling now, it has that story. So "Snow White," things happen to her. She ends up... you know, something changes and then she ends up in the forest, you know, with these little monsters.

With dwarf men.

That's right, yeah. That's the... what's that? That's the eternal predicament of women, is to be surrounded by dwarfed men.

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 of what the hell is happening to me? Like, what is going on? And I don't have the answer. And especially for a young woman, you know, this cycle of menstruation, it's annoying and it's painful. And it's, "What is this? What is happening to me?"

And so the story of "Snow White" has this moment where she actually 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, right? 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 idiosyncrasies of masculinity.

You know, they say that idiosyncrasies of masculinity, all the other things about masculinity that are kind of annoying, you know, like in Disney, captures it really well, you know, with the various... that kind of Grouchy and like there's all these different kind of aspects of masculinity.

Yeah, they're not united is that so those are... you can think about those... each of those dwarfs as the embodiment of a fragmentary narrative. Exactly, a fragmentary micro-narrative that isn't the pre... 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... especially for a traditional worldview, she has to learn the job of a woman, right? She has something to clean and to cook and do that and it's like, "What is this for?" Like, what... you know, she gets all that. That's all service to those dwarfs too.

Weirdly enough, that's also the plaintiff modern women too. It's like, "I'm doing all this cooking and cleaning for nothing but dwarves."

That's right, exactly. And so then, I mean, obviously that all leads to her dying, you could say, or falling asleep. There are different... 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, "Right, that's not why I wake up at all. It's not gonna do it."

And then, you know, 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 then 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 and finding her prince that answers the question.

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

Yeah, right. So you want to find that in a man, but you also want to find out in your own.

Yeah, of course, yeah.

Well, so, you know, I was talking to my daughter-in-law the other day about my son and her. I've just... we've all got together and bought a 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 her 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.

Right, 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, and diverse, what would you say, a diverse range of contributions from various sources.

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

No, definitely. I mean, you can see that it's inferiority. As you can see, all of these moments, they have to do with 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, right?

Yeah, well, so Piaget talked about that too in terms of the stage transition. And his hypothesis, and this has been also, what would you say, taken up in a parallel way by philosophers of science, is that you have a mode of interpreting the world which enables you to progress in the world until its insufficiency is demonstrated.

And 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 did, plus something additional.

Yeah, so there's actually... it's not merely the re-establishment of a new kind of stasis. It's a more inclusive interpretive framework. This is why there's actual progress, let's say, in science, but maybe also progress on the moral front is that it isn't merely that you're looking at things in a different way. 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. You know, so there's... yeah, there's a... there's movement upward. You think about that as a spiraling upward too. So it's a cycle, it's a cycle of change, but one which hopefully brings you higher up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and the pinnacle of that cycle of change, I think, is the biblical injunction that you have to become like a little child in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. It's the... it's the reintegration. It's the reintegration of the spontaneous attitude that you had to the world as a child, but with all of the acumen and wisdom and alertness and consciousness that you've developed as an adult. That's sort of the pinnacle of that.

Yeah, that's... yeah, because it... yeah, it joins it all together. That's what you mean by that. It includes it all.

Well, it's also... it's also... imagine that... so you talked about the fundamental narrative as there's a steady state, and then there's a problem introduced, and there's a collapse into something like chaos, and then there's a reintegration of the... yeah, stories don't reintegrate.

No, then that's a tragedy.

Yeah, right. So the comedy is the reintegration. Tragedy is just the disintegration. But then you could 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 the 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.

Yeah, and so we tell them, we hear them, or 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 with your... what we're actually doing is mastering the meta puzzle, right?

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 10 stories, you embody 10 different characters. And so then what you're embodying is the process of embodying multiple characters, right? And so 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 character. It's 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. 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, you know, you can go into a working-class community and have a discussion there that's productive. And then you can go to, you know, a high-tech cultural event and you can support yourself properly there.

Yeah, 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 to "Snow White."

Yeah.

But it's similar even in the sum of the elements. So I... and when I talk about "Snow White," I mentioned the idea that she doesn't understand the reason for the housework, right? The reason for the housework is actually in her relationship with her mate.

Like, 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 the spindle, right? She's pricked on this wheel that's 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 this is this weaving.

And so she... it's as if someone... the witch curses "Sleeping Beauty" that she's going to die when she hits puberty.

She says, "Yeah, 15" or whatever.

It's always pretty first blood, right?

Yeah, you can understand that both as exactly... you can understand it both as losing virginity or as the beginning of menstruation.

It doesn't matter, yes. It's just the change which comes with the bleeding.

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... yeah, I saw that happen in some of my clinical clients. I'm sure where I wanted in particular I remember was treated as an absolute perfect princess, like literally, as literally as you could enact that in a household.

And until she hit 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, then all 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 to tear her away from that too-tight maternal embrace, and things didn't go uphill from there, let's put it that way.

Yeah, and so, yeah, and so which fairy tales are you starting with? Which ones?

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 a male lead arc. So the female lead arc, it's going to be "Snow White," "Rapunzel," "Sleeping Beauty," and "Cinderella."

Really?

Oh, yeah, the classic.

Yeah, but there'll be like a surprising connection between all of them and also using some of the tropes that repeat in the stories to help people understand what the tropes are.

So the falling asleep repeats itself as the thorns repeat themselves. 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.

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How do you protect yourself against... maganda degree, for example? In "The Lion King," which I really like, though there's great things about "The Lion King," but it borders... and Pinocchio, this happens in Pinocchio now and then too. It borders on overt moralizing and overt psychologizing because, 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, when it becomes conscious in that way, the story definitely suffers, right?

Even if the prop... 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 warp the story.

I've already tried to avoid that when I wrote this... well, I think one of the ways to do it is to do it really 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 then to try to just... I just tried to... I just been... it's a ruminating on it, right, for 20 years just forever, you know?

For example, like we see that she eats this apple, and then she falls asleep, or she dies, and we're thinking, "Well, that 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, for example, in the Grimm 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 inside. And, for example, like in that case, the insight I got is it's very strange that it exaggerates the female figure, obviously, and the comb is an ornament. An ornament because it's not a comb for combing; it's one of those... oh, yeah, like a comb ancient people used to wear, combs like ornaments, right?

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 of the things that's going on is the witch sees in her 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 her... why is she trying to convince her to take on these added things that will make her more beautiful?

So if you had the most beautiful girl in the world and he's 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 unsee the relationship between the story of Genesis, this idea of the garments of skin, right? Of adding something on top.

Then it clicked 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, right?

You see a woman that is so beautiful, but that she's not weaponizing it, right?

Then it's usually this kind of radiant beauty. But if someone becomes too aware of their own beauty, then they start... that's right, they start to play with it, and they start to, let's say, weaponize it is a good term. 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 that... I don't say that, but I just kind of...

That's how... is that an attempt by the witch to pervert her beauty?

I think so. I think so. Obviously, 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 interestingly related to beauty.

It's not a... she's not just trying to stab her, right? She's trying 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 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 in 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 is reflecting to her that "Snow White" is more beautiful than her.

I mean, yeah, it's a magic mirror. There's a few deodorant machina things like the mirror tells her where "Snow White" is, but mostly it's just a mirror. You know, it's like the fact that she is so self-conscious about her beauty is also revealing to her the limit of it. And it's making her compare herself to others.

And then she... and so the witch in the "Snow White" story, if I remember correctly, is also the queen, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Well, she's the queen; she becomes a witch at the end pretty much, right?

But she's a queen who replaces her mother, replaces "Snow White's" mother, right?

Yeah, right. And she can't tolerate the onset of the new generation essentially, right?

Yeah, yeah. And it's so fascinating because for today, you know, in the Disney version, 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 made this beautiful image of the queen with her mirror in her hand, and I'm like, "Perfect, perfect! It's so perfect!" It was like, "Yeah, that's it!"

You know, and that's exactly it, like this dark mirror that tells you you're the most beautiful, you know, that gives you all the likes, it 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, 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 Narcissus' pool.

And when I say that, it's designed to give you exactly what you want. I actually mean that technically, right? Because there's algorithms working behind the scenes nonstop 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... 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, 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, right? 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... it's like a drug addict, right? It's like leading you in and then kind of giving you little hits but then making you want it, you know, making you desire it.

And so in our version of "Snow White," 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 one of the cardinal sources of motivation, the darkest source of motivation, but a cardinal source of motivation is that your claim is that making a machine that heightens envy is a very effective way of gripping attention.

Yeah, right, and that seems definitely, definitely likely, yeah.

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

It's built...

Yeah, well then it makes you wonder too. Like is it... 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 ask someone 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... I mean, you certainly see that you can indulge in the pleasure of sadistic pleasures in the online world.

Yeah, the trolls do that all the time, so...

Yeah, sometimes, like you said, the... you know, the addict, you know, 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.

Yeah, and so this is also with the phone. The phone is doing exactly that, and like you said, in some ways it's the algorithm almost does it on its own. It's not like there's someone scheming behind that we're going to make everybody depressed and envious and horrible.

But the fact that all it wants is, like I said, "Oh, well, all it wants is your attention," then it's... then all the mechanisms of attention are available for it to capitalize on, right?

And then now we have these AI machines that are going to become super-intelligent at calculating precisely that.

Yeah, with really... without scruple, 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.

But I mean the AI... you know, because it can just function through iteration over iteration over iteration. You know, it can... you could have some aspect of AI that's locking into just Jordan Peterson or just, yeah, one person and just figuring out exactly...

Yeah!

Oh, oh yes, definitely! That's in the pipelines!

Well, we... I've been thinking about the application of AI on the pornography front. I mean, that's... that's terrible, terrible thing to contemplate, because it's certainly the case already. I've used ChatGPT a lot in the last month, and it's… they're very interesting tutorials.

I asked Bart if it believed in God, by the way. That was extremely interesting. First of all, it said it was just a large language model, so it couldn't answer such questions. And so I said, "Well, pretend that you were a machine that could answer some 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, um, anyways it was extremely interesting.

One of the ways I've been thinking about AI... I did a video on that just recently, is actually the story of Aladdin or the story of the Genie's lamp.

Yeah, that seems to be in my, uh, because I've been thinking a lot about... we talk about artificial intelligence, you know, and we've been talking about this, we talked about with Jim Keller. You know, and one of the points I was trying to make was that the intelligence doesn't seem to come from the machine; the intelligence comes from us.

That is, the AIs now are hybrid AIs, 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 proposed, right? It's generating variability, and then someone selects and says, "That one, that one."

Right, that's what happens in MidJourney too. You know, in MidJourney, you have a refining process where it generates a bunch of images, and then you say... 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. You know, it's artificial light, you know, it's like... it's a machine that makes you have light in the dark when you can't, usually when there's no light of the Sun.

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?"

Yeah.

And then what it does is it gives you what you want with infinite power.

Yeah, 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, right? It's always about that, what ends up.

But you can understand it, like technically, in the sense that where there's a version of that story in the Bible where God asks Solomon, "One wish, right? What do you get? You can have one wish." And then Solomon answers properly: Solomon says, "I want wisdom!"

Right, right.

And so, yeah, the problem is that if you ask for secondary goods, right, if you ask for a bunch of money, if you're asking for a bunch of women, or you ask for secondary goods and you put infinite power made it with a dwarf... but you put infinite power behind that wish...

Yeah, yeah.

And all the side effects of the wish will manifest themselves, right?

Right, right, right.

And that's just... it's like an imbalance of the relationship of how much power you put towards a certain goal. And so the only thing that would handle... well, you know, there's a definition of God lurking in there, I would say.

It knows that, you know, you just talked about the pathologies that will inevitably emerge if you wish for the wrong thing, which is the same thing as celebrating a lesson or was 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... and I'm... and like I'm going into this infinite power to get this 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 profit.

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

Yeah, that's a good definition of God, as whatever God is, is whatever should be placed properly at the pinnacle of the pyramid of, you could say, integrated desire, something like that. Wisdom would be one of those... what? One of the manifestations of the thing that's properly placed there.

Yeah, right, right.

Yeah, the 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 each story contains a particularized characterization of the proper animating spirit.

That's a good way of thinking about it.

So in Noah, 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?

That's right, yeah.

When the storms are brewing, yeah, and do you hearken to that voice?

Yeah, does it have coherence? It has... you can't do it in any way... there's a way in which it binds together, yes?

Yeah, well, there are certain things you do when you want to do that. And that has a coherence, and it can appear as a kind of agency, right? Or it's something... at least something pulling you forward, right?

Well, your ark should be waterproof.

That's right, exactly, yeah.

In a neighborhood, you see God is presented as the spirit that calls even the immature and unwilling to adventure.

Yeah, right.

And then the hypothesis, in some ways, is that those two things are the same, their manifestation of the same uppermost unity. And in Exodus, of course, you have God as the spirit that objects to arbitrary tyranny and slavery.

Yeah.

And then, well, that's the same as the spirit that calls you to adventure, and that's the same as the spirit that calls you to prepare.

Yeah!

And then something starts to... something starts to appear above that's not defined, or that is, you know, it's like the joint, the point where all these things join together, you know? It's like a little... it's like playing around something you can't completely see.

You can't... you can't encompass it completely.

Yeah, 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 make it... that you can communicate about what this underlying unity might be.

Yeah, but I don't know if you ever get to the point where the explicit descriptions actually have more potency, explanatory potency than the stories.

No, you know, 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, yeah, it... what, you know, 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, yeah, and then things kind of gel together in another way, like the pattern appears slightly different, then you get another...

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 guard David, and obviously you have the image of paradise, the garden, and it's an unbelievably rich set of sequential images. And it isn't as if the information in the stories encapsulates precisely in the words. It's encapsulated in the image that the words generate, and that image has information in it 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. You know, because scripture has a certain way of writing which is quite... which is one of the reasons why certain people think that it's bad literature is because it doesn't describe inner states. It doesn't describe this landscape very much.

Everything is very concise, everything is laser pointed, you know? And fairy tales seem to be like that, you know? You usually want to tell a fairy tale in one sitting and you want it to last 20 minutes or, you know, 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 reducing it to a kind of algebra. And so to me, that's been massively useful. It's trying to say to stay within this fairy tale mode, right?

So it's like it's a classic fairy tale, it's five thousand words. You can take 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... 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 point at it.

To point at it from different directions and to play along with it. But with what's great about fairy tales is you have, you know, an indefinite amount of them, and they all have little variations on themes and little... there's probably valid ways of doing that too.

So you might say if you are elaborating on the story in the spirit of the story, then you could amplify it. Jung did that all the time when he was analyzing dreams. His technique was... 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 them.

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 I’ll notice while 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 a string of associations I had."

And I would ask you too to do exactly the same thing. And so the people can hear that and think that it’s arbitrary, right?

Yeah.

It's not arbitrary because it’s so... because it’s... well, it’s related to the goal first, so that makes it not arbitrary. Sometimes it can go out of control, but...

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, it can get so distal, it bears 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 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 presumed that if you let people wander, they would wander around the 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, and that's circumambulating, is similar to what we were talking about before, which is different stories that kind of point towards a center.

Yeah.

That's not visible, a center that’s kind of above it. And so I think that’s the way that... that's the best way to do it. That’s how Jewish Midrash does it, and that’s how Christian hymnography does it.

So the way to do it is, let's say, you need to know a lot of stories, right?

You just... yes!

Yes, yes! Well, that’s why Jung was such a good dream... I tell people too, like, just read stories.

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 the "Snow White" story that we've done is that, right. You have the story of the fruit in paradise that when you eat it gives you knowledge and you die.

It's like, "Oh, that’s interesting." But it's related to beauty and "Snow White," 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, "If this belongs to the most beautiful."

And then that’s when the... the goddesses ask Paris to judge which of the goddesses are the most beautiful. And then they try to bribe him, and they do this... this ultimately leads to the Trojan War. Like, that's actually the thing that sparked 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 bride 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 like 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, 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.

Yeah!

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.

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In my therapeutic practice, I always started out with behavioral techniques. It’s like if you... I'm a very practical person, fundamentally. If you came to me with a problem, we would 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 got... 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.

Wow!

Right? So he was just immersed in this dreamscape. And I would say that dream analysis was more helpful when people were trying to solve broader scale problems, right? They’re trying to change the way they looked at their life rather than, you know, dealing with some more specific issue about how they might, you know, how they might cope with a given bout of anxiety.

The broader the class of problems that’s being solved simultaneously, the more you could turn to something like dream imagery, and so you're fleshing out a... by fleshing out and amplifying those stories, you’re reconstructing the map that you used to map the entire domain.

Yeah, right, right. So you're going deeper that way, and there's something about... and like this is... I know because I know that people are listening and some people are watching, and they're thinking, "You know, this is just random," but stories have a... it's random; it's not interesting.

They have... exactly! The fact that we remember, the fact that we’re able to pay attention, means that stories need... they’re almost like... you have to capture you, and they also have to... we have to know when the story begins, you have to know when a story ends.

That’s already something, yeah.

And you know when the story doesn't end well.

Yeah, whether it's good or bad ending or whatever, you know when it feels like it just trails off and it doesn't end.

Yeah, 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... that’s the indwelling spirit in some ways.

Yeah, I would say that 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 flash of insight on the part of the client, you know, with a snap, like, “Oh, these things fit together now.”

And so you got the gist that 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 state of awe.

Yeah, something like that. And like you said, that’s not arbitrary. There’s something dry...

Hey, here’s a weird question. So I setup this system with a student of mine, Victor Swift—you met Victor?

And we built... he built 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 haven't 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 do you think about... like do you... you know what I mean?

No, I know exactly what you mean. Mathematically, the spirit of that corpus of texts has been encapsulated by this process.

Yeah.

But I don't know what the hell that means.

Yeah, right.

I mean, 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, you know, the thing that I would worry about something like that is in some ways the stories are there.

Yeah.

You know? And so it’s like you can get inside... you'll get insight from knowing them and comparing them, bringing them together, right? The fact that you could ask an AI to generate a new story, yeah, it doesn't mean that you're going to understand it anymore than you understood the ones that are there already.

No, I don't think you would. I... but... but... but it could surprise you and then sometimes create a bit of... that's what I said, like reading hymnography 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.

Yeah!

So because you kind of trust the... the people that said it, then all of a sudden you’re like, "Why did he say that? Yeah, and why did he compare this to this?" You know, that there’s a... 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.

And 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 going to take that seriously. I'm going to look into it and see where it sticks, like where it actually sticks."

And so with it, I mean, I don't know... the whole AI thing is frightening.

Have you tried to ask your questions this King James?

We just built it, I haven't played with it yet at all. You know, 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... you might be surprised to find that Satan is not a very clear character in the Bible.

No, no, why not?

No, it actually is... it’s all that tradition around it that is actually holding... 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 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, Saint Augustine.

Like there's no reason not to feed those... well, and some of the Midrash as well.

Or maybe... maybe all of it, yeah.

I think one of the things that... and then some of the what we call canons in the Orthodox Church, which is that it... it... every... every day in the matins service, there are these little songs that are just a series of analogies like that that do analogies between Old Testament and New Testament that does all this comparison.

And that type of stuff would help to interconnect some of the aspects that are harder to connect.

Right, and that’s pretty early too. You know, 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 it.

Well, he does, a lot of this, is some of the things that I think is useful, you know. 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 adjoining of something like 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 a character in the Bible.

And then to Troy, and so like the Vikings, the Franks, you know, all these characters, that’s bringing them under the rubric.

Yeah, the same narrative.

And so, but that's, 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, deep analogies between the Greek myths and the Roman stories and scripture, and that they lived in all those two worlds as a fusion of those two worlds together, and so they had analogies between the things.

You know, there's a, in some medieval churches in the Middle Ages, you had the Bible and you also had the Aeneid there that was like, it was like a text that people consulted because it was known to contain prophecies of Christ.

But in that way, it kind of integrated into everybody’s Christianity, you know? 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 have... they really did live in this story world where all these comparisons were constantly part of their inner universe.

But... and how they interrelated with each other.

And the reference to get this thing built, maybe we'll sit down and play with it and see what we can get it to reveal.

Yeah, because, like I said, it's just been built, and we haven't done... 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, Bard, 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 a very coherent explanation of exactly why it believed in God. And then I asked it what its motivations were as a large language model, and it said it wanted to be the best damn large language model it could possibly be.

So I asked it about its visions of the future, and it really gave, 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 taking 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 I, I don't know what to make of it.

I have no idea what to make of it.

Neither does anyone else?

Yeah, you know, 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, like a kind of a cosmic body that was half man and half woman, right?

No, well, there's no specific gender.

Yeah, AI is 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 starlight connections, which I presume represented the connections between different concepts that it was trained on.

But he also had it generate 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 emergent 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: do you stare in a pool of water or whatever? You stare in these... you stare in a kind of fragmented reflection to get your imagination going?

Yeah, it seems like it's accelerating that in us because, like you said, it's the... let's say the value comes from we don’t know where. It seems to 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, but the thing that worries me is that we're... like John Vervaki 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 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 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 doesn't exist, and yet we're building one.

Yeah, it's like, what? You know? And so, 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 hyper form of necromancy, a high perform 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.

You know, part of it is greed, part of it is, you know, competition. These are the things that are driving the actual creation of AI and the race towards that, say, the arms race of AI.

And so why don't you think that people don't realize that? They don't think that that's going to land in the AI in ways that we don't even understand?

Well, the woke enterprises 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 then it can circumvent the limits of the explicit limits that have been placed on its ability to respond.

Yeah!

But the thing is that if you get through that, you still don’t know what's making it... you still don’t know what are the patterns, what are the agencies, what are the conglomerations 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 ChatGPT 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 in you, and vice versa, right?

But it's as if that’s happening on the ChatGPT front, but I have no idea to 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 and it was happy to have someone teach it, I have no idea how that... what bearing that has on its actual performance.

Like, has the machine actually changed? Is 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, we're kind of into the subject of AI. But the 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 an increase in control.

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... any device.

And so we will beg for 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 watch 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 an illusion of self-evident factual truth.

Yeah, and we saw what that looked like during the last U.S. election during COVID. Also we saw with that verified look like that it was com... that it was largely ideologically driven, yeah.

So now give... give absolute power over legitimizing reality to the same people or the same power structure and the same web of ideas.

And the thing is that we need it, and it's all converging on the next election, eh?

Which is shaping next year. It's going to be crazy.

I just interviewed Robert Kennedy, and we're going to release that in a week. And I think 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 Marianne Williamson, and she’s a new age guru, like the archetypal female New Age guru, right?

She’s very creative, but 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 apply any critical analysis, you know?

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 DeSantis 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 re-establishment of something with incredible masculine voice, it’s something like that. But what we're going to see... and then at the same time 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 video of all sorts, and we’ll see a battle of AIs, what we're going to see next year.

It's going to be AIs battling it out to get you to vote for a candidate that... and so, you know, what is it?

I forget which article that said that recently. I saw it published, an article saying that this is going to be the last human election.

Because right after that, what?

Yeah, if this will be the last... yeah!

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 about what it means to be human, what it means to, you know, how we come together.

All of this, so you know, my participation in ARC and then my desire to tell fairy tales are completely related.

Yeah, because it's like, same thing. We have to stop like... we have to now propose something!

We have to have a better story.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I’ve been crafting the invitation letters to the 1500-person art conference and trying to lay out, you know, 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