 Yeah. So in this kind of world that we've been talking about, I feel like we're kind of trying to build a vision of what the future would look like. And we've sort of uncovered some, what I would say, our fundamental flaws in the hero's journey, the kind of pitting us versus an external enemy, the eternal struggle, all of that stuff that kind of comes along with traditional narratives. How would you rewrite the narrative in this kind of world where there's, where you can involve yourself into a project or a cause that you care deeply about to make it happen or make it better? I mean, what does the narrative look like from that frame? Well, let me just say about the hero's journey. I don't think it's a useless archetype. I think it's a powerful archetype. It's just like we've made everything about the hero's journey. If someone says, someone mentions, say, Joseph Campbell or mentions mythology or something, I'm like, oh yeah, hero's journey, as if that is the map for life, the roadmap. Some have pointed out that the hero is actually a boy archetype, not a man archetype. The man archetypes are magician, lover, warrior, and king, and they each have a boy counterpart. Hero is the boy counterpart of king. Yeah, the champion, you know, the hero, like, I've done it. That's not what the king seeks. The king, the king, as my friend Claudio Miranda says, he's a musician. He says the best musician is the one who makes the others play well. Yeah, we actually just finished a multi-part podcast series on the archetypes. And so we talked about this literally a couple of days ago that one of the roles of the king is to bless others, which means to see them as whole and to elevate them and to encourage them and want them to see them thrive. And the desire of the hero is to go out there and test his limits to prove something to himself so there's no narrative of service in the boyhood archetype. It's just testing your own limits. Right. Yeah, you don't see like Luke Skywalker conferring blessings on others. No. Yeah, so that's, and this is tied into some of the stuff we were talking about earlier, the war of each against all, the mode of problem solving where you find the thing to overcome. I mean, it's the thing to test your limits against the challenger. Like you need that at a certain stage of psychological development. And perhaps humanity as a whole has been through that hero's journey in a way where the opponent, the adversary, the challenger was nature itself. And through this struggle against nature, I mean, this was defining of human history. This is how human history was narrated. If you look at the history of history, this is how human history was narrated for a long time. And glory and even goodness itself was associated with overcoming the wild, pushing the boundaries of civilization farther and farther. It had a political dimension, it had a scientific dimension. Conquering the wild meant bringing more and more of the mystery into the realm of quantifiable phenomena. Understanding that things that we could understand, predict and therefore control. So that that hero phase of development, it defined so many aspects of our civilization. And I think we could say now that we have completed that, that phase, that we have tested our limits, we have bested the adversary in a way. Some people say nature bats last, and that the future of the planet is not in doubt, it's only the future of humanity. In my book, I say maybe that's not true. Like, you know, I, and I paint the picture of a possible concrete world, I mentioned it before, with food grown in vats and carbon sucking machines in bubble cities and digital displays of all the nature that's been lost. Like, I don't know, but we are moving toward that, like each generation more distant from nature and nature more dead than the last generation. So yeah, like you could say that, that the hero archetype on the collective level has been completed. Like we don't need to like, it's like, you know, the hero's, you know, defeated Darth Vader or whatever, you know, one that he's, he's one, he's defeated his challenger, he's discovered himself. And now he's like, well, now I need a bigger challenger. Now I need to find some new evil to fight. It's like getting stuck there. Like, what about turning toward, toward kingship, turning toward blessing, turning towards service? What do I use these powers for? More glory for myself? More control, more domination? Or am I, am I ready to, to go through the, the next phase of the journey? It's not the hero's journey anymore. And it's a phase of, of unlearning things. It's a phase of, of humbling. What would that look like collectively? And I mean, I know this in my own life, you know, like when I was in my 20s and 30s, like, yeah, like I, you know, I wanted to be a big shot, wanted to be a respected thinker, you know? And now I'm at a phase of like, who cares? No matter how big a shot I become and how respected I am, someday I'm going to die. And everyone will forget me. The only thing that can live beyond me is what I give to the world, because it's no longer in me. I've given it away. That survives me. So it's, it's, it's like, maybe through the hero phase building up, and then after that, sending out until there's nothing left, until the world has been saturated with me. And there's nothing left, because I've become the world. I've given everything that I'm meant to give. And from the perspective of the separate self, that means I've been extinguished. But from the perspective of interbeing, it means that I have merged with who I truly am. Integrated. Yes. And so for humanity, part of that process is to really see ourselves as part of a larger whole, as part of nature, and in service to the health, but also the development and evolution of the planet. As an organ, we are an organ of a living planet, like a heart, like a liver. What is our role here? And it's a planet that's, it's a living planet that's not just a static being, but that wants to, to grow in a certain way that wants to transform that is going through a metamorphosis. I don't know the answer to what Earth wants to become. All I know is that that's the question. And we could ask that question for the next thousand years. And still might maybe we wouldn't know. But we would know the first step, because the sincere inquiry will magnetize the next step. Then that's all we need to know. And I think the next step is obvious. It's to heal the damage that has been done on the hero's journey. It's interesting how many of our narratives do focus on that struggle period. I mean, that's the major excited part. The, I think of the Avengers Civil War when they in the previous movie they defeated the aliens and then all of a sudden they're fighting amongst themselves like the narrative of struggle had to continue for it to be entertaining. But how interesting would it be if they just decided disband, let's focus on peace, let's teach, let's share our gifts, that sort of thing. There aren't many narratives like that. And I'd be curious to see how they actually, what narratives of kind of emerging kingship would look like nowadays and if they would actually take on? I think maybe part of why the hero's journey is so prevalent. Well, is, I mean, it's obviously in still in our collective consciousness. But also, I think that's kind of, it's because it is the loud and exciting part of a person's life. And then the really deep development and the giving tends to happen more privately and quietly. Like people aren't really seeking glory for that when they're truly in service. Yeah, it doesn't make as much of a spectacle. I'd still watch it. I want to know what Iron Man is doing. Well, I think this is, this is, this is a deep, a deep movement that wants to happen in, in storytelling. If we need to recover some of these, I mean, these archetypes are all present in mythology, in folktales, fairy tales. Like you can find, you can find all of the archetypes there. Archetypes themselves go through a lifespan. When I speak of everything is alive, the sun, you know, the water, the soil, that also goes for stories and archetypes. The ancients understood that they personified archetypes as gods. And gods had life stories. They were born. They, they, they went through evolutionary processes and that is saying that, that archetypes themselves change over time. And sometimes new archetypes are born. I'm not an expert mythologist, but I am like you really curious. I would love to see films or something that, and maybe there are astute people out there who can say, yes, actually, Charles, this, this is happening. You know, look at this film, look at that film. I'm not really so up on popular culture. But I know that when I see a film that invokes some other archetype than the hero's journey, some other archetype than good defeating evil, I feel like a heart opening. As you know, when, when the resolution isn't that good finally overcomes evil, when the resolution, especially when the resolution is evil has a change of heart. That I'm like, yes, so satisfying. The very least one, it's not evil for the sake of evil. Let's just see something that has depth and reason behind it, you know, because then it would be possible to think about reforming the villain. But if the villain is just evil because it's something to point at, then, you know, it's, it's uncomprehensible and the only objective can be to destroy it. There's no conversion. There's no helping that person. Do you remember in Moana, that animated Disney film, the whole goal of the journey is to restore the heart of the island goddess? I haven't seen that film. Like they're not trying to defeat anything. They're trying to restore her heart. And then when they do this kind of ang, she turned from this angry fire monster looking lady into a beautiful peaceful green island goddess. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's a healthy movie. That's the kind of thing I would be willing to show my my little kid. I've got a five year old as well as some grown kids. And one movie that was also like that was Kirikou, I think it was called, based on some African folktales, where there's the evil sorceress, kataba the sorceress that's causing all kinds of problems for the village. And one after another, the young warriors go to destroy her, but they end up becoming enslaved by her. And finally, Kirikou, this this baby who's born walking and talking, he goes to to try to solve the problem and learns that that the reason that kataba the sorceress is so wicked is that she has a thorn in her back. So he goes and has many adventures and ended up pulling the thorn up from her back. And she doesn't want the thorn pulled out of her back. She's so comfortable with it. But when he does pull it out, then she transforms into a magnificent goddess. What a perfect narrative that is. Yeah, I mean, that's what it is. The villain's always broken in some way. That's about healing. So when when Kerry, my son, you know, he's into superheroes, like he's five, okay? Like, can we grow up as a culture and stop being into superheroes, you know, and supervillains? Like it's okay for a five year old, but we're still like, it's like, yeah, the Joker, why do you think the Joker so mean? Like we ask that, why do you think Darth Vader is so mean? What happened to him? Just to get him thinking in that way, rather than the simple prescription that of solve the problem by finding and destroying the bad guy, Osama bin Laden, you know, Trump, Saddam Hussein, bad guy, drug lord, you know, criminal, et cetera, terrorist, kill the terrorist, and then everything will be fine, kill evil, everything will be fine. That is juvenile. And it goes along with that, we're saying that whole mentality of, like the concept of evil arose in the beginnings of civilization when it was associated with the wild, the lion, the wolf, the wild, that was evil. The good king was what was the one who domesticated the wild, who cut down the forest, who killed the beasts, who mastered the beasts, Hercules killing the lion, Gilgamesh, like all these, all these heroes, that so, so, you know, when we have the supervillain, that is actually wild nature. And so this, so the transformation of civilization's relationship to nature goes hand in hand with the shedding of these stories of good versus evil, and superhero versus supervillain, and the hero's journey, not that they don't have their place, they still do have their place, but they have usurped the proper role of every other archetype almost, and they need to be returned to their place. Yeah. Yeah, I love what you said about the hero's journey being an adolescent, the narrative being adolescent from start to finish. You know, I hate to bring up another superhero show again, but in the latest Avengers movie when they had Thanos get the gauntlet, Infinity Gauntlet, and he had all of, you know, he's got all the power in the universe, and his first thought is let's just kill half of all people because there's not enough resources. There's no thought of like, well, maybe double the resources. Like, what? Yeah. I just thought of that the other night. I was like, oh, god. That was a fascinating movie, actually. I did see that on the airplane, and I was like, whoa, the bad guy just won. Like, without qualification. Like, he didn't just like kind of win. He won. He fully did it. He fully won. And now he's vacationing. He's vacationing. I mean, there was like this sinister thing, like if you ever are tapped into some of these conspiracy narratives, you know, where the Illuminati power elite, et cetera, et cetera are integrating a population reduction program through chemtrails, et cetera, et cetera. Like, there's this whole, you know, conspiracy universe, which has powerful mythological and archetypal resonance as well. Its truth does not depend on its factual, its factuality. But that's a whole other thing I could talk about. But it has a resonance with that film, you know, that it's almost like that film is preparing us for that solution of kill off half the population so that we can continue living as we've lived before. And there's something almost endearingly childlike about Thanos. Very true. They spent so much time on that character, and they really dived in more than any other villain they've ever done in those superhero movies. So I think you might be on to something about them maybe preparing us in that way for that idea. I would love to see like the sequel where someone goes and reasons with him and he's like, look, Thanos, I know you meant well, but actually, you didn't change anything. They're just the population is just going to grow again, and everybody's traumatized. And that trauma is going to cause them to reenact all of the horrors that make them miserable. So it didn't work, man. You know, you're going to have to come up with another strategy and for Thanos, I mean, who means death, right? To go through an enlightenment process. I don't know, there's a lot, a lot. Hey, if any, if any, anyone's watching this, you know, I'm volunteering to consult the screenwriters. Because there's, there's so much potential in that story that would be like such, I like to say such a mind fuck for people who are expecting certain narrative arcs. Like it could be utterly, utterly novel for 99.9% of the people and, and make them come alive. Yeah, mind fucking in the positive sense of fuck, you know, like, like, wow, that was, that just ravaged my brain. There is so much potential in that as a cultural, cultural psychedelic. Yeah, that's totally not going to happen, though. They're going to go back in time, and then they're going to undo what he did, and then they're going to kill him, and then everyone lives happily ever after. Yeah, that's boring. I mean, there's, there's the gem of, of, of like the classic movie of the century here, if they go for it. Yeah, it would require some courage for them to go there.