Episode 32 - Storytelling at Sundance

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before we start the show this week we've got a couple of announcements to share with you about upcoming events you know we love the podcast and we love talking to you on twitter and through email about what's happening in your life and on your journey of faith but it's nowhere near as powerful to us as going to different cities and meeting our listeners face to face and we've got some really exciting opportunities to do that coming up this year but first i want to tell you about our series of conferences called the liturgist gathering we listen to your feedback about belong especially from those of you who wanted to go to belong but couldn't make it because belong didn't happen close enough to you or because the tickets were too expensive and we're determined that this year we're going to get together with as many of you as we possibly can so here's how we're going to do that the liturgist gathering is happening in four cities geographically distributed across the us our goal is to be a reasonable drive or affordable flight from as many of you as we can be we're upping the size of the liturgist gathering from a hundred with belong to 500 people per city with the literature allergies gathering so instead of 200 people a year having a chance to go this will let 2 000 people go and scaling up the event a little bit uh also lets us offer a much more affordable ticket so this is not going to be an expensive event like belong was of course there's no telling who might show up from the liturgist podcast or the liturgies we've put on but you know that i'll be there michael will be there lisa gunger will be there we'll have the honey badger there and uh there's no telling who else of our friends might come as well also so you don't have to take off time from work or take very little time off from work this is going to be a friday evening plus saturday event so you know not having to miss work and if you're a minister you'll be able to catch a late flight back home and be at church sunday morning so we're trying to just make this as easy as possible now finally we can announce dates we have some dates to announce dallas coming to dallas april 29th through 30th and uh the tickets will go on sale next week denver is going to be september 16th and 17th and that's just a few days after my book launch so we'll probably do some special stuff for that and uh we don't have dates for chicago and los angeles yet but those should get announced in the next couple of weeks if you're interested in going to the liturgist gathering go to the liturgist.com gathering to learn more and you can also sign up to be notified by email about when tickets go on sale or dates get locked in i don't want to oversell this but most of the events we do sell out and at the low ticket price we're offering for the liturgist gathering i expect these tickets to go pretty fast so if you're not on the email list and if you know if you wait too long i'm just worried you might not get a chance to attend so go to liturgist.com gathering and sign up to be notified via email of course that's not all we've got going on this week in phoenix in los angeles we're doing our lost and found event that's a liturgy style event like the stuff we have on itunes and it's a story of you know doubt and reconciliation with god through the lenses of science art and faith it's beautiful it features music by gunger and the brilliance and if you want to go don't wait because there's just a handful of tickets left for the second showing in la the first showing is sold out and in phoenix all the vip tickets are sold out so you can't do the vip event anymore and the regular tickets are going fast so if you were thinking i don't know if i'm gonna go or not you need to make your decision you need to buy your ticket uh especially in phoenix um we'd love to see you there and you know we're driving from l.a to phoenix la people if l.a sells out hop in a car you know you can you can uh caravan with us back to los angeles uh but we'd love to see you at lost and found and then also the liturgists are going to be a part of gunger's one wildlife tour this won't look anything like the liturgist gathering or lost and found it'll be a gengar show a rock show great music you know thunder's music it's phenomenal it'll be a dash of science mike stuff as part of that show and then we'll have a liturgist podcast style q a after the concert so it's going to be really exciting we're hitting a ton of cities [Music] in the southwest primarily i don't get as far as texas and we'd love to see you there if you'd like to know more about lost and found or that one wildlife tour just go to the liturgist.com events they'll all be listed there or you can go to our facebook page at facebook.com the liturgist and just click on the tour dates tab and all the events will be there links for tickets will be there everything you need to know we would love to see you in the next few months at an event and just go to our website to find out more welcome to the liturgist podcast everybody michael and i were recently in park city utah for the sundance film festival we were there to receive the spirit of wind rider award from some of our friends at the wind writer institute for our work on this show i'm pretty excited about that because i can now introduce myself as an award-winning podcaster at parties a distinction that's frankly new to me the only trophy i've ever won was in the seventh grade but anyway we figured if we're going to spend a week in the mountains with the world's most talented filmmakers and storytellers we should do an episode on storytelling and to that end our friends at the wind rider institute set us up with a recording space that was overlooking this beautiful vista of the mountains and it had a balcony and there was two feet of snow on it the whole week and it was just a gorgeous space to talk about how we tell stories we were really lucky to be able to sit down with several of the filmmakers who were at the festival so this episode is sort of a collection of some of the conversations that we had at sundance film festival and we're starting it off with a conversation that we had with jacob and hayden marshall who you actually heard from on the last episode but we really enjoyed the conversation we hope you do as well [Music] so we're here at sundance we've been talking about what to put on the podcast because we've seen so many things michael said something i disagree with wholeheartedly so i'm going to ask him to repeat it oh boy well we were talking about how specifically should we talk about the films on the podcast i was like i don't know that most people aren't going to want to hear about the specifics the conversation don't get me wrong there's been an interesting conversation here after the films and everything but especially conversation about films that i haven't seen i'm not interested in and i was being a little facetious but i said i barely am interested in discussion about the films i have seen you ever watched the bonus content on dvds no really it has to be i have to be really intrigued to watch the bonus features most films kind of think they're made to speak for themselves and you vietnamese agree i vehemently well no it's just like i almost like a discussion about the film or behind the scenes more than the film itself which i wonder if that's because i care more about crafting stories and hearing them [Laughter] you know what i mean like i'm just always desperate to learn how to tell a story better and so i have trouble watching films or reading books without deconstructing the craft behind it and what worked and how it was effective it's very difficult for me to sit with a narrative piece of storytelling without dissecting it for my own gain as a storyteller what about musicians and albums behind the scenes i would actually if it's a band i like i would love to know behind the scenes you don't have access to that really very often so i feel like for a lot of filmmakers and storytellers especially if you don't have a lot of resource and can't go to film school those behind the scenes become the how-to and i hate behind the scenes of records really i just want to hear the record i just want to sit with the record that's weird how you relate more to filmmakers than music well i i tell linear stories on stage with spoken vacation or i write stories but i tell a scene by scene narrative that is more rigid and definitive in its character and nature than an album or even a painting they all tell stories yeah the storytelling in a song first of all you only have like five minutes and that's including instrumental breaks and extended words and like you'd have very few words to tell a story with yeah so i go to stories in novels and films primarily to feel i think not to analyze i when i feel like that newtown documentary last night and i feel the pain of gun violence afflicted against families i internalize that emotion and then out of what i feel in life is where music is born so i need the feeling more than i need the knowledge of how that was done in fact i don't want knowledge that's going to limit any feeling as i watched that film and as i was emotionally devastated by its content they would they'd be interviewing a person who's looking directly at the camera and as they were talking sometimes the screen would go dark in this cinematic effect and i went oh what a great way to cover an edit that's what i thought too right but i mean are they doing the same timing every time where's the audio file ending before they come in the audio segment what and like is it consistent to have a style guide for that and i lost that whole loop i did too i didn't think it was great i didn't like that because that's what made me think too made me think of the edit did you guys get that yeah and and that's an interesting thing to think about for a second is when the creative act gets in its own way like when does the craft itself actually prohibit you from encountering the emotion or the insight or the the wisdom or the the breakthrough that the character is supposed to to go through and realize i feel like the moment i learned what the willing dispension of disbelief is it ruined me and so when i watch a film like uh the revenant which is one of the most beautifully shot films cinematic films i've ever seen they use only natural lighting in this movie i take a movie like that and i receive it as a gift however because i know what the willing suspension of disbelief is i so frequently can step out and and get caught up on the creative process of all these people that i know that worked on this project together and think wow that's how they did that and oh wow i would i would probably have done that a little bit different or that shot and yeah like seeing how the sausage is made yeah it's just like so i feel like anytime i'm experiencing film um now it's both for me i'm receiving the gif but i'm also learning and critiquing and sometimes i wish i could turn one of them off yeah but i can't i think that's part of why i don't usually want to watch extras or anything i like to keep it as magic as possible yeah what about that um newer high definition tvs and stuff though when it gets that like weird effect what is that called again you talk about the high frame rate stuff yeah but it's 120 hertz no there's like an effect that some people like it's streamy no it almost looks too real too real too real yeah but like and slow camera yeah it just looks weird almost like a soap opera yeah yeah yeah that for me is a real thing like when i was even in some of the newer theaters with like the ultra high definition digital like the hobbit the last hobbit movie yep i felt like i was on the set and not in a cave or whatever and you didn't like that i did not like that no i understand yeah i get that well in a way all of these things are sitting above the the core or fundamental question of why do stories work you know these are effects of production but what is it about a story that has been with us for our entire history as a species as an artifact of something that we trade back and forth or build an entire belief system or series of customs around i don't even think about what am i as a human being you can't take story out of that without story what are you you're just a bag of carbon with you know story is what gives back the bag of carbon humanity it's i have a life i have a family i have i'm experiencing time in a sequential order where i have a life that i can think of like my life a past a present a future that's all story a goal obstacles that stand in the way of achieving that goal so i don't see a story is not extractable from human beings because we are story that's literally true in the brain the your consciousness is the set of loops in your brain that model reality creating a story from those events so that's why storytelling's interesting to me because you are constantly telling yourself a story and the way the brain composes the narrative in literary terms is we're the protagonists of our own story at all times and our brains have a natural tendency to cast anyone that opposes us in any way as the antagonist it's an automatic filtering function of the brain that's related to why story is so powerful and sweeps us into other places because it's the only form of information conveyance that lets us escape our own perspective and explore the lens of another person's conscious experience it's the only it literally when you listen to a story or watch a story in film your brain puts yourself in the shoes of that protagonist your sensory cortexes make all the sights and sounds that you either read or watch real your documented bias to emulate the beliefs and behaviors of a protagonist you identify with unconsciously so if you watch a film where the protagonist cheats on his wife and you really identify their protagonist you might be more likely to cheat on your wife but on the other hand if you see a protagonist do something truly heroic you're actually more likely to be heroic and even the information if a protagonist especially in literature but also in film discovers a piece of information your brain treats it like you discovered that information yourself and what you'll find is unconsciously in the weeks following the consumption of a story people will pass on that information if it's their own insight while ever knowing that happened it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourself or feeling connected to the people that we love better help will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that 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but different stories about reality i mean i think some of them are are stories practices attached to stories and practices attached to stories uh i'm not to the point anymore where i say that there is any objective means in which christianity is a better story than some other faith you know what i mean i don't universally hold that i don't project that's a fat claim to me i can't make a faith-based fact claim i know that christianity is a story that compels me and compels a lot of people i know that told well the christian story pragmatically drives really positive beliefs and behaviors but i i think a lot of people identify so closely with those stories it becomes such a core part of how they view themselves that's the reason the clashes in these stories creates such intense conflict because on the two sides of this story uh on the israel-islam conflict on each side they're both the protagonist and the other is the antagonist it's it's that clean from those two perspectives and that's just how brains tell stories i wonder what it's doing to our brains in in how much more sophisticated a lot of our stories are becoming more and more so with not having such clean protagonists and antagonists and so clean good guy bad guy when you consume a story like that though it's like listening to a particularly creative indie record you're having to use more of your neocortex to digest that information and as reality becomes more complex itself there are some people that are leaning into it that but i also think you have this retreat this craving for simple stories that not only shows up in film and literature and media pop music pop you know summer blockbusters those kinds of things but also shows up in ideologies that voluntarily surrender information for the sake of simplicity and so there's this retreat i think the anti-scientism movement which is common in many contexts not just in the conservative religious right as science makes reality more ambiguous and more complicated it becomes overwhelming it disrupts the brain's ability to tell story even a story to itself and therefore the brain picks a more palatable story even if it's not an accurate story so i saw this study everything i say i started with i saw this study i had this data at this point it feels that it gives me a warmth my hair yeah i know we're about to go somewhere good so they were they were testing how people absorb information and they invited people in three groups and before they came into the room they got blood drawn and 20 and then they would come into a room and three things happen one they were given a list of health detriments to cigarette smoking in the second group they were shown a narrative where a child lost their parent to lung cancer from smoking the third group that information was inserted the facts and figures were inserted into the narrative from the second group then they left they had blood drawn again and then they had an opportunity to give some percentage of their twenty dollars their participation fee to anti-tobacco charity basically what they found was on average there was a a change in oxytocin the cuddle hormone in their bloodstream and it was the least in group one and the most in group three and not only that the change in the oxytocin level in their bloodstream predicted the amount of money they would give to the charity so if they had a big swing in oxytocin they were likely to give all twenty dollars they had a moderate swing they'd get five or ten they had none they gave nothing so this the story the emotional connection the facts and figures orange now i'm orange should be enough it it should make the case but it doesn't it's only the story when someone makes emotional connection they see the world through someone else's eyes that it changes their behavior there is this admirable movement right now for people to study the methodology of storytelling but having worked in advertising and having watched politics and even observing religion over human history this power to influence people through story it can do great things but it can also be used in horrible ways to justify warfare one story we sell today is that we're in a post-racial society and we're all we're all equal and we're all fine and that's a very pleasant story if you're white if you're white and i can see why people and why in my past i've elected to hold on to that story but that story causes immense harm to millions of people in society today and so i've i've started to wonder especially being an unapologetic relativist how do we know when the story we're telling is a good one yeah that's why i think exposing yourself to other stories finding ways of engaging with stories other than your own is actually somewhat of a moral imperative and just look at history and how how many stories have killed how many millions of people i mean from the mongols to alexander the great believing he was the god that needed to spread around every empire had a story the germans the nazi germans had a story about germany in their minds that they were telling that they they had this like god-given right the explorers of america had this god-given story that we have this manifest destiny that we're bringing the truth of god's word into these barbaric places and and what happens is genocide and also i mean the worst things are because you have stories unchecked that that turn into monstrosities but i think when you start finding yourself hearing the stories of others that are not in your tribe finding the humanity of others from a different perspective we were just talking you mentioned the racial thing i mean it wasn't long ago that i like my black friends and they would talk about how the police treated them differently i thought there was probably something to that but i didn't i didn't really i was like but you know the police are mean to me sometimes too i mean i've had interactions with i feel like that's a jerk police officer but then when i actually saw one time directly how this police officer treated one of my black friends and i was like what and then you start seeing all the i mean over the last few years you can't avoid seeing it in the news how these stories that are actually happening if you're not if you don't see these stories you don't feel these stories it's easy to get insulated into like i grew up in a town or you know i had a couple black friends and they seemed to be fine i never think i ever got picked on in my experience everybody's kind of on the equal playing field but you have to find stories that are outside of your experience and outside of your tribe just to keep moving forward is that maybe a little bit of the difference between art and entertainment because i think sometimes we we seek out stories to escape reality and that's fine like that's part of existence it's part of how we we cope and we've been entertained and even felt the warm fuzzies and and been enlightened in some some way through entertaining content but art and storytelling a lot of times is uncomfortable something that stabs us right in the heart and opens up a part of us that we didn't know was closed i think that's that's why something like sundance is important because you you don't really come to sundance to be entertained in quite the same way that you would normally go to emotionally devastated and depressed yeah it's been my primary response to these films yeah these beautiful these beautiful segments of reality showing me new things while i want to lie down forever or not beautiful segments of reality yeah some have not been the appropriate words not been beautiful i mean how many times we said this week i hate human beings many times many many times and i've seen beauty in everyone hmm i have really and i think that's i don't think yeah yeah i mean like no that's true even the new town one new town there's so so ugly what happened but there's something about the fact that everybody's sitting there and everybody in the film knows that it's ugly and laments it together that's a goodness and you see the goodness of humanity and hating it and you can see the light arise in the darkness of standing up against that evil and there's something powerful about experiencing that together you know and and i think in many ways we have become desensitized to some of the harsher aspects of our reality part of that is the way that those stories get told as news or as as fact they get reported unemotionally as fact and so to be able to process something like that that is in our collective conscious as a nation to acknowledge that it happened through a story like that allows us to you know share in that kind of processing together the news is an interesting thing to think of in terms of storytelling because they do a shitty job intentionally intentionally yeah because you're not yes you're not supposed to impose your emotional reaction into the fact at least that's historically the tradition of the news effectively it's a relatively recent phenomenon even the early days of print journalism weren't dry tellings and historical historically historical writings were not dry tellings that's kind of a a modernist take on the assumption that humans can convey objective reality and so you know you had this this birth of objective and i don't mean fox news no spin this is this far predates that but this uh factual non-emotional relaying of events in newsprint that carried over into television news and this this divide between news and editorial that didn't really exist before that it was obvious if you go back into the 1700s anytime someone was writing a piece it was editorial yeah everything was editorial there was no objectives i mean the constitution and the declaration of independence are in many ways obviously narrative obviously self-serving doctors yes they don't they don't try to hide their bias they just try to exclaim the worthiness of their argument and now you've got the people that read the bible like a newspaper i mean that's what he does so that's why i love what he's you know like we take a constitutional lens to a story the bible is a story and it's better that way like when i take the bible as a story i lose all the problems and objections i had reading it as a as a law book as a history book and as a science book when i take it as stories written by people about their experiences with god it's beautiful and it has pop art and it has sundance film festival content and it's all in there there's this great diversity in people's experiences with god you have these psalms where people talk about the favor of god and how they enjoy his protection it's poetic it's beautiful you have lamentations where like is god even here and if he's here he hates us it's so weird how it got turned into something else especially how dark it is it'd be like taking one of the darkest films here at sundance and like trying to make it a moral sacred text the holy anomalisa yeah like take that film and just you this is the law of the world [Laughter] trying to make science out of it try to make science of it of course we're all composed of frames which that's kind of interesting that's pretty good uh physics wise actually when you think of this as story though and this is one thing i was trying to say in our earlier conversation with ralph because christianity is you couldn't even say a story because where which story it's it's a set of stories that you i guess all of us create a story from it necessitates evolution in in your faith because the story keeps going like it's sort of the same thing with the evolution of spiral dynamics when you have other elements enter the story it has to you have to adjust the meta story you have to and and your whole the whole thrust of the story if you want to stay on in the same stream of development of consciousness towards whatever you're moving towards the light moving towards good and in faith you can't ever push pause how could the how could the disciples have pushed pause after the crucifixion if they saw like whoa that was like the sacrifice of the lamb or let me say they say they get some some theology from the crucifixion and like oh and then the resurrection happens well we already have the theology going we already have the crucifixion they say oh resurrection after crucifixion and then what the ascension and then the birth of the church and then and then the birth of christendom and then the separation of the east from the west and then the protestant reformation and then all this how could you not have these as like chapters in the story and how does it not affect the story when we found out that the earth wasn't flat and that there's not an upper realm that god lives in in a lower realm that satan lives when we could actually like see out and be like oh this is not a three-tiered reality that we have to adjust the story in some way we have to keep going with the story if there's a plot twist in a novel it doesn't mean that everything before that it led you to that point now there's a twist and whoa oh we thought they were literal naked people in a garden six thousand years ago whoa twist it's part of the story and that's fine i just i'm i think historically back on the way that the church has responded as an institution to any new development in human insight or understanding it's always the first to try to shut it down yeah and i wonder what's at the heart of that yeah well you have like authoritarianism basically yeah yeah the the ability to have complete control the elevation of an organizational story over the stories of the members that compose that organization that's authoritarianism and the growth or a change in stories in members to an organization can threaten the stability of the organizational story and that's where you see that panicked reaction but the thing i think about so much is at this point in history you are going to be exposed to the other stories it's almost impossible to wall yourself off and if you do you're just isolated from all of culture all of the world i found myself so many times in my life entered periods of really emotionally destructive times they've turned out well but because i fell upon these stories i didn't search for them and there's such a tendency to learn from that and then think you've learned to be open to reflect on all stories but i've become increasingly aware to how much more open i am to the stories of the oppressed than the comfortable and there's some merit to that but i can't deny the stories in my past that shaped me and i can't deny that other people are on journeys of their own and i certainly can't allow myself to fall for the trap believing my story is inherently better or superior to theirs you know we've got a really remarkably diverse set of people that are part of this program that listen and contribute and that gives me a lot of hope and a lot of comfort that you have these non-religious people you have atheists you have many stripes of the church represented many denominations many movements but i don't think there's any way to get around the fact that if you talk about say conservative evangelicalism for example that's a that's a pretty small slide there's people there and i'm grateful for all of you who are there but that it's a relatively small sample and that i've started to insulate my world with the stories that are more palatable to mine and so i find myself unconsciously distancing myself from people who are good friends who are conservative evangelicals and i don't mean the the kinds of relationships that are traumatizing or danger that need boundaries i'm talking about people that are reasonable friends thoughtful people who are conservative evangelicals and i get really personally and i'm going to use this word convicted when i come to something like we've been to this week because my friend john pretty puts on this wind rider institute and i look at the diversity of voices that he brings to that table and he's got all the kind of groups represented by our liturgist podcast so he's got atheists that show up and filmmakers that don't believe in non-religious and catholics and mainline protestants but he also brings a bunch of really conservative evangelicals to the table and mormons and muslims and he brings them all together and the other wider co-founders in this context of telling better stories and all the sharp elbows i usually see at those gatherings aren't present and i find it both beautiful and deeply challenging deeply challenged [Music] i think if you some what's so powerful about some of the stories here is they help you zoom out enough because if you find a evangelical christian and a and a muslim person let's say and one of the people here was talking about one of the filmmakers was saying how to the evangelical when they're saying allah when the muslim person is saying allah they're saying something different form but they're both just really saying god literally they're just saying god and when you can zoom out far enough both the evangelical or the muslim person and you can see oh here we are these human beings these little specks of dust on this rock with a very limited knowledge of of anything we're both trying to find meaning we're both trying to find love we're both trying to find a way to survive in this world that gets so harsh we both want to find ways of having our hearts not so closed off with it we feel okay we both want to feel okay you know like you zoom out and you see oh we're largely doing the same thing we find when you zoom in you find that there's a lot of specifics that we we think we have different answers to we have different stories but when the story gets informed by a wide enough camera angle you can find a lot of common ground with anybody and i'd say one of the things driving the expansion of that perspective has been the internet and the fact that for the first time in human history we've had this ability to connect to each other globally across vast distances across ideologies across languages all the things that normally divide us and separate us and keep us in our our more closed communities or more similar communities we can traverse those more easily so the whole internet thing that's like that's where i was going because there's this possibility with digital connectivity of having other stories hate your story like matter and anti-matter and there's a huge release of energy and both are gone and you're just left going wait what oh accidental nihilist because that's the virtue of of connection without intent but i think there's something to be said for the evangelical seminaries that are sending their students to sundance and those students are coming with intent and they're getting their ex their perspective broadened but they're not surrendering their story the way that i was exposed to a new story it destroyed my evangelicalism i could there was no way i could hold on to that anymore but i see i see these students coming in holding on to like really core theological and ideological tense of evangelicalism and yet at the same time being open to the world in the same way that i am and that actually gives me that unity through storytelling and the appreciation of it gives me hope for a better future for humanity which is why the arts are so important and why we shouldn't cut arts funding from education and what because the arts is how we tell these stories the best yes yep yes you can because you can have the news agencies report these stories or you can have facebook posts about them or whatever but it's art that gets like to go back to that new town story again i knew that story and i felt really sad when i saw it on the news but i didn't weep for an hour about it like i did last night because it was put in an artistic medium that drove it into my heart and that's important that's important for the future of the human race and i wonder how related the retreat to simplistic stories in our society is with the way we've decimated arts education in this country and have been for 30 years do that modernism devalues right it's it's all about information objectivity yeah even english is a practical implement to communicate as you do science and math and the don't get me wrong i do like the science sure but it's not it's not a complete picture of the world and frankly science can help you optimize a story but it can't help you craft or tell one look at when science is at its most even sciences that is more powerful when you for me when i see cosmos when i see like it's put into an art form that i suddenly i can see these stars and the like i know there are billions and billions of stars i know i know that but when i see even when we went into this art gallery this afternoon and there's a photo of the milky way over this rock and you see and even just seeing that you're like those are all star like that's a galaxy you could see a little galaxy and like there's something about the art form of that photograph that raw data can't get into your heart unless maybe maybe science might data can get into his heart more pretty good but for most people it is art that turns word into flesh i have wept twice reading brian green's fabric at the cosmos i'm a little emotional thinking about the special relativity [Laughter] i have a friend who's a poet and he says for a science guy you have a poet's soul and so a lot of times when i read scientific things they invoke images to me that are are poetic and then i weep yeah you know so i'm reading about i've always understood special relativity in the context of uh bending space time with both speed and gravity what i didn't understand and thank you brian green is that the effects of speculativity are amplified by distance and so if you have two points sufficiently far enough apart say 10 billion light years relatively minor changes in their relative velocity can cause huge disparities in what you would call now the common now the common reference is trading between the two and in fact pretty small changes in velocity can sweep now back and forth across human history and so when i read that like i immediately looked at my life in a different way how at some theoretical vantage point you don't exist yet yeah or i'm being born again or being born again again wow or i'm already holding my grandchildren please girls or you've been dead for ten thousand years or i've been dead for those years or i haven't been here yet but in that way i'm just i'm always here and then that got me thinking about like this silly jesus obsession of mine and the cross and the tomb and the manger and all those scenes and how some way across 10 billion light years in relative velocities those moments are now yeah just from where you're looking literally from where you're looking it is right now and story helps you look from a different place that's right and song or image poem yeah film those are the units of uh our humanity in a way ralph winter is a film producer who has helped produce blockbuster movies such as x-men fantastic four and many of the original star trek films he also worked on irobot and the first remake of planet of the apes his imdb page reflects a staggering level of success and his films have grossed collectively over 2 billion dollars so michael and i sat down with ralph to talk about film faith and how story changes people why do you think hollywood does such a better job telling stories today than the church does hollywood is skilled at the storytelling process you can sort of break down movies as in the three things content structure and style oddly enough in hollywood we talk about the content for a moment and then all we talk about after that is structure and style how the story is told it contrasts that with the way things are done in the church in the church the content's all important it's the preaching it's the message it's the words and it's not it's not the structure of the worship service and how it leads to that although good churches do a good job of that good worship services but it's primarily about content we need to be better storytellers we also as a faith community are not in touch with the visual as much because we threw that out in the pro in the reformation so let's make a let's make a let's make a list let's make a list of all the great evangelical directors and and it's hard okay let's make a list of all the great catholic directors there's coppola there's john ford there's hitchcock you know you can just start you know run down martin scorsese you can run down the list of great storytellers and they're steeped in the images of the church and what they've grown up with they're not afraid of showing blood but that offends the puritan stuff inside of us as evangelicals i was brought up you know the presbyterian church that's a hard transition for protestants i think and so we have to work extra hard to become better storytellers better visualizers of that the secular market has no trouble telling stories in a visual way but we resisted because oh they said a bad word oh uh there's too many f words i can't see that where a lot of people live that's the way they talk you may not like it and i think that leads to another thing that can way off topic now that's where we live in the margins that niceness is confused with christianity that's not christian so we have to separate those things what's biblical christianity and what's cultural christianity i think the more we dig into what that's about the more we're going to be better informed about what our faith is etc and it'll drive us to different stories [Music] story storytelling is pervasive in our culture we talk about in every aspect of our life in the courtroom you have to have the right narrative they talk about that they talk in in the corporate world in terms of what our vision is it's about what's your narrative what's your story how are you going to tell your story of your big you know engulf and devour so that people will engage with you and resonate and be sympathetic to what your cause is it's all about your story we live in a culture where the best story wins so if you're on wall street and and the story in the culture is that no matter what china does we're going to get crushed when in fact the actual exports of the u.s are 0.6 of one percent of the exports it doesn't matter what the facts are this narrative is so powerful it controls us that can be for good or evil that can work either way look how the stories of conspiracy about jfk are enduring whether it's true or not it's powerful i read them as a kid story is a powerful thing and i think humans we've known it for millennia we sit around campfires that's how we teach our kids here's how to hunt here's how to be a good friend here's how to avoid disaster here's what to do when you're in trouble and that the power of those stories the oral tradition that's carried down through that tribal culture we just do it now you know on netflix stories get even more powerful when they're emotional when i can bring you to an emotional place and it can be laughing where you're making fun of something or enjoying how something is being ridiculed or it can be emotional where you're literally can't control yourself weeping then when your defenses are down the messaging the story for good or bad is is much more readily accepted it's easy for you to absorb that information when you're emotionally vulnerable if you just want to look at it from a practical economic point of view then you should embrace storytelling if you want to look at it from a spiritual point of view how do i affect the world it's from a storytelling point of view the stories that 12 guys had 2 000 years ago changed the world it's incredibly that's all they had that's all they had that's all they had they had nothing they didn't have technology but they were right place right time and we think we believe right story ralph winter thank you very much cool we also sat down with jeremy khloe he was the grand prize jury winner of the winrider international student film festival his film this way up tells the story of a homeless father trying to hide his living situation from his family and in doing so his film challenges popular notions of poverty and the homeless how much are you thinking in overall arching themes are you trying to just stay in the story and let the themes speak as they will to whoever you know what i mean like are you coming from the small to the big are you coming from big to the small um to be honest every story is completely different i remember with my feature i was driving in a car one day and like a nine-year-old girl pulled up next to me in traffic driving a truck and i was like what in the world is that girl's story that's uh pretty weird it was super weird and that was kind of the impetus for the whole story just that image of kind of exploring like how does that happen and so that kind of launched this whole story and theme came a little bit later once we'd kind of explored some ideas that were just interesting to us i think um one of the best things to do is just kind of stay fascinated with the project so as long as something's pecking at you and you're exploring an idea and wanting to push that further i think that's kind of what drives it so sometimes it starts with theme sometimes it doesn't everybody has a different process i know i'm pretty sure with christopher nolan theme always comes last and it's just a different way of working and when you say theme comes last i don't think that's actually ever true i just think maybe its theme is subconscious at that point you don't really realize what your story is about but you have a story that you feel like needs to be told and you're not exactly sure why and as you kind of narrow things down and withhold some information and put in more you really kind of it comes to kind of fruition i feel the same way with different albums that we've made there are some that i have a heavier theme at the beginning and other ones that i discovered the theme in the specifics rather than the other way around i worked in the ad business for 15 years which is hugely informs my storytelling sensibilities sure for good and definitely for bad and so i was trained in a methodology where you begin with an understanding of where you're going to take someone who sees content and what it's going to do to them thematically to cause a particular action sure and i've drilled that so long it's actually hard for me to imagine just starting with a story and letting it unfold organically as opposed to putting it on rails and taking it somewhere yeah i think uh once i'm at the script writing phase i definitely know where it's ending before i start i definitely know the journey i'm trying to take the viewer on and i know what how i want to move them and what i want them to feel when they walk away from the movie but it's so film is so open to interpretation many times you know you start out kind of with multiple themes that can be convoluting and it can kind of mess up something and sometimes it's about taking those other things out so people aren't drawing meaning from everything every little thing in going in different directions and kind of solidifying to what is the one specific theme and and trying to find that one we saw this film in the the golden deer i haven't seen that yet okay so there's the screen and you're watching like this it's a loop it's on the loop but you're seeing this like golden calf or deer born out of a couch that has just been zoomed in from this luxury house and then it flies up in a spaceship winds up in a duty-free shop in this airport and then they're floating this like phallic weird like bendy mushroom spiky thing comes out of an anus that is the anus of a larger golden deer but it's like a photorealistic human anus and you're sitting there going and at first i assumed it meant nothing when i first saw it i was like this is just nonsense like just a tree you know drug inspired whatever sure but the more we watched it we kept like trying to draw meaning i think i think the area he goes i think this is about privilege that's to your point in that the human brain searches for meaning in everything it's always looking for patterns and so to tell a story and to take people somewhere you have to be so intentional about what's in and what's out because even a great scene can detract from that theme you're landing on definitely yeah i totally agree but i need to check out this golden exhibit spoiler alert there's also a giant floating castle with humongous testicles oh wow i mean it's it's maybe the weirdest thing i've ever seen i mean i'm kind of an expert in the weird and this was just beyond beyond beyond weird i'd love to read the artistic statement for that piece well we talked to the bartender it was so funny because the bartender stands right next to the to the film that's looping and she said she sees it eight hours a day for it was like the fifth day or whatever we were there and she said the artist she googled it one day because she sees people all day sitting there analyzing do what we were doing like yeah i think it means this and she finally the filmmaker came and she recognizes that she's like okay you have to tell me i stand here eight hours a day watching this movie you have to tell me what does it mean he's like it doesn't mean anything it was a dream maybe maybe his dream is telling him [Laughter] so this week we've been hanging out at the sundance film festival with some friends one of those is uh john pretty a guy i've known since he uh took me to sundance last year he's a co-founder of something called the wind rider institute and we're also here with greg detweiler who also co-founded winrider and it's a pretty remarkable experience i didn't really know what to expect last year when i got a call from john saying hey do you want to come to sundance i couldn't figure out why i could contribute to sundance in the first place is a weirdo nerd podcaster but when i arrived i found something pretty spectacular and there was this odd intersection of seminary students and film students and filmmakers having really compelling conversations about faith and culture so i want to talk a little bit with john and craig today about how that came to be and what the goals are on winrider tell me a little bit about how it all started john well first of all it's just great to be with you guys i'm a huge fan of the podcast and i've been waiting it for you know a year to get invited to be on that show you made it yeah gunger finally said why don't you know can't we just get the guy out of the way and get an interview with them so it's great to be with you guys and also i'm delighted to be here with craig because he along with will stoller lee and my brother ed the four of us are the co-founders of the winrider forum and it happened uh very differently than we imagined we the four of us came 13 years ago with the idea craig was a professor at fuller at the time i was a fuller student for theological seminary we came with the idea of what would it look like to have a class at the sundance film festival a class for credit where seminary students could come and take in sundance and we thought we were originally coming with the idea that we would go see sundance films and we would come back and talk about them if you'd have told me 12 years later that we would be the number one ticket purchasing block at sundance we'd have 13 institutions 10 undergraduates three graduate institutions here and that we're a place where sundance filmmakers want to come back and have a conversation with us i don't think we could have predicted that on our first trip craig what do you think well that's that's exactly right we were we had this group of students uh some were aspiring film students you know people who wanted to be film majors um and then others were the seminary students and we went to the films and basically the text for the course was go see the go see films right so instead of reading ten books you gotta go see ten films you happen to have to do it in one week right but that was the assignment and uh as we got into these films we realized there's so much intense spiritual content on these films that it took a lot to unpack it so we came back to unpack it and then we realized that hey the filmmaker's right here and we didn't really get to ask as many questions as we wanted let's go up and ask him or her if they join us so the first person we did that with was a guy named kirby dick who is academy award nominated it was a film called twist of faith which was you know about uh abuse in the catholic church and priest scandals and that type of thing really messy thorny film we asked him to come back and join us and and so he starts talking to this group and it takes him about 10 minutes before he realizes like wait you guys all like believe in god and i just made a film about abuse you know in the name of god suddenly it's like a light went off in his head and he's like you've got like a community here that's like my community of filmmakers but your community is is now joining with my community and it kind of blew his mind and he was our first guest and we've had countless and amazing sundance winners with us every year since why do you find it important to have seminary students and christian students for them to engage with culture on this level you know independent film is such an interesting genre to have as a way to enter in and what we've learned specifically here at the sundance film festival is there's a tremendous spiritual conversation taking place the people of faith can enliven that conversation but by and large that conversation is happening with or without us and often time most often it's happening without us well i think it trains you in a sense to be a first responder you know five years ago we were dealing with film after film that was dealing with the questions of the gay community and the christian community and is there tension and what about gay christians and and nobody knew exactly how to talk about it we've been talking about it for over five years so we're not surprised by this conversation uh same thing i think is going to happen with the gun conversation right we're going to see films that the dude four films yeah the deal with the newtown tragedy and as people of faith we better be ready to respond you know and get in front of the conversation rather than responding kind of after the fact both years i've been to sundance i have found compelling beautiful evocative spiritual art so what can people in the church especially the institutional church learn from filmmakers at sundance about how to tell good stories that also explore real spiritual issues well i feel like it's in a sense first and foremost telling the truth kind of unvarnished right these these filmmakers aren't editing themselves they're sort of wading into issues where they may not have the answers but they say somebody needs to get into this somebody needs to address this and and i think we tend to maybe as people of faith pull back and sort of say well i have to figure out what the answers are before i'm allowed to start talking and these filmmakers are like no no no we have to talk now and so that kind of courage i think is very instructive to our students i also think the artist gets isolated part of the courage that craig is talking about is it's messy you know it's messy to delve into stories and to try to bring truth out and so in many ways if we can surround a young filmmaker with a collaborative team i guess what i the goal would be maybe more arts savvy pastors and more theologically informed filmmakers yeah that's that's that's the sweet spot and and it's the the bringing of those people together right rather than isolating them rather than rather than saying oh artists you're supposed to over be there in art world or pastors you're supposed to stay out of our world and just stick to theology it's like no no we all need to get into the middle of that mix which is that cultural matrix where all these discussions both spring from and continue so if you look at kind of the national conversation around the church and christianity today take any issue presidential elections guns black lives matter marriage equality black lives matter whatever you find a church that's deeply polarized against itself that more than i've seen in a long time publicly there's a napoleonic warfare thing going on shooting across at each other not acknowledging any shared culture or even core faith ideas but then i come to winrider and there's a remarkable diversity of denominational backgrounds and theological positions all sharing space and doing so successfully so have you cultivated that kind of culture how do you bring all those people to the table together in my view it's about creating place in space because when you go to a film at a film festival there's a thing called a q a right and the q a at a film festival tends to not be very deep when we come back to our space with those filmmakers it's it is a safe space now it doesn't mean that people are going to agree that's not the intention of it but it's a way for people to hear the filmmaker's perspective of why they told a particular story so whereas a question at the at the sundance festival might be what camera did you use at the wynn writer forum the students might ask who are you and why did you choose this topic and how has it changed your life and what can you tell us about that journey it's a very different type of discussion and that discussion seems to percolate a cohesion of generosity i like that i think that is right i i feel like what i'm what we're trying to do with windwriter is i think is create a third way which i think is called sort of a jesus way right jesus was was he was basically assassinated by a combination of like liberals and conservatives you know he was sort of sort of equally hated on both sides like and and so i think what we're trying to do is it's not that it's an apolitical space it's a highly politicized discussion that we're having but it is it's sort of asking you to put aside your preconceptions and actually hear from each other in the same way when you enter into film you should probably do the same thing you should say okay for this 90 minutes i'm going to get into their head and into their world see what they have to say and then i'll come back to my world and what i know and bring that to it but until i've actually heard them for 90 minutes i can't start speaking not really fairly right until i've seen the end of the film i don't know what the filmmaker's point was and so in a sense news like john said it's in safe space it's a neutral space and it's a listening posture as opposed to a posturing posture i don't want to get too deep dish but what we're doing theologically we would say is reversing the hermeneutic old flow maybe in a normal situation you sort of put on your bible goggles and then you like see the world create your politics you know read a book watch a film we ask you to put aside the bible goggles and just watch the thing and then be open to god speaking to you through that experience and then pick your bible back up and maybe you're going to read the bible differently because now your heart has been opened up a little bit you've been softened a little bit you maybe have been sensitized a little bit right i had to watch a film yesterday about kurdish refugees right syrian refugees they took me there i can't go and pick up a newspaper the same way now because i just spent you know two hours in a in a kurdish refugee camp and situation so that storytelling thing right it broadens your heart it broadens your mind and then i actually think it makes you more receptive to the spirit of god in your life and that's that reverse i think that's powerful i think that that was something that switched for me i remember in college because i i was raised in i had pretty strict like the things i would watch you can't let the bad things in you know you got to guard the temple and then there came like a flip for me in college i'd forget i read a book basically kind of saying some of that stuff like listen to god through art and through film and through culture and it's interesting to even think the people that canonize scripture when they're thinking about what should be can and they're looking at stories and they're looking at and what is true what is true and where is the spirit speaking through these the stories that's something that people of faith have i guess always done is like the stories that we've told and we pass on we find god in them and so learning to do that not just with the stories that have been deemed god has already been found here god has already been but look everywhere and god's still speaking right that's that's the idea with christians and art why are christians often afraid of places like sundance and why does christian art a lot of times people are within the church and they want to make art they want to make movies they want to make music from my experience what that means like if you're going to say there's a christian movie playing you wouldn't necessarily assume that that's the birth of a nation or uh you wouldn't assume that's christian because there are raw human elements like you would find all in scripture there's sex there's cussing and violence and a lot of times christian media is stuff that cuts off all that stuff and kind of sanitizes it makes it family-friendly well i think we're recovering the fact that the bible's an r-rated document right yeah i mean you know every other chapter is you know incest murder rape pillaging stuff in the name of god misunderstanding of god using god to justify your position good kings bad kings that's that's the history right it's the history of humanity it's the history of people of faith i think we're just allowing people to reclaim a more holistic view of both scripture and ourselves how do you think how do you think it went there though like how did it get into the g rating yeah why does why does christianity do that do you think i i think we prefer a g-rated lie to an r-rated truth hank hughes was the winner of the windrider international student festival's director's choice award for his short film day one which by the way was also nominated for an academy award inspired by a true story day one depicts a new translator's first day accompanying a u.s army unit as it searches for a local terrorist as she quickly discovers her job will bring up brutal complexities as gender and religious barriers emerge with lives hanging in the balance this is our conversation with hank so one day day one this is going to be the most fun interview right away as i got on because like if i didn't say them would have been this whole thing one day [Laughter] no it's it's it's fine i'm not even like upset or embarrassed no no that's cool cleaner i've never met someone more comfortable making mistakes than i am or else i'd like i'd have to die i just i make mistakes constantly so this film really wanders into some pretty politically hot territory like just the setting immediately the middle east the tension between all the cultures there is the backdrop for the film what drew you to telling a story in such a hot geopolitical context the the practical answer is that um i spent two years in afghanistan i did two tours and it's a big part of who i am and how i see the world i can't separate the fact that i now make movies and i was in the army and so therefore whoever knows those two pieces of information are gonna assume that one informs the other it can be something that is perhaps too defining um and also people might accept what i'm saying as more valid which may or may not be true because it's just at the end of the day it's just uh how i felt about something and uh to do some sort of like um larger inductive reasoning of like well if this one veteran feels this way about the war then that means you know you can choose that to fit your own agenda how you see fit so that that i feel dangerous about that but also i just thought i'd ignore that and try and say what i felt was true so what drew you to filmmaking somewhere in high school i was in kentucky and we started making class projects and i was naturally drawn towards it i just loved the idea of creating something so it's your art form yeah yeah you could say that sure um i don't i mean i don't think i would necessarily be very good at photography or painting or maybe even a novel but somehow the the movie if you only have to be like you know jack of all trades and some of those things and a master of none um and you can work in a collaborative manner with uh people who are masters in their specific fields to build something together so the teamwork aspect of it is really uh fundamental to like why i enjoy the process for sure yeah yeah that's one thing i'm always jealous of as a musician like every time i see a film when i see all those names i'm like the amount of brilliant people working together on one thing that's so cool like i get to work with a few brilliant people sometimes uh i'm an author yeah there you go it's even less yeah exactly i don't know i'm always jealous of musicians because their expression is so immediate and like primal like you guys get this or you get to share that with you know an immediate audience whether it's one person yourself or hundreds of people in a way that like in order for you know to make a just a short film it took a year you're putting a lot of time and effort and all your eggs in one basket and hoping that it kind of comes together i appreciated the sensibility and the sensitivity to not portray any person or people group in black and white protagonist antagonist terms and i thought that that kind of helped undermine some of the especially american narrative about war where good guys rush in versus bad guys and the complexity that storytelling was really compelling so i was raised i think i said earlier in germany and we had this family across the street that became like a surrogate family and so their opa became my oppar grandfather for a few years and we would just like hang out and play chess as a young boy and i remember i asked him once because i think i'd learned in school about world war ii and i said i asked if he was a nazi and he asked my father he's like can i tell your son the truth and my dad said yeah you can and he said yes i was a nazi i was in the ss now he was not in the concentration camp ss he was in the waffen ss which is like to be frank essentially what i was in the american army it's a very hardcore elite unit so it's interesting because here's this man that i had grown to admire who spent time with me who was a mentor and he went on to explain that yeah he was i was 18 or 19 whatever it was and that's what boys did in bavaria and i thought to myself you know it's interesting like i can look back like i signed a contract when i was like 17 because that's what men in my family do that doesn't make it so simple and binary i guess i'm not really interested if it's right or wrong or good or bad because it's just like simply human that people sometimes make choices that aren't really their choices i mean i just still think you have to own your choices i don't mean to say that uh it's a free-for-all in that way but there are circumstances beyond you that that shape who you are to just so simply say because there are 13 stripes and 50 stars on my shoulder that i'm a good guy i think is missing the point of actually why we started as a country we should all have a bit of humility to understand that if i was born in nazi germany under certain circumstances i can't be sure that i wouldn't yeah we're a product largely product of our i always thought of the guys that were that we were shooting at each other in afghanistan think you know like if i was 16 and someone invaded this is how they said invaded my country uh they don't belong here and i'm being told and have good evidence to say that they're not doing what i think they should be doing based on my morals or social mores really yeah i i would definitely take up arms and do that thing i mean it's it's not unbelievable actually it just requires a little bit of empathy or to look from their point of view and it's tough because you're right the thing that rebels is like well of course i wouldn't be you i don't want to kill people you feel like you're a good person you want to believe that you're a good person yeah and and you also don't want to just justify bad behavior because then right everybody has their own circumstances anybody that kills anybody that's anything horrible there are reasons that they ended up there that and a lot of them are beyond their control personality disorders mental illness like um so you don't just want to like excuse it but you also it's a complicated thing like very much it's funny i spend a lot of time thinking about this and it's like the more the further i've gotten away from my wartime experience i i feel less judgmental about things because i find it so hard to find a structured way to say yes or no good or bad because you start to realize like well i did some things that were if seen in from the right way are not necessarily good some things that are bad and so how does that and i didn't mean to my motives i thought were were good and so it becomes a very complex thing and i use the word thing because i can't ever nail down what we're talking about honestly your film like so many films at sundance explores the kinds of things we're talking about really complex narratives high degrees of empathy for people in different perspectives multicultural much more real to life stories and they because of that help people become informed and explore perspectives that are alien or foreign to them and on the other hand you have summer blockbusters which tell very simple stories with very obvious good guys and bad guys and because of that are more palatable to human brains how do you as an artist think we can help people cultivate an appetite for more sophisticated more compelling stories i think first have to recognize that sometimes people go to the movies just to be entertained and that's not bad like i actually enjoy a good popcorn movie i one day want to make big movies that people can enjoy hopefully that also like you know test the way you think or you know require empathy but um there is an amusement ride aspect to go into the movies and that's something that is it doesn't even need to be unavoidable it's just a fun thing that can happen and so i think that just allowing that as a as its own thing is great but i do think storytelling has gotten much more sophisticated over time look at the old testament verse new testament and how harsh one isn't how nuanced the other is and that changed you know as people changed you know and so you have i'm sure these stories we're going to allow more nuance as the world is becoming a global society as we're like hearing all these other stories as as a bunch of 19 old americans go to afghanistan for a year like the world is becoming a smaller place i don't think it will be as simple think about the internet like and how the connected we are now like i don't think people automatically uh want to just shuffle things left and right um and so i i think it will start to get more nuanced even some of the bigger blockbusters are are trying for sure but it is uh star wars made me hurt for stormtroopers this time for sure yeah um no i had sets that was actually one of my biggest sticking points in the movie i actually wish he had been a part of that that massacre i feel like the old star wars might have done that and the new one kind of let him just witness it but i did nonetheless that was a very like a nuanced thing that i was concerned about but i thought very good very good that they're like showing this is a stormtrooper who's like questioning what he's doing and the casting and that alone is very helpful for moving forward in a thoughtful progressive manner so i know i was i was overall very pleased with the star wars in that way so you mentioned the old testament and the new testament and what our podcast is about is the intersection of science art and faith so how does your faith inform your art and how does your art inform your faith i was raised very catholic um i actually wanted to be a priest when i was younger up until about like 12 or 13 and then i guess girls came along or something [Laughter] but yeah and i mean i would probably say that uh two years ago i would have called myself an atheist and my wife and i she is a very spiritual person who searches for the deeper meaning of her existence and it has been a a model to look at that and i don't know what my answers are anymore certainly but i know that there's the search is an incredibly valid search where i'm at with faith and how it informs my art and i i think they actually tied together really well just that i don't have answers but i know that i'm asking the right question oh i was an atheist uh i don't know a few years ago and i'm i definitely just asked questions i have no answers you know what did it for me was uh not just my wife and and her her search but you guys watch cosmos oh yeah yeah oh yeah i was like oh my goodness it just i it just made me feel so minuscule and also so important and part of being like all the stardust stuff i was like what is the design of all of this you know you start thinking these really big questions if you liked cosmos you gotta read pale blue dot oh it's funny it's on my list yeah yeah oh man it's that's like the one of the best books ever written it's that that for me is uh like in a very miniscule way like storytelling is like going to church and then like the biggest existential stuff i've done so far is like thinking about the universe and that that really kind of brought back into this idea of maybe there is more than just um what i can rationally or you know in a reductionist way say this is this or this is that so we've talked a little bit in this episode about how story shapes your brain but your brain has a reference point for lots of media now your brain knows how to accommodate a podcast or a television program or a film or a book you have a filter that lets you step back from those media if it's overwhelming if you don't like what you're hearing and this week we've got to spend a lot of time trying out something that blows away that distance it's called virtual reality now if you uh don't live under a rock you've probably heard the term vr many times in your life the matrix was an exploration of what really advanced vr could be good and bad mostly bad vr has been something that's been talked about since the 90s and i tried vr in the 90s it wasn't impressive they were really primitive and then yesterday i was on mars like i was on mars i'm telling you like i just looked over and there was like the martian surface in glorious lifelike textured 3d detail and i drove a rover and i prepared a spacecraft for launch and then using my glove i propelled myself towards space into a rendezvous point and my brain believed it all he was a five-year-old boy [Laughter] and that's called the martian the vr experience but i've even got this little simple thing it's made by mattel it's a viewmaster you remember the viewmaster but this is you put your phone in it and it's a really like a 30 basic vr headset and i played a game called sisters well it's my game it's a story but it's a horror story and not like gory really simple second grade turn the lights out ooh there's someone next to you and i couldn't finish it the first two times and we were actually in this new frontiers exhibit at sundance and we heard someone scream and she ripped the vr headset off because her brain couldn't get the distance from vr now that this is interesting one because vr is kind of overcoming the brain's ability to resist story but on the other hand nobody knows how to tell stories in vr yet because in traditional storytelling if it's a novel if it's a film you grab someone and you control their reference frame you carry them along and you can't do that in vr if you try you make people puke because they move against their will that that what they see doesn't match what their brain is tracking and it's disorienting and it's amazing to me because in this type of storytelling right now we're at the same point film was when audiences jumped up and tried to get out of the way of the oncoming train and that's happening right now a fundamental reinvention of how humans tell stories at the heart of this question is the changing nature not just of narrative but of the audience itself and how the audience's position or vantage point into a story determines in a sense where where things can go and and where they are going the key way to describe the the essence of that change is really into more and more immersion putting people as deep inside of a story as they can possibly go and so you see a medium like virtual reality you have removed what in film you would call the fourth wall it's basically the wall that you as the audience are looking into this universe through you're looking through that window well in virtual reality the window expands so far that it disappears entirely and we're used to that progression right if you think about uh normal films becoming 3d films you know the progression is deeper inside of that world or you look at first person shooters and in the gaming world but virtual reality loses that window entirely and you are fully immersed inside of a new reality like you were saying mike what's so fascinating is the way that our biology that our senses believe it so readily it's so easy for us to believe the world that we now inhabit and our bodies embrace it and as a result it has this extraordinary impact actually on our neurology as well and that the experiences you have in virtual reality are a lot less like you know a passive engagement with a film or a traditional narrative but it actually is impacting us much more like actual memories that's crazy and it's full of creatively i don't say troubling but difficult challenges because one of the big things if you look at a novel or a film there's a protagonist who you identify with and often your brain puts yourself in their shoes but you're observing them in a film you're viewing the protagonist and there's this pivot point and it's been a challenge in gaming forever telling stories because you literally the you are the protagonist you don't observe the protagonist so many channels how do you handle dialogue it's disorienting even in a game when you do a cut scene if you keep it in first person perspective and you the protagonist speak and it's not your voice you're not saying it it breaks the immersion and so then you get the vr and there's kind of two perspectives i've seen in vr you make the viewer an observer and they can see a protagonist they can follow a film i've seen animations done that way what's the name of the the animated feature the the boy and the girl go different directions you can follow duet duet oh so good google yeah so if they get lost for example in that you can watch either a boy or a girl or go back and forth as they grow and if you just get totally lost totally turned around i think a butterfly will come and guide you back to the scene right and it's it's beautiful and lovely and scored and so it doesn't really break the immersion but there's only so many stories you can tell that way so then the other approach is to make the person themselves look through the eyes of the protagonist but at that point you're either having a level of interaction design that is effectively gaming or you are risking breaking immersion when people see themselves acting in a way that's non-volitional and this is to me an unsolved problem in the media and i don't know how we'll solve it or eventually of course you get graphics good enough you get ai sophisticated enough and you can accommodate whatever the observer may do but at this point you're you're not crafting a story as much as creating a functioning virtual world well it's exciting to let our geniuses loose on this our creative storytelling geniuses because it there will be creative ways of going about this i mean look at sleep no more in new york sure is a thing where you walk around and try to gather this story that there's no central stage there's no like you're just walking around seeing these characters and kind of putting it together i think it's pretty brilliant how they put it together so who knows what people are going to do with this but i think it's i mean some of the people we've met that are doing it this guy that we met that's doing gabo aurora putting together like these experiences where you're immersed into a syrian refugee camp and you're there and he's he brought it to the united nations correct and like these people the united nations have to be immersed they put this on and they're immersed in this refugee camp and how are you not going to let that affect your policies you're like let's talk about refugee camps okay well just be there for a second that's what's amazing about as technology develops and lets us tell our stories more and more effectively it really can change the world i mean there's a reason that the most oppressive regimes on earth there's always censorship there's always don't let in the outside stories we need to censor these movies we need to censor the internet we need to like keep these stories that like what would happen if in north korea if they all could just watch a couple of really well done stories that kind of saw things from a different perspective like if i mean you want to talk about a forced one-story environment yeah i mean that's that's the most troubling form of storytelling to me is indoctrination because it still works it totally works have you ever watched any north korean media yes and i don't mean like like the news propaganda pieces i mean like a concert or a spectacle of some kind i mean the production yeah it's crazy country is putting into this it's telling their own story though i know but they're telling that story i don't know they're telling it well yeah but i could imagine you know i watched in this film and i was like look of course the country looks glorious if you look on television and see that yeah the people are made to believe that their world the bubble that they're in is actual utopia and that they are safe and living in peace because their leader who they're supposed to view as god is protecting them from the outside world so everyone else is the enemy which is surprisingly familiar yeah yeah and yeah imagine every day everything around you is telling you that same narrative that we are safe stay with me stay under this umbrella like everyone else is going to kill you and they're out to get you beware of beware of stories that are too afraid of other stories there's a virtual reality experience that takes you inside of a factory farm to watch an animal get slaughtered there is a question today in a panel by someone who works for a non-profit that's focused on ending human trafficking that's trying to recreate a scene of an abduction from multiple points of view and the question he asked was how much is too much yeah yeah there's no ethical code yet and and there isn't there's no rating system for these games there's you know the the neuroscience you can be a victim in a rape like in virtual reality so that i mean their point was to build empathy over victory i want to be i want to articulate this because for people who haven't tried vr this is so weird and academic oculus which is one of the leading developers of virtual reality headsets and systems and software has told developers they won't allow into their store experiences that use anything that's a startle like a cheap jump out at you because it's too overpowering in vr it might actually kill some people like people or like people like lose bladder control or i mean it's and i'm talking about just ha right in your face then when i and it's accidental but i guess i didn't follow when i first turned on google cardboard the app they have kind of an intro video and i was looking the wrong way when a scene came up so i looked back there was a baboon like right here and it wasn't even moving and i have terrible reflexes i don't startle it really scared me what hands turn white like adrenaline overdrive just because a baboon was too close to my face and so when we talk about these kind of experiences getting raped but can tell important stories yeah but oh it's so difficult to understand what are the unforeseen consequences of telling these stories in this way i told you guys i had that nightmare i watched i you know spent that afternoon watching vr about um there were images of war photography and what i thought was five minutes inside the vr experience it was actually 20 minutes and so then the following night i had a terrible nightmare and it was just like chaos and ex terrorists and explosions and not realizing that those images for 20 minutes had imprinted in my mind and caused that trauma so that i'm having nightmares and who knows that you know that was just photographs to experience some oh man that's weird that our technology is getting to a place already and we'll get to a place where it's like the immersion it could actually cause like ptsd yeah exactly like you have to like oh you're too immersed in the story now yes absolutely it's a very real there's a there's a prototype uh where you can put on headsets and then your action field where you can move your hands and have them tracked is in kind of a box in front of you and there's an array of ultrasound emitters in this box and so if you reach out and there's a curtain these ultrasonic projectors can give a tactile sensation of cloth against your hand even though nothing is there now obviously you if you did a door you could push right through the door or break immersion but this is the kind of movement haptic and tactic and all these technologies we had an experience here where you flew i think as a dragonfly you had a backpack on and you felt the of the wings flapping on your back as you flew over from a dragonfly's perspective the floor of a forest the brain's not ready it's just not ready you know what's scary what's scary about this to me is that it's individual and the power of the technology and where to immerse yourself in if you can live in an entirely different reality and it's only based on your own private space it's going to turn into what the internet is largely porn you know just experiencing things for your own pleasure or whatever there is totally vr porn already if it becomes a way of actually disconnecting from the reality of others and the real stories of others and just entering into this reality that is an escaped reality i mean there are plenty of like sci-fi books about this sort of thing and everything already but it's like what are we gonna do with this technology and there's something interesting about the communal aspect of storytelling that's beautiful about if you know a movie theater or maybe when you go back going back to faith like the bible was always until the last couple centuries primarily an oral discipline it was a declaring and telling stories to a group of people in a community people didn't own bibles they didn't know how to read it wasn't a text that people would come and like take to their personal homes primarily that was a that's a relatively recent development within christianity and actually i've heard of some theologians lately that would that would encourage like because of what we've done with the bible in modern society would say we probably if we could get bibles out of the hands of i think it might be uh what's the cussing old guy that you're afraid of stanley howard howard wass it may have been him i don't wanna miss gloria i'm afraid to read your work and because of that we'll probably never invite you on the show even though we think you're great no we got it i would love to have our wife awesome um but i think it was him i don't want to miss quote him so somebody like i don't know who's like howard was but would say like would be best if we could get bibles out of the hands of christians and make it again a proclaimed story within community so how community relates to story versus just me and my bible or me and my vr headset yes and years ago one of the first attempts at a metaverse a virtual world that was interactive was a platform called second life and at first i had a second life account and it was amazing it turned into strip clubs and porno everywhere but at first it was primarily a creative tool i met a lot of people friendships i still have on second life and wait you still do you still play second life no these people i know beyond second life okay but i you know if i'm in the city they live in and go have a drink whatever but i met one person in second life and we climbed a mountain together and when we got to the top he told me something i've been talking for months doing something never told me before and uh he was quadriplegic and he felt like he climbed a mountain that day and no one judged him on his disability in second life because he looked and walked and flew just like everybody else i had another friend who was severely autistic but could handle interacting with people in second life and i even stumbled upon once this was long before my deconstruction or the liturgists a small church where people many of them gay couldn't find local communities gathered together in second life to have a virtual eucharist and i was baptist at the time so that was muddy and they found a community and so i imagine although i didn't want to leave mars yesterday i sure would like to gather in a giant cathedral with every listener of this show at the same time and get to know them virtual face to virtual face liturgist church right where cyberspace go to literature's church [Music] it's better for all of our listeners to have people in their community who would accept them just as they are and love them but when that doesn't happen those are the times i think that individualistic experience can transcend into a communal one beautiful because we all we will always feel the desire to connect that's part of us the real the thing where you're right and what i get is if the other inhabitants of this space are virtual as well and subservient yeah to the dis so what's good about communities there's people that just won't adhere to your will but if if you create a virtual world in which everyone in which you're basically god that might be entertaining for a couple hours but if you did that too much that really would be psychologically warping you might actually engineer yourself into a sociopath so that's what i mean yes and this can go both ways and this probably will go both of those ways yeah one of the one of the things you were talking about and in terms of increasing isolation you know that's certainly possible inevitably will happen for certain people but there's this moment that i'll never forget as long as i live i was honored to to be a guest at the un this year during one of the summit and right outside of the doors of the un was this giant room set up that was featuring all kinds of new storytelling technologies there were several different virtual reality experiences set up there and covering a wide variety of issues and this young man had made an experience called machine to be another and there was no line for it and so i walked up and and asked if i could you know go in and participate and have this experience and i was ushered right in it's basically like a little photo booth so you go inside the booth and you look into the mirror and you put on headsets you know you put on your your your virtual reality goggles and your headphones and across from you uh when when the experience comes on you basically are looking in the mirror and and the reflection that's coming back to you is of another human being who is on the other side of this mirror it was a middle-aged african-american woman and the entire point of this experience was basically to inhabit her thought as she's sitting there looking into the mirror quietly reflecting and they had these little sensors you could put in your hand and basically as you you were instructed to kind of slowly lift your hand and examine your hand and what was so interesting about the way that this experience was set up using the mirror is that the there was an actual woman on the other side of the screen in real time and she was mirroring my actions so when i slowly moved my hand up to my face she was doing the same thing on the other side so as i'm looking down at my hands in virtual reality i'm seeing her body i have in a sense looking across the room i'm seeing in virtual reality the human form of myself and when i look down at my body i'm seeing her and so as i'm slowly uh you know making movements it can even touch my own face and you're sitting in this moment you can't really get out of you're you're you're forced into another perspective but there's this moment right at the end where after having a very emotional time you know inhabiting her thoughts that you stand up and the mirror basically you know falls and so as you've kind of been looking down at your hands as an african-american woman and seeing your face as an african-american woman in the mirror the mirror drops and you see your physical form on the other side and you walk over and you embrace yourself but you're inhabiting her body so your body as an african-american woman embraces you know the virtual self but it's actually her and so you there's this i i and i can't even put into words how powerful this experience was but like you all of a sudden physically realize that the body you are hugging and seeing as your body in virtual reality is her body and i just wept like i wept i lost it and i took the headset off and she looked at me and she started to cry and she was like this is exactly what this is about i'm so excited for our kids can you imagine in your formative years experiencing that sort of like seeing through other eyes starting there if it go back to education if education can start using technology and story like this to actually help our kids see through different eyes even when you're learning about history and like learning about civil rights movement learning about any of these things and feeling it not just as numbers in a book i hope that people that we use this to step into the eyes of somebody else in the stories of somebody else and what that can do for us as human beings as profound that's beautiful thanks for sharing that i think sometimes you know maybe that's the way to give some sort of value determination to whether something is good as a story in these new technologies because coming back to your your point sometimes they can pull you into isolation and it can be this world where you're kind of directing the universe and controlling it and becoming a megalomaniac by you know the types of narratives you're inside of but on the other side there's this other kind of experience that pulls you into togetherness having experienced that that changed something about my heart and the way that i see the world and i can't deny that and i can't unsee it and i wouldn't want to you know thanks to all those who were so kind as to take the time to talk to us at the festival i'd like to especially thank the wind rider institute and john pretty and craig thatwaller and everybody for the award and having us out there what a pleasure it was uh thanks to tyler chester for a couple of the tracks on this podcast thanks to greg garden for some of the editing help [Music] we look forward to seeing you guys on the road here soon thanks for listening everybody you