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Jonathan Pageau on Art, Metaphor vs. Literal, Christ, The West, and Better Left Unsaid
April 2, 2021
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This is an interview with Jonathan Pageau who invited me into his home
Though I released it about two years ago, it was conducted two years ago, but I'm embarrassed about it and ashamed even because I was younger and nervously interrupting in an attempt to try and impress Jonathan, which is a quality or a characteristic that was there when I interviewed Janice Fiamengo as well in the Janice Fiamengo interview, which is also on this channel. It's not surprising because it was recorded day afterward. However, many of you enjoyed it. At the time it had a 98.5% like ratio and
I'm reposting it because of that. I have a larger audience now and perhaps many more people now will benefit from Jonathan's words. Jonathan Peugeot is wonderful in the interview. There are what are called math prodigies, child prodigies in math. What they are generally are people who at a young age can take numbers, large numbers, sum them, multiply them, divide them in their head rapidly. Jonathan is like that.
with symbolism. He's able to watch a movie and almost instantaneously deconstruct it. His channel, The Symbolic World, will have you question the distinction between the literal and the metaphoric, which actually means it helps you or imposes a questioning of reality upon you. This can be either for good or for ill. I think it's for good and if you make an assessment based on the comments and the people he's influenced, you would say it's for good as well. He's a talented figure and for those of you who know Ramanujan, he's Ramanujan, the Ramanujan of the symbolism world.
He came pretty much from nowhere with no formal training and has a preternatural ability in this domain. As an aside, this was for a documentary called Better Left Unsaid, which I directed and is actually released now, so you can go to betterleftunsaidfilm.com to see the version with Jonathan Pageau in it. You can also watch it on iTunes and so on, but the director's version, the one that has Jonathan in it, the one that's more
Thank you, and if you enjoy seeing conversations like this, then please do consider going to patreon.com and supporting. You can make a custom pledge. Literally, each dollar makes a difference financially as well as motivationally. It may even help metaphorically. Please enjoy the interview despite my asinine and unpolished, likely still unpolished interview skills. Thank you.
I'm here with the preeminent, the exigent, the pivotal, paramount, Jonathan Pageau, artist, carver, public speaker, symbolic translator. I guess, yeah, you could say that, something like that. Why don't you just tell me about what you do? Tell everybody about what you do, but tell me. All right, well, I
I'm mostly an artist. I make religious art, liturgical art, you could call it, in the Orthodox tradition, but in general in, let's say, the kind of Christian medieval tradition. And that has led me to look into symbolism in the Christian tradition, but also in general, looking at other religions, other traditions, but through other types of storytelling as well, fairy tales, mythology, and now modern storytelling such as movies and novels and everything. And so looking into symbolic structures,
relating to my art has led me to becoming interested in symbolism in general. And so in my daily practice, in making icons, I engage in that world, let's say that symbolic world through my art making. And then the way that that art integrates into the life of a church and in the life of a community is also part of that. But then
Now, for the past, I guess, two years now, I've been doing a lot more of public speaking, talking about symbolism in general, how it relates to our life, how its structures inform our perception of reality and our interaction with reality. So that's what I've been doing through YouTube, but also doing a lot of public speaking all over North America for the past two years now. So you said that you got started because you were an artist, and so you started studying the symbolic representations and what they mean.
Give me a timeline of your life. So you were four years old and you started this and then you were... Well, I know, when I was young, I always kind of knew I was going to be an artist from when I was pretty young. But then I was also, my parents were Christian. I was a Christian. I was part of a evangelical church. And then when I studied in college, when I studied at Concordia University, painting and drawing, I really hit a wall. It was just contemporary art is,
An art which is very removed from what it's doing. You know, it's like a comment upon a comment upon a comment. Is that another word for modern art or is that different? Well, contemporary art, you would say you could use modern for the whole period, but usually we use the word modern for the early 20th century up to about World War II. And then after World War II, we start to talk about moving towards what we could call postmodern art or contemporary art, which is even more, let's say, removed from
more a comment, like I said, a comment upon a comment. It becomes about art itself, it becomes a kind of circular playing with elements. So the piece of art that was just a urinal? Yes, well that was modern, but Duchamp, who made that urinal, is seen as one of the seminal figures in bringing about what would be today installation art and contemporary art. So there are certain figures in modernism which
lead into what we now consider people like Jeff Koons or Andy Warhol, you know, they take their drive from people like Marcel Duchamp at the beginning of the century. So it was already there at the beginning of the century. Let's say everything was kind of packaged up and then it unfurled itself into now the kind of on one hand anything goes but on the other hand everything has to be packaged in a
a kind of post cynical, you know, ironic, double irony, triple irony. So that's really what it is. So it was very difficult for me coming in as someone who wanted to connect with reality, you know, who as a person of faith, I wanted to make things which weren't just this flighty irony, you know, of references, but wanted to connect with something real. And so I was just hitting a wall. I just couldn't make it happen.
I got interested in some contemporary artists. For example, there's a German artist, his name is Anselm Kiefer, and he was the closest to what I was hoping to do. He was trying to bring back mythological thinking within the artwork.
But his work was still, it's still problematic because it's still in galleries, it's still prestige objects, objects which have no function in the world, right? We're actually so used to thinking that art doesn't have a function in the world that we forget that traditional arts in all cultures actually have function within a community. They integrate themselves within a worldview, within a community living. And so... And is that conscious?
Do they consciously construct art so that they're integrating one another or does that happen because they're communally putting together a piece of art and then they all respect it and revere it and it has their values embedded in it somehow? Well, the traditional way of seeing art is very different from the contemporary way of seeing art. The way that traditional vision, pretty much I would say worldwide, you see art as a skill.
And so the notion of art is, we still use that word today when we say the art of cheese making or the art of this, the art of that. And so that's really the traditional way of understanding the word art. The word art actually means in Latin comes from the notion of fitting things together. So the capacity to fit things together properly. That's what art is. And so in a traditional vision of art, we say things like the art remains with the artist.
The art is the skill of making things. And so the object that is made has to serve a purpose. There's no such thing in a traditional vision as making art. You don't make art.
You use art to make things. So art is the tool. Art is the tool. Art is the skill. Art is the capacity that you have mastered to make an object. And so then that object needs to have a function in the world. It needs to be integrated within a purpose. And that's probably one of the hardest things for people to understand is that art is not a value in itself.
And once you understand that, at least when I understood that, it actually liberated me from a lot of problems, because one of the problems we're always asking is, is this art? Is this art? You know, they come up with some crazy Jeff Koons, you know, blown up Snoopy, and then the question is, is that art? And the answer to me now has become, I don't care.
That doesn't matter. That's not the point. Whether it's art or not, that's not a question. The question is, does it matter? Does it have meaning? Does it have a function? Is it integratable into society? Does it have a capacity to integrate into the world? All of this was kind of playing around in my head while I was studying fine art. It was so funny because it was so taking that that became the subject of my art.
The subject of my art in college was how can I make art in this postmodern world, which is not just ironic, which is actually connected to a community, to let's say a coherent worldview. But then it was still being very removed. It was like, I'm not doing it. I'm asking myself whether I can do it. And it was so funny because the last
My last day in school when my supervisor was giving me my final grade, she said, it was so funny because I actually finished first in my program, like I was really diligent, I was working hard, but she knew that it just wasn't working and she just looked at me and said, don't worry, you're getting all A's, it's okay. What did she know was not working? Well, she understood that if what I was trying to do, which is, for example, to be a Christian person,
who is making art in a manner which was authentic but was still somehow part of the contemporary art world which is full of irony and full of double, let's say, double removal and constant, you know, a kind of flighty removed version of reality. She just knew that it wasn't happening.
And so she just told me on the very last day of my degree, she said, what are you doing here? You don't belong here. You should go to seminary or something. Because you're too traditional? No, because she could see that the questions I was asking were not, it just wasn't fitting with the contemporary art world. It just didn't have its place there.
such as the utility of asking whether or not a piece of art is a piece of art? No, no, not that. That is something that everybody is always constantly asking. The problem was mostly to say, how can I, let's say as part of a community, let's say a part of a Christian community, how can I make objects which fit into my life and into my world and into my community in an integrated way?
It really is the difference between, I didn't know yet because I hadn't discovered traditional art. It really is the difference between, let's say I make, you're a musician and you come to me and you say, here's what I'm trying to play, this is what I'm doing, then I design a guitar for your particular needs. That's traditional art.
And the postmodern version of that would be? The postmodern version of that would be I will make a guitar that will question what a guitar is. I will make a guitar that cannot be played but will ironically question the whole tradition of what guitars have been and what music and then now today it's even worse because now it's going to show how the guitar itself as an object created by
by hierarchies of historical hierarchies. How is it an object which manifests or subverts that hierarchy? That's the difficulty of postmodernism. So that's not what I was wanting to do. That's not what I was trying to do. I was trying to create a visual language which would integrate with my own experience, with my own faith, with my own participation in a community, in a church and all that.
Okay, let's get back. We're going to get back to this, but let's get back to art as a tool. So you're saying art as a tool. So this Snoopy example, I don't know the reference. I don't get this. Jeff Koons is this big Snoopy. Yeah. Well, I don't think he made a big Snoopy. He made, he makes like, for example, he did a, he did a big, a big sculpture, which is a pile of Play-Doh. So like, imagine like a lot, a small child has taken bits of Play-Doh and you just kind of jump bundle up in a thing. He made a giant bronze sculpture of a, of a, of a,
So this amalgamation of Plato, is it art? Your answer is, it doesn't matter. What matters more is does it matter and does it provide meaning to a certain set of people and does it integrate that people with the community?
I don't know if I'm recapitulating correctly. How does it integrate into the world? How does it participate in the world? How does it build? And if it does, then it's art? Or forget about the question of whether something's art? The art itself is the skill. It's the capacity to do that.
That's the traditional worldview. Okay, so let's take another example. Let's say someone's a great pizza maker, and then they make something. Let's say they made it out of pizza, but they're a good pizza maker. So then the question is, is that pizza? And you would say, well, did they use the skill of pizza making on that object? The question would be, is it good? Because that's what pizza is supposed to do. So can you eat it? Yes. And does it taste good? If you want to know if whether or not that pizza maker is a good artist,
is whether or not the pizza does what the pizza is supposed to do, which is taste good, you know, whatever it is that it could be to be healthy too. It depends on what the pizza maker wants to accomplish by making his pizza. You know, it's the same thing with someone, like I said, somebody who would make a musical instrument. The question if you ask whether or not that, you know, the musical instrument maker
is a good artist is whether or not that instrument does what it's supposed to do and that's very difficult for people to think that way now you know because even in the past music was composed for reasons we don't people didn't just compose music just to compose music they would compose music for a requiem music for a mass music for a feast music to celebrate someone's birthday to celebrate the king to to
The music was written to integrate into society. Unless you were making studies or maybe you were studying to practice or you were doing things like that, but your ultimate purpose was to write a piece of music which would function, even storytelling.
That's been a while since we've had that, but even storytelling in a traditional sense, like if you think of the great epics, if you think of the Iliad or the Odyssey, those were community building stories. Those stories were meant to create, to even create what the Greeks were. So how do you judge a piece of art where the artist themselves doesn't know what the purpose of the piece of art was?
Because you're saying you can posit a goal and then whether or not you achieve that goal through the art, that's a measure of the art's worth. You could go further than think that it's just based on the individual's purpose. It's a broader thing than that. Let's say a pizza maker decided you wanted to make a pizza to taste better. By the way, all pizza makers, I'm sure there's a technical term for you,
And I apologize. I know you're just greeting your teeth right now. So let's say a pizza maker decided he wanted to make a pizza that tastes bad. He could do that, but it would probably not be considered
great pizza. And that guy would probably not be considered a good pizza artist. Okay. But in there, in that example, it's obvious what the intention of the pizza is to be eaten. But say someone like Picasso and he just goes in a room, he doesn't know what he's doing. He organizes his room. So now he's like, maybe I'm an interior decorator. Oh, I just discovered cubism somehow in his room, but he doesn't know what it's for. Because he doesn't know what it's for. We also don't know what it's for because the artist was just exploring and they created something. So can we judge it then?
Because we don't know its purpose. Well, I think that Picasso and modern art in general has a has a destabilizing effect on society. And I think they meant for it to be that. So in a way, maybe they did what they did was right. I think that most modern art and contemporary art believes in a revolutionary vision of reality, that the purpose
that our purpose is to bring about revolutions, to destroy the status quo, to destroy the existing order. And I think that Picasso was a communist. I mean, he was a communist pretty much his whole life, even when it became embarrassing maybe to be so. And a lot of the modern artists were either communists or fascists. The futurists were straight on fascists. They wanted to burn the old system down and set up a totalitarian
We have artists who were totalitarian in their artistic vision. We don't tend to want to see them that way now for some reason, but a lot of the abstract artists, especially the Russian abstract artists, had a totalitarian vision of reality. And a lot of modern designers were very totalitarian. Some modern architects would say things like, I wish I could design the people in my house.
or I wish I could nail the chairs to the floor so that I could control... It sounds like excess order. ...exactly everything the way it is, okay? So you have these two tendencies, let's say, in modern art. You have both. You have a kind of destructive tendency and a totalitarian tendency, which is part of the modern world. So you see it as off-balance because... Oh, yeah. ...in the Petersonian point of view, which is also the Taoist point of view, there's order and chaos, and you see it as being on the extremes and that they're not mediating between the two.
properly. Yeah, I agree. I think the whole modern world, that's what it is. It's just a swing, it's just this pendulum swing between two excesses. And you can see it in modern art, you can see it as well. And they become confused and they kind of fight and then they break each other apart. But it is a fascinating thing to see. Now we kind of just gloss over a lot of it. But if you look at the way, for example, that even post-abstract expressionist art
I saw this painting that was just white with one speck of red. Do you know that painting?
L'Art, it's a very famous painting. I don't know which painting you're referring to. Okay, just imagine a blank canvas and then just some splotch of red in the corner and then it's sold for millions of dollars. Is that contemporary? Yeah, well that depends. It could be. It would probably be considered modern or late modern, you could say. Contemporary art tends to be more cynical.
and we'll take modern conventions and be more playful about them, and we'll create a kind of parody. For example, German artists like Richter, who is an abstract artist, but his abstract art is considered to be a kind of parody of abstract art, where it's almost like a comment on abstract art. It's not directly abstract art. It looks like abstract art with a kind of weird photo...
lack of focus in it. And there's a lot of neo-abstract artists who are actually, there's a kind of weird cynicism to what they're doing. But it gets very confusing. Contemporary art right now is just a giant ball of anything. It's very difficult to know. Is it post-modern? Or is it post-modern right now? I think that what I'm doing could be considered post-post-modern.
I'm part of a group, let's say, of people who have grown up in contemporary art, who learned contemporary art, several who had a promising contemporary art career ahead of them. You know, they were in galleries, they had different scholarships and everything to big schools, but then they kind of came to the end of the carnival. At some point, the carnival has to end. At some point, you've eaten enough pie.
and you know you've had enough pizza, exactly, you had enough sugar and blinking lights and so what ends up happening is a rediscovery of what I would call traditional art and I see that. So I know several iconographers who make icons for churches who had that exact turn where they came to the end of contemporary art and they realized this is
This is just nihilism. It's just nihilism on steroids. And so they, they reembrace, let's say the traditional language of, of the church. Some people. Does that happen within a field of modern? Okay. So there's modernism, there's postmodernism, then there's traditionalism. Now, does this cycle happen even within a section? So there's the section of traditional and section of modernism and postmodernism, or does it happen within
I think that the problem with the contemporary art world is that the very setup of the contemporary art world is not conducive for it within that world for let's say a return to order to happen or let's say a post-modernism to happen because you have a
Or return to the proper balance between order and chaos. Because as you were saying, can't just be returned to order because the fascists had extreme order. So for them it would be returned to the middle. Exactly. The problem is, it's true, one of the things we forget about modernism is there is another wing of modernism which we don't tend to
to think of, which is social realism. And social realism has been used very much as a just pure propaganda, like just a pure propaganda tool because its whole style, its whole affectations are basically, you know, a kind of sentimentality, you know, a kind of going in to get your sense of nationalism or your sense of courage or whatever. And so they tend to push you towards
towards propaganda. So what people traditionally think of as propaganda is social realism? I mean, usually those are the techniques that are used. Like these Nazi propagandistic clones? Yes, of course. Yes, they are. And the same with the Russians. Like the Russians had a whole tradition of social realism. I mean, Jordan Peterson has collected them. His house is full of Russian social realism where the purpose of these paintings is to make you a good citizen, right? To make you participate in
in the state. Do you see elements of social realism in the modern films that we have now, like Mona, I think it's called Mona, the one that you analyzed, Mona, Moana, and then Frozen, and then Wonder Woman? Yeah. Well, right now we don't, I would say that we're not using social realism for our propaganda anymore, because it's a weird different world than, for example, early century, early
One of the things that has happened is, let's say, the revolutionary elements of our society, they've actually understood symbolism. They've been the ones who, for the past, let's say, 50 years, have understood symbolism the most. And so they've actually been using
Let's say mythological structures to affect their propaganda. It's very different. Much like the Nazi symbol being, Swastika was what? Swastika is one of the most ancient images, one of the most ancient symbols that exist. It's an image that is universal. You can find it in all cultures. You can go to a medieval church and see Swastikas. You can go to a Hindu temple and see Swastikas. It's probably one of the
oldest images we have. And so they were able to take it, to change it a little bit. They made it, instead of making it straight, they slanted it. I think that the Nazis are a really good example in a way, in the sense that the Nazis, they wanted to co-op mythological thinking more than others. They had a weird religious feel to them, right? They had a kind of strange esoteric and
desire to revive northern gods. They also had weird contacts with the Indian, the aristocracy in India, with the, what are the names of the cast? I can't remember the name of the cast. So do you think that's one of the reasons why these totalitarian regimes, when they come in, particularly on the left, so particularly communist regimes, that they want to obliterate traditional art and obliterate religion and ban it? Oh, for sure.
Because they understand it. Well, because they understand how potent it is. And also because, especially the communist groups, they really wanted to, because they believe that the human person is malleable, that we're a blank slate type. And so they wanted to destroy all the cultural tenets which were there in order to bring about their utopia.
You know, the Chinese, the Russians did it too. The Russians liquidated. They destroyed, the Russians destroyed over 30,000 churches just during the early times of Stalin. And you know, we all know that the Maoist culture revolution was insane. They just went around destroying everything. Not only destroying, but executing anybody that had to do with the priesthood. Yeah. And the same thing, I mean, early communists, Russians would go around, you know, and just
Today, it's weird. It's different. Our version of that, let's say our version of propaganda is a little different from that. It's more insipid and it's more
It tends to understand, like I said, it tends to be more subversive rather than directly offensive in the sense that it's better to show inversions and to have stories with the notion that the inverted becomes the norm in a way. And that seems to be the way that a lot of propaganda is happening now.
And so it's a bit different. And so sometimes it's tricky because sometimes the stories actually end up looking very much like ancient traditional stories. It's often just that they're upside down or that there's a like Shrek is a great example. Shrek is like the most, the easiest example to see where it looks like a fairy tale, but it's actually an upside down. It's a totally upside down fairy tale where
You have an ogre and a princess, and the ogre is this monster, and they present him as a monster. So that would be an example of a postmodern film? Yeah, of an upside down fairy tale, of a subversive use of traditional tropes, where all the tropes are there, but they're just totally upside down. The ogre is represented as a monster, it suggests that he's a cannibal, it suggests all these things that the normal ogre is, and then he meets a princess, and in the end the princess becomes an ogre.
And it's like, okay, the shape of water is a great example too, a more recent version, where all the normative characters, you know, the Christian, the white male, all that, they're all absolutely evil, okay? And then all the kind of exceptional characters, like the monster, and then all these other exceptional categories are somehow pure and innocent in all of that. And then in the end, the woman,
becomes a monster, like that's how it ends. She goes into the water, she becomes a sea monster. And it's like, we're so used to it, we think that somehow that that's a normal way for a story to go, but it's very disturbing, you know. I've seen that so much in the past 15 years. Yeah, and a normal story, like the story of the frog and the princess, for example, is that the exceptional character, the frog, this talking frog, who's a monster, is by some proof of their virtue integrated into the world.
Little Mermaid Becomes a Human, or Ponyo Becomes a Human. You know Miyazaki, I've been watching Miyazaki films because you commented on Spirited Away and I wanted to watch it again so I started watching a few and I was trying to put my finger on why is it so damn good. His films are very good and I realized not only are they magical and whimsical like a child and imaginative but there's
a complete lack of cynicism, a complete lack of sarcasm or sardonic commentary. No, I think you really put your finger on it. And I think that because we're in a situation, because of technology and because of our extremely ordered societies where we have a, you know, everything is controlled by the state, basically, not everything, but so much of our world is controlled by the state and by these giant corporations and everything, we have a need for
Feminine symbolism we have a need for the private sphere We have a need for the refreshing aspect of of our personal relationships all this feminine symbolism we have a desire and a need for it and the thing about Miyazaki is that almost all his films take on this feminine symbolism, but he does it in such a beautiful way where he doesn't feel the need to be
subversive or to kind of show how, you know, the male character is an idiot or useless. There's a complete absence or lack of a political message. Oh, yeah. No, I think so, too. The closest may be Ponyo where he says the humans are ruining the earth with their ships. That's the closest that I've found so far. But I agree. I agree that that's what makes him so strong. And they make him so strong also because he's able to create strong female characters, but in a manner which is not
doesn't have that kind of anger and bitterness and cynicism in it, or it's more like a celebration of these beautiful feminine characters. Yeah, and it doesn't make the feminine the masculine. Exactly. It doesn't make a girl have traditionally masculine qualities and then say, we're subverting notions of gender. Yeah, because that's what so many of the superhero movies that we've seen recently and a lot of the Star Wars movies and everything is, and I think that's why people are kind of annoyed with them is because they're
It's not only the desire to make, let's say, a female character into the same action hero that we've had since the 1980s that everybody's criticized. The feminists or the postmodern criticized that figure of the male hero. But now you want to make a woman into it. Masculinity is toxic as long as it's a male. Exactly.
It's like masculinity becomes good if it's a female who embodies it. It's just completely upside down. I mean, here's what else I find funny about that. Femininity is just unattractive when it's attached to a male. So as a male, you can't win. It's very difficult to win. But if you're attractive and you have toxic masculinity, you can get away with almost anything. We had this conversation with Janice Fiamengo that the people who are getting sent letters saying stop what you're doing are
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This one British comedian
He was like a huge deal and he became depressed and everything. He did an interview with Sam Harris and he did an interview with Jordan. He's kind of on board with Intellectual Dark. Anyways, he was this super good looking guy and he was extremely promiscuous.
had loads and loads
Really interesting, you know imagine if anybody else had done that, you know what it would have been and I'm just I mean I'm figuring like maybe Russell Wren at some point I'm gonna turn on him when he kind of when he loses his his attractive edge They might turn on him at some point. But yeah, no, I agree that it's mostly that that that certain behaviors Let's say trying to trying to be flirty with a woman if you're good-looking and you're into your desirable Then that's not a problem. But if you're ugly
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The ring is really power. I mean, it's called the ring of power. But I think that the ring is the power in the sense that we understand it today, in the sense of technological power, that is the capacity to affect the world. So it could be political as well. But a good way to understand it is technological power, in the sense that it's a
It's the capacity to control, to affect things around you. So the ring itself, this symbol of metallurgy is a very ancient symbol of exactly that. In the Bible, you have this notion that as the fall of man kind of increases, moving towards the flood, one of the steps is the creation of metallurgy with two balcanes and the forging of weapons.
But it's there in other traditions as well. Somebody was telling me a Nordic tradition about almost the same idea. In Greek thinking, Hephaestus, the god of metallurgy, he's kind of like a monstrous deformed god who was kicked out of
Olympus and lives in a kind of dark fiery place and that's where he makes his and so it's like this it's kind of like an image of the capacity on the margin to to control the the outside you could say something like that does that make sense yeah yeah and then you're saying how the ring becoming something that makes you invisible makes sense because
Right. Well, the idea is that you have to understand it, you have to understand technology, or if you have to understand power or capacity to move out into the margin, you have to understand it as adding layers to yourself, right? That's a good way to understand technology. You could add the supplement. So you supplement your existence with something. So, you know, you wear clothes,
You add a layer of clothes and then you can live further out, right? You used to be only to live on the equator, now you can live further out from the equator because you have clothes and you can keep warm. Then you develop houses, you develop different technologies to bolster your capacity to live further out. So imagine now the same thing in terms of political power. You're one person, what can you do? You can't do much. So in becoming, in adding power to yourself,
Let's say you hire an army, you get weapons, you put on an armor, you do all these things, you learn to ride a horse, you have all these things that you add to yourself in order to make yourself more powerful, right? And the ultimate example of that is the ornament. So we often don't think metaphysically what an ornament is, but an ornament is something that you add to another thing.
to make it just to make it different just to make it special right because it has no purpose if i if i put a if i paint a flower on a chair
It doesn't participate in the chair, nature of the chair. It doesn't help me sit on it. All it does is it makes it different from others. And it's the same for people. So a woman will wear jewelry, a man will wear jewelry as well, a woman will wear makeup in order to supplement her beauty, you could say. So a woman wears me to supplement her beauty. But what happens is as the supplement gets stronger and stronger,
The question is, are you supplementing to show? To call attention to? Or are you supplementing in order to hide the true nature of what it is that you're supplementing? And it's hard to know when that happens. It's hard to know when I take a hammer in order to be able to hit nails and hit them in, but then at some point the technology becomes so big that
I could never do it. It's actually there to mask my capacity to do that actual action. The same with makeup. Everybody has seen a woman who at some point in her life as she enters her 50s or 60s, she doesn't realize what's going on and then she starts to wear too much makeup and then you realize that it's actually there to hide her age. It's not there to
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I see. I see. So, okay, so an empty shell. So there's technology. I'm just going to see if I understand. So there's technology and use that technology to expand what you can do to expand your dominion over the world and over others. Then you can also think of it in terms of makeup as a technology. Buying a big car to signal your attractiveness is a technology in the sense because it's a tool. So tool is another word for technology. Right. And the big car is a great is the great example, right?
I mean, for a man, it's a joke that we have, right? The guy with the sports car, you know, is it there to actually hide something about him? Something that he's missing? Some aspect of him which is deficient? And then he's hiding himself behind his big car. He's actually hiding the fact that he's, I mean, this is like the joke, right? He's hiding himself, the fact that he's somehow deficient in some spheres of his love life,
with this big car. So he's overcompensating in that manner. And so that's a way for him to hide. He's hiding himself behind this ring. How does it work when it comes to armies? Like let's say you're the president of the United States and you just keep pumping money into the military. So you're expanding your range of dominion. How does that relate to hiding? Let's try to understand it in terms of an army. Because I understand it in terms of masking when it comes to something like makeup,
or the man with the car, or someone who's extremely well dressed, but to the point of not being well, being overly dressed. Well, I would say we could see some examples, I think, in terms of when is it that, let's say, civilizations become expansive?
I think a lot of people could argue with me on this, for sure. But I think that if you look at the expansion of the Roman Empire, for example, the question is why did it expand? Why would it expand?
And one of the answers could be exactly what I said, could be exactly that it is lacking within itself what it needs to exist. And so it has to speed up what it's eating on the outside. It has to kind of devour the outside and add, add, add, add, add, add, add to a point where it always feels like it's pushing away that moment where it's going to break apart.
By doing that, because there's something in the center which is lacking. There's some inner thing which is lacking. You could think about in terms of materialism how people will start to buy, buy, buy things because there's something lacking within themselves. They do that in a way to make them feel like they're
Okay, so they lack something crucial that will help them survive and so they stave off the inevitable by increasing their imperialistic powers. Is this something that the communists did? I think so. I think that that's a good way to understand it in terms of empires that tend to... Oh, I mean, that's one example because others could just simply be greed. Yeah, but I think that greed is that too. I think that this... Ah, that's true because greed could also be tied to an insecurity, which means you don't have something. That's right.
and so that's why the ring is related to our desires this periphery this idea of supplement is also related to what the Christians would call the passions so you have these you have these things that pull you from the outside desires you know the gluttony pride sexual desire all these things and so if
If you move in that direction, usually that's what it is. You're devouring, you're eating, you're taking in things, you're acting in certain ways in order to compensate for something that you're lacking interiorly. And everybody knows someone who does that. I mean, you can take extreme cases of someone, let's say, who drinks. And you know, someone who becomes an alcoholic, he doesn't just become an alcoholic because of alcohol. Right?
usually you become an alcoholic you drink to fill up some malaise that you have some kind of and everybody has that malaise you know we just we have different ways of dealing with it but you can you engage in certain supplementary behaviors in order to and the supplement because the supplement is also medicine that's also important in understanding this idea of supplement is it also has to do with the notion of taking in something or intoxicants or medicine all that is part of
This notion of the supplement because when you're sick, you have to take something from the outside in order to heal you and it works like it can work, you know, and the supplement is not, there's nothing wrong about the supplement. There's nothing wrong about this process. It's just that it can become out of control, you know, because you need to eat and there's nothing wrong with sexual activity. All those things are fine. It's just that if you can fall into a pattern where that behavior or that
How does this relate to the ring becoming heavier?
Let's say Frodo is moving out into that chaotic world. And so it has to become heavier in a certain way. Just like you need to add more and more layers the further away you get from yourself. So it's going to be, you know, it's like you need a bigger gun, a bigger sword, a bigger army, a bigger house, more technology. Going out into space is the ultimate example, you know. Like you go out into space, you need a massive shell
around you, a massive, massive shell to protect you from the outside because the outside will kill you. And I think that that's what's happening in the Lord of the Rings is that as Frodo is moving away from his home, as he's moving away from his family, his identity and all of that, and he's moving out towards this dark place, then the ring gets heavier and it takes a toll on him. At first he has enough innocence to
to bear the ring without being completely taken over, but as he moves out and further and further and further out, then it starts to eat away at him. And the only character in Lord of the Rings who can handle the ring without a problem is Tom Bombadil, and that's because he is a representation of that natural kind of innocence, that kind of boisterous self
fullness of being you know he doesn't he doesn't he he's a he's a he has a kind of joyful innocence that means that he's not tempted by the the the the periphery are tempted by that a good example is in the movie Spirit of the Way it's a great example where the the central character what is her name again forget her name anyways Sen but that was what she was given yeah well Sen she herself has that innocence
And so when she's not in danger, the same way that others are, in that world of gold and of pleasures and of this house of sensuality, she's not in danger. So when No-Face presents her with the gold, she's like,
But she'll take it if she needs it, right? And it's fine. She's like, oh, she needs, she needs the, she needs something from No Face. She'll, she'll take it. She's fine. But then he's like, no, I want to give you more. I want, I want you to give me more. And she's like, why would I want more? I, I'm fine. I, I needed this tool to do this and I did it. And then I'm done. And that was because she was innocent? I think it's because she has, she has a, a kind of innocence in the right way to see innocence, a kind of purity, you could say, a kind of lack of a self
It's a joyful purity. I don't know how else to say it. We were talking about The Little Mermaid before we started filming, and I don't know if you had much time to think about it before we started filming, but can you comment on how The Little Mermaid has a connection to today? Right. Well, especially if you're talking about the movie, The Little Mermaid, like the Disney movie, I think it's
It's interesting because the Little Mermaid, she... It's funny because maybe I need to make a caveat about the Little Mermaid. The first Little Mermaid, like the one that was written by Hans Christian Andersen, was really about the incapacity to cross over. It was really about the... Be happy with what you are. Because she dies, right? She can't. She can't cross over into the human world.
because that's not our place, right? And so the Disney version is the actual total opposite. The Disney version is the very opposite. It is the modern, you can be whatever you want version of that. So it's kind of interesting, first of all, to think about the difference between the two worlds, the worlds of Hans Christian Andersen and our world today, where we have this idea that you can pretty much just do whatever you want. But what's interesting in
The scene with the witch, what's her name again?
Ursula. Ursula. Yeah, what is interesting in that scene is that Ursula is making her feel like she cares about her, right? Making her feel like she's this poor, this poor thing, this poor victim of her circumstance, this poor... And she's like, I'm going to... I can offer you what you want. I can offer you your desire, but what you have to give me is your voice, is your self, basically. And so in a way... Your logos. Yeah, exactly, your logos. And so in a way, it is...
It is an image of this problem of desire in that sense. The problem with that movie is that in the end she gets her thing. That's the problem. That's more complicated. But she's like, you need to sacrifice yourself, your logos, in order to get what you desire. And that's
that is part of this notion of the supplement in a sense is that you you if you if you desire this new car that's what you really desire if you if you desire to to have all these sexual experiences if you desire to have a certain lifestyle and that's like that's what you think that that's what you are that's when you lose your logo that's interesting because you can look at it from two points of view one is Ursula which you can think of as the radical left enticing people with with wish fulfillment I just want your voice but then on the other side
There's the people who are willing to give up their voice. Yeah. Who are willing to give up their logo, so their core, their heart or whatever, in order to get something that they desire, in order to get something that they want. And I think that that's... And there's something about that in the ring too. There's something about that in the notion of the ring in general, where the person who is going to bear the ring, especially someone who already has a purpose,
that they're going to be able to accomplish what they want. If they have that power, they'll be able to do that, but they have to give up their soul to get it. All the magical transactions in stories are always like that. You get what you want, but you have to give up something more profound in order to get that.
And I think that you see people who go through that all the time. People go through that all the time, right? The guy who all he wants is to get his million dollars, and then he sacrifices his family, sacrifices his relationship with his wife, he sacrifices the things that are actually very precious, that are really precious because they constitute your being in terms of a communal being, and they do that to get what they want. And I think that in terms of the radical left, one of the problems that we're seeing is that
the radical left has been able to convince people that they're only this one aspect of what they want. So someone is like, I, you know, I feel like I'm, you know, that either I'm just one thing, like I'm this one thing. And if I embrace this one aspect of myself, I will get power, like I'll get some political power.
And I think that that's that's dangerous in terms of just normal people like as we're not like I am NOT just a You know, I'm not just a man. I'm not just a carver. I'm not just a or if I was if I was gay I'm not just gay. I'm not just trans. I'm not just whatever and I'm not just a European I'm not so it's like if you embrace this one aspect of yourself then all of a sudden it's like
But there's something, that's how you make a weapon, right? That's what a weapon is. A weapon is a point. It's like, I'm going to push something into a point, then I'm going to use it as a weapon. And that's how you make a weapon. But that's not the way you make a person.
You don't make a person by turning a person into a weapon or weaponizing something about yourself because you'll lose yourself in that weapon, you could say. And you can do it with all kinds of things. You could turn your bitterness into that. You could become your bitterness. You can become your bitterness at your parents.
You hate your parents because of what they did and your whole life falls into that bitterness and you make this nice jagged pointy thing where all you exist in is this one thing about you which is the way your parents treated you and you dive into that and it becomes your spear and you start slashing at the world with it and it makes you feel powerful because it works. It actually does give you power but you lose something in the balance. You lose the capacity to become a full person, a total
I just had a thought about giving up what you have in order to get what you want, which is aerial. But nihilists in today's world give up what they want in order to keep what they have. So they'll give up their aspirations like forget about marriage even though they actually want it. Forget about traditional values even though they actually want friends and they would like maybe a nuclear family or whatever it may be.
In order to retain their worldview, what they have. But I think it has to do also with a kind of shortening of... What nihilism tends to do is it tends to shorten the horizon, you could say. And so the most immediate things we have are these desires, right? Those are the most immediate. The idea of wanting a family, you have to like...
swim over that first wave, which is I just want to have a beer, right? You have to swim over that in order to get to something which is more purposeful. And so I think that what nihilism does is it opens up the possibility of just living in more immediate desires. You know, playing video games all day or whatever it is that you want to do in the immediate and not feel like you have to direct yourself towards something which is higher.
And so in that sense, I think that that's what, that's what nihilism tends to do to people. So what do the hostile brothers, Cain and Abel, they're others, which I can't think of right now, but what do they have to tell us about our current situation with regards to the radical left or even the alt-right? Yeah. Well, I think in terms of, I think in terms of Cain and Abel, I really do, I do think that Jordan Peterson has hit the nail in the right place in terms of that story and how it relates to today in the sense of resentment. And I think that,
In the story of Cain and Abel especially, you see Cain who feels like he should have more than what he has. And it's not just, and so it becomes the basic, you could say that it's pride, right? Pride is the first sin. It's the first sin in pretty much all the whole biblical story. You know, the devil sin is pride. Cain's sin is pride. Adam and Eve's sin is pride as well. It's the feeling that
I deserve more than what, what I should have. And it's always relative to someone else because it's not, it's almost equivalent to I should have more, but also you shouldn't have that. If I don't have that, you shouldn't have that. Oh yeah, for sure. No, I totally agree. And I think that that's, it seems to be, I think that that's, that's for sure. If you talk to people who are far on the left, far on the left, you could say you, it doesn't take a long time to scratch at
the fact that what frustrates them is not so much that they're poor because most of the time, at least here, they're not, you know, there's very few people starving in Canada. I mean, I'm sure there are, but they're very few. It's usually that they're annoyed to think of Jeff Bezos in his, you know, his huge house. That's what annoys them. And I think that, I mean, I'm not saying that there isn't something to say for
the problem of disparity and the problem of people of one person having too much power. I think that that's something which is important to think about and to talk about where certain individuals have so much power that they actually can become a danger to social cohesion. But I think that if you look at it out of resentment in the sense like why
Why would he get that? Why not me? It's not fair. That kind of thinking. I think that doesn't lead the person in a good situation. You see it in the story of Cain, of course, where he ends up killing his brother. In the story of Cain, what's interesting in that story is that it doesn't tell you why. It's really fascinating because later traditions have always tried to
to try to guess why. Why is it that Cain's sacrifice was not acceptable to God? But in the story itself, it doesn't say. It just says, Cain's sacrifice was not acceptable, Abel's sacrifice was acceptable. It's like, okay, you don't even know why. And so, but it doesn't matter. It's like, that's reality, right? Another way to see it is these are the cards that have been dealt you. This is it. You can't argue with reality. And so, are you going to argue with reality? Are you going to say, I should?
have more and, and I'm going to want more so much and I'm willing to blow the whole thing up just because I don't have what I want, you know? And, and I think that what you see, what you're seeing in the, especially in the, in the, in the radical left is you definitely see that type of, that type of thing. And you see it too, like, like you said, you do see it now in the extreme right, you're seeing similar things as well, where there, there is a nihilism, which is propping up in the more extreme right.
which is, you know, basically our culture, Western culture is, is over. So let's just participate in, in blowing it up. Like let's just, let's just run it into the ground, you know, so no one can have it. Uh, there's a little bit of that going on and it's very disturbing to watch. So yeah. Something that I always struggle with is the radical left-end side. There is a, there is a, there is a grain of truth, more than a grain of truth, which is that,
We don't all have what we want, which we'll never all have what we want, but there's some basic needs. So in Canada, we all have healthcare. So let's just forget it, but let's say in the States, so they don't all have healthcare. They don't all have, they all are, many people are living paycheck to paycheck. And then they look at someone like Jeff Bezos and they say, it's not fair that someone should be living so insouciantly and free while I am just struggling. Yeah. Okay. So there is something to be said about not
having to struggle this much for basic necessities. Then at the same time, there is something to be said of, well, are you trying to be a champion for the cause of people who are struggling or are you just trying to tear down those who have much more than you? Now, there is something, there is also something to be said for, again, tearing down those who have disproportionately too much simply because we don't want power to accumulate in the hands of the few and in crony capitalism,
Obviously money translates into politics. We don't want that. So it's there's I see both sides and I'm always struggling because I See the benevolent side of the radical left which is which is which is the benevolent side of the left in general Yeah, and then obviously the benevolent side of the right comes out as well, which is what we need hierarchies You can't just dispense with all hierarchies. What for what is it? What is it that you struggle with you struggle with?
So I think that the left... Because any attempt to criticize the radical left, they can just say, no, it's not this claim of resentment. It's that all that nice, bonamy, gracious, altruistic, philanthropic aspect, all those elements that you just listed, that's actually our true motivation. And it's difficult. Well, you can look, you can take the psychoanalytical approach, which is something I'm going to try to do in the documentary, which is, well, what do your behaviors show? Forget about what you say. Let's see how you act.
So are you killing tens of millions of people in the 1900s? Well, obviously they didn't, but I'm saying the same philosophy has. And are you clapping when Jordan Peterson is debating Slavoj Zizek and Jordan Peterson references bloody violent revolution and then the rest and then the radical left says, yeah, which happened. I don't know if you saw that. I saw I saw the one scene where he says he says hierarchies are not says hierarchies are not all posited on
On violence and dispossessing and everything and then someone laughs and I thought his answer was so perfect He said he said well, maybe those that laugh is that's the way they would do it There's another time where he just mentioned what would happen is bloody violent revolution and then the Yeah, he didn't know what to say. Well, yeah, how would you know to say to that because I
And those people have never experienced anything close to Bloody Violent Revolution. So for this documentary, I started looking at clips of just some of the worst of what humans can do to other humans on a large scale. And it just tears you apart, man. Some of them are not that visceral because there's black and white footage with no sound. They're still... And then some are like the
I think especially now, I think that's what's difficult is that you can imagine that someone
In the 19th century, just coming out of very difficult times in Russia where you're present, you're barely eating, you don't get to eat any meat, all the aristocrats eat meat, that kind of life where it's very difficult, and then that you would feel so desperate that you would be willing to risk everything just to topple the whole thing compared to now, which is
I mean, who are these people who want bloody revolution in our country? We talk 1% of anybody who's ever lived. Right. And so I don't totally understand how that... And I also don't understand how they define what rich is, because rich, to me, always seems to be defined by them as whoever is richer than me. Yeah, exactly. No, I agree. I agree. Yeah. So what other ancient stories have you read?
that apply to this modern time radical left alt right crazy world that we live in. Um, I was thinking about that and I, and I don't, and I don't, I don't totally see in terms of, we seem to be in a very unique moment because one of the things that's happening right now, which is extremely unique is that
We have these two excesses that are growing up at the same time. And I think that that's the one thing that people find very difficult to see because they tend to just see the other excess. And so, for example, we live in a world where there's more control
and more calculation of what you're doing than any other time in the history of the world. Google has everything about you. You exist virtually in Google's, on some Google Drive there. They know everything about you, everything you've said, everything you've thought.
They can clone you from your emails.
looking online for certain things, not related to pregnancy, but they've calculated that if you look online for certain things, even if it's not directly related to pregnancy, it probably means you're pregnant, and so they'll show you ads for pregnancy stuff, right? So there's this massive data control over what we are, and just in terms of laws, like
The modern state, I can't build something in my yard. I need to get permission from my town to build anything I want. Right now, we're in the process in Quebec where the government wants to, we're homeschooling our kids, and the government wants to force us to take standardized tests. And I think that's normal. I think it's normal that the government decides
what your kids are going to learn. We think that's normal. We think that the government has that possibility. So we have the most, but we also have this weird, carnivalesque, crazy world of passions where, you know, pornography is rampant, where people are dying from opioids. And so there's also this other weird world that's completely chaotic and upside down. So we have these two things that are kind of growing up at the same time. And so it's almost like this is a very unique moment.
in history where the capacity for absolute control and the capacity for absolute breakdown seem to be looking at each other and somehow feeding into each other. So it's very weird. I don't know if there's a... Are there any biblical stories? My brother would probably be better at finding a story that shows as much the two extremes at the same time.
I mean, it's possible that maybe the closest thing we have would be the collapse of the
the first collapse, let's say third century collapse, where it's as if there was this huge gigantic bureaucratic state, crazy, but then these decadent elites that all they cared about were their orgies, and then it just couldn't hold until it collapsed into civil war. So it seems like maybe that's the closest thing that we have to understanding kind of where the symptoms of our society seem to be close to, let's say, the
One reason I'm asking is because there's so much wisdom in these old stories. And if we want to, if we want to engineer a solution to our current times, it's always good to look back and see, well, what did they do then? Yeah. You know, I don't think there's a solution to our current time. I wish, I wish, and a lot of people, you know, and I think that that's one of the reasons why I kind of took on Jordan's way of seeing things in terms of the solution.
A lot of people have criticized me just for kind of coming too close to Jordan as a Christian, and a lot of people have criticized me.
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Jordan for his individualism, you could say. And I've been thinking about it a lot recently, and I think that Jordan's solution is the only one right now. Not individualism in the sense of... Not the Ayn Rand kind of...
selfish individual, but the notion that in a world that is so extreme right now and the systems are so big, the only thing you can do is become a saint as much as possible, is to become a just in the world, to be an anchor
for for people around you and so and that means changing yourself that means and I think it is in line with the deepest Christian teaching which is you know take take the the beam out of your own eye before before removing the straw out of your brother's eye and I and there's also several citations of saints for example Saint Seraphim of Sarov who said acquire the spirit of peace and thousands around you will be saved and so this notion of
becoming something, rather than trying to immediately want to find these gigantic solutions to the problem. Because I think we're headed for trouble. And I think that the only hope is that there will be enough bastions of civility and justice and truth
to carry us through the chaos. To be honest, I don't see us fixing these massive problems. They're so big. It's like the AI thing. You have all these people saying,
Be careful about AI. Be careful about AI. But no one's gonna stop. It's just this machine is turning and turning and speeding up. And we're heading towards it. Everybody knows we're heading towards it. Everybody's afraid. Everybody knows how dangerous it could be. But no one can stop it. You know, Elon Musk can't stop it. No one can stop it. It's gonna happen. And so... I don't know, you know. I don't...
Sorry to be a pessimist. So where do you see it going? You just see it remaining and then we strengthen ourselves as individuals, becoming a person that someone can rely on, an anchor? I do think that it has to build ground up, that for sure. And I think that we need to rediscover
Our center, our heart, we need to rediscover that and then we also need to participate in actual communities. And that's one of the reasons why I tell people that... Okay, you mean to say that you don't see it going away, the problem of the extreme right and extreme left with some large-scale solution. You see it as a problem that will be solved from a bottom-up approach as you... They can only be. I think it can only be solved by a bottom-up approach. It's the same problem with the ecological problem. The ecological problem
It's too big because it's based in people's desires. The ecological problem is based on our desire to accumulate and to supplement our existence to that extent.
The problem is so profound that no matter what recycling you set up, it's not going to go away. It's not going to go away. The only thing that can make it go away is for transformed people and transformed communities. But we don't, like communities, they don't exist anymore. We don't have, at least some do, but it's very different. This is why John Bravacchi dates the current meaning crisis. He says, well, he might say,
Yeah, for sure. I totally agree. When he said 12th century, I was like, John, you've got it. That's where it started. That's where the West started to vacillate, let's say, between extremes. And so it's a cyclical thing. It's a story that's too big for us.
It's too big for individuals to think that they're going to change it. But there are ways to exist in those times of breakdown. Like there are ways to exist which alleviate, let's say, or make you not be an actor in the breakdown and henceforth not be an actor in your own breakdown. Not fall and live a life, a dissolute life of the passions and be completely taken up by your desires.
and then wake up on your deathbed and it's like, okay, I have a big house and a big car, but I'm divorced and my kids hate me. And it's like, that's okay. Congratulations. You know, what did you accomplish? And so one of the reasons why I've insisted, a lot of people, sometimes they wonder why I insist on it so much is one of the reasons why I keep saying that,
at least in the West, we need to remember the Christian story. Like we need to remember the fact what it is that made us something. Yeah, remember also means understanding. Yeah. And I think it means to a certain extent participate in too. And so that's why I think... It's a Vivacian idea. Yeah. But I think we don't fall in the same place because... So John's way of participation is very individualistic.
And so he says, I'm a practitioner. I practice this. I practice that. You know, I practice these different mystical practices. And it's like for him, it's a way out of the meaning crisis, but it has to, it has to come together too. We have to remember that even in Buddhist, in, in Buddhist teaching that, you know, there's a lack of community in John's approach. I think so. I think so. And I think the lack of community is,
We don't, we don't totally decide what story we're part of. I keep telling people that it's difficult for people to fully understand it. My, the way that I view how things are going on is I think what we're seeing is a playing out of in the West, you know, we're seeing a playing out of the Christian story, the bass of Christian story. And part of that story is a breakdown. It's there in the story, you know, that's why. You're the only person that I've seen articulate our current crisis in this manner that
Christianity itself might have to die in order for it to come back and be reborn. But I think it's there in the story. Like it's there, it's there. That's interesting because you're applying the narrative to the narrative. Yeah, that's how symbolism works. So symbolism is a, you know, it's embedded structures within themselves, right? It's a... That the archetype is so true that it applies to the archetype. Well, that it's a... It's like a... Yes, exactly.
That's what religious stories do in general. They understand a form of self-consciousness. They have a form of self-consciousness where they try to look at themselves as well. There's a weird circularity that's part of the symbolic structure. I find that fascinating. I need to think about that some more because it's an interesting idea. I haven't heard someone else express it, at least not articulate it in the direct manner that you have.
So how did you start to come to view stories in this symbolic fashion? So you're saying you're 22 or you just graduated from college and your teacher was telling you, you don't belong here. You're a traditionalist. The questions you're asking are not ones that you'll find the answer to not in college. Yeah. Well, so what basically happened is I tried to make contemporary art for a little while.
I had a studio with some friends and I was kind of working towards something and then... Just for freelance? Just for some money? Like a real artist, like going to a gallery and do the real artist thing, you know? I made these giant, you know, kind of really ego-driven giant works of art, you know? My whole life is just one big giant ego-driven work of art. So anyway, so that's what I had and then I got married and marriage really kind of slammed me against myself, right? Like I saw all my own
Can you explain how that happens? Because I recently got married and so I want to know. I want to know what's in store for me. It depends on people. Some people get married and then it's wonderful for a little while and then the mirror starts to show. For me it was the opposite. Like we got married like a week after we got married all of a sudden it was like
Did you live together beforehand?
And so it was like just seeing this mirror. And so it led me to a lot of questioning and also just kind of spiritual crisis in general. I was also becoming very disillusioned with the world, the kind of evangelical world that I was in. In college I'd read a lot of authors, a lot of philosophers, and I just felt like the church where I was going wasn't answering the questions. What kind of church was it? It was kind of a Baptist, Baptist, evangelical Baptist church.
kind of American style church there. Not liturgical, you know, just very kind of looks like a business meeting. Can you explain what you mean when you say liturgical? Do you mean to say what studies the Bible? No, liturgical means that it's, that it has a service which is, which is a pattern, right? It's, it's based on, it's not just a, so like let's say a evangelical church today, they'll get together, they'll sing songs, and they'll have a sermon,
but they'll say things like we could do it we could do whatever like we you know there's no it doesn't matter what you do there's no structure oh you mean no structure for your life or no structure for the meetings right no structure for the church and so liturgical means that there's an order of service and so there's we we do things in a certain order so like the jehovah's witnesses i don't know if you're familiar with them yeah well they're not liturgical more like the evangelical baptists so liturgical is like anglican catholics orthodox
They're liturgical. So they sing. They have the architecture of the building is meaningful. The order of the service is meaningful. The way the priest is dressed is meaningful. Everything is done in a manner which is meaningful and which manifests what you're trying to do, right? So it's not just arbitrary. So anyway, I was going to a kind of evangelical church and
I felt like it was just lacking in profundity, lacking in meaning. And also, I was reading philosophers, and then I started reading authors from other traditions, Buddhist authors, Sufi authors, and I discovered the mystical way, you could say, the mystical thinking, and transformational thinking, you could call it. And I was really impressed by it. And then I thought, whoa, why is it that Christians don't have that?
Like, why is it that Christians don't have the mystical transformations and mystical vision of how the world works and all of that? And it was only because it did. It's just I didn't know about it. And then that's when I discovered the early Church Fathers and traditional Christianity and then iconography. Can you define what iconography is? So iconography would be, let's say, a way of practicing art, which is traditional in the sense that it has certain
types, certain typology. It has a set of rules, kind of like if you write a sonata. You have certain rules and then you write within those rules. So iconography is the visual practice of the ancient church, which was developed, let's say if you went into a church in the year 1000 or 1100, anywhere in the world you would have seen pretty much the same thing.
And that was done without a top-down, you know, imposition of what was going to be there, but it was just this kind of bubbling up. It was like the brand style guide for the church. The what? You know, brand styles. Okay. So when you design a website or you have a company, like use these fonts, use these colors, make sure that when you place the logo, you place it this much of a distance between the borders. Well, I don't think, no, I don't think that's the way to see it. The way to see it is to see it more like a, um,
a view of the world as full of meaning and full of pattern. And so the story of the world and the story of our lives is a pattern. It's not arbitrary. It's not random. And so that pattern then can be found, let's say in scripture, can be found and then it
It transposes itself into the way that we worship, let's say. So the structure of how we worship in a church, in a traditional church, is patterned based on the same patterns as that you find in the Bible. So there's a center, right? There's the altar, and then that's the most holy place. And then you can imagine a series of layers as you move out from that holy place. Remember when I told you a little bit about this idea of adding layers? Well, you can see that also in the terms of sacred space where
you have profane space, which is outside the church. And as you move in to the church, then you, you, you move towards the sacred center, which is that, which defines the space itself and which defines the community and which defines everything. So that structure, let's say the architecture of a church, then in iconography, you have those same types of structures. So you have to know the types. It's like a, you have to understand that,
The reason why Christ is represented in a certain way is not arbitrary. It's there to show you who Christ is. And so there's a certain manner in which you represent a figure to show you who what they are and what their place is in this bigger pattern. And did they do this consciously? Like they knew that they were not copying or imitating, but that this specific representation of Christ was being repeated in other parts of the world? Did they know that consciously that here's
the proper representation of Christ or here's what it's saying. We're at the center because this is what's most holy and then here's what's profane in the way that you're articulating it. Yeah. I think it's a mix of intuition and participation in the life of a community where we agree on certain things and we participate in the story. And so for example, like if you would ask me, would it be conscious to put Christ in a central space? And you would say, well, yeah, but at the same time, what else are you going to put there? Cause that's the center.
That's the incarnation. That's the point where heaven and earth meet. That's the focus of the origin of Christianity, the focus of Christianity. So it's like, where else would you put it? There's another reason for the cross. That's something I've been thinking about. Another reason for the cross to be symbolized like this is because this represents the spiritual and this represents the profane, the mundane, earthly. And the proper place is to be at both.
But then the other reason why the earthly is a little bit higher is because it's more important to be slightly more spiritual than you are earthly.
I mean, yeah, I've never thought about the second part that you said. For sure, the cross is meant to represent the union of heaven and earth. That's for sure. And I think that a lot of people resist that because they say, no, that's the shape of an actual cross, right? That's how crosses were made. But it's like, that's the thing is that symbolism is the coalescence of things. Just because that's how crosses were made doesn't mean that it doesn't also mean that, especially in this context,
And there's also preponderance of things that are associated with Christ, and why would we choose the cross? Well, there's obvious reasons why we would choose the cross, but the cross as a symbol has multiple meanings. And it definitely is a center, that's for sure. And if you look at the early Church Fathers, they'll say things like, you know, the cross is everywhere,
you know, look at a mast of a boat with a sail, that's a cross, and they'll point to crosses which exist almost naturally in the world and say, you know, the image of the cross has been shown forever, you know, people need to just recognize what it's talking about, like, what is the center? What's at the center, actually? Like, what does unite heaven and earth? You know, that's the question, and of course,
Christian's answer with the incarnation. That's the answer. But iconography is basically understanding the rules and the language of Christian art, why it resembles what it does. And then it's almost like an algebra. And so you know the terms, then you can, if you need to improvise an image, you can, but improvising that image needs to be done within the general frames and tenets that iconography offers you.
So it's a truly traditional art in that sense. Okay, so you started studying iconography because your eyes were opened because you started studying Buddhism and you realized they have an interesting way of seeing the world. Yeah, it was a little bit of Buddhism, a lot of Sufi authors. I read some early modern kind of Sufi converts. What's Sufi? Sufi is a mystical Islam.
Yeah, it's a branch of Islam which is far more mystical, analogical, and it's closer, some people argue with me if I say this, but it's closer to Christianity in some respects because of its emphasis on love and because of its emphasis on the transformation of the person, all of that. To get you into more hot water than you already are, do you fundamentally see Islam as a religion of peace?
I think that we need to see Islam for what Islam actually says. There are two spheres in Islam. There's the sphere of peace and there's the sphere of war. And Islam is the religion of peace in the sense that within Islam is peace. And that's how it's viewed in the Muslim world. That's how it's been presented.
And so you have the outside world, which is the space of war, and you have the inside of Islam, which is the space of peace. And one of the goals of Islam is to bring peace, to bring the space of peace to the world. But that's by becoming Muslim, or by submitting to Islam somehow, by becoming a dhimmi, or by paying the tribute. A lot of Muslims don't think that today. I would say that
Most Muslims in the West don't have that approach to Islam anymore, but traditionally that's why Islam was from the beginning an expansive religion.
is not expensive. Judaism wants to recover the Holy Land. They want to get their place. That does cause trouble. Obviously we see that it's caused trouble since they're back there. It's a difficult situation. And Christianity, it's kind of not clear because the Roman Empire converted to Christianity
So then the Roman Empire became Christian, and so it's complicated to think. It's not so much that then Christians went out and, at least in the first, you know, thousand years, went out and invaded other places, although it probably happened. You know, you get stories in the West, you get stories of Charlemagne converting by the sword, and you get those stories as well. But they're always kind of iffy. But Islam was like, Islam exploded, became huge.
If you look at an image of the map at the year 1000, it's immense. I don't know. I think that most Muslims today are not, especially people who come here, it depends from where they come from and what intentions they have. In Quebec here, a lot of the Muslims who come here come from Northern Africa and they want to work, they want to have a good life, they want to have a good family, they want to be left alone and do their thing.
Okay, so let's get back to you were studying, studying iconography and that allowed you to see the world and see stories through a particular lens. Yeah. I was watching you give an interview. I mean, I was watching you have a conversation about the spider verse with someone. Yeah. And that person then made a comment about some other, some other aspect of the spider verse. And then you said, Oh, and what that could mean is this, this, this, and this. And then the guy said, Oh, I didn't see that before. And then you said, Oh, I didn't see it before until you mentioned it. And that made me realize you,
That's not something you thought about because for a regular person, a regular person who's even watching this, they would have to sit and think, okay, what could the spider verse mean? Here's what I know. Okay. Okay. Hmm. Okay. This fits in here. This fits in here. This doesn't work. Okay. Okay. And then it would take them maybe 20 minutes to come up with something that you came up with in the span of a sentence or two, which means you actually see the world or you've thought about it for so long that it's just second nature to you.
And I want to know how did that develop and how do you see the world? So do you see people walking down the street differently than you used to? No, I mean that seriously, because even people who study physiology, they can tell people's ailments just by watching them walk, even if they look like they're normal. Oh, you slightly tilt in this direction. It's almost like Sherlock Holmes.
And so you see people moving towards a subway and then you think, okay, that's a, that's a place of communion where people don't interact. That's almost like what we had in the 12th century when this happened and this happened. So I want to know, do you see the world like that? No, I see. And how did you start to see the world the way you see it? I mean, I think I see the world through patterns. That's for sure. Okay. Now when you say patterns, I'm going to get specific here. So when you say patterns, you mean,
repetitions, parts of life that repeat or parts of life that are abstracted. So for example, there's a pattern of talking where I talk, you talk, I talk, you talk. Now that's a pattern repeating or another pattern is, is you abstract out from a certain set. So there's a pattern of what it means to be human. Right. So it's, I would say, okay, so the pattern, you could say the pattern starts with how things exist, right?
And when I say how things exist, what I mean is how they exist phenomenologically, not in terms of science, because that's what confuses people. In terms of experience? In terms of experience. How we experience things existing. And that's really the basis of how things exist, no matter what we say. We try to push beyond the phenomenological, but we always see it through the lens. So the scientist, even though he has all the scientific categories, he's still in a consciousness and looking
I'll give you a perfect example. So the way that something exists, you need for something to exist to have it have an identity, right? And then have a, you could say a variety, say it that way. You need to have an identity and a variety or a
One-ness and a multiple-ness to it. Can you give me an example? Well, so if I have a cup, so this has an identity. Let's say its identity is the cup. It has other identities, but let's use that one for start. So it has an identity, it's a cup. But then it also is not just, there is no such thing as a cup.
It's actually non-binary and it's offended that you defined it in terms of a cup. Well, there's no such thing as a, there's no pure cup, right? Not in the world, right? So a cup has to have, has to have a particular, particularity to it, right? And the particularity to it is its variety. It's a multiplicity. And then in order for it to have particularity, then it has to embody other identities. So it has a color. It has, you know, it has to have a color, right? But there's no color in the cup.
Cup doesn't have color, but it has to have color for it to exist. So there's the concept of cup-ness, which doesn't actually exist in the world in space and time, but it's a concept nonetheless. Cup-ness. Something that makes something a cup. It's a non-material essence. It's a concept. I try not to get too tied up because people will say, okay, you're being platonic. Just trying to see how things come to exist. And so there's an aspect of it, which is one. There's an aspect of it, which is multiple and everything
always has to have that. For anything to exist, it has to be one and multiple at the same time. Because it also has to be constituted by parts. Okay, so you're saying the elements of this that are not a cup are... But also for, even for it to be a cup, it also needs to be constituted with parts. So it has one, oneness, and it also has parts, which are multiple. And the cup-ness of the cup holds the cup together.
So let's just say that you have one and one and many. Okay. Okay. Okay. So if you have one and many, just that you already have a basic pattern and then you could look at the world through one and many and you can notice when things move towards one or when they move towards many or how they move towards one, how they move towards many. Okay. So then let's do that in space. You a good way to represent it in space. Best way to represent it in space center periphery.
So you have a wheel, let's say, you have a center, the center is that which around everything else turns. And then as you move out from the center, you get more quantity, you would say, as you move towards the center, you get more quality. And so that's a basic pattern. So then you can look at a person like that. That's extremely interesting. You can also look at the political sphere, hear that sound.
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Would you say the radical left is on the periphery and then the alt-right is in the extreme center?
I struggle with this alt-right thing, but let's talk about the radical left. Let's say right hand, left hand. We can use that. The right hand traditionally is the tendency to move towards the center, and the left hand is the tendency to move away from the center.
For example, Christ says, when he's judging the world, he says to the sheep, he says, come into my kingdom. And to the goats, he says, depart from me. I never knew you. Okay. So moving towards the center, moving away from the center. There's a rabbinical teaching that says exactly that, which has, you know, bring things closer to you with your right hand, move them away from you with your left hand. Right. So now you can think of it as a person, traditionally in any traditional culture, almost every single traditional culture you eat with what hand?
You're right. You wash with what hand? You're right. You wash with your left hand. Oh. Because you're moving, because you don't want to eat with what you wash with. You go to the bathroom, you use your left hand, you eat with your right hand, right? So you bring towards you with your right hand, you move away from you with your left hand, right? So you understand that that's just a basic pattern of being. Like a person has a tendency towards unity and a tendency towards outside, towards inside, towards outside.
That's the, that's a pattern. That's the basic pattern of reality. Then you can, you can apply that to a society. A society has a basic identity and it has ways in which you move towards that identity. And then it has a way in which you move away from that identity. But you could, moving away or closer is not moral, right? Because some things you need to move, you need to, to move away from you. And there's some things also that move away from you for, from you for a good reason.
Right. In the sense that you could be extending yourself out into the world as well. Right. And so, and so it's not, it's not, the patterns are not moral. There's no, in, in the pattern, there's nothing good or bad. They can become good or bad depending on how they're used, for what reason they're used. But the pattern itself is it just, then you can look at the world and you can, what I see when I look at the world is that's what I see. I see how the pattern is manifested in different instances.
Now this detaching of moral judgments from how close you are to the center or how far you are from the center, is that a Buddhist concept or does that fall in line with Christianity? Because I know Christianity has an emphasis on putting moral judgments on almost every aspect and Buddhism is the opposite as far as I know. I could be wrong.
so does that does that okay so you said look there's the center there's the moving away from the center and you can move toward you can move towards center you can move away from the center it's not in and of itself a i mean it's not in and of itself moralistic to do one of no
They both have danger and they both have opportunity. The Buddhist won't necessarily frame it in the same terms, but they will, they'll say the passions. They'll say, you have these passions on the edges, let's say, in yourself, and those passions are pulling you, are fragmenting you, they're pulling you apart. And in the Christian way of describing the passions in the same way, especially in the Orthodox tradition, you have these passions, these desires, and these desires pull you away from your heart, let's say.
and uh and you need to go back to your heart you need to to to uh to uh let's say so that's a return to the center return then you return to the center okay um and do they have in christianity a pushing away from the center well it depends like i said for example i'll give you an example of a pushing away from the center which is which is positive the pentacost pentacost is when the disciples are in the high place and then all of a sudden
the fire of the Holy Spirit comes down upon them and then they start to speak and then everybody can hear them speak in their own language. And so as they're speaking, then everybody else is hearing them speak in the language that they understand. So that's a fire, right? That's fire. That's the left hand. That's moving away from the center. And so the message is being dispersed out into the periphery because those who are outside hear the message in their own language.
And so that's a left hand movement. It's a moving out. And so, like I said, it's not necessarily good, good or bad. And then there's also, there's a bad left hand, right? This idea of giving in to your fire, giving in to your desires, giving in to your passions is this being pulled away from yourself. And that would be represented as a kind of left hand movement, you could say.
But there are also right-hand sins. So St. Maximus the Confessor, for example, talks about left-hand and right-hand sins. And he says the left-hand sins are, you know, gluttony, prostitution, all the sins of the passions, like you let yourself go to those types of desires. And the sins of the right-hand are pride, self-sufficiency, right? So now you can see where the
Moving into the center can become negative in the sense of pride, the sense of thinking that you don't need anything, the sense of thinking that you're self-sufficient. And so like I said, those patterns are not negative or positive. It's just in their balance. Well, it just depends on
In the situation? In the situation. It just depends on what is trying to be accomplished. So entering into the center in the sense of removing yourself from your passions and going into the center in order to look up and see what's above you. Okay, so simply just a matter of appropriateness to the situation. Right. Sometimes you need to be far, sometimes you need to be close. Yes, and it just depends also, you could say a good way... So not necessarily... I was wrong when I said balance because that would imply that there's a proper place to occupy in almost every situation, whereas it's actually different
Sometimes you just need to be completely right-handed, sometimes you need to be left-handed, sometimes you need to be a mixture of both. So in terms of center and periphery, for example, the good way to understand it is like it's called memory. So if you're moving away from the center, if you remember the center, then it doesn't matter how far you go.
If you remember yourself, if you remember God, no matter how you say it, you can go very far and you won't fall. You won't be taken in by whatever is pulling you out. Does that make sense? Okay, so now you see the world like this. You said you started to see the world primarily through the center periphery.
So now when you watch something like a movie, how do you see the movie? What are you looking for? Are you looking for anything?
Can you give me an example of your thought process from a recent movie so that it's fresh in your mind? So some movie that you saw recently that you went in thinking, okay, I'm just gonna watch this movie and then what thoughts occurred to you and then what thoughts occurred to you afterwards? Okay, so
Okay, I just went to see Shazam with my kids. I went to see that movie. And so the movie Shazam is about a young man, a young boy who becomes a superhero, an adult superhero, right? And the movie is, for example, one of the images that keeps appearing in the movie is an image of the carnival. And the carnival keeps coming back. And so, for example, if an image like that keeps coming back, especially the carnival,
Then you say, okay, I need to pay attention to this because there's something going on here. And so a carnival, for example, is this edge. The carnival is the edge of the world, the best way to understand it. Everything's upside down, right? Everything's spinning. Everything in a carnival is spinning all the time. The Ferris wheel, all the rides, everything's spinning. And everything is garish.
All the colors are garish. Everything is there to titillate you in that way. It's all bad food. It's all spinning. It's all laughing and pleasure in the very basic sense of having fun and clowns and impossible precision
This is
I don't want to give out all these spoilers, but the story in Shazam is about dealing with the seven deadly sins. And so it's like, okay, so here's all of this going on at the same time. So these seven deadly sins kind of come out and possess this one man, you know, and then they start to kind of attack the world and do all this stuff. So, okay, so the seven deadly sins at a carnival, it all kind of makes sense. It's like it all kind of fits together.
It's not trying to say anything. It's not like there's a message, but the pattern is right. And so when the pattern is right, where the seven deadly sins appear at a carnival, it's like it fits. And then when you're watching it, you have a kind of satisfaction.
which is a satisfaction of the world being right, even if it's talking about the upside down world, right? It's talking about these monstrous seven deadly passions that are coming to suck up the world, but it's having it in a carnival, which is an upside down world already. And so all of this is going on. And so it's like, even though it's showing you the extremes, it fits because everything's in the right place. And so when sometimes what can happen is if
You could have a place where it just is wrong, where it just doesn't work. Where it's... And that's because you're interpreting it incorrectly or you feel like it's being forced on the part of the filmmaker? Being forced, exactly. It's just being forced. So there's a desire to give a message and so they'll push something in which will force it. But the best way to force it is to... Because it's difficult to get away from these patterns because they're the patterns of reality. All you can do is you can...
You can make them upside down. You can twist them, right? So you can't totally get rid of them. And so I think that a lot of the modern kind of propaganda, that's what they do, is they twist them in a way. They kind of just toss them to it, make them in like the idea of, yes, we need, we can't avoid the masculine, feminine archetypes. So what we'll do is we'll put a woman in the place of the masculine figure and we'll put a man in the place of the feminine figure. And demean the man.
How does one know when they're reading too much into a piece of art? Something that Peterson's been criticized for
on a minor basis like when he's looking at Pinocchio. How do you know you're not reading too much into it? So how does one prevent themselves from reading too much in? Is there such a thing as reading too much into art? Of course. Yeah, for sure. And I think that the way that, for example, what I do is I just point at the pattern. So I'm not actually interpreting the movie usually when I interpret a movie. I'm not interpreting in the sense of saying,
This aspect of the movie represents, I don't know, represents Hitler. This character in the movie represents Stalin. I would never make an interpretation of a movie like that. I'll say, look at the pattern. Here are the terms of the pattern. You have someone on the inside. You have someone on the outside. How are they interacting?
So we're talking about how does one know when they're reading too much into art? And you were saying, well, I'm not going to substitute different elements of the film and say this represents the struggle of man and this represents the church and this represents Hitler. Yeah, usually a movie will give you its pattern.
The movie has a pattern. In order for you to even recognize it as a story, especially movies that are trying to make money, movies like little art type movies where the person doesn't care whether or not anybody watches it, usually those you're hopeless in terms of pattern. But movies that are actually trying to attract a lot of people, they have to
Even if the person isn't conscious about it, in order to attract a mass amount of attention, they have to embody certain satisfying patterns that human beings have within them. It's necessary because the world's people won't go see them. Or the cynic would say it's just marketed well. That's not true because we know movies that have been massively marketed which have failed.
Maybe they'll have that first bump, but then it'll all go away. Whereas if you really want to attract a lot of attention, you need to have that pattern. The movie will usually tell you what's going on. You just need to let the movie tell you what's happening.
trying to, I always try not to go outside of the movie, like the least, the least that I can, like try not to reference anything outside the actual story that's going on and to just say, well, this character says this, this is what he does. This is, this is how, this is his struggle. He's telling you what the struggle is. He's going to tell you this is his, this is his problem. He's going to tell you what the solution is. Then all I'm going to try to do is show you how that is a pattern and how it would, how it's a pattern. And then once I've done that,
then i can say okay now this pattern see this pattern this is the same as this other pattern this other pattern this other pattern like see how uh you know like for example the pattern of resurrection you know and that pattern is there everywhere someone dies or almost dies and then gets back up at the end it's like you see it in so many movies you know that's it's just there it's just there in the story
I can show you that it's there and then once I've shown you that it's there, then maybe we can start to talk about what it means. But it's no longer now about just that one movie. It's about that pattern which is there in several other stories and now we can talk about what it's referring to in terms of existential reality. And so to me, if you stay within those frames, you have less of a danger of
of kind of going overboard. One of the things that happens, and it's happened to me, is that sometimes you'll see a pattern and you won't see a counter pattern. You'll want to see one aspect of the pattern too much, then you won't see something else that's going on. So that's totally possible. Well, can you explain what you mean? You mean to say that you as the person who's interpreting the piece of art wants to see a certain pattern and so it blinds you to a counter pattern? Yeah, for sure.
In other words, you're selectively choosing. Well, that's what a pattern is, right? A pattern is the selectivity. Because just like a movie, just like any other reality, has an indefinite amount of details, right? You could talk about the way the leaves are moving in the story, but you're not going to talk about that because that's not what interests you. And so you'll focus on the characters, for example. You could say,
You could interpret, you could ask if you were just a kind of nihilist, you could ask, why are you focusing on the characters when you're watching a movie? Why aren't you focusing on the top right pixel? Exactly. Or the way the wind is blowing. Well, some people who have autism do that. They don't actually look at the characters. Yeah, they don't look at characters in the eye. You can watch them. You can track their eye fixations and they don't look. So right now I'm looking at you in the eye and they don't watch the characters. They look at the light bulbs. They watch how this swing is swinging.
In a way it's kind of inevitable, but hopefully you try to not
to not do it too much and also to be able to see both and to see both sides. I think the best interpretations that I've done for movies have been the ones where I'm able to show the two sides, let's say, to almost sometimes imagine as if you could see the movie from different aspects. So let's say you're an artist and you want to create something that's not propagandistic, that doesn't try to, you don't try to instill your own values into the art because otherwise
Jung would call that, Jung, Carl Jung would call that propagandistic versus exploration art or he called it the difference between introverted art and extroverted art. So introverted art is the art where you're trying to, you have your own intentions and if you're just using the art as a tool to let the world know what you think politically, it's usually political, but it could be whatever. It could be, you're the main character in the film because you're filming it yourself and you want people to feel sorry for you. It could be whatever.
Are you want you had a bad experience with the father and now you want to make sure that people when they look at their fathers they have a bad experience with their father like they look at fathers negatively. Yeah. Okay. Then he said there's extroverted art where it just comes through your conduit for which these ideas flow from and you don't even know what you're doing when you do it.
And until it comes together as a cohesive whole, maybe you can look back, but maybe you can't even look back. And as much as you try to explain it, you realize it's deeper than my explanation. You come back one year from now and there's more, there's more to it, more to it, more to it. Religion is like that. The Bible is like that. So Jung would call that extroverted art. What advice would you have for artists who would like to not fall prey to introverted art? They want to do art that will stand the test of time and not
Right. I think it's difficult for me to answer that question because I'm not making the kind of extroverted art that Jung is talking about. Let's say the liturgical art that I make is a desire to participate in a community and a communal language. And so it's very different. It's neither
me trying to impose my vision of the world on others, nor is it this kind of surrealist type of exploratory art where you, like you said, like you just kind of let yourself go and you don't know what you're doing. It kind of almost, you know, like a medium or something. It's completely different. It's exactly trying to participate in a common language. And so
So like I said, that to me, I've chosen that as being the most... Because the problem with... Well, I don't see anything wrong with that because let's say you're a poet, you're using the language of English or whatever language you're using. So you're using the language of iconography and then you're constructing within that. So I don't see that as necessarily being opposed to introverted art or extroverted art. I mean, I don't see that as you trying to will a certain point of view. I just see it as you using a language. Well, maybe it's because of
my idea of how I understand what you're talking about when you talk about the extroverted art, which is this kind of, you know, this kind of letting it flow, right? Almost like a surrealist, like how they make a Kadarovsky or how they would, they would automatic writing, all that kind of stuff. I think you can just think of it as the absence of an intentional message. Right.
Well, yeah, I think that in terms of reducing a message, I would say, I think that understanding the complexity of traditional stories is probably a way to help that in the sense that to try to always see the... The Old Testament characters are some of the best for that. You can read the Bible, the Old Testament characters, and you can
read them as the hero, and almost every single character you can read them as a villain, almost every single one. You can see how they actually... there's a shady aspect to what they're doing, okay? You can do that about... you can do that about every single character in the Old Testament. It's really fascinating, by the way, to do that. And I think that being aware of that is... is probably helpful, is to understand
that there are two sides to to the symbolism all the time there's always there's always there's always two sides and that's something that's wrong or missing in modern movies like like he said the one with the the the reversal of little mermaid what was it called diarra galtorm or del toro whatever oh the shadow of the shape of water yes the shape of water that the white male was just he's bad there's no good to him he's just bad if you label them as bad you're correct
Yeah, that was definitely a propagandistic movie. In so many ways it was propagandistic. And so I think that that's... I also don't have a problem with having a bad character. There's nothing wrong with that. But if you look at Lord of the Rings, if you look at a character like Gollum, for example, it's a great character too because he's bad. He's a bad character.
But he's also like an extension of Frodo. You know that he's where Frodo could go. Like if he let himself go, he could go there. So you can see Gollum and Frodo, and you can see Frodo and Gollum a little bit too. And so that's a powerful story because you have these two characters, one which is like a good character, one which is a bad character, but it's also not just, it's not a simple
simple relationship. There's a relationship where one is like the promise of the other in a certain manner. And so that makes it far more subtle and far more engaging in my opinion. I was trying to think of when is it okay to actually just have a character which you can outright categorize as bad. And I wonder if it's only when they are a representation of Satan. So like let's say Sauron. Yeah. Yeah. He's like, he's not even embodied, right? He's like a, he's just like a,
He's just an idea, almost. I mean, obviously, he's a being, but he's not embodied in the world. They don't encounter Sauron. They encounter him through kind of third, second tiers or whatever. So, yeah, I think so. Maybe that's a good way to understand it. I've actually thought about Sauron quite a bit sometimes about if it's too easy, if that character is too easy. But like you said, because he's not an actual character. Someone could criticize the Bible and say,
Jesus is too easy. He's too good. And the Satan is too bad. That's too easy. But it's like, that's the point. It's supposed to be the extreme. So maybe it's okay when it's supposed to be the extremes. People don't understand that Christ does not fit that category. People don't know the story of Christ or they read the story of Christ. The story of Christ is the most elated and disturbing story at the same time.
Christ says some stuff that people don't like to cite because it just, if you want to just make Christ into a simple good guy story, it's not, that's not. Give us an example. Christ says, I came to bring fire to the world to turn brother against brother. Christ said on the cross, father, why did, how, why did you abandon me? Christ said, you know, Christ said to Peter, bring a sword. And then when Peter takes a sword out and cuts off the ear of a soldier, he stops and he says, no, don't do that.
What I'm saying is that Christ is a far more complex figure than what we want to believe that he is. Think of Christ, think of crazy stories, think of Christ there as the rabbi who is the one who brings, who's bringing the word and the truth and all that and imagine a whore washing his feet with perfume. Think of Christ
as the one who hung out with Samaritans, with strangers and demarginalized and all that, and that's how the left want to portray him, for example. But then he also goes and hangs out with a tax collector, who's basically a stooge for the Romans, who's basically a tool of the empire to control us.
And so Christ goes all directions. Christ goes in every direction. If you understand the types that are in stories and you read Christ's story. I've read scholars complain that we don't know how to frame Christ because he's a teacher.
But he's like a rabbi figure. He's also like a prophet figure. But then he's also like the son of a worker. He's also like a woodworker. He hangs out with fishermen. He kind of fills up all the stories. And so that's why the story of Christ is very difficult to
Well, getting back to propagandistic, this is what's interesting because it's not simple. You can't frame this person as good or bad. Now that's standard in screenwriting, never make your protagonist purely good, never make your antagonist purely bad. Can we go a little bit beyond that as to how can we stop ourselves from consciously trying to push a message? Yeah.
Well, I mean, I think that there's simple ways. There's ways that have been told to us forever. I mean, just Aristotle told us, give your characters a fatal flaw. Like, it's not a mystery. You know, give them something that could destroy them, you know, and either it does or it doesn't, but make sure that it's there, that even your hero has something that could devour them. And I would say the same for your enemy, right? Make your enemies convincing. Make them
a twisted version of something true. Don't just make them a random bad guy. If you make them a twisted understanding of something which actually has value, then that makes for powerful bad guys. For example, in the last Avengers movie, the Thanos character, that was a great character. It was a great evil character because he actually talks about
Things that people care about today. He talks about ecological disaster He talks about you know, all the things that even the left cares about but then he pushes it to Such an extreme that you kind of shy away from it because like okay. Okay, where are you going with this? You know versus the shape of water, which is like just trash. It's a trash movie Because it's because it it doesn't
I mean, in every single way. There's so many ways in which The Shape of Water is trash because it's almost like a cliché. It's almost a cliché of you could guess each character, what's going to happen to them when it starts. And there's some, especially the bad guy in the movie, some of the things he says that are so bad in terms of they're so obvious that it hurts. What is it? There's one scene
when he says something he goes to the bathroom and he says you can learn a lot about a man whether he washes his hands before or after and you don't do it twice because that shows weakness yeah it's like you're so obvious you know you're so obvious about him being you know excessive purity and all that stuff but yeah it's just par for the course by now it's non-stop you know there's this movie coming out just now what's it called like these monstrous dolls and you know it's just not
I mean, we've kind of swallowed this thing right now. This is where society is going in this direction. I don't know where it's going to lead because it can't sustain itself. You can't have a world of exceptions. Do you see Hollywood contributing to this problem? Oh, for sure. Since the beginning, I think. I think that... This problem of polarization, or this problem of what?
The thing is that it falls into the, it's the problem of entertainment culture itself. That's a problem. The idea that our cultural artifacts are entertainment. That's a problem. We don't realize that it's basic. It comes back to what I talked to at first when I talked about art, when I told you that traditional art integrates in a culture, right? So,
Traditional storytelling was part of festivals, was part of gathering around the campfire and telling the story of our ancestors. It was about putting on masks and wearing the costumes and playing out these characters, but in a manner in which we're participating in it. We're doing it on this date because it's to remember something that happened in our... There's a shared principle, united under purpose.
Yeah, purpose and just the fact that we're together, all of this comes together. And so the problem is that now almost all our cultural artifacts are there to entertain us. They're like a giant circus. The last remaining cultural artifact we have is basically a circus. It's just there to keep us distracted. Okay, last question.
When do you see the left going too far? I think the purpose of the left is to ask questions, you could say. Is to say, what about this, right? So you have some identity, doesn't matter what it is, and then the right hand's like this, and then the left hand's like, well yeah, what about this?
Like the role of the skeptic? Yeah, like, well, how does this fit, you know? And why doesn't this fit? And what did you think about this? You know, it's like, oh yeah, you say this, but you're leaving this aside, right? You're not considering this. And so in society, that ends up being exactly kind of what we see, which is this like, oh, you forgot the exception. Don't forget the exception. There's your rule, but there's also exceptions. Some people don't fit. So you have to remember them. Don't forget the exception, you know?
The problem happens when we try to make the exception the norm. It doesn't work. You can't have a world of exceptions. It just doesn't exist. It can't exist. It just, it crumbles. And so I think that that's the problem that we have now is that we want, we went from wanting to care for marginalized identities to this, the idea that somehow an accumulation of marginalization will make you
into a heroic figure that doesn't do that. Just because you are marginalized doesn't make you pure. It's like you're flipping it upside down. It's like the identitarians are saying, just because I am of this group, I'm fine. Just because I am white or I'm a man or I'm this, just because of that, then I'm sufficient and I'm fine.
It's like I'm pure, right? That's the bad... But now when we have this weird, crazy left is the very same thing, just upside down. It's like a competition of purity, but like a competition of exception. If you can be the most exceptional in the sense that you are the most marginalized, then you're playing the same purity game, just upside down. It doesn't work. You need the two, like you need the statement of
of identity and then you need things that are there on the, on the margin, which say, Hey, hey, don't, don't think you've got everything. Cause I'm here to show you that you haven't accounted for everything, right? You haven't accounted for everything. And I think that that's, that's the normal balance. All right, man. Thank you so much. Well, I hope, I hope it's useful. Let's see what it looks like.
▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
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"text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze."
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"text": " Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? Streaming only on Peacock. I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us. So this was all planned? What did you get it to? I will do whatever it takes to get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other. All Her Fault, a new series streaming now only on Peacock."
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"text": " Alright, hello toe listeners, Kurt here. That silence is missed sales. Now, why? It's because you haven't met Shopify, at least until now."
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"text": " Now that's success. As sweet as a solved equation. Join me in trading that silence for success with Shopify. It's like some unified field theory of business. Whether you're a bedroom inventor or a global game changer, Shopify smooths your path. From a garage-based hobby to a bustling e-store, Shopify navigates all sales channels for you. With Shopify powering 10% of all US e-commerce and fueling your ventures in over"
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"text": " This is an interview with Jonathan Pageau who invited me into his home"
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"text": " Though I released it about two years ago, it was conducted two years ago, but I'm embarrassed about it and ashamed even because I was younger and nervously interrupting in an attempt to try and impress Jonathan, which is a quality or a characteristic that was there when I interviewed Janice Fiamengo as well in the Janice Fiamengo interview, which is also on this channel. It's not surprising because it was recorded day afterward. However, many of you enjoyed it. At the time it had a 98.5% like ratio and"
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"text": " I'm reposting it because of that. I have a larger audience now and perhaps many more people now will benefit from Jonathan's words. Jonathan Peugeot is wonderful in the interview. There are what are called math prodigies, child prodigies in math. What they are generally are people who at a young age can take numbers, large numbers, sum them, multiply them, divide them in their head rapidly. Jonathan is like that."
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"text": " with symbolism. He's able to watch a movie and almost instantaneously deconstruct it. His channel, The Symbolic World, will have you question the distinction between the literal and the metaphoric, which actually means it helps you or imposes a questioning of reality upon you. This can be either for good or for ill. I think it's for good and if you make an assessment based on the comments and the people he's influenced, you would say it's for good as well. He's a talented figure and for those of you who know Ramanujan, he's Ramanujan, the Ramanujan of the symbolism world."
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"text": " He came pretty much from nowhere with no formal training and has a preternatural ability in this domain. As an aside, this was for a documentary called Better Left Unsaid, which I directed and is actually released now, so you can go to betterleftunsaidfilm.com to see the version with Jonathan Pageau in it. You can also watch it on iTunes and so on, but the director's version, the one that has Jonathan in it, the one that's more"
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"text": " Thank you, and if you enjoy seeing conversations like this, then please do consider going to patreon.com and supporting. You can make a custom pledge. Literally, each dollar makes a difference financially as well as motivationally. It may even help metaphorically. Please enjoy the interview despite my asinine and unpolished, likely still unpolished interview skills. Thank you."
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"text": " I'm here with the preeminent, the exigent, the pivotal, paramount, Jonathan Pageau, artist, carver, public speaker, symbolic translator. I guess, yeah, you could say that, something like that. Why don't you just tell me about what you do? Tell everybody about what you do, but tell me. All right, well, I"
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"text": " I'm mostly an artist. I make religious art, liturgical art, you could call it, in the Orthodox tradition, but in general in, let's say, the kind of Christian medieval tradition. And that has led me to look into symbolism in the Christian tradition, but also in general, looking at other religions, other traditions, but through other types of storytelling as well, fairy tales, mythology, and now modern storytelling such as movies and novels and everything. And so looking into symbolic structures,"
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"text": " relating to my art has led me to becoming interested in symbolism in general. And so in my daily practice, in making icons, I engage in that world, let's say that symbolic world through my art making. And then the way that that art integrates into the life of a church and in the life of a community is also part of that. But then"
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"text": " Now, for the past, I guess, two years now, I've been doing a lot more of public speaking, talking about symbolism in general, how it relates to our life, how its structures inform our perception of reality and our interaction with reality. So that's what I've been doing through YouTube, but also doing a lot of public speaking all over North America for the past two years now. So you said that you got started because you were an artist, and so you started studying the symbolic representations and what they mean."
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"text": " Give me a timeline of your life. So you were four years old and you started this and then you were... Well, I know, when I was young, I always kind of knew I was going to be an artist from when I was pretty young. But then I was also, my parents were Christian. I was a Christian. I was part of a evangelical church. And then when I studied in college, when I studied at Concordia University, painting and drawing, I really hit a wall. It was just contemporary art is,"
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"text": " An art which is very removed from what it's doing. You know, it's like a comment upon a comment upon a comment. Is that another word for modern art or is that different? Well, contemporary art, you would say you could use modern for the whole period, but usually we use the word modern for the early 20th century up to about World War II. And then after World War II, we start to talk about moving towards what we could call postmodern art or contemporary art, which is even more, let's say, removed from"
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"text": " lead into what we now consider people like Jeff Koons or Andy Warhol, you know, they take their drive from people like Marcel Duchamp at the beginning of the century. So it was already there at the beginning of the century. Let's say everything was kind of packaged up and then it unfurled itself into now the kind of on one hand anything goes but on the other hand everything has to be packaged in a"
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"text": " a kind of post cynical, you know, ironic, double irony, triple irony. So that's really what it is. So it was very difficult for me coming in as someone who wanted to connect with reality, you know, who as a person of faith, I wanted to make things which weren't just this flighty irony, you know, of references, but wanted to connect with something real. And so I was just hitting a wall. I just couldn't make it happen."
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"text": " I got interested in some contemporary artists. For example, there's a German artist, his name is Anselm Kiefer, and he was the closest to what I was hoping to do. He was trying to bring back mythological thinking within the artwork."
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"text": " But his work was still, it's still problematic because it's still in galleries, it's still prestige objects, objects which have no function in the world, right? We're actually so used to thinking that art doesn't have a function in the world that we forget that traditional arts in all cultures actually have function within a community. They integrate themselves within a worldview, within a community living. And so... And is that conscious?"
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"text": " Do they consciously construct art so that they're integrating one another or does that happen because they're communally putting together a piece of art and then they all respect it and revere it and it has their values embedded in it somehow? Well, the traditional way of seeing art is very different from the contemporary way of seeing art. The way that traditional vision, pretty much I would say worldwide, you see art as a skill."
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"start_time": 603.353,
"text": " And so the notion of art is, we still use that word today when we say the art of cheese making or the art of this, the art of that. And so that's really the traditional way of understanding the word art. The word art actually means in Latin comes from the notion of fitting things together. So the capacity to fit things together properly. That's what art is. And so in a traditional vision of art, we say things like the art remains with the artist."
},
{
"end_time": 641.152,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 629.275,
"text": " The art is the skill of making things. And so the object that is made has to serve a purpose. There's no such thing in a traditional vision as making art. You don't make art."
},
{
"end_time": 665.981,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 641.357,
"text": " You use art to make things. So art is the tool. Art is the tool. Art is the skill. Art is the capacity that you have mastered to make an object. And so then that object needs to have a function in the world. It needs to be integrated within a purpose. And that's probably one of the hardest things for people to understand is that art is not a value in itself."
},
{
"end_time": 689.565,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 666.527,
"text": " And once you understand that, at least when I understood that, it actually liberated me from a lot of problems, because one of the problems we're always asking is, is this art? Is this art? You know, they come up with some crazy Jeff Koons, you know, blown up Snoopy, and then the question is, is that art? And the answer to me now has become, I don't care."
},
{
"end_time": 719.923,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 690.179,
"text": " That doesn't matter. That's not the point. Whether it's art or not, that's not a question. The question is, does it matter? Does it have meaning? Does it have a function? Is it integratable into society? Does it have a capacity to integrate into the world? All of this was kind of playing around in my head while I was studying fine art. It was so funny because it was so taking that that became the subject of my art."
},
{
"end_time": 744.804,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 720.384,
"text": " The subject of my art in college was how can I make art in this postmodern world, which is not just ironic, which is actually connected to a community, to let's say a coherent worldview. But then it was still being very removed. It was like, I'm not doing it. I'm asking myself whether I can do it. And it was so funny because the last"
},
{
"end_time": 773.643,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 746.203,
"text": " My last day in school when my supervisor was giving me my final grade, she said, it was so funny because I actually finished first in my program, like I was really diligent, I was working hard, but she knew that it just wasn't working and she just looked at me and said, don't worry, you're getting all A's, it's okay. What did she know was not working? Well, she understood that if what I was trying to do, which is, for example, to be a Christian person,"
},
{
"end_time": 795.418,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 773.899,
"text": " who is making art in a manner which was authentic but was still somehow part of the contemporary art world which is full of irony and full of double, let's say, double removal and constant, you know, a kind of flighty removed version of reality. She just knew that it wasn't happening."
},
{
"end_time": 817.534,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 795.623,
"text": " And so she just told me on the very last day of my degree, she said, what are you doing here? You don't belong here. You should go to seminary or something. Because you're too traditional? No, because she could see that the questions I was asking were not, it just wasn't fitting with the contemporary art world. It just didn't have its place there."
},
{
"end_time": 843.353,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 817.841,
"text": " such as the utility of asking whether or not a piece of art is a piece of art? No, no, not that. That is something that everybody is always constantly asking. The problem was mostly to say, how can I, let's say as part of a community, let's say a part of a Christian community, how can I make objects which fit into my life and into my world and into my community in an integrated way?"
},
{
"end_time": 865.947,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 844.343,
"text": " It really is the difference between, I didn't know yet because I hadn't discovered traditional art. It really is the difference between, let's say I make, you're a musician and you come to me and you say, here's what I'm trying to play, this is what I'm doing, then I design a guitar for your particular needs. That's traditional art."
},
{
"end_time": 889.36,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 866.203,
"text": " And the postmodern version of that would be? The postmodern version of that would be I will make a guitar that will question what a guitar is. I will make a guitar that cannot be played but will ironically question the whole tradition of what guitars have been and what music and then now today it's even worse because now it's going to show how the guitar itself as an object created by"
},
{
"end_time": 917.159,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 889.36,
"text": " by hierarchies of historical hierarchies. How is it an object which manifests or subverts that hierarchy? That's the difficulty of postmodernism. So that's not what I was wanting to do. That's not what I was trying to do. I was trying to create a visual language which would integrate with my own experience, with my own faith, with my own participation in a community, in a church and all that."
},
{
"end_time": 945.077,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 917.551,
"text": " Okay, let's get back. We're going to get back to this, but let's get back to art as a tool. So you're saying art as a tool. So this Snoopy example, I don't know the reference. I don't get this. Jeff Koons is this big Snoopy. Yeah. Well, I don't think he made a big Snoopy. He made, he makes like, for example, he did a, he did a big, a big sculpture, which is a pile of Play-Doh. So like, imagine like a lot, a small child has taken bits of Play-Doh and you just kind of jump bundle up in a thing. He made a giant bronze sculpture of a, of a, of a,"
},
{
"end_time": 962.108,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 946.101,
"text": " So this amalgamation of Plato, is it art? Your answer is, it doesn't matter. What matters more is does it matter and does it provide meaning to a certain set of people and does it integrate that people with the community?"
},
{
"end_time": 981.22,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 962.415,
"text": " I don't know if I'm recapitulating correctly. How does it integrate into the world? How does it participate in the world? How does it build? And if it does, then it's art? Or forget about the question of whether something's art? The art itself is the skill. It's the capacity to do that."
},
{
"end_time": 1007.927,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 981.613,
"text": " That's the traditional worldview. Okay, so let's take another example. Let's say someone's a great pizza maker, and then they make something. Let's say they made it out of pizza, but they're a good pizza maker. So then the question is, is that pizza? And you would say, well, did they use the skill of pizza making on that object? The question would be, is it good? Because that's what pizza is supposed to do. So can you eat it? Yes. And does it taste good? If you want to know if whether or not that pizza maker is a good artist,"
},
{
"end_time": 1028.302,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1008.217,
"text": " is whether or not the pizza does what the pizza is supposed to do, which is taste good, you know, whatever it is that it could be to be healthy too. It depends on what the pizza maker wants to accomplish by making his pizza. You know, it's the same thing with someone, like I said, somebody who would make a musical instrument. The question if you ask whether or not that, you know, the musical instrument maker"
},
{
"end_time": 1057.381,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1028.626,
"text": " is a good artist is whether or not that instrument does what it's supposed to do and that's very difficult for people to think that way now you know because even in the past music was composed for reasons we don't people didn't just compose music just to compose music they would compose music for a requiem music for a mass music for a feast music to celebrate someone's birthday to celebrate the king to to"
},
{
"end_time": 1077.125,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1057.824,
"text": " The music was written to integrate into society. Unless you were making studies or maybe you were studying to practice or you were doing things like that, but your ultimate purpose was to write a piece of music which would function, even storytelling."
},
{
"end_time": 1099.275,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1077.5,
"text": " That's been a while since we've had that, but even storytelling in a traditional sense, like if you think of the great epics, if you think of the Iliad or the Odyssey, those were community building stories. Those stories were meant to create, to even create what the Greeks were. So how do you judge a piece of art where the artist themselves doesn't know what the purpose of the piece of art was?"
},
{
"end_time": 1125.418,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1100.213,
"text": " Because you're saying you can posit a goal and then whether or not you achieve that goal through the art, that's a measure of the art's worth. You could go further than think that it's just based on the individual's purpose. It's a broader thing than that. Let's say a pizza maker decided you wanted to make a pizza to taste better. By the way, all pizza makers, I'm sure there's a technical term for you,"
},
{
"end_time": 1139.224,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1125.418,
"text": " And I apologize. I know you're just greeting your teeth right now. So let's say a pizza maker decided he wanted to make a pizza that tastes bad. He could do that, but it would probably not be considered"
},
{
"end_time": 1167.585,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1140.35,
"text": " great pizza. And that guy would probably not be considered a good pizza artist. Okay. But in there, in that example, it's obvious what the intention of the pizza is to be eaten. But say someone like Picasso and he just goes in a room, he doesn't know what he's doing. He organizes his room. So now he's like, maybe I'm an interior decorator. Oh, I just discovered cubism somehow in his room, but he doesn't know what it's for. Because he doesn't know what it's for. We also don't know what it's for because the artist was just exploring and they created something. So can we judge it then?"
},
{
"end_time": 1190.896,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1168.029,
"text": " Because we don't know its purpose. Well, I think that Picasso and modern art in general has a has a destabilizing effect on society. And I think they meant for it to be that. So in a way, maybe they did what they did was right. I think that most modern art and contemporary art believes in a revolutionary vision of reality, that the purpose"
},
{
"end_time": 1220.196,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1191.152,
"text": " that our purpose is to bring about revolutions, to destroy the status quo, to destroy the existing order. And I think that Picasso was a communist. I mean, he was a communist pretty much his whole life, even when it became embarrassing maybe to be so. And a lot of the modern artists were either communists or fascists. The futurists were straight on fascists. They wanted to burn the old system down and set up a totalitarian"
},
{
"end_time": 1249.531,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1220.452,
"text": " We have artists who were totalitarian in their artistic vision. We don't tend to want to see them that way now for some reason, but a lot of the abstract artists, especially the Russian abstract artists, had a totalitarian vision of reality. And a lot of modern designers were very totalitarian. Some modern architects would say things like, I wish I could design the people in my house."
},
{
"end_time": 1279.002,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1250.043,
"text": " or I wish I could nail the chairs to the floor so that I could control... It sounds like excess order. ...exactly everything the way it is, okay? So you have these two tendencies, let's say, in modern art. You have both. You have a kind of destructive tendency and a totalitarian tendency, which is part of the modern world. So you see it as off-balance because... Oh, yeah. ...in the Petersonian point of view, which is also the Taoist point of view, there's order and chaos, and you see it as being on the extremes and that they're not mediating between the two."
},
{
"end_time": 1307.688,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1279.002,
"text": " properly. Yeah, I agree. I think the whole modern world, that's what it is. It's just a swing, it's just this pendulum swing between two excesses. And you can see it in modern art, you can see it as well. And they become confused and they kind of fight and then they break each other apart. But it is a fascinating thing to see. Now we kind of just gloss over a lot of it. But if you look at the way, for example, that even post-abstract expressionist art"
},
{
"end_time": 1337.346,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1308.319,
"text": " I saw this painting that was just white with one speck of red. Do you know that painting?"
},
{
"end_time": 1360.589,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1338.08,
"text": " L'Art, it's a very famous painting. I don't know which painting you're referring to. Okay, just imagine a blank canvas and then just some splotch of red in the corner and then it's sold for millions of dollars. Is that contemporary? Yeah, well that depends. It could be. It would probably be considered modern or late modern, you could say. Contemporary art tends to be more cynical."
},
{
"end_time": 1386.715,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1361.374,
"text": " and we'll take modern conventions and be more playful about them, and we'll create a kind of parody. For example, German artists like Richter, who is an abstract artist, but his abstract art is considered to be a kind of parody of abstract art, where it's almost like a comment on abstract art. It's not directly abstract art. It looks like abstract art with a kind of weird photo..."
},
{
"end_time": 1411.8,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1387.193,
"text": " lack of focus in it. And there's a lot of neo-abstract artists who are actually, there's a kind of weird cynicism to what they're doing. But it gets very confusing. Contemporary art right now is just a giant ball of anything. It's very difficult to know. Is it post-modern? Or is it post-modern right now? I think that what I'm doing could be considered post-post-modern."
},
{
"end_time": 1441.357,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1412.619,
"text": " I'm part of a group, let's say, of people who have grown up in contemporary art, who learned contemporary art, several who had a promising contemporary art career ahead of them. You know, they were in galleries, they had different scholarships and everything to big schools, but then they kind of came to the end of the carnival. At some point, the carnival has to end. At some point, you've eaten enough pie."
},
{
"end_time": 1468.558,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1441.596,
"text": " and you know you've had enough pizza, exactly, you had enough sugar and blinking lights and so what ends up happening is a rediscovery of what I would call traditional art and I see that. So I know several iconographers who make icons for churches who had that exact turn where they came to the end of contemporary art and they realized this is"
},
{
"end_time": 1492.654,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1469.019,
"text": " This is just nihilism. It's just nihilism on steroids. And so they, they reembrace, let's say the traditional language of, of the church. Some people. Does that happen within a field of modern? Okay. So there's modernism, there's postmodernism, then there's traditionalism. Now, does this cycle happen even within a section? So there's the section of traditional and section of modernism and postmodernism, or does it happen within"
},
{
"end_time": 1513.592,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1493.097,
"text": " I think that the problem with the contemporary art world is that the very setup of the contemporary art world is not conducive for it within that world for let's say a return to order to happen or let's say a post-modernism to happen because you have a"
},
{
"end_time": 1535.708,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1514.292,
"text": " Or return to the proper balance between order and chaos. Because as you were saying, can't just be returned to order because the fascists had extreme order. So for them it would be returned to the middle. Exactly. The problem is, it's true, one of the things we forget about modernism is there is another wing of modernism which we don't tend to"
},
{
"end_time": 1564.889,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1536.476,
"text": " to think of, which is social realism. And social realism has been used very much as a just pure propaganda, like just a pure propaganda tool because its whole style, its whole affectations are basically, you know, a kind of sentimentality, you know, a kind of going in to get your sense of nationalism or your sense of courage or whatever. And so they tend to push you towards"
},
{
"end_time": 1593.422,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1565.794,
"text": " towards propaganda. So what people traditionally think of as propaganda is social realism? I mean, usually those are the techniques that are used. Like these Nazi propagandistic clones? Yes, of course. Yes, they are. And the same with the Russians. Like the Russians had a whole tradition of social realism. I mean, Jordan Peterson has collected them. His house is full of Russian social realism where the purpose of these paintings is to make you a good citizen, right? To make you participate in"
},
{
"end_time": 1622.602,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1593.814,
"text": " in the state. Do you see elements of social realism in the modern films that we have now, like Mona, I think it's called Mona, the one that you analyzed, Mona, Moana, and then Frozen, and then Wonder Woman? Yeah. Well, right now we don't, I would say that we're not using social realism for our propaganda anymore, because it's a weird different world than, for example, early century, early"
},
{
"end_time": 1642.773,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1624.172,
"text": " One of the things that has happened is, let's say, the revolutionary elements of our society, they've actually understood symbolism. They've been the ones who, for the past, let's say, 50 years, have understood symbolism the most. And so they've actually been using"
},
{
"end_time": 1671.135,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1643.712,
"text": " Let's say mythological structures to affect their propaganda. It's very different. Much like the Nazi symbol being, Swastika was what? Swastika is one of the most ancient images, one of the most ancient symbols that exist. It's an image that is universal. You can find it in all cultures. You can go to a medieval church and see Swastikas. You can go to a Hindu temple and see Swastikas. It's probably one of the"
},
{
"end_time": 1700.896,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1671.613,
"text": " oldest images we have. And so they were able to take it, to change it a little bit. They made it, instead of making it straight, they slanted it. I think that the Nazis are a really good example in a way, in the sense that the Nazis, they wanted to co-op mythological thinking more than others. They had a weird religious feel to them, right? They had a kind of strange esoteric and"
},
{
"end_time": 1730.759,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1701.288,
"text": " desire to revive northern gods. They also had weird contacts with the Indian, the aristocracy in India, with the, what are the names of the cast? I can't remember the name of the cast. So do you think that's one of the reasons why these totalitarian regimes, when they come in, particularly on the left, so particularly communist regimes, that they want to obliterate traditional art and obliterate religion and ban it? Oh, for sure."
},
{
"end_time": 1754.445,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1730.759,
"text": " Because they understand it. Well, because they understand how potent it is. And also because, especially the communist groups, they really wanted to, because they believe that the human person is malleable, that we're a blank slate type. And so they wanted to destroy all the cultural tenets which were there in order to bring about their utopia."
},
{
"end_time": 1781.169,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1754.872,
"text": " You know, the Chinese, the Russians did it too. The Russians liquidated. They destroyed, the Russians destroyed over 30,000 churches just during the early times of Stalin. And you know, we all know that the Maoist culture revolution was insane. They just went around destroying everything. Not only destroying, but executing anybody that had to do with the priesthood. Yeah. And the same thing, I mean, early communists, Russians would go around, you know, and just"
},
{
"end_time": 1804.514,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1781.817,
"text": " Today, it's weird. It's different. Our version of that, let's say our version of propaganda is a little different from that. It's more insipid and it's more"
},
{
"end_time": 1834.718,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1805.162,
"text": " It tends to understand, like I said, it tends to be more subversive rather than directly offensive in the sense that it's better to show inversions and to have stories with the notion that the inverted becomes the norm in a way. And that seems to be the way that a lot of propaganda is happening now."
},
{
"end_time": 1857.398,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1834.991,
"text": " And so it's a bit different. And so sometimes it's tricky because sometimes the stories actually end up looking very much like ancient traditional stories. It's often just that they're upside down or that there's a like Shrek is a great example. Shrek is like the most, the easiest example to see where it looks like a fairy tale, but it's actually an upside down. It's a totally upside down fairy tale where"
},
{
"end_time": 1886.357,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1857.875,
"text": " You have an ogre and a princess, and the ogre is this monster, and they present him as a monster. So that would be an example of a postmodern film? Yeah, of an upside down fairy tale, of a subversive use of traditional tropes, where all the tropes are there, but they're just totally upside down. The ogre is represented as a monster, it suggests that he's a cannibal, it suggests all these things that the normal ogre is, and then he meets a princess, and in the end the princess becomes an ogre."
},
{
"end_time": 1915.367,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1887.21,
"text": " And it's like, okay, the shape of water is a great example too, a more recent version, where all the normative characters, you know, the Christian, the white male, all that, they're all absolutely evil, okay? And then all the kind of exceptional characters, like the monster, and then all these other exceptional categories are somehow pure and innocent in all of that. And then in the end, the woman,"
},
{
"end_time": 1944.497,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1915.964,
"text": " becomes a monster, like that's how it ends. She goes into the water, she becomes a sea monster. And it's like, we're so used to it, we think that somehow that that's a normal way for a story to go, but it's very disturbing, you know. I've seen that so much in the past 15 years. Yeah, and a normal story, like the story of the frog and the princess, for example, is that the exceptional character, the frog, this talking frog, who's a monster, is by some proof of their virtue integrated into the world."
},
{
"end_time": 1969.94,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1945.111,
"text": " Little Mermaid Becomes a Human, or Ponyo Becomes a Human. You know Miyazaki, I've been watching Miyazaki films because you commented on Spirited Away and I wanted to watch it again so I started watching a few and I was trying to put my finger on why is it so damn good. His films are very good and I realized not only are they magical and whimsical like a child and imaginative but there's"
},
{
"end_time": 1998.882,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1970.247,
"text": " a complete lack of cynicism, a complete lack of sarcasm or sardonic commentary. No, I think you really put your finger on it. And I think that because we're in a situation, because of technology and because of our extremely ordered societies where we have a, you know, everything is controlled by the state, basically, not everything, but so much of our world is controlled by the state and by these giant corporations and everything, we have a need for"
},
{
"end_time": 2021.374,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1999.258,
"text": " Feminine symbolism we have a need for the private sphere We have a need for the refreshing aspect of of our personal relationships all this feminine symbolism we have a desire and a need for it and the thing about Miyazaki is that almost all his films take on this feminine symbolism, but he does it in such a beautiful way where he doesn't feel the need to be"
},
{
"end_time": 2047.995,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2021.8,
"text": " subversive or to kind of show how, you know, the male character is an idiot or useless. There's a complete absence or lack of a political message. Oh, yeah. No, I think so, too. The closest may be Ponyo where he says the humans are ruining the earth with their ships. That's the closest that I've found so far. But I agree. I agree that that's what makes him so strong. And they make him so strong also because he's able to create strong female characters, but in a manner which is not"
},
{
"end_time": 2076.92,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2048.677,
"text": " doesn't have that kind of anger and bitterness and cynicism in it, or it's more like a celebration of these beautiful feminine characters. Yeah, and it doesn't make the feminine the masculine. Exactly. It doesn't make a girl have traditionally masculine qualities and then say, we're subverting notions of gender. Yeah, because that's what so many of the superhero movies that we've seen recently and a lot of the Star Wars movies and everything is, and I think that's why people are kind of annoyed with them is because they're"
},
{
"end_time": 2101.254,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2077.159,
"text": " It's not only the desire to make, let's say, a female character into the same action hero that we've had since the 1980s that everybody's criticized. The feminists or the postmodern criticized that figure of the male hero. But now you want to make a woman into it. Masculinity is toxic as long as it's a male. Exactly."
},
{
"end_time": 2131.101,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2101.408,
"text": " It's like masculinity becomes good if it's a female who embodies it. It's just completely upside down. I mean, here's what else I find funny about that. Femininity is just unattractive when it's attached to a male. So as a male, you can't win. It's very difficult to win. But if you're attractive and you have toxic masculinity, you can get away with almost anything. We had this conversation with Janice Fiamengo that the people who are getting sent letters saying stop what you're doing are"
},
{
"end_time": 2147.022,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2131.288,
"text": " Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 2174.053,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2147.961,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 2193.916,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2174.053,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level."
},
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"index": 87,
"start_time": 2193.916,
"text": " Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
},
{
"end_time": 2238.49,
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"text": " This one British comedian"
},
{
"end_time": 2256.852,
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"start_time": 2238.66,
"text": " He was like a huge deal and he became depressed and everything. He did an interview with Sam Harris and he did an interview with Jordan. He's kind of on board with Intellectual Dark. Anyways, he was this super good looking guy and he was extremely promiscuous."
},
{
"end_time": 2272.534,
"index": 90,
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"text": " had loads and loads"
},
{
"end_time": 2299.804,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2272.534,
"text": " Really interesting, you know imagine if anybody else had done that, you know what it would have been and I'm just I mean I'm figuring like maybe Russell Wren at some point I'm gonna turn on him when he kind of when he loses his his attractive edge They might turn on him at some point. But yeah, no, I agree that it's mostly that that that certain behaviors Let's say trying to trying to be flirty with a woman if you're good-looking and you're into your desirable Then that's not a problem. But if you're ugly"
},
{
"end_time": 2318.183,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2300.435,
"text": " Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover."
},
{
"end_time": 2346.698,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2318.183,
"text": " Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business, so that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades, and no planned obsolescence."
},
{
"end_time": 2363.063,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2346.698,
"text": " It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime. Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything."
},
{
"end_time": 2391.749,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2363.063,
"text": " If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A V I N G dot com slash everything and use the code everything. Let's get to Lord of the Rings. All right, Lord of the Rings. I want you to tell me the story of not don't tell me the story is going to take hours and hours. Tell me the symbolism behind the ring. Well,"
},
{
"end_time": 2416.834,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2392.619,
"text": " The ring is really power. I mean, it's called the ring of power. But I think that the ring is the power in the sense that we understand it today, in the sense of technological power, that is the capacity to affect the world. So it could be political as well. But a good way to understand it is technological power, in the sense that it's a"
},
{
"end_time": 2441.664,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2417.449,
"text": " It's the capacity to control, to affect things around you. So the ring itself, this symbol of metallurgy is a very ancient symbol of exactly that. In the Bible, you have this notion that as the fall of man kind of increases, moving towards the flood, one of the steps is the creation of metallurgy with two balcanes and the forging of weapons."
},
{
"end_time": 2464.77,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2442.722,
"text": " But it's there in other traditions as well. Somebody was telling me a Nordic tradition about almost the same idea. In Greek thinking, Hephaestus, the god of metallurgy, he's kind of like a monstrous deformed god who was kicked out of"
},
{
"end_time": 2490.367,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2465.213,
"text": " Olympus and lives in a kind of dark fiery place and that's where he makes his and so it's like this it's kind of like an image of the capacity on the margin to to control the the outside you could say something like that does that make sense yeah yeah and then you're saying how the ring becoming something that makes you invisible makes sense because"
},
{
"end_time": 2514.377,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2491.101,
"text": " Right. Well, the idea is that you have to understand it, you have to understand technology, or if you have to understand power or capacity to move out into the margin, you have to understand it as adding layers to yourself, right? That's a good way to understand technology. You could add the supplement. So you supplement your existence with something. So, you know, you wear clothes,"
},
{
"end_time": 2542.193,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2514.889,
"text": " You add a layer of clothes and then you can live further out, right? You used to be only to live on the equator, now you can live further out from the equator because you have clothes and you can keep warm. Then you develop houses, you develop different technologies to bolster your capacity to live further out. So imagine now the same thing in terms of political power. You're one person, what can you do? You can't do much. So in becoming, in adding power to yourself,"
},
{
"end_time": 2570.418,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2542.517,
"text": " Let's say you hire an army, you get weapons, you put on an armor, you do all these things, you learn to ride a horse, you have all these things that you add to yourself in order to make yourself more powerful, right? And the ultimate example of that is the ornament. So we often don't think metaphysically what an ornament is, but an ornament is something that you add to another thing."
},
{
"end_time": 2578.695,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2570.93,
"text": " to make it just to make it different just to make it special right because it has no purpose if i if i put a if i paint a flower on a chair"
},
{
"end_time": 2608.353,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2579.292,
"text": " It doesn't participate in the chair, nature of the chair. It doesn't help me sit on it. All it does is it makes it different from others. And it's the same for people. So a woman will wear jewelry, a man will wear jewelry as well, a woman will wear makeup in order to supplement her beauty, you could say. So a woman wears me to supplement her beauty. But what happens is as the supplement gets stronger and stronger,"
},
{
"end_time": 2636.647,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2609.616,
"text": " The question is, are you supplementing to show? To call attention to? Or are you supplementing in order to hide the true nature of what it is that you're supplementing? And it's hard to know when that happens. It's hard to know when I take a hammer in order to be able to hit nails and hit them in, but then at some point the technology becomes so big that"
},
{
"end_time": 2663.592,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2637.073,
"text": " I could never do it. It's actually there to mask my capacity to do that actual action. The same with makeup. Everybody has seen a woman who at some point in her life as she enters her 50s or 60s, she doesn't realize what's going on and then she starts to wear too much makeup and then you realize that it's actually there to hide her age. It's not there to"
},
{
"end_time": 2687.449,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2663.951,
"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon"
},
{
"end_time": 2712.073,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2691.954,
"text": " Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where everyone in the family can choose their own plan and save. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal."
},
{
"end_time": 2739.65,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2712.073,
"text": " I see. I see. So, okay, so an empty shell. So there's technology. I'm just going to see if I understand. So there's technology and use that technology to expand what you can do to expand your dominion over the world and over others. Then you can also think of it in terms of makeup as a technology. Buying a big car to signal your attractiveness is a technology in the sense because it's a tool. So tool is another word for technology. Right. And the big car is a great is the great example, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 2766.391,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2739.872,
"text": " I mean, for a man, it's a joke that we have, right? The guy with the sports car, you know, is it there to actually hide something about him? Something that he's missing? Some aspect of him which is deficient? And then he's hiding himself behind his big car. He's actually hiding the fact that he's, I mean, this is like the joke, right? He's hiding himself, the fact that he's somehow deficient in some spheres of his love life,"
},
{
"end_time": 2795.828,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2766.8,
"text": " with this big car. So he's overcompensating in that manner. And so that's a way for him to hide. He's hiding himself behind this ring. How does it work when it comes to armies? Like let's say you're the president of the United States and you just keep pumping money into the military. So you're expanding your range of dominion. How does that relate to hiding? Let's try to understand it in terms of an army. Because I understand it in terms of masking when it comes to something like makeup,"
},
{
"end_time": 2820.913,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2796.084,
"text": " or the man with the car, or someone who's extremely well dressed, but to the point of not being well, being overly dressed. Well, I would say we could see some examples, I think, in terms of when is it that, let's say, civilizations become expansive?"
},
{
"end_time": 2840.725,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2822.005,
"text": " I think a lot of people could argue with me on this, for sure. But I think that if you look at the expansion of the Roman Empire, for example, the question is why did it expand? Why would it expand?"
},
{
"end_time": 2870.486,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2841.357,
"text": " And one of the answers could be exactly what I said, could be exactly that it is lacking within itself what it needs to exist. And so it has to speed up what it's eating on the outside. It has to kind of devour the outside and add, add, add, add, add, add, add to a point where it always feels like it's pushing away that moment where it's going to break apart."
},
{
"end_time": 2890.52,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2870.896,
"text": " By doing that, because there's something in the center which is lacking. There's some inner thing which is lacking. You could think about in terms of materialism how people will start to buy, buy, buy things because there's something lacking within themselves. They do that in a way to make them feel like they're"
},
{
"end_time": 2919.258,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2891.135,
"text": " Okay, so they lack something crucial that will help them survive and so they stave off the inevitable by increasing their imperialistic powers. Is this something that the communists did? I think so. I think that that's a good way to understand it in terms of empires that tend to... Oh, I mean, that's one example because others could just simply be greed. Yeah, but I think that greed is that too. I think that this... Ah, that's true because greed could also be tied to an insecurity, which means you don't have something. That's right."
},
{
"end_time": 2942.108,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2919.633,
"text": " and so that's why the ring is related to our desires this periphery this idea of supplement is also related to what the Christians would call the passions so you have these you have these things that pull you from the outside desires you know the gluttony pride sexual desire all these things and so if"
},
{
"end_time": 2968.029,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2942.551,
"text": " If you move in that direction, usually that's what it is. You're devouring, you're eating, you're taking in things, you're acting in certain ways in order to compensate for something that you're lacking interiorly. And everybody knows someone who does that. I mean, you can take extreme cases of someone, let's say, who drinks. And you know, someone who becomes an alcoholic, he doesn't just become an alcoholic because of alcohol. Right?"
},
{
"end_time": 2998.285,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2968.422,
"text": " usually you become an alcoholic you drink to fill up some malaise that you have some kind of and everybody has that malaise you know we just we have different ways of dealing with it but you can you engage in certain supplementary behaviors in order to and the supplement because the supplement is also medicine that's also important in understanding this idea of supplement is it also has to do with the notion of taking in something or intoxicants or medicine all that is part of"
},
{
"end_time": 3028.302,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 2998.558,
"text": " This notion of the supplement because when you're sick, you have to take something from the outside in order to heal you and it works like it can work, you know, and the supplement is not, there's nothing wrong about the supplement. There's nothing wrong about this process. It's just that it can become out of control, you know, because you need to eat and there's nothing wrong with sexual activity. All those things are fine. It's just that if you can fall into a pattern where that behavior or that"
},
{
"end_time": 3058.473,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3028.541,
"text": " How does this relate to the ring becoming heavier?"
},
{
"end_time": 3087.978,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3059.735,
"text": " Let's say Frodo is moving out into that chaotic world. And so it has to become heavier in a certain way. Just like you need to add more and more layers the further away you get from yourself. So it's going to be, you know, it's like you need a bigger gun, a bigger sword, a bigger army, a bigger house, more technology. Going out into space is the ultimate example, you know. Like you go out into space, you need a massive shell"
},
{
"end_time": 3114.957,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3088.319,
"text": " around you, a massive, massive shell to protect you from the outside because the outside will kill you. And I think that that's what's happening in the Lord of the Rings is that as Frodo is moving away from his home, as he's moving away from his family, his identity and all of that, and he's moving out towards this dark place, then the ring gets heavier and it takes a toll on him. At first he has enough innocence to"
},
{
"end_time": 3138.319,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3115.503,
"text": " to bear the ring without being completely taken over, but as he moves out and further and further and further out, then it starts to eat away at him. And the only character in Lord of the Rings who can handle the ring without a problem is Tom Bombadil, and that's because he is a representation of that natural kind of innocence, that kind of boisterous self"
},
{
"end_time": 3169.172,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3139.718,
"text": " fullness of being you know he doesn't he doesn't he he's a he's a he has a kind of joyful innocence that means that he's not tempted by the the the the periphery are tempted by that a good example is in the movie Spirit of the Way it's a great example where the the central character what is her name again forget her name anyways Sen but that was what she was given yeah well Sen she herself has that innocence"
},
{
"end_time": 3191.8,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3169.599,
"text": " And so when she's not in danger, the same way that others are, in that world of gold and of pleasures and of this house of sensuality, she's not in danger. So when No-Face presents her with the gold, she's like,"
},
{
"end_time": 3221.51,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3192.244,
"text": " But she'll take it if she needs it, right? And it's fine. She's like, oh, she needs, she needs the, she needs something from No Face. She'll, she'll take it. She's fine. But then he's like, no, I want to give you more. I want, I want you to give me more. And she's like, why would I want more? I, I'm fine. I, I needed this tool to do this and I did it. And then I'm done. And that was because she was innocent? I think it's because she has, she has a, a kind of innocence in the right way to see innocence, a kind of purity, you could say, a kind of lack of a self"
},
{
"end_time": 3250.196,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3223.285,
"text": " It's a joyful purity. I don't know how else to say it. We were talking about The Little Mermaid before we started filming, and I don't know if you had much time to think about it before we started filming, but can you comment on how The Little Mermaid has a connection to today? Right. Well, especially if you're talking about the movie, The Little Mermaid, like the Disney movie, I think it's"
},
{
"end_time": 3280.691,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3251.084,
"text": " It's interesting because the Little Mermaid, she... It's funny because maybe I need to make a caveat about the Little Mermaid. The first Little Mermaid, like the one that was written by Hans Christian Andersen, was really about the incapacity to cross over. It was really about the... Be happy with what you are. Because she dies, right? She can't. She can't cross over into the human world."
},
{
"end_time": 3310.828,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3280.879,
"text": " because that's not our place, right? And so the Disney version is the actual total opposite. The Disney version is the very opposite. It is the modern, you can be whatever you want version of that. So it's kind of interesting, first of all, to think about the difference between the two worlds, the worlds of Hans Christian Andersen and our world today, where we have this idea that you can pretty much just do whatever you want. But what's interesting in"
},
{
"end_time": 3314.445,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3311.613,
"text": " The scene with the witch, what's her name again?"
},
{
"end_time": 3343.029,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3314.701,
"text": " Ursula. Ursula. Yeah, what is interesting in that scene is that Ursula is making her feel like she cares about her, right? Making her feel like she's this poor, this poor thing, this poor victim of her circumstance, this poor... And she's like, I'm going to... I can offer you what you want. I can offer you your desire, but what you have to give me is your voice, is your self, basically. And so in a way... Your logos. Yeah, exactly, your logos. And so in a way, it is..."
},
{
"end_time": 3366.118,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3344.292,
"text": " It is an image of this problem of desire in that sense. The problem with that movie is that in the end she gets her thing. That's the problem. That's more complicated. But she's like, you need to sacrifice yourself, your logos, in order to get what you desire. And that's"
},
{
"end_time": 3396.63,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3366.732,
"text": " that is part of this notion of the supplement in a sense is that you you if you if you desire this new car that's what you really desire if you if you desire to to have all these sexual experiences if you desire to have a certain lifestyle and that's like that's what you think that that's what you are that's when you lose your logo that's interesting because you can look at it from two points of view one is Ursula which you can think of as the radical left enticing people with with wish fulfillment I just want your voice but then on the other side"
},
{
"end_time": 3426.101,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3396.834,
"text": " There's the people who are willing to give up their voice. Yeah. Who are willing to give up their logo, so their core, their heart or whatever, in order to get something that they desire, in order to get something that they want. And I think that that's... And there's something about that in the ring too. There's something about that in the notion of the ring in general, where the person who is going to bear the ring, especially someone who already has a purpose,"
},
{
"end_time": 3448.695,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3426.613,
"text": " that they're going to be able to accomplish what they want. If they have that power, they'll be able to do that, but they have to give up their soul to get it. All the magical transactions in stories are always like that. You get what you want, but you have to give up something more profound in order to get that."
},
{
"end_time": 3478.626,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3449.701,
"text": " And I think that you see people who go through that all the time. People go through that all the time, right? The guy who all he wants is to get his million dollars, and then he sacrifices his family, sacrifices his relationship with his wife, he sacrifices the things that are actually very precious, that are really precious because they constitute your being in terms of a communal being, and they do that to get what they want. And I think that in terms of the radical left, one of the problems that we're seeing is that"
},
{
"end_time": 3501.715,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3479.411,
"text": " the radical left has been able to convince people that they're only this one aspect of what they want. So someone is like, I, you know, I feel like I'm, you know, that either I'm just one thing, like I'm this one thing. And if I embrace this one aspect of myself, I will get power, like I'll get some political power."
},
{
"end_time": 3528.763,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3501.988,
"text": " And I think that that's that's dangerous in terms of just normal people like as we're not like I am NOT just a You know, I'm not just a man. I'm not just a carver. I'm not just a or if I was if I was gay I'm not just gay. I'm not just trans. I'm not just whatever and I'm not just a European I'm not so it's like if you embrace this one aspect of yourself then all of a sudden it's like"
},
{
"end_time": 3546.186,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3529.65,
"text": " But there's something, that's how you make a weapon, right? That's what a weapon is. A weapon is a point. It's like, I'm going to push something into a point, then I'm going to use it as a weapon. And that's how you make a weapon. But that's not the way you make a person."
},
{
"end_time": 3565.196,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3546.664,
"text": " You don't make a person by turning a person into a weapon or weaponizing something about yourself because you'll lose yourself in that weapon, you could say. And you can do it with all kinds of things. You could turn your bitterness into that. You could become your bitterness. You can become your bitterness at your parents."
},
{
"end_time": 3594.753,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3565.196,
"text": " You hate your parents because of what they did and your whole life falls into that bitterness and you make this nice jagged pointy thing where all you exist in is this one thing about you which is the way your parents treated you and you dive into that and it becomes your spear and you start slashing at the world with it and it makes you feel powerful because it works. It actually does give you power but you lose something in the balance. You lose the capacity to become a full person, a total"
},
{
"end_time": 3619.292,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3594.94,
"text": " I just had a thought about giving up what you have in order to get what you want, which is aerial. But nihilists in today's world give up what they want in order to keep what they have. So they'll give up their aspirations like forget about marriage even though they actually want it. Forget about traditional values even though they actually want friends and they would like maybe a nuclear family or whatever it may be."
},
{
"end_time": 3641.937,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3619.582,
"text": " In order to retain their worldview, what they have. But I think it has to do also with a kind of shortening of... What nihilism tends to do is it tends to shorten the horizon, you could say. And so the most immediate things we have are these desires, right? Those are the most immediate. The idea of wanting a family, you have to like..."
},
{
"end_time": 3671.476,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3643.029,
"text": " swim over that first wave, which is I just want to have a beer, right? You have to swim over that in order to get to something which is more purposeful. And so I think that what nihilism does is it opens up the possibility of just living in more immediate desires. You know, playing video games all day or whatever it is that you want to do in the immediate and not feel like you have to direct yourself towards something which is higher."
},
{
"end_time": 3701.596,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3672.449,
"text": " And so in that sense, I think that that's what, that's what nihilism tends to do to people. So what do the hostile brothers, Cain and Abel, they're others, which I can't think of right now, but what do they have to tell us about our current situation with regards to the radical left or even the alt-right? Yeah. Well, I think in terms of, I think in terms of Cain and Abel, I really do, I do think that Jordan Peterson has hit the nail in the right place in terms of that story and how it relates to today in the sense of resentment. And I think that,"
},
{
"end_time": 3730.196,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3701.8,
"text": " In the story of Cain and Abel especially, you see Cain who feels like he should have more than what he has. And it's not just, and so it becomes the basic, you could say that it's pride, right? Pride is the first sin. It's the first sin in pretty much all the whole biblical story. You know, the devil sin is pride. Cain's sin is pride. Adam and Eve's sin is pride as well. It's the feeling that"
},
{
"end_time": 3759.326,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3730.759,
"text": " I deserve more than what, what I should have. And it's always relative to someone else because it's not, it's almost equivalent to I should have more, but also you shouldn't have that. If I don't have that, you shouldn't have that. Oh yeah, for sure. No, I totally agree. And I think that that's, it seems to be, I think that that's, that's for sure. If you talk to people who are far on the left, far on the left, you could say you, it doesn't take a long time to scratch at"
},
{
"end_time": 3787.722,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3759.599,
"text": " the fact that what frustrates them is not so much that they're poor because most of the time, at least here, they're not, you know, there's very few people starving in Canada. I mean, I'm sure there are, but they're very few. It's usually that they're annoyed to think of Jeff Bezos in his, you know, his huge house. That's what annoys them. And I think that, I mean, I'm not saying that there isn't something to say for"
},
{
"end_time": 3812.688,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3788.643,
"text": " the problem of disparity and the problem of people of one person having too much power. I think that that's something which is important to think about and to talk about where certain individuals have so much power that they actually can become a danger to social cohesion. But I think that if you look at it out of resentment in the sense like why"
},
{
"end_time": 3841.169,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3813.524,
"text": " Why would he get that? Why not me? It's not fair. That kind of thinking. I think that doesn't lead the person in a good situation. You see it in the story of Cain, of course, where he ends up killing his brother. In the story of Cain, what's interesting in that story is that it doesn't tell you why. It's really fascinating because later traditions have always tried to"
},
{
"end_time": 3867.022,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3841.63,
"text": " to try to guess why. Why is it that Cain's sacrifice was not acceptable to God? But in the story itself, it doesn't say. It just says, Cain's sacrifice was not acceptable, Abel's sacrifice was acceptable. It's like, okay, you don't even know why. And so, but it doesn't matter. It's like, that's reality, right? Another way to see it is these are the cards that have been dealt you. This is it. You can't argue with reality. And so, are you going to argue with reality? Are you going to say, I should?"
},
{
"end_time": 3897.193,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3867.705,
"text": " have more and, and I'm going to want more so much and I'm willing to blow the whole thing up just because I don't have what I want, you know? And, and I think that what you see, what you're seeing in the, especially in the, in the, in the radical left is you definitely see that type of, that type of thing. And you see it too, like, like you said, you do see it now in the extreme right, you're seeing similar things as well, where there, there is a nihilism, which is propping up in the more extreme right."
},
{
"end_time": 3925.981,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3897.483,
"text": " which is, you know, basically our culture, Western culture is, is over. So let's just participate in, in blowing it up. Like let's just, let's just run it into the ground, you know, so no one can have it. Uh, there's a little bit of that going on and it's very disturbing to watch. So yeah. Something that I always struggle with is the radical left-end side. There is a, there is a, there is a grain of truth, more than a grain of truth, which is that,"
},
{
"end_time": 3955.52,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3926.288,
"text": " We don't all have what we want, which we'll never all have what we want, but there's some basic needs. So in Canada, we all have healthcare. So let's just forget it, but let's say in the States, so they don't all have healthcare. They don't all have, they all are, many people are living paycheck to paycheck. And then they look at someone like Jeff Bezos and they say, it's not fair that someone should be living so insouciantly and free while I am just struggling. Yeah. Okay. So there is something to be said about not"
},
{
"end_time": 3984.224,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3955.776,
"text": " having to struggle this much for basic necessities. Then at the same time, there is something to be said of, well, are you trying to be a champion for the cause of people who are struggling or are you just trying to tear down those who have much more than you? Now, there is something, there is also something to be said for, again, tearing down those who have disproportionately too much simply because we don't want power to accumulate in the hands of the few and in crony capitalism,"
},
{
"end_time": 4010.572,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3984.514,
"text": " Obviously money translates into politics. We don't want that. So it's there's I see both sides and I'm always struggling because I See the benevolent side of the radical left which is which is which is the benevolent side of the left in general Yeah, and then obviously the benevolent side of the right comes out as well, which is what we need hierarchies You can't just dispense with all hierarchies. What for what is it? What is it that you struggle with you struggle with?"
},
{
"end_time": 4038.114,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4011.271,
"text": " So I think that the left... Because any attempt to criticize the radical left, they can just say, no, it's not this claim of resentment. It's that all that nice, bonamy, gracious, altruistic, philanthropic aspect, all those elements that you just listed, that's actually our true motivation. And it's difficult. Well, you can look, you can take the psychoanalytical approach, which is something I'm going to try to do in the documentary, which is, well, what do your behaviors show? Forget about what you say. Let's see how you act."
},
{
"end_time": 4067.5,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4038.114,
"text": " So are you killing tens of millions of people in the 1900s? Well, obviously they didn't, but I'm saying the same philosophy has. And are you clapping when Jordan Peterson is debating Slavoj Zizek and Jordan Peterson references bloody violent revolution and then the rest and then the radical left says, yeah, which happened. I don't know if you saw that. I saw I saw the one scene where he says he says hierarchies are not says hierarchies are not all posited on"
},
{
"end_time": 4092.108,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4067.824,
"text": " On violence and dispossessing and everything and then someone laughs and I thought his answer was so perfect He said he said well, maybe those that laugh is that's the way they would do it There's another time where he just mentioned what would happen is bloody violent revolution and then the Yeah, he didn't know what to say. Well, yeah, how would you know to say to that because I"
},
{
"end_time": 4121.374,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4092.654,
"text": " And those people have never experienced anything close to Bloody Violent Revolution. So for this documentary, I started looking at clips of just some of the worst of what humans can do to other humans on a large scale. And it just tears you apart, man. Some of them are not that visceral because there's black and white footage with no sound. They're still... And then some are like the"
},
{
"end_time": 4150.162,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4121.63,
"text": " I think especially now, I think that's what's difficult is that you can imagine that someone"
},
{
"end_time": 4177.961,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4151.118,
"text": " In the 19th century, just coming out of very difficult times in Russia where you're present, you're barely eating, you don't get to eat any meat, all the aristocrats eat meat, that kind of life where it's very difficult, and then that you would feel so desperate that you would be willing to risk everything just to topple the whole thing compared to now, which is"
},
{
"end_time": 4207.568,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4179.07,
"text": " I mean, who are these people who want bloody revolution in our country? We talk 1% of anybody who's ever lived. Right. And so I don't totally understand how that... And I also don't understand how they define what rich is, because rich, to me, always seems to be defined by them as whoever is richer than me. Yeah, exactly. No, I agree. I agree. Yeah. So what other ancient stories have you read?"
},
{
"end_time": 4235.179,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4207.807,
"text": " that apply to this modern time radical left alt right crazy world that we live in. Um, I was thinking about that and I, and I don't, and I don't, I don't totally see in terms of, we seem to be in a very unique moment because one of the things that's happening right now, which is extremely unique is that"
},
{
"end_time": 4252.295,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4236.647,
"text": " We have these two excesses that are growing up at the same time. And I think that that's the one thing that people find very difficult to see because they tend to just see the other excess. And so, for example, we live in a world where there's more control"
},
{
"end_time": 4269.855,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4252.79,
"text": " and more calculation of what you're doing than any other time in the history of the world. Google has everything about you. You exist virtually in Google's, on some Google Drive there. They know everything about you, everything you've said, everything you've thought."
},
{
"end_time": 4288.37,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4269.855,
"text": " They can clone you from your emails."
},
{
"end_time": 4308.456,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4289.07,
"text": " looking online for certain things, not related to pregnancy, but they've calculated that if you look online for certain things, even if it's not directly related to pregnancy, it probably means you're pregnant, and so they'll show you ads for pregnancy stuff, right? So there's this massive data control over what we are, and just in terms of laws, like"
},
{
"end_time": 4330.299,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4309.206,
"text": " The modern state, I can't build something in my yard. I need to get permission from my town to build anything I want. Right now, we're in the process in Quebec where the government wants to, we're homeschooling our kids, and the government wants to force us to take standardized tests. And I think that's normal. I think it's normal that the government decides"
},
{
"end_time": 4360.384,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4330.606,
"text": " what your kids are going to learn. We think that's normal. We think that the government has that possibility. So we have the most, but we also have this weird, carnivalesque, crazy world of passions where, you know, pornography is rampant, where people are dying from opioids. And so there's also this other weird world that's completely chaotic and upside down. So we have these two things that are kind of growing up at the same time. And so it's almost like this is a very unique moment."
},
{
"end_time": 4387.108,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4360.879,
"text": " in history where the capacity for absolute control and the capacity for absolute breakdown seem to be looking at each other and somehow feeding into each other. So it's very weird. I don't know if there's a... Are there any biblical stories? My brother would probably be better at finding a story that shows as much the two extremes at the same time."
},
{
"end_time": 4401.869,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4389.377,
"text": " I mean, it's possible that maybe the closest thing we have would be the collapse of the"
},
{
"end_time": 4432.295,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4403.746,
"text": " the first collapse, let's say third century collapse, where it's as if there was this huge gigantic bureaucratic state, crazy, but then these decadent elites that all they cared about were their orgies, and then it just couldn't hold until it collapsed into civil war. So it seems like maybe that's the closest thing that we have to understanding kind of where the symptoms of our society seem to be close to, let's say, the"
},
{
"end_time": 4461.425,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4432.79,
"text": " One reason I'm asking is because there's so much wisdom in these old stories. And if we want to, if we want to engineer a solution to our current times, it's always good to look back and see, well, what did they do then? Yeah. You know, I don't think there's a solution to our current time. I wish, I wish, and a lot of people, you know, and I think that that's one of the reasons why I kind of took on Jordan's way of seeing things in terms of the solution."
},
{
"end_time": 4470.401,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4462.108,
"text": " A lot of people have criticized me just for kind of coming too close to Jordan as a Christian, and a lot of people have criticized me."
},
{
"end_time": 4497.415,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4471.305,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
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"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone."
},
{
"end_time": 4546.886,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4523.524,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothies, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
},
{
"end_time": 4576.476,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4546.886,
"text": " Jordan for his individualism, you could say. And I've been thinking about it a lot recently, and I think that Jordan's solution is the only one right now. Not individualism in the sense of... Not the Ayn Rand kind of..."
},
{
"end_time": 4598.029,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4576.971,
"text": " selfish individual, but the notion that in a world that is so extreme right now and the systems are so big, the only thing you can do is become a saint as much as possible, is to become a just in the world, to be an anchor"
},
{
"end_time": 4626.015,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4598.387,
"text": " for for people around you and so and that means changing yourself that means and I think it is in line with the deepest Christian teaching which is you know take take the the beam out of your own eye before before removing the straw out of your brother's eye and I and there's also several citations of saints for example Saint Seraphim of Sarov who said acquire the spirit of peace and thousands around you will be saved and so this notion of"
},
{
"end_time": 4652.108,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4626.578,
"text": " becoming something, rather than trying to immediately want to find these gigantic solutions to the problem. Because I think we're headed for trouble. And I think that the only hope is that there will be enough bastions of civility and justice and truth"
},
{
"end_time": 4669.36,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4652.329,
"text": " to carry us through the chaos. To be honest, I don't see us fixing these massive problems. They're so big. It's like the AI thing. You have all these people saying,"
},
{
"end_time": 4691.971,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4669.991,
"text": " Be careful about AI. Be careful about AI. But no one's gonna stop. It's just this machine is turning and turning and speeding up. And we're heading towards it. Everybody knows we're heading towards it. Everybody's afraid. Everybody knows how dangerous it could be. But no one can stop it. You know, Elon Musk can't stop it. No one can stop it. It's gonna happen. And so... I don't know, you know. I don't..."
},
{
"end_time": 4715.265,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4692.176,
"text": " Sorry to be a pessimist. So where do you see it going? You just see it remaining and then we strengthen ourselves as individuals, becoming a person that someone can rely on, an anchor? I do think that it has to build ground up, that for sure. And I think that we need to rediscover"
},
{
"end_time": 4745.094,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4715.93,
"text": " Our center, our heart, we need to rediscover that and then we also need to participate in actual communities. And that's one of the reasons why I tell people that... Okay, you mean to say that you don't see it going away, the problem of the extreme right and extreme left with some large-scale solution. You see it as a problem that will be solved from a bottom-up approach as you... They can only be. I think it can only be solved by a bottom-up approach. It's the same problem with the ecological problem. The ecological problem"
},
{
"end_time": 4763.148,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4745.828,
"text": " It's too big because it's based in people's desires. The ecological problem is based on our desire to accumulate and to supplement our existence to that extent."
},
{
"end_time": 4787.602,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4763.541,
"text": " The problem is so profound that no matter what recycling you set up, it's not going to go away. It's not going to go away. The only thing that can make it go away is for transformed people and transformed communities. But we don't, like communities, they don't exist anymore. We don't have, at least some do, but it's very different. This is why John Bravacchi dates the current meaning crisis. He says, well, he might say,"
},
{
"end_time": 4815.213,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4788.097,
"text": " Yeah, for sure. I totally agree. When he said 12th century, I was like, John, you've got it. That's where it started. That's where the West started to vacillate, let's say, between extremes. And so it's a cyclical thing. It's a story that's too big for us."
},
{
"end_time": 4843.336,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4815.213,
"text": " It's too big for individuals to think that they're going to change it. But there are ways to exist in those times of breakdown. Like there are ways to exist which alleviate, let's say, or make you not be an actor in the breakdown and henceforth not be an actor in your own breakdown. Not fall and live a life, a dissolute life of the passions and be completely taken up by your desires."
},
{
"end_time": 4864.667,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4843.592,
"text": " and then wake up on your deathbed and it's like, okay, I have a big house and a big car, but I'm divorced and my kids hate me. And it's like, that's okay. Congratulations. You know, what did you accomplish? And so one of the reasons why I've insisted, a lot of people, sometimes they wonder why I insist on it so much is one of the reasons why I keep saying that,"
},
{
"end_time": 4892.022,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4865.06,
"text": " at least in the West, we need to remember the Christian story. Like we need to remember the fact what it is that made us something. Yeah, remember also means understanding. Yeah. And I think it means to a certain extent participate in too. And so that's why I think... It's a Vivacian idea. Yeah. But I think we don't fall in the same place because... So John's way of participation is very individualistic."
},
{
"end_time": 4918.148,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4892.227,
"text": " And so he says, I'm a practitioner. I practice this. I practice that. You know, I practice these different mystical practices. And it's like for him, it's a way out of the meaning crisis, but it has to, it has to come together too. We have to remember that even in Buddhist, in, in Buddhist teaching that, you know, there's a lack of community in John's approach. I think so. I think so. And I think the lack of community is,"
},
{
"end_time": 4948.626,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4919.923,
"text": " We don't, we don't totally decide what story we're part of. I keep telling people that it's difficult for people to fully understand it. My, the way that I view how things are going on is I think what we're seeing is a playing out of in the West, you know, we're seeing a playing out of the Christian story, the bass of Christian story. And part of that story is a breakdown. It's there in the story, you know, that's why. You're the only person that I've seen articulate our current crisis in this manner that"
},
{
"end_time": 4978.66,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4949.036,
"text": " Christianity itself might have to die in order for it to come back and be reborn. But I think it's there in the story. Like it's there, it's there. That's interesting because you're applying the narrative to the narrative. Yeah, that's how symbolism works. So symbolism is a, you know, it's embedded structures within themselves, right? It's a... That the archetype is so true that it applies to the archetype. Well, that it's a... It's like a... Yes, exactly."
},
{
"end_time": 5005.981,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 4978.951,
"text": " That's what religious stories do in general. They understand a form of self-consciousness. They have a form of self-consciousness where they try to look at themselves as well. There's a weird circularity that's part of the symbolic structure. I find that fascinating. I need to think about that some more because it's an interesting idea. I haven't heard someone else express it, at least not articulate it in the direct manner that you have."
},
{
"end_time": 5030.674,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 5006.135,
"text": " So how did you start to come to view stories in this symbolic fashion? So you're saying you're 22 or you just graduated from college and your teacher was telling you, you don't belong here. You're a traditionalist. The questions you're asking are not ones that you'll find the answer to not in college. Yeah. Well, so what basically happened is I tried to make contemporary art for a little while."
},
{
"end_time": 5060.913,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5031.118,
"text": " I had a studio with some friends and I was kind of working towards something and then... Just for freelance? Just for some money? Like a real artist, like going to a gallery and do the real artist thing, you know? I made these giant, you know, kind of really ego-driven giant works of art, you know? My whole life is just one big giant ego-driven work of art. So anyway, so that's what I had and then I got married and marriage really kind of slammed me against myself, right? Like I saw all my own"
},
{
"end_time": 5087.585,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5061.903,
"text": " Can you explain how that happens? Because I recently got married and so I want to know. I want to know what's in store for me. It depends on people. Some people get married and then it's wonderful for a little while and then the mirror starts to show. For me it was the opposite. Like we got married like a week after we got married all of a sudden it was like"
},
{
"end_time": 5110.674,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5088.37,
"text": " Did you live together beforehand?"
},
{
"end_time": 5138.712,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5111.118,
"text": " And so it was like just seeing this mirror. And so it led me to a lot of questioning and also just kind of spiritual crisis in general. I was also becoming very disillusioned with the world, the kind of evangelical world that I was in. In college I'd read a lot of authors, a lot of philosophers, and I just felt like the church where I was going wasn't answering the questions. What kind of church was it? It was kind of a Baptist, Baptist, evangelical Baptist church."
},
{
"end_time": 5168.729,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5139.104,
"text": " kind of American style church there. Not liturgical, you know, just very kind of looks like a business meeting. Can you explain what you mean when you say liturgical? Do you mean to say what studies the Bible? No, liturgical means that it's, that it has a service which is, which is a pattern, right? It's, it's based on, it's not just a, so like let's say a evangelical church today, they'll get together, they'll sing songs, and they'll have a sermon,"
},
{
"end_time": 5199.002,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5169.582,
"text": " but they'll say things like we could do it we could do whatever like we you know there's no it doesn't matter what you do there's no structure oh you mean no structure for your life or no structure for the meetings right no structure for the church and so liturgical means that there's an order of service and so there's we we do things in a certain order so like the jehovah's witnesses i don't know if you're familiar with them yeah well they're not liturgical more like the evangelical baptists so liturgical is like anglican catholics orthodox"
},
{
"end_time": 5227.654,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5199.241,
"text": " They're liturgical. So they sing. They have the architecture of the building is meaningful. The order of the service is meaningful. The way the priest is dressed is meaningful. Everything is done in a manner which is meaningful and which manifests what you're trying to do, right? So it's not just arbitrary. So anyway, I was going to a kind of evangelical church and"
},
{
"end_time": 5256.903,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5228.609,
"text": " I felt like it was just lacking in profundity, lacking in meaning. And also, I was reading philosophers, and then I started reading authors from other traditions, Buddhist authors, Sufi authors, and I discovered the mystical way, you could say, the mystical thinking, and transformational thinking, you could call it. And I was really impressed by it. And then I thought, whoa, why is it that Christians don't have that?"
},
{
"end_time": 5286.596,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5257.125,
"text": " Like, why is it that Christians don't have the mystical transformations and mystical vision of how the world works and all of that? And it was only because it did. It's just I didn't know about it. And then that's when I discovered the early Church Fathers and traditional Christianity and then iconography. Can you define what iconography is? So iconography would be, let's say, a way of practicing art, which is traditional in the sense that it has certain"
},
{
"end_time": 5310.879,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5286.937,
"text": " types, certain typology. It has a set of rules, kind of like if you write a sonata. You have certain rules and then you write within those rules. So iconography is the visual practice of the ancient church, which was developed, let's say if you went into a church in the year 1000 or 1100, anywhere in the world you would have seen pretty much the same thing."
},
{
"end_time": 5339.172,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5311.288,
"text": " And that was done without a top-down, you know, imposition of what was going to be there, but it was just this kind of bubbling up. It was like the brand style guide for the church. The what? You know, brand styles. Okay. So when you design a website or you have a company, like use these fonts, use these colors, make sure that when you place the logo, you place it this much of a distance between the borders. Well, I don't think, no, I don't think that's the way to see it. The way to see it is to see it more like a, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 5361.254,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5340.35,
"text": " a view of the world as full of meaning and full of pattern. And so the story of the world and the story of our lives is a pattern. It's not arbitrary. It's not random. And so that pattern then can be found, let's say in scripture, can be found and then it"
},
{
"end_time": 5391.203,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5361.51,
"text": " It transposes itself into the way that we worship, let's say. So the structure of how we worship in a church, in a traditional church, is patterned based on the same patterns as that you find in the Bible. So there's a center, right? There's the altar, and then that's the most holy place. And then you can imagine a series of layers as you move out from that holy place. Remember when I told you a little bit about this idea of adding layers? Well, you can see that also in the terms of sacred space where"
},
{
"end_time": 5419.633,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5391.988,
"text": " you have profane space, which is outside the church. And as you move in to the church, then you, you, you move towards the sacred center, which is that, which defines the space itself and which defines the community and which defines everything. So that structure, let's say the architecture of a church, then in iconography, you have those same types of structures. So you have to know the types. It's like a, you have to understand that,"
},
{
"end_time": 5448.558,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5420.282,
"text": " The reason why Christ is represented in a certain way is not arbitrary. It's there to show you who Christ is. And so there's a certain manner in which you represent a figure to show you who what they are and what their place is in this bigger pattern. And did they do this consciously? Like they knew that they were not copying or imitating, but that this specific representation of Christ was being repeated in other parts of the world? Did they know that consciously that here's"
},
{
"end_time": 5478.968,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5449.718,
"text": " the proper representation of Christ or here's what it's saying. We're at the center because this is what's most holy and then here's what's profane in the way that you're articulating it. Yeah. I think it's a mix of intuition and participation in the life of a community where we agree on certain things and we participate in the story. And so for example, like if you would ask me, would it be conscious to put Christ in a central space? And you would say, well, yeah, but at the same time, what else are you going to put there? Cause that's the center."
},
{
"end_time": 5503.353,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5479.206,
"text": " That's the incarnation. That's the point where heaven and earth meet. That's the focus of the origin of Christianity, the focus of Christianity. So it's like, where else would you put it? There's another reason for the cross. That's something I've been thinking about. Another reason for the cross to be symbolized like this is because this represents the spiritual and this represents the profane, the mundane, earthly. And the proper place is to be at both."
},
{
"end_time": 5509.821,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5503.66,
"text": " But then the other reason why the earthly is a little bit higher is because it's more important to be slightly more spiritual than you are earthly."
},
{
"end_time": 5539.991,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5510.742,
"text": " I mean, yeah, I've never thought about the second part that you said. For sure, the cross is meant to represent the union of heaven and earth. That's for sure. And I think that a lot of people resist that because they say, no, that's the shape of an actual cross, right? That's how crosses were made. But it's like, that's the thing is that symbolism is the coalescence of things. Just because that's how crosses were made doesn't mean that it doesn't also mean that, especially in this context,"
},
{
"end_time": 5561.613,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5539.991,
"text": " And there's also preponderance of things that are associated with Christ, and why would we choose the cross? Well, there's obvious reasons why we would choose the cross, but the cross as a symbol has multiple meanings. And it definitely is a center, that's for sure. And if you look at the early Church Fathers, they'll say things like, you know, the cross is everywhere,"
},
{
"end_time": 5589.019,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5562.125,
"text": " you know, look at a mast of a boat with a sail, that's a cross, and they'll point to crosses which exist almost naturally in the world and say, you know, the image of the cross has been shown forever, you know, people need to just recognize what it's talking about, like, what is the center? What's at the center, actually? Like, what does unite heaven and earth? You know, that's the question, and of course,"
},
{
"end_time": 5619.241,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5589.94,
"text": " Christian's answer with the incarnation. That's the answer. But iconography is basically understanding the rules and the language of Christian art, why it resembles what it does. And then it's almost like an algebra. And so you know the terms, then you can, if you need to improvise an image, you can, but improvising that image needs to be done within the general frames and tenets that iconography offers you."
},
{
"end_time": 5647.671,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5619.906,
"text": " So it's a truly traditional art in that sense. Okay, so you started studying iconography because your eyes were opened because you started studying Buddhism and you realized they have an interesting way of seeing the world. Yeah, it was a little bit of Buddhism, a lot of Sufi authors. I read some early modern kind of Sufi converts. What's Sufi? Sufi is a mystical Islam."
},
{
"end_time": 5673.831,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5648.336,
"text": " Yeah, it's a branch of Islam which is far more mystical, analogical, and it's closer, some people argue with me if I say this, but it's closer to Christianity in some respects because of its emphasis on love and because of its emphasis on the transformation of the person, all of that. To get you into more hot water than you already are, do you fundamentally see Islam as a religion of peace?"
},
{
"end_time": 5706.084,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5677.381,
"text": " I think that we need to see Islam for what Islam actually says. There are two spheres in Islam. There's the sphere of peace and there's the sphere of war. And Islam is the religion of peace in the sense that within Islam is peace. And that's how it's viewed in the Muslim world. That's how it's been presented."
},
{
"end_time": 5736.135,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5706.357,
"text": " And so you have the outside world, which is the space of war, and you have the inside of Islam, which is the space of peace. And one of the goals of Islam is to bring peace, to bring the space of peace to the world. But that's by becoming Muslim, or by submitting to Islam somehow, by becoming a dhimmi, or by paying the tribute. A lot of Muslims don't think that today. I would say that"
},
{
"end_time": 5752.824,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5736.698,
"text": " Most Muslims in the West don't have that approach to Islam anymore, but traditionally that's why Islam was from the beginning an expansive religion."
},
{
"end_time": 5776.237,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5753.114,
"text": " is not expensive. Judaism wants to recover the Holy Land. They want to get their place. That does cause trouble. Obviously we see that it's caused trouble since they're back there. It's a difficult situation. And Christianity, it's kind of not clear because the Roman Empire converted to Christianity"
},
{
"end_time": 5803.439,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5776.578,
"text": " So then the Roman Empire became Christian, and so it's complicated to think. It's not so much that then Christians went out and, at least in the first, you know, thousand years, went out and invaded other places, although it probably happened. You know, you get stories in the West, you get stories of Charlemagne converting by the sword, and you get those stories as well. But they're always kind of iffy. But Islam was like, Islam exploded, became huge."
},
{
"end_time": 5831.647,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5803.797,
"text": " If you look at an image of the map at the year 1000, it's immense. I don't know. I think that most Muslims today are not, especially people who come here, it depends from where they come from and what intentions they have. In Quebec here, a lot of the Muslims who come here come from Northern Africa and they want to work, they want to have a good life, they want to have a good family, they want to be left alone and do their thing."
},
{
"end_time": 5859.582,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5831.886,
"text": " Okay, so let's get back to you were studying, studying iconography and that allowed you to see the world and see stories through a particular lens. Yeah. I was watching you give an interview. I mean, I was watching you have a conversation about the spider verse with someone. Yeah. And that person then made a comment about some other, some other aspect of the spider verse. And then you said, Oh, and what that could mean is this, this, this, and this. And then the guy said, Oh, I didn't see that before. And then you said, Oh, I didn't see it before until you mentioned it. And that made me realize you,"
},
{
"end_time": 5886.34,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5860.401,
"text": " That's not something you thought about because for a regular person, a regular person who's even watching this, they would have to sit and think, okay, what could the spider verse mean? Here's what I know. Okay. Okay. Hmm. Okay. This fits in here. This fits in here. This doesn't work. Okay. Okay. And then it would take them maybe 20 minutes to come up with something that you came up with in the span of a sentence or two, which means you actually see the world or you've thought about it for so long that it's just second nature to you."
},
{
"end_time": 5906.715,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 5886.715,
"text": " And I want to know how did that develop and how do you see the world? So do you see people walking down the street differently than you used to? No, I mean that seriously, because even people who study physiology, they can tell people's ailments just by watching them walk, even if they look like they're normal. Oh, you slightly tilt in this direction. It's almost like Sherlock Holmes."
},
{
"end_time": 5935.913,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 5907.176,
"text": " And so you see people moving towards a subway and then you think, okay, that's a, that's a place of communion where people don't interact. That's almost like what we had in the 12th century when this happened and this happened. So I want to know, do you see the world like that? No, I see. And how did you start to see the world the way you see it? I mean, I think I see the world through patterns. That's for sure. Okay. Now when you say patterns, I'm going to get specific here. So when you say patterns, you mean,"
},
{
"end_time": 5965.247,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 5936.357,
"text": " repetitions, parts of life that repeat or parts of life that are abstracted. So for example, there's a pattern of talking where I talk, you talk, I talk, you talk. Now that's a pattern repeating or another pattern is, is you abstract out from a certain set. So there's a pattern of what it means to be human. Right. So it's, I would say, okay, so the pattern, you could say the pattern starts with how things exist, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 5994.855,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 5965.947,
"text": " And when I say how things exist, what I mean is how they exist phenomenologically, not in terms of science, because that's what confuses people. In terms of experience? In terms of experience. How we experience things existing. And that's really the basis of how things exist, no matter what we say. We try to push beyond the phenomenological, but we always see it through the lens. So the scientist, even though he has all the scientific categories, he's still in a consciousness and looking"
},
{
"end_time": 6024.326,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 5995.077,
"text": " I'll give you a perfect example. So the way that something exists, you need for something to exist to have it have an identity, right? And then have a, you could say a variety, say it that way. You need to have an identity and a variety or a"
},
{
"end_time": 6048.695,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 6024.616,
"text": " One-ness and a multiple-ness to it. Can you give me an example? Well, so if I have a cup, so this has an identity. Let's say its identity is the cup. It has other identities, but let's use that one for start. So it has an identity, it's a cup. But then it also is not just, there is no such thing as a cup."
},
{
"end_time": 6078.558,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 6049.411,
"text": " It's actually non-binary and it's offended that you defined it in terms of a cup. Well, there's no such thing as a, there's no pure cup, right? Not in the world, right? So a cup has to have, has to have a particular, particularity to it, right? And the particularity to it is its variety. It's a multiplicity. And then in order for it to have particularity, then it has to embody other identities. So it has a color. It has, you know, it has to have a color, right? But there's no color in the cup."
},
{
"end_time": 6106.937,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 6079.224,
"text": " Cup doesn't have color, but it has to have color for it to exist. So there's the concept of cup-ness, which doesn't actually exist in the world in space and time, but it's a concept nonetheless. Cup-ness. Something that makes something a cup. It's a non-material essence. It's a concept. I try not to get too tied up because people will say, okay, you're being platonic. Just trying to see how things come to exist. And so there's an aspect of it, which is one. There's an aspect of it, which is multiple and everything"
},
{
"end_time": 6132.398,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 6107.261,
"text": " always has to have that. For anything to exist, it has to be one and multiple at the same time. Because it also has to be constituted by parts. Okay, so you're saying the elements of this that are not a cup are... But also for, even for it to be a cup, it also needs to be constituted with parts. So it has one, oneness, and it also has parts, which are multiple. And the cup-ness of the cup holds the cup together."
},
{
"end_time": 6161.237,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 6132.858,
"text": " So let's just say that you have one and one and many. Okay. Okay. Okay. So if you have one and many, just that you already have a basic pattern and then you could look at the world through one and many and you can notice when things move towards one or when they move towards many or how they move towards one, how they move towards many. Okay. So then let's do that in space. You a good way to represent it in space. Best way to represent it in space center periphery."
},
{
"end_time": 6184.002,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 6162.022,
"text": " So you have a wheel, let's say, you have a center, the center is that which around everything else turns. And then as you move out from the center, you get more quantity, you would say, as you move towards the center, you get more quality. And so that's a basic pattern. So then you can look at a person like that. That's extremely interesting. You can also look at the political sphere, hear that sound."
},
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"end_time": 6211.067,
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"start_time": 6184.957,
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},
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"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level."
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"text": " Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
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{
"end_time": 6281.049,
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"start_time": 6260.52,
"text": " Would you say the radical left is on the periphery and then the alt-right is in the extreme center?"
},
{
"end_time": 6305.384,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6283.422,
"text": " I struggle with this alt-right thing, but let's talk about the radical left. Let's say right hand, left hand. We can use that. The right hand traditionally is the tendency to move towards the center, and the left hand is the tendency to move away from the center."
},
{
"end_time": 6334.718,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6305.811,
"text": " For example, Christ says, when he's judging the world, he says to the sheep, he says, come into my kingdom. And to the goats, he says, depart from me. I never knew you. Okay. So moving towards the center, moving away from the center. There's a rabbinical teaching that says exactly that, which has, you know, bring things closer to you with your right hand, move them away from you with your left hand. Right. So now you can think of it as a person, traditionally in any traditional culture, almost every single traditional culture you eat with what hand?"
},
{
"end_time": 6361.374,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6335.094,
"text": " You're right. You wash with what hand? You're right. You wash with your left hand. Oh. Because you're moving, because you don't want to eat with what you wash with. You go to the bathroom, you use your left hand, you eat with your right hand, right? So you bring towards you with your right hand, you move away from you with your left hand, right? So you understand that that's just a basic pattern of being. Like a person has a tendency towards unity and a tendency towards outside, towards inside, towards outside."
},
{
"end_time": 6388.882,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6361.834,
"text": " That's the, that's a pattern. That's the basic pattern of reality. Then you can, you can apply that to a society. A society has a basic identity and it has ways in which you move towards that identity. And then it has a way in which you move away from that identity. But you could, moving away or closer is not moral, right? Because some things you need to move, you need to, to move away from you. And there's some things also that move away from you for, from you for a good reason."
},
{
"end_time": 6417.807,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6389.292,
"text": " Right. In the sense that you could be extending yourself out into the world as well. Right. And so, and so it's not, it's not, the patterns are not moral. There's no, in, in the pattern, there's nothing good or bad. They can become good or bad depending on how they're used, for what reason they're used. But the pattern itself is it just, then you can look at the world and you can, what I see when I look at the world is that's what I see. I see how the pattern is manifested in different instances."
},
{
"end_time": 6444.036,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6417.995,
"text": " Now this detaching of moral judgments from how close you are to the center or how far you are from the center, is that a Buddhist concept or does that fall in line with Christianity? Because I know Christianity has an emphasis on putting moral judgments on almost every aspect and Buddhism is the opposite as far as I know. I could be wrong."
},
{
"end_time": 6458.251,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6444.462,
"text": " so does that does that okay so you said look there's the center there's the moving away from the center and you can move toward you can move towards center you can move away from the center it's not in and of itself a i mean it's not in and of itself moralistic to do one of no"
},
{
"end_time": 6487.159,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6458.387,
"text": " They both have danger and they both have opportunity. The Buddhist won't necessarily frame it in the same terms, but they will, they'll say the passions. They'll say, you have these passions on the edges, let's say, in yourself, and those passions are pulling you, are fragmenting you, they're pulling you apart. And in the Christian way of describing the passions in the same way, especially in the Orthodox tradition, you have these passions, these desires, and these desires pull you away from your heart, let's say."
},
{
"end_time": 6513.456,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6488.268,
"text": " and uh and you need to go back to your heart you need to to to uh to uh let's say so that's a return to the center return then you return to the center okay um and do they have in christianity a pushing away from the center well it depends like i said for example i'll give you an example of a pushing away from the center which is which is positive the pentacost pentacost is when the disciples are in the high place and then all of a sudden"
},
{
"end_time": 6542.005,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6513.78,
"text": " the fire of the Holy Spirit comes down upon them and then they start to speak and then everybody can hear them speak in their own language. And so as they're speaking, then everybody else is hearing them speak in the language that they understand. So that's a fire, right? That's fire. That's the left hand. That's moving away from the center. And so the message is being dispersed out into the periphery because those who are outside hear the message in their own language."
},
{
"end_time": 6570.282,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6542.398,
"text": " And so that's a left hand movement. It's a moving out. And so, like I said, it's not necessarily good, good or bad. And then there's also, there's a bad left hand, right? This idea of giving in to your fire, giving in to your desires, giving in to your passions is this being pulled away from yourself. And that would be represented as a kind of left hand movement, you could say."
},
{
"end_time": 6595.265,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6571.049,
"text": " But there are also right-hand sins. So St. Maximus the Confessor, for example, talks about left-hand and right-hand sins. And he says the left-hand sins are, you know, gluttony, prostitution, all the sins of the passions, like you let yourself go to those types of desires. And the sins of the right-hand are pride, self-sufficiency, right? So now you can see where the"
},
{
"end_time": 6613.882,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6595.759,
"text": " Moving into the center can become negative in the sense of pride, the sense of thinking that you don't need anything, the sense of thinking that you're self-sufficient. And so like I said, those patterns are not negative or positive. It's just in their balance. Well, it just depends on"
},
{
"end_time": 6642.073,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6614.394,
"text": " In the situation? In the situation. It just depends on what is trying to be accomplished. So entering into the center in the sense of removing yourself from your passions and going into the center in order to look up and see what's above you. Okay, so simply just a matter of appropriateness to the situation. Right. Sometimes you need to be far, sometimes you need to be close. Yes, and it just depends also, you could say a good way... So not necessarily... I was wrong when I said balance because that would imply that there's a proper place to occupy in almost every situation, whereas it's actually different"
},
{
"end_time": 6667.671,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6642.295,
"text": " Sometimes you just need to be completely right-handed, sometimes you need to be left-handed, sometimes you need to be a mixture of both. So in terms of center and periphery, for example, the good way to understand it is like it's called memory. So if you're moving away from the center, if you remember the center, then it doesn't matter how far you go."
},
{
"end_time": 6691.067,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6669.036,
"text": " If you remember yourself, if you remember God, no matter how you say it, you can go very far and you won't fall. You won't be taken in by whatever is pulling you out. Does that make sense? Okay, so now you see the world like this. You said you started to see the world primarily through the center periphery."
},
{
"end_time": 6715.964,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6691.357,
"text": " So now when you watch something like a movie, how do you see the movie? What are you looking for? Are you looking for anything?"
},
{
"end_time": 6745.179,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6716.203,
"text": " Can you give me an example of your thought process from a recent movie so that it's fresh in your mind? So some movie that you saw recently that you went in thinking, okay, I'm just gonna watch this movie and then what thoughts occurred to you and then what thoughts occurred to you afterwards? Okay, so"
},
{
"end_time": 6772.568,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6745.742,
"text": " Okay, I just went to see Shazam with my kids. I went to see that movie. And so the movie Shazam is about a young man, a young boy who becomes a superhero, an adult superhero, right? And the movie is, for example, one of the images that keeps appearing in the movie is an image of the carnival. And the carnival keeps coming back. And so, for example, if an image like that keeps coming back, especially the carnival,"
},
{
"end_time": 6800.606,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6772.927,
"text": " Then you say, okay, I need to pay attention to this because there's something going on here. And so a carnival, for example, is this edge. The carnival is the edge of the world, the best way to understand it. Everything's upside down, right? Everything's spinning. Everything in a carnival is spinning all the time. The Ferris wheel, all the rides, everything's spinning. And everything is garish."
},
{
"end_time": 6823.319,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6800.964,
"text": " All the colors are garish. Everything is there to titillate you in that way. It's all bad food. It's all spinning. It's all laughing and pleasure in the very basic sense of having fun and clowns and impossible precision"
},
{
"end_time": 6838.08,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6823.609,
"text": " This is"
},
{
"end_time": 6865.742,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6838.49,
"text": " I don't want to give out all these spoilers, but the story in Shazam is about dealing with the seven deadly sins. And so it's like, okay, so here's all of this going on at the same time. So these seven deadly sins kind of come out and possess this one man, you know, and then they start to kind of attack the world and do all this stuff. So, okay, so the seven deadly sins at a carnival, it all kind of makes sense. It's like it all kind of fits together."
},
{
"end_time": 6883.114,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 6865.742,
"text": " It's not trying to say anything. It's not like there's a message, but the pattern is right. And so when the pattern is right, where the seven deadly sins appear at a carnival, it's like it fits. And then when you're watching it, you have a kind of satisfaction."
},
{
"end_time": 6909.701,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 6883.643,
"text": " which is a satisfaction of the world being right, even if it's talking about the upside down world, right? It's talking about these monstrous seven deadly passions that are coming to suck up the world, but it's having it in a carnival, which is an upside down world already. And so all of this is going on. And so it's like, even though it's showing you the extremes, it fits because everything's in the right place. And so when sometimes what can happen is if"
},
{
"end_time": 6940.265,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 6910.759,
"text": " You could have a place where it just is wrong, where it just doesn't work. Where it's... And that's because you're interpreting it incorrectly or you feel like it's being forced on the part of the filmmaker? Being forced, exactly. It's just being forced. So there's a desire to give a message and so they'll push something in which will force it. But the best way to force it is to... Because it's difficult to get away from these patterns because they're the patterns of reality. All you can do is you can..."
},
{
"end_time": 6967.363,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 6940.742,
"text": " You can make them upside down. You can twist them, right? So you can't totally get rid of them. And so I think that a lot of the modern kind of propaganda, that's what they do, is they twist them in a way. They kind of just toss them to it, make them in like the idea of, yes, we need, we can't avoid the masculine, feminine archetypes. So what we'll do is we'll put a woman in the place of the masculine figure and we'll put a man in the place of the feminine figure. And demean the man."
},
{
"end_time": 6991.084,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 6967.824,
"text": " How does one know when they're reading too much into a piece of art? Something that Peterson's been criticized for"
},
{
"end_time": 7017.415,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 6991.34,
"text": " on a minor basis like when he's looking at Pinocchio. How do you know you're not reading too much into it? So how does one prevent themselves from reading too much in? Is there such a thing as reading too much into art? Of course. Yeah, for sure. And I think that the way that, for example, what I do is I just point at the pattern. So I'm not actually interpreting the movie usually when I interpret a movie. I'm not interpreting in the sense of saying,"
},
{
"end_time": 7046.852,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 7017.892,
"text": " This aspect of the movie represents, I don't know, represents Hitler. This character in the movie represents Stalin. I would never make an interpretation of a movie like that. I'll say, look at the pattern. Here are the terms of the pattern. You have someone on the inside. You have someone on the outside. How are they interacting?"
},
{
"end_time": 7065.128,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 7049.053,
"text": " So we're talking about how does one know when they're reading too much into art? And you were saying, well, I'm not going to substitute different elements of the film and say this represents the struggle of man and this represents the church and this represents Hitler. Yeah, usually a movie will give you its pattern."
},
{
"end_time": 7088.353,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 7065.725,
"text": " The movie has a pattern. In order for you to even recognize it as a story, especially movies that are trying to make money, movies like little art type movies where the person doesn't care whether or not anybody watches it, usually those you're hopeless in terms of pattern. But movies that are actually trying to attract a lot of people, they have to"
},
{
"end_time": 7111.578,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 7088.763,
"text": " Even if the person isn't conscious about it, in order to attract a mass amount of attention, they have to embody certain satisfying patterns that human beings have within them. It's necessary because the world's people won't go see them. Or the cynic would say it's just marketed well. That's not true because we know movies that have been massively marketed which have failed."
},
{
"end_time": 7130.401,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 7112.142,
"text": " Maybe they'll have that first bump, but then it'll all go away. Whereas if you really want to attract a lot of attention, you need to have that pattern. The movie will usually tell you what's going on. You just need to let the movie tell you what's happening."
},
{
"end_time": 7159.343,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 7130.794,
"text": " trying to, I always try not to go outside of the movie, like the least, the least that I can, like try not to reference anything outside the actual story that's going on and to just say, well, this character says this, this is what he does. This is, this is how, this is his struggle. He's telling you what the struggle is. He's going to tell you this is his, this is his problem. He's going to tell you what the solution is. Then all I'm going to try to do is show you how that is a pattern and how it would, how it's a pattern. And then once I've done that,"
},
{
"end_time": 7183.387,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 7159.616,
"text": " then i can say okay now this pattern see this pattern this is the same as this other pattern this other pattern this other pattern like see how uh you know like for example the pattern of resurrection you know and that pattern is there everywhere someone dies or almost dies and then gets back up at the end it's like you see it in so many movies you know that's it's just there it's just there in the story"
},
{
"end_time": 7212.756,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 7184.104,
"text": " I can show you that it's there and then once I've shown you that it's there, then maybe we can start to talk about what it means. But it's no longer now about just that one movie. It's about that pattern which is there in several other stories and now we can talk about what it's referring to in terms of existential reality. And so to me, if you stay within those frames, you have less of a danger of"
},
{
"end_time": 7242.961,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7213.097,
"text": " of kind of going overboard. One of the things that happens, and it's happened to me, is that sometimes you'll see a pattern and you won't see a counter pattern. You'll want to see one aspect of the pattern too much, then you won't see something else that's going on. So that's totally possible. Well, can you explain what you mean? You mean to say that you as the person who's interpreting the piece of art wants to see a certain pattern and so it blinds you to a counter pattern? Yeah, for sure."
},
{
"end_time": 7268.097,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7243.848,
"text": " In other words, you're selectively choosing. Well, that's what a pattern is, right? A pattern is the selectivity. Because just like a movie, just like any other reality, has an indefinite amount of details, right? You could talk about the way the leaves are moving in the story, but you're not going to talk about that because that's not what interests you. And so you'll focus on the characters, for example. You could say,"
},
{
"end_time": 7297.534,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7268.37,
"text": " You could interpret, you could ask if you were just a kind of nihilist, you could ask, why are you focusing on the characters when you're watching a movie? Why aren't you focusing on the top right pixel? Exactly. Or the way the wind is blowing. Well, some people who have autism do that. They don't actually look at the characters. Yeah, they don't look at characters in the eye. You can watch them. You can track their eye fixations and they don't look. So right now I'm looking at you in the eye and they don't watch the characters. They look at the light bulbs. They watch how this swing is swinging."
},
{
"end_time": 7321.049,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7297.978,
"text": " In a way it's kind of inevitable, but hopefully you try to not"
},
{
"end_time": 7348.148,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7322.142,
"text": " to not do it too much and also to be able to see both and to see both sides. I think the best interpretations that I've done for movies have been the ones where I'm able to show the two sides, let's say, to almost sometimes imagine as if you could see the movie from different aspects. So let's say you're an artist and you want to create something that's not propagandistic, that doesn't try to, you don't try to instill your own values into the art because otherwise"
},
{
"end_time": 7375.64,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7348.695,
"text": " Jung would call that, Jung, Carl Jung would call that propagandistic versus exploration art or he called it the difference between introverted art and extroverted art. So introverted art is the art where you're trying to, you have your own intentions and if you're just using the art as a tool to let the world know what you think politically, it's usually political, but it could be whatever. It could be, you're the main character in the film because you're filming it yourself and you want people to feel sorry for you. It could be whatever."
},
{
"end_time": 7394.667,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7377.517,
"text": " Are you want you had a bad experience with the father and now you want to make sure that people when they look at their fathers they have a bad experience with their father like they look at fathers negatively. Yeah. Okay. Then he said there's extroverted art where it just comes through your conduit for which these ideas flow from and you don't even know what you're doing when you do it."
},
{
"end_time": 7425.026,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7395.469,
"text": " And until it comes together as a cohesive whole, maybe you can look back, but maybe you can't even look back. And as much as you try to explain it, you realize it's deeper than my explanation. You come back one year from now and there's more, there's more to it, more to it, more to it. Religion is like that. The Bible is like that. So Jung would call that extroverted art. What advice would you have for artists who would like to not fall prey to introverted art? They want to do art that will stand the test of time and not"
},
{
"end_time": 7449.804,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7426.186,
"text": " Right. I think it's difficult for me to answer that question because I'm not making the kind of extroverted art that Jung is talking about. Let's say the liturgical art that I make is a desire to participate in a community and a communal language. And so it's very different. It's neither"
},
{
"end_time": 7474.206,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7450.111,
"text": " me trying to impose my vision of the world on others, nor is it this kind of surrealist type of exploratory art where you, like you said, like you just kind of let yourself go and you don't know what you're doing. It kind of almost, you know, like a medium or something. It's completely different. It's exactly trying to participate in a common language. And so"
},
{
"end_time": 7504.002,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 7474.531,
"text": " So like I said, that to me, I've chosen that as being the most... Because the problem with... Well, I don't see anything wrong with that because let's say you're a poet, you're using the language of English or whatever language you're using. So you're using the language of iconography and then you're constructing within that. So I don't see that as necessarily being opposed to introverted art or extroverted art. I mean, I don't see that as you trying to will a certain point of view. I just see it as you using a language. Well, maybe it's because of"
},
{
"end_time": 7529.189,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7505.316,
"text": " my idea of how I understand what you're talking about when you talk about the extroverted art, which is this kind of, you know, this kind of letting it flow, right? Almost like a surrealist, like how they make a Kadarovsky or how they would, they would automatic writing, all that kind of stuff. I think you can just think of it as the absence of an intentional message. Right."
},
{
"end_time": 7557.927,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7529.411,
"text": " Well, yeah, I think that in terms of reducing a message, I would say, I think that understanding the complexity of traditional stories is probably a way to help that in the sense that to try to always see the... The Old Testament characters are some of the best for that. You can read the Bible, the Old Testament characters, and you can"
},
{
"end_time": 7587.944,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7558.404,
"text": " read them as the hero, and almost every single character you can read them as a villain, almost every single one. You can see how they actually... there's a shady aspect to what they're doing, okay? You can do that about... you can do that about every single character in the Old Testament. It's really fascinating, by the way, to do that. And I think that being aware of that is... is probably helpful, is to understand"
},
{
"end_time": 7616.971,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 7588.609,
"text": " that there are two sides to to the symbolism all the time there's always there's always there's always two sides and that's something that's wrong or missing in modern movies like like he said the one with the the the reversal of little mermaid what was it called diarra galtorm or del toro whatever oh the shadow of the shape of water yes the shape of water that the white male was just he's bad there's no good to him he's just bad if you label them as bad you're correct"
},
{
"end_time": 7645.572,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 7617.142,
"text": " Yeah, that was definitely a propagandistic movie. In so many ways it was propagandistic. And so I think that that's... I also don't have a problem with having a bad character. There's nothing wrong with that. But if you look at Lord of the Rings, if you look at a character like Gollum, for example, it's a great character too because he's bad. He's a bad character."
},
{
"end_time": 7668.985,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 7646.049,
"text": " But he's also like an extension of Frodo. You know that he's where Frodo could go. Like if he let himself go, he could go there. So you can see Gollum and Frodo, and you can see Frodo and Gollum a little bit too. And so that's a powerful story because you have these two characters, one which is like a good character, one which is a bad character, but it's also not just, it's not a simple"
},
{
"end_time": 7694.753,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 7669.428,
"text": " simple relationship. There's a relationship where one is like the promise of the other in a certain manner. And so that makes it far more subtle and far more engaging in my opinion. I was trying to think of when is it okay to actually just have a character which you can outright categorize as bad. And I wonder if it's only when they are a representation of Satan. So like let's say Sauron. Yeah. Yeah. He's like, he's not even embodied, right? He's like a, he's just like a,"
},
{
"end_time": 7723.285,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 7695.145,
"text": " He's just an idea, almost. I mean, obviously, he's a being, but he's not embodied in the world. They don't encounter Sauron. They encounter him through kind of third, second tiers or whatever. So, yeah, I think so. Maybe that's a good way to understand it. I've actually thought about Sauron quite a bit sometimes about if it's too easy, if that character is too easy. But like you said, because he's not an actual character. Someone could criticize the Bible and say,"
},
{
"end_time": 7751.869,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 7723.49,
"text": " Jesus is too easy. He's too good. And the Satan is too bad. That's too easy. But it's like, that's the point. It's supposed to be the extreme. So maybe it's okay when it's supposed to be the extremes. People don't understand that Christ does not fit that category. People don't know the story of Christ or they read the story of Christ. The story of Christ is the most elated and disturbing story at the same time."
},
{
"end_time": 7782.09,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 7752.432,
"text": " Christ says some stuff that people don't like to cite because it just, if you want to just make Christ into a simple good guy story, it's not, that's not. Give us an example. Christ says, I came to bring fire to the world to turn brother against brother. Christ said on the cross, father, why did, how, why did you abandon me? Christ said, you know, Christ said to Peter, bring a sword. And then when Peter takes a sword out and cuts off the ear of a soldier, he stops and he says, no, don't do that."
},
{
"end_time": 7810.964,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 7783.626,
"text": " What I'm saying is that Christ is a far more complex figure than what we want to believe that he is. Think of Christ, think of crazy stories, think of Christ there as the rabbi who is the one who brings, who's bringing the word and the truth and all that and imagine a whore washing his feet with perfume. Think of Christ"
},
{
"end_time": 7836.237,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 7811.357,
"text": " as the one who hung out with Samaritans, with strangers and demarginalized and all that, and that's how the left want to portray him, for example. But then he also goes and hangs out with a tax collector, who's basically a stooge for the Romans, who's basically a tool of the empire to control us."
},
{
"end_time": 7855.964,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 7836.937,
"text": " And so Christ goes all directions. Christ goes in every direction. If you understand the types that are in stories and you read Christ's story. I've read scholars complain that we don't know how to frame Christ because he's a teacher."
},
{
"end_time": 7882.022,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 7856.527,
"text": " But he's like a rabbi figure. He's also like a prophet figure. But then he's also like the son of a worker. He's also like a woodworker. He hangs out with fishermen. He kind of fills up all the stories. And so that's why the story of Christ is very difficult to"
},
{
"end_time": 7906.203,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 7882.568,
"text": " Well, getting back to propagandistic, this is what's interesting because it's not simple. You can't frame this person as good or bad. Now that's standard in screenwriting, never make your protagonist purely good, never make your antagonist purely bad. Can we go a little bit beyond that as to how can we stop ourselves from consciously trying to push a message? Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 7935.282,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 7906.476,
"text": " Well, I mean, I think that there's simple ways. There's ways that have been told to us forever. I mean, just Aristotle told us, give your characters a fatal flaw. Like, it's not a mystery. You know, give them something that could destroy them, you know, and either it does or it doesn't, but make sure that it's there, that even your hero has something that could devour them. And I would say the same for your enemy, right? Make your enemies convincing. Make them"
},
{
"end_time": 7961.34,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 7936.732,
"text": " a twisted version of something true. Don't just make them a random bad guy. If you make them a twisted understanding of something which actually has value, then that makes for powerful bad guys. For example, in the last Avengers movie, the Thanos character, that was a great character. It was a great evil character because he actually talks about"
},
{
"end_time": 7985.452,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 7961.817,
"text": " Things that people care about today. He talks about ecological disaster He talks about you know, all the things that even the left cares about but then he pushes it to Such an extreme that you kind of shy away from it because like okay. Okay, where are you going with this? You know versus the shape of water, which is like just trash. It's a trash movie Because it's because it it doesn't"
},
{
"end_time": 8016.067,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 7987.824,
"text": " I mean, in every single way. There's so many ways in which The Shape of Water is trash because it's almost like a cliché. It's almost a cliché of you could guess each character, what's going to happen to them when it starts. And there's some, especially the bad guy in the movie, some of the things he says that are so bad in terms of they're so obvious that it hurts. What is it? There's one scene"
},
{
"end_time": 8044.241,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 8016.544,
"text": " when he says something he goes to the bathroom and he says you can learn a lot about a man whether he washes his hands before or after and you don't do it twice because that shows weakness yeah it's like you're so obvious you know you're so obvious about him being you know excessive purity and all that stuff but yeah it's just par for the course by now it's non-stop you know there's this movie coming out just now what's it called like these monstrous dolls and you know it's just not"
},
{
"end_time": 8073.251,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 8046.493,
"text": " I mean, we've kind of swallowed this thing right now. This is where society is going in this direction. I don't know where it's going to lead because it can't sustain itself. You can't have a world of exceptions. Do you see Hollywood contributing to this problem? Oh, for sure. Since the beginning, I think. I think that... This problem of polarization, or this problem of what?"
},
{
"end_time": 8105.538,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 8076.391,
"text": " The thing is that it falls into the, it's the problem of entertainment culture itself. That's a problem. The idea that our cultural artifacts are entertainment. That's a problem. We don't realize that it's basic. It comes back to what I talked to at first when I talked about art, when I told you that traditional art integrates in a culture, right? So,"
},
{
"end_time": 8135.998,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 8106.596,
"text": " Traditional storytelling was part of festivals, was part of gathering around the campfire and telling the story of our ancestors. It was about putting on masks and wearing the costumes and playing out these characters, but in a manner in which we're participating in it. We're doing it on this date because it's to remember something that happened in our... There's a shared principle, united under purpose."
},
{
"end_time": 8164.07,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 8136.357,
"text": " Yeah, purpose and just the fact that we're together, all of this comes together. And so the problem is that now almost all our cultural artifacts are there to entertain us. They're like a giant circus. The last remaining cultural artifact we have is basically a circus. It's just there to keep us distracted. Okay, last question."
},
{
"end_time": 8185.094,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 8164.991,
"text": " When do you see the left going too far? I think the purpose of the left is to ask questions, you could say. Is to say, what about this, right? So you have some identity, doesn't matter what it is, and then the right hand's like this, and then the left hand's like, well yeah, what about this?"
},
{
"end_time": 8214.053,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 8185.998,
"text": " Like the role of the skeptic? Yeah, like, well, how does this fit, you know? And why doesn't this fit? And what did you think about this? You know, it's like, oh yeah, you say this, but you're leaving this aside, right? You're not considering this. And so in society, that ends up being exactly kind of what we see, which is this like, oh, you forgot the exception. Don't forget the exception. There's your rule, but there's also exceptions. Some people don't fit. So you have to remember them. Don't forget the exception, you know?"
},
{
"end_time": 8242.551,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 8214.275,
"text": " The problem happens when we try to make the exception the norm. It doesn't work. You can't have a world of exceptions. It just doesn't exist. It can't exist. It just, it crumbles. And so I think that that's the problem that we have now is that we want, we went from wanting to care for marginalized identities to this, the idea that somehow an accumulation of marginalization will make you"
},
{
"end_time": 8270.384,
"index": 321,
"start_time": 8242.841,
"text": " into a heroic figure that doesn't do that. Just because you are marginalized doesn't make you pure. It's like you're flipping it upside down. It's like the identitarians are saying, just because I am of this group, I'm fine. Just because I am white or I'm a man or I'm this, just because of that, then I'm sufficient and I'm fine."
},
{
"end_time": 8300.725,
"index": 322,
"start_time": 8271.51,
"text": " It's like I'm pure, right? That's the bad... But now when we have this weird, crazy left is the very same thing, just upside down. It's like a competition of purity, but like a competition of exception. If you can be the most exceptional in the sense that you are the most marginalized, then you're playing the same purity game, just upside down. It doesn't work. You need the two, like you need the statement of"
},
{
"end_time": 8327.5,
"index": 323,
"start_time": 8301.067,
"text": " of identity and then you need things that are there on the, on the margin, which say, Hey, hey, don't, don't think you've got everything. Cause I'm here to show you that you haven't accounted for everything, right? You haven't accounted for everything. And I think that that's, that's the normal balance. All right, man. Thank you so much. Well, I hope, I hope it's useful. Let's see what it looks like."
}
]
}No transcript available.