#155: Creative Codex, Carl Jung, Misfit Artists, Tragic Heroes, and Creative Genius with MJDorian
52:37 Share

Kia ora, ni hao and hello. Welcome to the Chewy Journal Podcast. I'm your host, Camille Yang. Today I'm excited to welcome MJ Doran, the creative force behind one of my favorite shows, Creative Codex. He's not just a podcaster, but also a talented artist and composer.

In this episode, we explore the making of creative codecs, discuss how Carl Jung has shaped many creative journeys. We also talk about the fascinating minds featured in his shows, such as William Blake, Nikola Tesla, Kurt Cobain, and many more. Let's dive in.

Welcome, M.T. Dorey. I think I mentioned to you, I listened to almost every episode of your show. Wow. Thank you, Camillia. And thank you for inviting me on your show today.

I'm very much looking forward to our conversation. I know it's going to be fun. Yeah, I think I first found you from the Third Eye Drop podcast. Michael interviewed you on his show. Then I found you. Then I said, wow, everything you talk about is on my interest, especially Ko Yong.

And I listened to, I think early back to 2018. Is that right? Yeah, 2018 was when it started. It's true. So how did you start your show and what motivated you to do that? Right. I mean, I would say I was in a kind of transitional point in my life creatively, interestingly enough, where I had been doing film scoring for about a decade out of college. That became kind of my career.

And but I'd always been passionate about learning these ideas about, you know, how does creative genius work? Where does creativity come from? You know, how important, obviously, it is to humankind and everything.

And as I had my career going, which is going well, I also had these other inclinations, one of them being to work on pop music and create this pop music album. And so I ended up kind of pivoting

Because creatively, I found that at the time in film music, I wasn't being satisfied creatively. The projects that I was being hired for, at least at the time, it might be a little different now. They wanted very minimal things musically. They like, God forbid, you tried to write a melody somewhere that was, you know, on a clarinet or something or use an orchestra, which is, you know, my part of my passion.

And so what ended up happening is it was organic enough that this podcast ended up being this kind of avenue for me to explore some creative things like writing music for the episodes, which I still do. You know, after six years, every episode that is one of these major long form narratives, I write new music for at least a few key scenes. And that's one of my passions.

And so it became a creative outlet, but also an outlet for one of these very early and deep curiosities that I had about the creative mind. And why does why once in a generation does a figure come along almost in every medium and kind of reinvent how we see the world? And so that's been a longstanding passion and still is. And I think it informs the work.

Yeah. So how has Carl Jung's work influenced your own creative process? Sure. Yeah, there's this other passion that has to do certainly with Dr. Carl Jung's work and his theories and analytical psychology. I've always had an interest in psychology, but this passion

This moment that I stumbled on Jung, it was kind of like a revelation as an artist, because what ends up happening is that in Jung, you end up being given a framework with which to understand creativity, because Carl Jung himself was a creative, but his framework very much helps explain a lot of the

the inclinations and compulsions of artists, the origin point of artworks, why artists feel like they need to create this painting, and then of course the symbolism of the painting or the artwork itself.

Jung's framework helps explain those things in very logical ways, actually, despite people maybe picking apart some elements of his theories as being unscientific and things like this. So I found great value in it. But as far as how does it inform my own creative process, I would say I try not to let it influence me too much in my own creativity. It's more an analytical tool, I would say.

After the fact. And also helps me understand other artists' works, basically. Because when you're in the process of creating something, you don't want...

a formula to guide your work. It's like if, you know, a movie script was written by committee and there was, you know, those check boxes and, you know, this person said, well, we got to make sure we check off that box. And this person, wait, wait, no, we got to rewrite this scene, even though at first it seemed really brilliant. But, you know, we didn't check off this, this other box.

And so there's a danger in that, as powerful as his theories are. If you become taken by this kind of romantic way of seeing them, you don't want to pigeonhole yourself and then make your art predictable. I think that's one of the things that I see as an analytical tool, but not so much in a way of...

Trying to limit my own processes. Yeah. So before I read the red book, I didn't realize how Ko Yang is an artist. Yeah. So when you see all these paintings, oh, wow. Yeah. So like, wow, amazed by that. And I think Ko Yang also helped me to

face my dark side because a lot of times when my shadow there I'm too afraid to touch it and now I kind of learning I can turn this kind of dark energy to my creative power as well right right and there's tremendous power in those what we know we label as dark sides or just the unseen aspects of our personality of our psyche because they're not always negative though you know maybe they often are

And there's tremendous creative potential there because one of the ways I think of first engaging the unconscious and those parts of yourself that are hidden is through creative work. Whether it's creative writing, whether it's journaling, whether it's creating a painting, drawing, writing a song, writing poetry, music.

all those things have the potential to kind of draw out these unseen aspects of ourselves and recognize those aspects of ourselves as long as we respect

what might be coming out and don't judge it too harshly. Yeah, when I listened to you reading the Red Book, there are so many audiobooks about that, other people reading it, but I didn't feel very attracted to that. But for your one, yeah, I was like, wow, it's amazing with the music. And you also invited other artists to do the other characters' voices.

I wonder, can you describe more about the process of you creating the reading for the Red Book?

And I know you are doing a new one, right? Yeah. I mean, there's two, I guess, tracks of my experiences working with the Red Book. There's the initial episodes I did about it, which I believe are episodes 11 and 12 in my show Creative Codex, my podcast. And there I did do these long form readings of the book in between analyzing them and reading

part of what I saw was the great potential in them is that they were very cinematic in quality, which is an exceptional detail there because he wrote these and he had these experiences in 1913 into 1914. And

This was before movies. So, you know, you can't say he had just watched, you know, a Marvel movie and he was really into it. And he sat down and had a meditation. And then, you know, he met death on a cliff as as, you know, this this tornado of bodies was spinning in front of him. And it's like, no, these are all just aspects of the human mind at work here. And you could argue the soul that he's interacting with.

And so because I saw those things and they startled me, I was like, you know, this is perfect for dramatizing just a little bit, just to add a little more emotion, you know, putting some music under it, adding sound design to some of these very descriptive elements of the environment.

And so in those original episodes, I did that and people responded to it incredibly well. I was very surprised by the response because at the time I didn't know that there was this whole subculture of Jungians and Jungian enthusiasts. I was just doing it because I really enjoyed it. And since then, you know, there's continues to be very much I see a demand

for that kind of approach to the Red Book. And so on my Patreon, every month I do a reading of a passage or specifically a chapter, and then I add original music where appropriate and continue to do the sound design as well. And occasionally for certain characters,

call on someone to kind of provide a little more of like a dynamic quality of a different voice. Yeah. And I noticed that the William Blake one is coming up soon. Oh yeah. It just got released today actually. Okay, great. Yeah. Just put the finishing stamp on it last night and out the door it went. And, and so people have been very much demanding that I cover William Blake. And I was like, fine. All right. And then it,

It's proving to be a wonderful challenge and it's teaching me a lot also about the way he viewed the world. Speaking of William Blake, I watched his exhibition when I was living in London. Oh, no way. Yeah. And yeah, it's back to 2019. Was it in the Tate? Yeah, in Tate. Yeah. Yeah. Did you go? No, I just know that it was one of his major exhibitions was in Tate, but I'd love to hear about it. Yeah. So that was the first time I heard about William Blake.

Yeah, before I was so ignorant. But after watching that exhibition, I was like, wow, mind-blowing. And interestingly enough, last year I was in Germany and I have no idea what happened. I was very sober and I'm not on drugs, but I saw William Blake's famous painting called

on the sky and I couldn't move at that time. I was just nailed down. Then when I look up, I saw that I forgot the name of that painting. It's like a gold put to the finger. Yes. Yes. Like he's putting his fingers out and there's a compass that draws down from the sky. Yeah. It's called the ancient of days. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's true. I want to know more about your, your, what sounded like a visionary experience, but it's, it's a wonderful, um,

because the episode I just released has that image as its cover art. Wow, cool. Amazing. Very nice. So what was this that you experienced? You said you froze and you saw it in the sky? So back to the story. So I went to Leipzig. And the reason I went there was Nietzsche.

was teaching there. I'm a big Nietzsche fan, so I went there just to want to do some research. By the way, I was walking around the campus of University of Leipzig. I saw someone look exactly like Nietzsche walking towards me. Then that's the time I froze.

I have no idea. I couldn't move because when I see the person walking towards me, I want to give him a hug. Then I start to cry. I have no idea. I think my mind is just like my imagination is going too much. Yeah, that's a very scary moment. Like I froze. I couldn't move. And then I just feel like I need to kneel down and look up the sky. That's when I saw William Blake's image there.

I have no idea how long it went. I feel like it went like hours, but it's only like two or three minutes. Yeah, probably. Yeah, that scared me for a while. But yeah, last year was a lot of this kind of supernatural experience I couldn't explain.

But yeah, after I listen to your podcast and other people's podcasts or do some readings, I feel like it's not that abnormal. A lot of people experience the similar stuff. Yeah. No, that's fascinating. So the other thing about those kinds of experiences is that

it kind of shakes your sense of reality where you start to open up a bit, right? Where you start to, you either end up having a mental breakdown or you end up having kind of this spiritual opening where your mind opens to other possibilities. And maybe that, you know, our, and this is the way that Blake describes it. He calls it the abyss of the five senses, right?

The potential that these five senses limit and constrain our consciousness. And in those kinds of moments, something breaks or opens up and you end up seeing something more filled with splendor and a visionary experience and something unexplainable.

And yeah, those are really valuable moments, I think. Yeah, it reminds me of Nikola Tesla's one sentence, one quote. He said, if you want to know the secret of universe, think about vibration, frequency, or I forgot the other one. Because you did the Nikola Tesla's episode. Yeah. And I was wondering, what's your take on his paradox of his genius? Because a lot of people think he's crazy and...

How do you think his unique approach to invention and creativity can inspire the artist today? Right. No, I mean, you start to when you study these kinds of figures, you know, as I have for six years and you study them very closely and you understand their lives and their contexts and you even read their journals, which I think is in their correspondences, which is the most useful.

you start to see that one of the traits of a creative genius is to be an outlier in their society, is to be an individual and very much like there's a staunch individualism about them that they have accepted their role as a weirdo

Because in a way, you know, their use in society, that they're more useful to society when they're a weirdo, when they're confident in that strangeness, because it allows them to see everything fresh. It allows them to see everything without, you know, the biases that we tend to view the world in and the limits, the constraints. So, you know, someone like a Nikola Tesla,

Not only was he an immigrant to the United States, but he already before that was viewing the world in a very, very startlingly different way. He was already questioning his teachers in college and saying that he would improve upon the direct current motor of the time.

which was the dominant form of electricity. And of course his teachers pushed him aside and said that that's crazy, nobody can improve on it, it's already a perfect system. And then before he even came to the States, he had already had a visionary moment while he was on the beach with a friend. And after having tried to toil over this problem of what an alternating current motor would look like for a number of years,

in a very focused way, it came to him in a flash and it kind of appeared to him in its perfect form. And he was able to visualize its ins and outs and how it functioned. And then he took a stick and he drew it on the sand with his friend there observing. And he said, this is it. This is the alternating current motor that will change the world. And then after that, of course, you know, once he was able to get the funding and support for it, it did.

But this is one of the things you learned from someone like a Nikola Tesla and all of these figures, that they embrace their role as an outsider. You know, that comes with certain difficulties, of course. But it allows them to have insights and views of the world that other people can't. Have you also come across this?

feeling of being an outsider? Can you share some stories? I mean, sure. There's a wonderful quote I only recently heard from a filmmaker, Jonas Mikas. And he said, for an artist, it is a disaster to be normal. And it immediately makes me smile when I first read it. It made me smile because, you know, that certainly was my experience even growing up.

I was an immigrant to the United States, so I already had accepted my role as being slightly outside, having to pick up English from kindergarten and being made fun of for my name. These aren't huge deals, but they leave a mark. They force you to accept a certain position from an early age.

And then, you know, approaching high school, I started doing a lot of drawing and visual art. And so I thought that it would be better for me to pursue that track rather than just to go to my local high school, because my brother went to his local high school, our local high school at the time, and it wasn't working out for him. Yeah.

He just was not fitting in very well. And so my parents had, you know, the insight of mind to accept this possibility and ended up going to an art high school in Manhattan called the High School of Art and Design. And that place was just filled with misfits. It was all those students, you know,

in their local high schools would be like the weirdos and the outcasts because they would be like the artsy kid in the corner drawing during class. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that I accepted that role kind of organically from an early age. And, you know, I still embrace it. I try to. Yeah, I see a lot of artists, if you trace back to their original stories, they all find their talent when they were very little.

Yeah, like Alexandra McQueen. Yeah, you did a series of his story. Before I just think, oh, he's a very unique designer. But once I know how his upbringing and how he made his way to become the most famous designer in the world. It's a very touching story. Yeah, no, it's an amazing story. And there are, you know, a lot of examples of artists

people finding their talent early on.

But there's also, you know, quite a few very notable ones of people starting kind of late or in their teenage years, just to give hope to those people out there. Yeah, true. Or like, well, it's too late, too late for me. You know, Jimi Hendrix, for one example, you know, one of the greatest guitarists of all time. I say that personally as a guitarist myself. He only picked up the guitar at around the age of 14 or 15. That was when he got his first guitar.

Before that, the only thing with his experiences of music were he played flute in school. Like, that's it. And within that span, he died at 27. Within that span of just 12, 13 years, he was the greatest guitarist alive, without a doubt. For anybody that viewed him in concert, from Paul McCartney to Eric Clapton being in his concerts, they were like, this guy is just on a different planet.

And it just goes to show you, you know, there are instances where people discover an early talent, but there are also just as many, like in the case of Vincent van Gogh, they go through life, you know, living how they can live.

And then they kind of stumble on something and they kind of pull up a root and that root leads them to just this entire, like this vein of gold in the earth that is this hidden talent of theirs or propensity or potential for an enormous talent that they didn't know they had. And I think that can happen a lot too. Yeah, true. Yeah. I think when I was little, I'm,

super passionate about drawing. My mom still keep a lot of drawing

of me when I was like five or six I draw I always draw a lonely person lonely just one person in the nature yeah just one person I play music or writing something in the nature yeah I feel like oh I was such a little kid how did I know like why I didn't draw like house or tree or flower like the other children's too so yeah now I

look back, I found interesting. I don't know what I mean, but I just finding interesting. I like this solitude. That is interesting. That's unique. I, for one, remember drawing a lot of violence, a lot of when I was in like junior high and such, a lot of body parts exploding, people beating each other up, you know, blood flying all over the place.

It was at the time just whatever I guess attracted me, but I was also drawing anatomy and people and such. But something about physical violence was drawn to that. So yeah, everybody is curious about these things. Yeah. Have you analyzed why you draw that? Do you figure out what it is or it doesn't matter that much?

I don't know. I think there is naturally an inclination in children to explore those darker aspects of life, especially when they aren't confronting them in their day to day. You know, there's of course, you could argue the instances of somebody, you know, who's in a horrible situation in their home life and, you know,

being abused and or seeing those kinds of things happening to someone they love and then they express it in art but in other instances like I could say you know just watching my daughter who's going to be 10 soon there was a point in time about last year where she started drawing like a lady who was like a ghost lady and she was covered in bleeding wounds and she was holding a knife and then there was like a dead body next to her like that was bleeding out

And she would like routinely draw this. And as an artist myself, I'm like, oh, that's really crazy. She must be just exploring this as kind of a new and edgy kind of dark thing. And then, of course, you know,

had to talk about it with some people and they were like, oh yeah, you know, just around that age, some kids just start to become interested in, you know, these darker subjects. And it was true, like a friend of hers in the schoolyard would show her like a crazy, gory picture that she drew. And then they would share, you know, oh, look at the one I drew. And so you can see it happening that way.

Yeah, interesting. It reminds me of a couple of short stories I wrote when I was in primary school, about 10 or 11 years old. I wrote a lot of murder stories. Oh, yeah. See? Funny enough, my language teacher, she thought, oh, you got some talent in writing. So she helped me to publish those stories. So now you can see, okay, oh, wow.

Yeah, children in that age can be very dark. Yeah.

And I have no idea where does all those thoughts come from. Maybe from TV or newspaper, but it still amazed me. Like, why I got that idea in that age? I guess it's a curiosity about, you know, the morbid side of life. It kind of comes with its negative associations. But the further in time you look, even as recently as the 1800s,

death was a very near and present part of everyday life. People would be dying from illnesses constantly that you knew, and you'd see it around you, whether it's just a loved one that recently passed. We weren't as shielded from death as we are now and decay as we are now. You mentioned Jimi Hendrix died 27 years ago.

And the recent episode you did with Kurt Cobain also joined the 27th club. The 27th club, sure. Very prestigious. Apparently very famous and prestigious club. Jim Morrison. Amy Winehouse. Amy Winehouse. Basquiat, very close to 27, around 20, I think just turned 28 around the time. But yeah, it's a strange thing. It's almost like there's a certain point that you push the human body to

to an extreme around that time. And it's around that age that it just gives out and either psychologically or physically, the body just gives up and says, that's it. I can't take it anymore. And

something turns, you know? When I was in my 27s, I had two panic attacks. I thought, oh, I'm going to join the club. It's wonderful. Although I didn't do any famous work yet. But yeah, it's just my mind is just making the stories. I think around that age, I visited Seattle to see Kurt Cobain, the Nevada's museum. Oh, cool. What's your opinion about him? Because his lyrics are very interesting.

And when I watched his documentary, when I saw all his notes and journals, I found there's a lot of symbolism and personal references in his lyrics. I wonder what was your interpretation of those from his creative process? Yeah, I mean...

Everything about his musicianship I find completely fascinating. And his lyrics are just stunningly original. You know, he had definitely a taste for kind of a morbid twist in certain phrasing using, you know, these contrasts of affection and love with like death and decay kind of contrast or illness. And

he definitely didn't shy away from obviously the darker emotions and twists in the lyrics and stuff like that. But also his sense of melody was completely his own. And in that series that I did on him on my Patreon, I go through a number of his songs and I analyze them where you have the chords on the piano and then you play the melody against them. And

to be able to logically create a melody that doesn't match up with the chords in the same key or that uses what would technically be very advanced concepts in music theory just shows that he had a very innate and highly developed sense for his melodies. And I would go so far as to say he was one of the greatest melody writers in rock music.

because some of them are just so haunting. I mean, in famous songs like Smells Like Teen Spirit, if you just isolate the melody by itself because we're so used to hearing it and hear the chords against it, it's just such a perfect balance of like tension and release in the notes he's jumping to versus the chords on the bottom. And it's genius. It really is. And so there's a lot in there that one can dig into and explore and

in some ways because the songs are so ubiquitous, we have to kind of set aside our familiarity with them and kind of try to look at them anew, like just isolate the lyrics by themselves and see what value you can find in them, you know, or isolate the melodies and things like that. Do you consider him as a tragic figure? Because for me, I always want to, yeah, if I can write something,

satisfied I could die next minute so I always feel like yeah Kurt Cobain yeah his life is a legend I didn't feel sad for his his gone because I you know when I was in Guns N' Roses concert when I was in

When I saw EXO become very big and his voice is broken, I feel like, oh God, why are you still doing that? It's not even reaching the average standard. I just feel sad when I saw artists, especially very well-known artists, become decaying. Right, there's like the slow fade. Yeah, I mean, it's tough as a singer, especially because...

You know, you have a living instrument and that instrument, you know, inside of your body, your vocal cords, your throat is affected by every single thing you do in your day to day life.

And then on top of that, it's affected by something you can't control, which is just age. And as you get older, your voice starts to get lower in pitch. And these are one of the struggles of singers. And no matter how good of a singer you are, there will come a point in time where you realize you're not as good as you used to be and you can't go back there.

And that's a depressing moment, of course, because you can't get a new instrument. You know, it's not like you're a violinist and your instrument is crap now and you can just go spend a good amount of money on a new one. So I completely understand that, you know, something like that happened with with Chris Cornell as well, a singer of Soundgarden.

And you could tell in the last few years of his life, his voice just wasn't there anymore. And he committed suicide. Unfortunately, he took his own life. But I'm sure there were other factors, obviously. But these are the weird things that one faces as a vocalist, basically, right? Yeah. Before, when I heard Hemingway killed himself, I feel like, how...

A writer wrote Old Man and the Sea, like has such a resilience, will kill himself. I couldn't understand. But later, like just as you said, you probably lost the ability to be the peak self. But when you lost that, you probably feel the difference and you couldn't stand for it. I mean, yeah, from the outside, there's definitely this strange romanticism to death.

and to somebody taking their own life, right? It's a powerful narrative because it immediately paints the person as almost like a tragic hero in our mind. And we're very taken by these narratives, you know, when we read them and we see them playing out before us. And the more brilliant somebody is,

Then when they take their own life, tragically, it's almost like the more we love them or feel the need to hold them to that much higher of a regard because there's something in that tragedy that crystallizes them in a very strange way.

And I don't know if that's a healthy thing. No. Because everybody, everybody, you know, has more work to give. I mean, Kurt Cobain, even just give us another 10 years, man. I mean, this guy was so untouchable at that point in his career. You know, Alexander McQueen, just, you know, give us 50 more years. You got it in you. He was still brilliant up to, you know, the last year. His...

Both of those people were serious drug addiction issues that really complicated things. So on top of clinical depression and emotional issues that require very deep therapy, they're also wrestling with very serious addictions. I hesitate to encourage the romanticization of someone taking their life because it's

It's true though, we do it, but all of these figures, I lament the works that they still had to give people. So based on all the theories you did with the artists for their creative progress, so what's the advice you will give artists who are facing some dark moment, like they feel like they couldn't do more and they couldn't reach the level they want?

Now, are you talking about that they couldn't... I'm just trying to figure out the specific framing. So you mean that there's a personal emotional struggle going on in their lives or that there's something in their...

their chosen field of art that they feel like they'll never attain that kind of success again. Yeah, we can. That kind of thing. Yeah, answer these two parts. Yeah, I'm very interested in these two parts. Sure. I mean, often one leads to the other. You know, it's like when you start to feel like you're fading in a sense, maybe you fall into, you know, a depression and then you...

try to cope with that depression with alcohol or with substance abuse, you know, certainly these kinds of things have been shown to happen to a lot of people. But in terms of, you know, the idea of like an artist, maybe achieving something early on, which happens and then feeling that they're always haunted by that, that, that definitely happens too. And the thing to remember is that there's,

there's a flux to life and, you know, there's, there's the ups and downs of people's interest in your work and disinterest in your work and what you just created, you know, a month ago versus what you created three years ago. That thing in three years ago may have clicked with people and been very successful because just society was calling for that at the time.

But the thing that you just created that you really love, that you think is even better, might not click so much. And that's not your fault. And that's just the function of producing work that is being released into the public. So there's that aspect of it. But then if we're also talking about a more personal side of somebody realizing maybe that they aren't as good anymore, or why aren't they producing stuff that they're really proud of?

I think that takes some soul searching in that case. Maybe it's time to pursue a different medium. Maybe it's time to change paths. It's kind of similar to when I mentioned that I was in film scoring. That was my career for 10 years. And there came a point where I wasn't frustrated, but I just wasn't satisfied with the work.

I could have continued, you know, maybe I would still be in it now and I'd be miserable and I'd have alcohol abuse issues or something, which isn't anything to laugh at, but I mean, it's real life. And but it goes it speaks to the point of at that point in time, I said, well, I feel like it would be really valuable for me to do some pop music. And so I did this pop music album. And then shortly thereafter, I started doing this podcast and

So perhaps it's time to change something about where your creativity is being directed. And don't be afraid of that. Yeah, like Bob Dylan. He didn't care much about the public's opinion. He just changed from a country singer to a rock star.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. And sometimes people hate you for it. I know. Sometimes they say, oh, you sold out. Or with, you know, a band like Metallica, when they went from their early thrash metal albums to the Black album, and then in the 90s did the two albums Load and Reload.

you know, they're hardcore fans and maybe even some of the casual fans are like, no, what are you doing? You know, you can't, you can't change. You're supposed to stay exactly the same. You know, you're not human. Yeah. Do you think the tarot card reading also helps you when you are in doubt or you finding your direction? Oh, that's a, that's a, yeah, that's a fun idea. I mean, I,

In my experience with the tarot, it's perfect for moments where you really need to hear an answer. It's perfect for moments where you're very emotionally tangled up and you're not sure what to do or which direction to go or what the answer is in a given situation.

And this isn't implying that there's some kind of invisible network of forces that caused the tarot to give you the correct answer. Maybe there is. But the function of what also is happening is that the cards have enough symbolism and narrative in them that the answer that's presented to you when you ask them a specific question like that

your mind and your unconscious is going to find something in there that it needs as an answer that it's going to find the meaning that it's looking for and it's often a meaning or an answer that was difficult for you to arrive at logically you know with your frontal lobes because it's somewhere in the unconscious and so so the cards will draw out that particular realization

through this indirect way. Yeah. It feels like every time I do the reading or toast the coin to decide something, the moment I do it, I've already knew the answer. It's always inside me. I feel like I just need someone or something just to confirm my decision is right. Yeah. That's true too. Yeah. I agree. Yeah. Sometimes we're,

at a fork in the road but deep inside if we were to take a moment and like really kind of push aside the curtains and the bramble and kind of see ourselves we know the answer we know the right answer. Have you ever like dreamed of something you can turn that into a song or story or creative idea? I mean of course yeah if you pay attention to

you know, those moments where your unconscious can seep through a bit, then everybody has those kinds of things. So like, there's these these beautiful moments in between when you're waking and sleeping, called the hypnagogic state, which artists like Salvador Dalio almost like revered as a source of inspiration. And so in those moments, a lot of things can come through. Some of it is complete nonsense.

But then other elements, specifically if you're wrestling with a problem or have a specific question, something might come to you during that in-between state. It could be a fully completed work of art. It could be a melody. It could be a piece of music. It could be the beginning verse of a poem. And then when you write it down, you realize like, oh, this just flows into a full poem. It just takes a bit of listening and trusting that,

There's messages coming through. And so as an example, you know, there've been moments I take a nap daily. It was so much so that I've become a biphasic sleeper where if I have even if I have a good night of sleep, if I don't get my 15 minute afternoon nap, I feel like a zombie, like my body needs it.

But while I'm falling asleep for my nap, occasionally there'll be something that comes to me. And so a few times, like one time it was a piece of music like on the piano that I'd never heard before. And I thought it was so compelling that I kind of I was like, OK, I'll get up a little bit, ruin my falling asleep moment. And I hummed it into my voice memo app.

as a melody and then I put the phone down went back to sleep and then when I woke up with the alarm I was like there was some kind of melody what was that melody I couldn't remember it but I picked up my phone I listened to it and I was like ah and I went over to the piano and it became a piece of music you know it really did I end up using it sometimes in the show I always feel the nap is such a magic thing every time I take a nap afternoon and uh

Something just in my mind is a lot of creative ideas, which if I go for sleep in the night, maybe in the morning I couldn't remember anything. But all the ideas, like dreams during my nap, is so clear. I have no idea why that happened. Yeah, no, totally. I love naps. I think everyone in the world should...

have a siesta, as they call it in Spanish, every day where, you know, yeah, around the time of noon or early afternoon, take a break from work, take a break from the world, and you take a nap. And I think there's a great function to that, that

In the Western world, we kind of have pushed out the window to our own detriment. Yeah, in China, when I was in school and the teacher encouraged us to take a nap. And I heard from my friends working in China, they also have the nap break.

So a lot of people, they have their desk, but there was a hidden bed underneath. So you can just pull out and then have a nap. They come back. It's very good. Yeah. It's a great idea. I think, I think it should come back. Bring, bring back the naps. That's my, that's the,

That's also what I'm running on for president. That's my, what does it say? Not my standing, but it's my campaign slogan. Bring back the naps. Tim Ferriss always asks the guests if you have a jammed billboard, what message you want to put it on. I think that should be. Campaign slogan, yeah. And you mentioned Salvador Dali. I got a tattoo, I think you can see.

The Dali's clock. I see it. Yes. He's a very creative person. I wonder what lessons you get from his creative process you can share to my audience. Yeah, sure. So Salvador Dali is kind of this endlessly entertaining figure in 20th century art history.

And in him, we see this bizarre dichotomy playing out, which is one as a brilliant artist, one of one of the core kind of features of his artwork and his approach is a very high reverence for the unconscious and kind of Freud's view of the psyche. And because of that, you know, he would engage these hypnagogic states we're talking about between waking and sleeping and

and tried to kind of encourage imagery from that state, from his unconscious, that he would then create into paintings and artworks. And to his credit, I think one of the wisest things he would do is that he would refuse to censor any of that kind of imagery, no matter what it presented to him. And he would just create the artwork fresh and follow that imagery through, even if he didn't understand what it meant.

So sometimes, you know, that would result in images that were very sexualized, other images that were very violent and images, even one that caused him a lot of controversy at the time with the fellow surrealists in Paris. It was a painting he did of Hitler that was, I believe it was, see, this is already a controversial image. It was viewing Hitler from behind and Hitler was masturbating. And

The fellow surrealists, they were obviously very anti-authoritarian, anti-fascist. And so they said, you cannot paint this. You can't have this anywhere in our galleries. This is sacrilegious to everything we believe in. And then he refused to censor that part of himself, of his unconscious. He said, well, this is my unconscious. And we're all about things from those deep recesses of the brain.

So he disagreed with them on that point. And I think that's to his credit. I think he was right on that front. But then this other part of him in this dichotomy is his public persona as this very exaggerated caricature of the artist, which in many ways led to his success in places like the United States in the 1940s, where like the idea now that television was around and newspapers were starting to talk gossip and everything.

The United States was a place perfectly ready-made for celebrity to kind of blossom forth in the 1940s. And so Dali noticed that when he would talk about bizarre things or when a reporter would ask him, what's the inspiration for this painting? The weirder and the crazier response he had, the more press he would get, the more people would come to his gallery showings.

And so it fed him to become this kind of caricature of the creative genius artist to an extreme, I think. But the fact that these two dichotomies play out in his story and his character, I think there's a lot to learn from there. Hmm.

His story also reminds me of another Italian painter, Caravaggio. He's also very rebel against the traditional way of featuring the Bible stories. And he's very used a new way to do the contrast. I forgot the terminology, how to describe his painting. Oh, chiaroscuro. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. When I was in Italy, when I saw his painting, I was just like,

burst out of my tears. It's intense. It's very intense visuals. And I know his tragic stories because he needs to flee around the country and live a very poor life. Yeah, I definitely think we'll do an episode or a series about Caravaggio. Oh, that would be great. That's my way of giving you a hint. Please do it. It's not.

Right, right. Yeah, because I've heard a few little passing nuggets about his life and felt like, huh, okay, there's something to dig into there. It sounds like he certainly has a good story with him. And you did a lot of female artist stories, like Emily Dickinson and...

Maria. Yeah, Marina Abramovich. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. And then another one who made the very controversial painting. Was it Leonor Fini? Maybe. Perhaps the French, Italian, French artist. And the very last I'll know from his peers. Yeah. People didn't mention her anymore. Right. Right. Yeah. She was, she was a contemporary of Salvador Dali and she,

I would say now, knowing her work closely as I do, I prefer her to Dali in her approach, in just the personality and the person that she was, which we can get into or not. But yeah, no, she was a brilliant, brilliant mind too. So, of course, the idea of this concept of creative genius is

you know, it arises in every medium. You know, it doesn't, it's not limited to visual art or writing or filmmaking. It just kind of crops up everywhere. And that's the beauty of, you know, trying to understand what is creative genius, which is, you know, one of the motivations of the show is

is that you end up being able to investigate and explore all these diverse mediums. You know, Emily Dickinson wrote poetry. You know, Salvador Dali was specifically a painter. We have Nikola Tesla, who was in electrical engineering. We have, you know, Frida Kahlo was a painter. Then we have someone like Dr. Carl Jung, who was a psychologist, but

I think seeing him as a creative genius gives a lot of insight into how he viewed the mind and why.

When you're doing all these episodes, are one of those figures that inspire your daughter as well? Like who is she look up to what she wants to become? I'll see. I'll talk to her. Maybe it will inspire something. Right now she's very much into animals because she's in a zoo camp. And so every day it's always something new about animals and animals.

and all that stuff so maybe I'll kind of like introduce someone like a Jane Goodall to her nice to pivot her into a possible idol like you're talking about to have okay I think our time is up it's very nice to

talk with you and ask you so many questions that I have from listening to your show. Yeah, Camelia. Oh my goodness. This was a lot of fun. Thank you so much for taking the time and for having such wonderful and thoughtful questions. It's really fun time talking to you. Thank you.