The Significance Of Stories | Ep.9

We dig into why stories change behaviour more than raw facts, from neural coupling and emotion-driven decision-making to the moral architecture inside Pinocchio. Parables, conscience, hedonism, sacrifice, and renewal all thread into a clear case for story as the carrier of truth.

• bad storytelling versus meaningful structure
• how neural coupling makes stories memorable
• emotions as drivers of decisions and habits
• facts and feelings needing each other
• parables in the Bible as layered guidance
• Pinocchio’s conscience, temptation, and captivity
• Pleasure Island as a map of hedonism
• Monstro, sacrifice, and becoming real
• why lies become visible over time
• symbolic truth versus historical proof
• compassion learned through narrative friction
• why story form delivers lasting change

Christ is King, Jesus loves you, and he's coming back soon

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Bad Storytelling
• 2:00 When Details Don’t Matter
• 5:40 Good Storytellers And True Crime
• 7:30 Why Stories Beat Raw Facts
• 10:30 Neural Coupling And Vivid Imagery
• 14:00 Emotion, Decisions, And Meaning
• 18:20 Facts And Feelings Together
• 20:10 Parables, The Bible, And Depth
• 23:20 Pinocchio: Conscience And Temptation
• 28:30 Pleasure Island And Hedonism’s Cost
• 33:00 You Can’t Go Home Again
• 36:00 Monstro, Sacrifice, And Renewal
• 40:00 The Real Lesson Of Lying

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to episode nine of Ministry of Mare. And I'm your host, Isaac Anthony Turner. And welcome. And welcome to subjectively the maybe fourth or fifth best podcast in the world. I would say subjectively, this is the fifth best podcast in the world. This is the top five podcasts in the world. And we're well on our way to being subjectively the number one podcast in the world. So welcome. So I was thinking today, I had this friend who would always feel the need. He spoke a lot, he talked a lot, and he would always share stories, right? But his stories never went anywhere. Like he'd begin to go, oh guess what happened? And we'd be like, oh what? And so we'd all be like leaning in, oh, what's he gonna say? And then he starts talking about, you know, he went to the shops and he did something, and uh, and like there was no like climax to the story, it was just a series of things that happened. This happened and then this happened and then this happened. You're like, okay, yeah, okay, right. Anyway, back to what we're talking about. You know, it was just like, why you why did you just speak now? Because that story wasn't a story at all. That was just things that happened today, or things that happened that you were you're just wanting to speak at the moment. It feels like you don't really know what to talk about and you want to talk, and you just want attention and people to look at you or something. Another really frustrating thing when when you meet a bad storyteller, because you want to enjoy the story. When someone goes, Oh, let me tell you this story, you get prepared to be like, oh, this could be really good. Your expectation is like, oh, I'm about to hear a story right now. And if it's a bad storyteller, it just kills you on the inside. Like, say someone's like, okay, I'm gonna tell you this story, and they start by saying, All right, so I was at Cole's supermarket, and you're like, yeah, and they go, Oh, wait, wait, wait. No, was it Cole's? It might have been Woolworths, actually. Oh, maybe maybe it was Cole's. What's that? Um, what's the the supermarket that's near that place in the corner? And then and so they're trying to figure out a detail that does I don't care about. That does not matter. And if you're gonna spend the three minutes trying to figure out where it was, and if it's not relevant to the story, the story could have been about you just saw someone and the story's about the conversation you have with the person. So it could have been in Texas in the middle of the desert for all I care. The story's about the conversation, it's not about where you were, I don't care about where you were. And so when people get so hung up on details that don't matter, I'm tuning out. I'm gone. I'm not with you anymore. You can keep telling the story if you want, but mentally, I'm not with us. I've gone. I'm somewhere else. I'm making up my own story, my own head for the fun of it. So yeah, yeah. Oh, it's so annoying, man. It's so annoying. And uh, or if or if someone's telling a story and there's a bad listener and they keep interjecting and asking questions, and they're just like someone's trying to tell the story, and they're getting cut off by someone just clarifying. Wait, wait, wait. So in the end, do you know if it was a cold or a worse? Oh no, it was a cold. Okay, continue. And so I ran into this person. Whoa, wait, did you know this person already? Or were they a stranger? Oh, yeah, they were just a stranger. I just ran into them. And it was just like, all these are clarifying, just let them tell the story, bro. Can we just give them a chance to speak and then at the end ask you questions? But like, and what does it even matter? Some people sometimes people ask clarification questions. It's like, that does not matter, dude. But on the contrary, when you find someone that is a good storyteller, you just want to listen to their stories. There are people that have jobs even now where they just tell stories. There's people on YouTube that have accounts, it's just like read, like telling true crime stories, or like just telling interesting stories or fantasy stories or made-up stories. And like I love them. I love like I'll chuck a random story on, and it's just some guy that's just made up a story, and I'll just listen to it on a drive, and I'll be like, oh, it's a cool story. But one of the reasons that I wanted to talk about this, I wanted to talk about the significance of stories, right? So stories are first of all, it's so much easier to learn from a story than it is to just learn in any other kind of format. When you think about uh when you teach a child something, you can teach them and say, hey, it's bad to lie. Or you might say, don't play on the road. It's not safe to play on the road. You could get hit by a car or something. They might go okay and they might not do it. The difference between that and saying, Do you know there was uh this one time where there was a little boy who was playing with his ball and he kicked his ball and it went out onto the road? And as he went out onto the road, a car came about by and hit the little boy. They are so much more likely to remember, whoa, the story, because you can kind of place yourself in that situation. So you you you remember a story more than you remember a fact because when it's in story format, your whole entire brain, every single part of the brain gets activated. When it's a fact, only one particular part of the brain gets activated. When someone is telling you a story, you go to that place. Every part of the brain is getting activated, even visual senses. There's a there's a thing called neural coupling. And what neural coupling is, is when you're telling a story, the listener of the story, their brain activity links up with the person telling the story. So you can just be sharing facts or in a conversation, whatever, people's brainwaves are doing whatever, but they monitored scans. They had uh monitors on brain activity and where it spikes and where it doesn't, the low areas, the high areas. When they began to tell a story, the brain activity of both the storyteller and the listener, it synced up. It all became like interlinked almost. And so you're kind of you're going there with the person. You are where the story is. So, for example, if I say to you, I was at this water park the other day, and I remember I was standing on this platform, and it was the highest peak of this water park, and there was this massive water slide, it was this blue and uh blue and yellow slide. And I put my feet onto the water and it was like freezing, freezing cold on the uh when as soon as I put my feet in, and I was like, okay, I really don't actually want to go on this thing anymore because it's gonna be so cold. So, well, okay, I'm gonna just stop it there because you can probably already imagine by now, you can see the the slide. You can see the blue and the yellow striped slide. Well, I think it was, I hope it was striped, I didn't say that, but but regardless, you pictured something, and then you might have even pictured or felt some sort of sensation of, oh, I can imagine what it's like when it's really, really cold. So it's like when you when you speak something, your imagination kind of creates this world while it's happening. So you start talking about, you know, a pink elephant, and all of a sudden in your mind there's a pink elephant. So storytelling is just such a more effective way to learn because you're kind of almost watching it in some way. If I just say to you, 73% of the time people do this particular behavior or whatever, you're you're so much more likely to forget rather than being like, I don't know, seeing it in a story form. So your brain doesn't really know the difference between what is real and what is imaginary. So have you ever, I'm sure most people have had experiences where they have thought about a fake argument. They thought, hmm, if I walk into this place and someone says this, then I'll say this back to them. And, you know, they might say this and I'll say this, and you know, and you can almost feel your heart beating, or even just remembering something. Your heart starts racing a little bit. You can think of things that don't happen, like maybe a loved one uh passing away or something. You can feel genuinely sad about that that isn't real. Your body's responding to it as if it is real, though. So the power that comes through storytelling and through imagination is massively different than just shouting facts at people. Yeah, so the reason why I feel like stories are used so much is because that's what actually changes behavior, is when someone can invoke an emotional response out of someone, data doesn't invoke any response. No one's gonna change their life based on just data and facts, but they will change their behavior if they have some sort of emotional reason to, if it's a bit more visceral, then they might actually change. Everyone knows already that like eating junk food is unhealthy, or that smoking causes cancer, or you know, there's so many different things. Watching going on your phone too much is so bad for you. All these things people already know, but like they know as fact, but it's not enough. It's not enough to just know the data, know the facts. You really do need to have something that is an inner emotional experience that drives you to change, to change your unhealthy habit or to just change a behavior at all in general. Antonio Damasio did some research on decision making and emotions. So the the amygdala in the brain is responsible for processing emotions, but it also impacts decision making as well. There were studies that were done where people had a damaged amygdala, so they weren't able to process emotions. And as a result, they weren't able to make decisions either, which is insane. It's insane to think that there's such a stark and distinct link between emotions and decision making. You would you would think that I should be making decisions regardless of emotion. But apparently, according to Antonio Damasio's studies, that that just wasn't true. There always has to be some sort of emotional thing. And like when you when you think about it, it because there has to be meaning. There has to be meaning for you to do anything. If it doesn't mean anything to you, then why would you do anything? You so if I'm going to do anything at all, it means that I'm not doing something else, which means that I'm valuing the thing that I'm doing more than anything else that I'm not doing at that point in time. If you don't have any emotions, why would you care to value anything? You don't feel a particular way about anything at all. You need to have emotions. This is why I really don't like the whole facts don't care about your feelings, because that is true. Facts don't care about your feelings. Uh a fact is a fact, regardless of how you feel about it or not. You can hate it, you can love it, it doesn't matter, the facts are the facts. But if the purpose of sharing the facts is to like, what is the purpose of sharing these facts? Usually you would think it's to sway someone's behavior. But feelings don't care about facts as well. And so it's kind of you kind of need both. Like if you don't feel you I've spoken about this before. You need you you need both. You need to have both facts and feelings, and it needs to be presented in a particular way. This is why I love the Bible so much, because every biblical historic story kind of doubles as analogous to current real life problems. So being being a historic reality and being an analogy for things that we deal with now, it's also it acts as a philosophical guidebook for life. It's also why Jesus always spoke in parables. Jesus would would very rarely just give just straight facts and information. He would say, This is a parable about the prodigal son, the son that leaves, but he's welcomed back by his father, even though he wasted his inheritance. Jesus spoke in parables so often that they asked Jesus, they were like, Why do you speak in parables? And he basically said, Because you guys already know, you have the revelation, but there's people that don't know yet. And so what he's what he's wanting is people to find the hidden meaning behind these stories, behind these parables. Because when you look a little bit deeper, when you look a little bit closer, it isn't just like you can you can look at it on face value, you can say, oh, okay, so yeah, this there was a kid who spent his money and he went away and he his dad welcomed him back in. Yeah, it sounds like a loving dad. Or you could look at the deeper meaning behind it, like it's it's it's very, very deep. That one, there's always things people are finding within it, and there's a I won't go into the full detail of that particular parable, but there's so much in it that if you sit on it and you think and you dwell and you ruminate on it, meditate on it, then things start to get revealed over time. And so that's why I love stories, it's why I love the Bible, there's so much meaning and depth in it. I've been really hung up lately on the story of Pinocchio. I was just thinking about this, and I'm like, that because it occurred to me, not a lot of people know much about Pinocchio. Everyone knows that it's about, you know, Pinocchio was the wooden puppet that wanted to become a real boy, and he would lie, and his nose would go if he lied. And that's kind of where most people like, no, I I said to a few people over the last, let's say, year or so, about oh, I relate to him so much because there's the scene where, you know, he's he's drinking and he's smoking, and you know, all the little boys on this island are turning into donkeys, and everyone's like, What? They're turning into donkeys? What do you mean? And like a lot of people just don't remember that scene. It's like one of the most crucial scenes in in the whole in the whole movie, but um I want to kind of go through and break down. So, this is how much you can get out of a single story. One of the things that people have with the story of Pinocchio is that I've heard it said Pinocchio isn't really about anything, it's about everything because there's so much that you can extrapolate from the story itself. It's way way more depth than it than I think a lot of people give it credit to. So the Disney version it starts off as this father, and well, let's say he's just an old man, and he's a clockmaker and a toy maker, and he creates this puppet, he creates a Pinocchio, and one of the first things that happens is this fairy comes, and the fairy comes and basically just brings Pinocchio to life. And there's a couple of little key things to know. So, first of all, one of the first characters that are introduced is Jiminy Cricket. Now, I don't think it's a coincidence, maybe it is. But Jiminy Cricket's initials is JC, very interesting in the terms of Jesus Christ and Jiminy Cricket, both which are used as some sort of profanity. When people are saying, let's say, they might say Jesus Christ in the in the way of saying, like, you know, that's crazy or something. They might also say Jiminy Cricket. You hear that quite a bit as well, maybe not so much in younger generations, but it's they're almost interchangeable when you you would use those. Not only that, but Jiminy Cricket is the conscience. So he's rep he's a representation of the conscience. And what happens throughout the story is you find Pinocchio not listening to his conscience, and then bad things happen. So I spoke last week about this, about exactly this: having an obligation to listen to your conscience and what might be called the natural law. So that's one thing. Pinocchio is uh is learning. So one of the first things he kind of does is he just sort of runs out into the world and he's completely innocent. So he is he doesn't know anything about anything, he's brand new, he has to be taught. And at his most innocent and vulnerable time, he's met with someone called Honest John. Honest John is depicted as a fox, which might be relevant to, you know, the phrase the sly fox. But it's more interesting that his name is Honest John, and there's nothing honest about him at all. It's kind of a reflection on what someone presents themselves to be and how not to just trust maybe the the outside effect or appearance of someone. Like being known as being honest John, you go, oh, okay, he's honest John. I should trust him, then he's honest. And it's just obviously it's not the case because throughout the movie, time and time again, he's actually one of the biggest predators in the movie. He's deceptive, he's a liar, he's completely the polar opposite to anything that is honest. There's not an honest bone in his body. Um, but what he does is he promises Pinocchio fame and riches, and he says, you need to be an actor. This is what it's all about, being an actor. And so um there's this guy, Stromboli. So Stromboli is this guy that runs the show, the the musical acting show that Honest John kind of convinces him to sign up to. And so Pinocchio agrees and he signs up. And the first song that he sings is talking about how I have no strings. So it's a song that he's singing. He gets presented, he's a wooden puppet, and um, because he's like a marionette puppet that would normally have strings attached, he's saying, I can move without strings. And the first thing that happens is he stuffs up the song and he falls down. And Stromboli gets really angry at him and scolds him, and then he tries it again. And so there's this, there's this interesting dynamic of being like, okay, he has full freedom now. Without strings, he can do whatever he wants. He can go wherever he wants. He's no longer controlled by anything. But then the first thing he goes into, he doesn't have freedom at all. He's being told exactly what to do. He's still almost bound by some uh maybe some idea of strings as being not limited. Like he wasn't able to just freely do whatever he wanted. He had a song to sing, he had a dance to do, he was an actor. Immediately after that, when they go back inside, Stromboli throws him into a cage and locks the key. So he's he's not he's not free whatsoever. So this is literally the idea of being a slave. You like you can never not be free free in the sense of you're always going to be a slave to something. So Paul in the Bible says, I'm a slave to Christ. Because if you you aren't a slave to Christ, you're a slave to something else. So needless to say, the fairy comes along again. So the fairy acts as like the spirit of grace. So this is a biblical story. Like if you look at the Disney version, the 1940s Disney film, this is a Christian tale. It's it's filled with Christian or biblical motifs throughout the whole movie. And one of those is that the fairy that keeps appearing is the spirit of the Lord. So she comes in and she goes, I'm going to get you out of this. It's the spirit of grace being like, I've stuffed up. So Pinocchio, in his mindless or maybe in his naivety, he didn't know. He went into something that he didn't know. It turned out to be really bad. He didn't listen to his conscience. His conscience, Jiminy Cricket was telling him not to do this stuff. He's saying, Go to school, don't go to, don't go here. Go and learn and be educated and all these things. Didn't listen. So the spirit of grace or the fairy comes along, sets him free. And as he's leaving, so he gets free and he's so grateful. He's like, okay, I'm never going to do that again. I'm just going to go to school. I'm going to learn. What ends up happening is he runs into Honest John again. And Honest John is like, oh no. And he convinces him like that he's unwell and that he's sick and all these. Yeah, he just basically gets into his head and goes, you know where you need to go? You need to go to Pleasure Island. This is where all little boys go. All young boys go to Pleasure Island. Now, the guy that runs Pleasure Island, I forget his name. One of the things is he's he has a meeting with Honest John and he goes, I'm collecting young boys, and we're sending them off to this island, and we're actually gonna trap them there. Like we're gonna um keep them there. And he goes, Honest John's like, Oh, well, like he was kind of showed a little bit of concern. And the owner of the island says, he says, Don't worry, they don't come back as boys. So it's if to say, once you go here, you don't return the same. You're not gonna come back as boys anymore. So anyway, so he goes to Pleasure Island, and you can kind of see these dark shadow workers. Like they're literally just apparitions, they're just dark figures that are kind of operating, they're closing the doors, and all the young boys are going off to have as much fun as possible. So there's so many, there's like roller coasters, there's rides, there's whatever food they want, they can drink, smoke, smash things, tear the place up, like do whatever. There is liter literally no rules. So all these boys, they they go in, they they start living it up as much as they can, as much as they want. And as as they're kind of going, the night kind of goes on. It's just Pinocchio and this one other boy. And there's an interesting thing that happens is Pinocchio is watching this boy, and something happens where the boy grows ears, donkey ears, and Pinocchio sees it and he puts his drink down. So he was drinking and he puts it down. Then the boy is playing some pool, and he starts he goes a tail. And Pinocchio looks, and then he puts the cigarette down or the cigar down. So he's kind of putting down these vices as he starts to see the negative effects unraveling in front of him. And then, of course, he um he goes and sees, you know, that he turns completely into a donkey, and Pinocchio turns half into a donkey. So he gets the donkey ears, he gets the tail before Jiminy Cricket arrives. And so what ends up happening is all the other little boys were captured. They turned into donkeys, they were captured, they were stuck there, basically. Which is this it is kind of a common thing that happens when people give in to hedonism and give in to their own pleasures. There are so many people that I used to party with when I was in my early 20s, and you and they're still doing the same thing now. There's people that are like well into their 30s that are still just doing the same things. Like they just want to drink and they just want to party and they just want to live as children. Like they weren't able to make it out of that. They were stuck there. So it goes on, and as they leave, they go, Okay, we need to get home. So Jimney Cricket and Pinocchio, like, we need to get home. We need to go see Geppetto, who is the the dad. And when they get there, the house is completely empty. So they're looking in the windows, everything's gone. Geppetto's not there, the fish, the cat, they're all gone. And they're it it's kind of a nod to the motif of, or like there's a bit of a thing in literature of you can't go home again, to say you've changed. There's a there's a quote by Heracletus that says, No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man, which is to say that you can't go home again. Like you you're you're different yourself, but also the place is different too. Like things change over time. And so Pinocchio notices that. He he feels the effects of he's no longer the same as he was, and his safe place to go home, he wasn't able to do that. He couldn't just return back to the way things were anymore. That wasn't an option. You can't just have this safe thing of, oh, I'll just let's just rewind. Let's rewind and just go back before this happened. It's like, no, that's not possible. You can't do that. So what ends up happening then is that this a literal dove floats down out of this flashing, shining star in the same way that the fairy would come, a dove now comes. And the dove is also the a symbolic representation of the spirit. It's used in the Bible as uh as references to God and purity and the spirit, and drops this note. And what's interesting is that it's Jiminy Cricket that reads the note, it's the conscience that reads the note. And it tells him basically that his father has gone looking for him, and they decide to go and rescue their father. They find out that their father was swallowed by a beast of a whale named Monstro. Monstro is the belly of the beast, going into the darkest, scariest place, essentially. Uh, and this is another motif of the story of Jonah. Jesus even says in Matthew 12, 39, an evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. So what happened with Jonah is he was trapped in the belly of the whale for three days, and then he was spat out. So same thing is happened to Jesus was saying in that moment, no sign will be given to you except that that of the sign of the prophet Jonah, to say he would go into the belly of the beast and come up and be spat out, or be to come up triumphant. So Jesus obviously dying for three days and then being resurrected. That was the sign given. And so you have the same thing happening here in this story is that Pinocchio, in order to save his father, he has to go into the belly of the beast. And there's all kinds of references that happen down when he's down there. But essentially, he goes in and he does. He saves his father, but he also dies. So what ends up happening is his father brings him home and he's laying there, and the fairy comes along and says something along the lines of due to the courage and the bravery that you've shown, I am going to restore you. And she turns him into a real boy. That's when he finally becomes a real boy after his show of bravery and courage, after he went into the belly of the beast and came out. That was when he resurrected and became real. And so it's this, it's an incredible story of like there's so many different elements in this story that you can look at. The the scene in which he has the lying, it only happens once in the movie where he lies and his nose grows. It's not a very big part of the movie. It's literally one scene. And it's when the spirit of grace was there, the fairy was there, and he tells her a lie, and he tells her another lie and another lie. And she ends up saying, Pinocchio, the more you lie, the more obvious it is. It's not, it's just the the story of Pinocchio lying isn't just say, oh, it's bad to lie. It's like, no, when you lie, it like the more you do it, other people can actually see it. It's a lot more obvious and it's worse the more you do it. It actually gets worse and worse and worse and more and more and more obvious. It is uh, it's not just to say lying bad, tell the truth. It's actually a warning that if you lie, you will be found out. That's that's the more clear message that's given in the movie, at least. And so, yeah, it's a really cool movie because it's got all these different lessons, it's got all these different things. It's very different to the original story as well. There's a lot of people that have done different adaptations and different endings where you know Pinocchio doesn't become a real boy and they go, you know, you you're good just the way you are, which is kind of lame. Like, I feel like that's that's not deep at all. It's like, yeah, like it's completely opposite to at least the Disney version, to be like, you know, that were like you had to almost to become a real human. There were certain trials to overcome to become real. And it tackles questions of even conformity of like, what do I need to do to become a real boy? Or uh, what are these things? Rather than just being like, oh yeah, just accept yourself as you are. It's like no part in the Bible does it say to accept yourself as you are, it says come as you are, but the expectation is that you change completely. It's like to be transformed. It uses the word transformed in the way of like a butterfly hatching from a cocoon, like a metamorphosis of transformation, completely transforming, going from a caterpillar into a cocoon to bursting out into a beautiful butterfly. So yeah, it's just it's a it's an awesome story. And by the way, that's just like the tip of the iceberg. People like do full studies on this thing, which is actually kind of weird. Disney don't allow you to just do a course on like Jordan Peterson wants to do a full proper course on unpacking Pinocchio, and he's been in contact with Disney and he has to get like approval to do it, and they won't let people just do it. You can't just do that because you want to. Like, you have to be approved and authorized. Yep, you can do an official talk on the 1940s movie Pinocchio. Like kind of weird. But anyway, it got me thinking as well. And Jordan Peterson will talk a lot about this type of thing, because he's like, he'll ask questions like, so what is real? What is real when a story like this happens? Because it's obviously it's a made-up story, but the lessons and the teachings and everything that sort of come within the story is kind of more real than anything else. It's it's real in a sense of how it impacts someone and how it can change someone's life. So Santa Claus isn't real, but he's more real to people, to millions and millions and millions of people than I am to those people. Because millions and millions of people, billions of people don't know who I am. And so, even though I'm materialistically real, in someone's life, Santa is far more real than I am. As far as they're from the moment they're born to the moment they die, I never came into their mind. I never did anything that crossed their path or impacted them in any way. And so for the history and the full documentary on their life, Santa Claus was more real and impacted them than I did. And so that's what the the idea of different categories of what is considered to be real. So, and why it doesn't always matter if it's materialistically real, if it's physically like real in the flesh. I watched a movie recently called it's a new knives out movie that just came out on Netflix. And there's this incredible scene where this detective walks into this cathedral, and the priest or the father is standing there, and they start having this conversation, and the detective is not a believer. And the priest asks him, So how does all this being in this cathedral, how does it make you feel? And he goes, How does it make me feel? And he starts looking around and he goes, you know, the architecture is interesting. I can see the grandeur, I can see the mystery behind it all, the intended emotional effect. But he says, It's it's as if someone is forcing a story upon me that I don't believe. And he lists all these reasons as to why he doesn't like the Bible and the things that happen in the Bible, and he's he's very angry about it, and he says, I want to get to a truth I can swallow without choking. And what's kind of funny is perhaps swallowing truth that does choke you is the more righteous path to take in the end. But regardless of that, the reply from the priest he says, Yeah, you're right. He goes, It is it is a lot of storytelling. He says, But the question is, do these stories convince us of a lie? Or do they resonate with something deep inside of us that's profoundly true that we can't express in any other way? Except storytelling. And it's really interesting because as that that scene is progressing and folding out, as the detective had walked in, it was kind of a warm light that was shining into the scene. And as he started talking about these negative things of, I don't like this, I don't believe it, and I feel like it's forcing a truth on me, I don't believe all these things, these things that he doesn't like, the light goes completely, and it's this cold light, this very dark light in the room as he's talking. And then as the priest starts talking again, and he's talking about this this profound, resonating truth that's revealed within storytelling, within the ideas of the story, the light is warm again and it warms up into this scene. So it's like the what it's trying to communicate, and and I believe in a multifaceted Bible that things are both true on multiple levels, that it's historically true, it's symbolically true, and that it's spiritually true. But what they what he was saying in this particular scene or what they were trying to communicate is why is it so important to someone that it's historically or materialistically true if it's symbolically and profoundly true, if it changes you ultimately in a good, real sense, that is the more important thing. The expression of this truth that only comes out through storytelling and is only able to be related to through storytelling. There's a moment in the movie where he's trying to ask a question to a lady over the phone, and she just will not stop interrupting him. And it's they're in a rush, they're really trying to get this information. And every time he goes to ask the question, he's like, Yes, but, yes, but but I'm just trying to oh, can I just ask you about this one question? It's like it's so annoying. And I'm sitting there watching the movie and I'm getting vis like physically frustrated. It was one of the most annoying things to listen to, and I'm getting so annoyed that I I literally pick up my phone and I almost cut myself out from the movie. I'm like, this is doing my head in. But then what happens is it slows right down to a complete stop almost. And this lady on the phone, she starts almost breaking down, and something really bad had happened. She felt like she had no one to talk to. And the priest who was on the phone with her slows down with her and he goes, It's okay. I'm you've got me, I can I can talk to you. And so he he stops trying to ask the question, and he walks into another room, and it's just this very somber moment, and it was a real reality shock for me because I was so annoyed at this person that I'm I basically had cut them off in my mind. This this person is so annoying, I don't want to listen to them anymore. I'm gonna pick up my phone and ignore. And what was really happening was something really serious was happening with this lady, and you have to, as a Christian, like what you want to do is have compassion for everyone. It's what's taught. And it was this almost it was a sobering moment because I'm like, man, I if this happened to me in real life, I would have already walked away, I would have hung up, and I wouldn't have had this opportunity to help this person who needed needed help and needed someone to talk to. So there's something that can really be revealed about yourself, even in form of a story, even if that wasn't part of the storyline. It was an event that was taking place that I was bearing witness to, I'm watching this unfold, and I'm realizing things about myself that I need to work on. It's just a random murder mystery story. It's got nothing to do with anything, but the profoundness that can be found through stories is I'm not gonna forget that. I'm not gonna forget the way that I felt when I was watching that scene and what it what it made me think about my own life. So there's something different about stories. I think one of the reasons people critique the Bible is because, oh, it's just a nice story. Isn't it funny how it just connects in a particular way? And people think that they made that up as, you know, it's this beautiful story. It's funny how that works. But that actually gives more credence to the value of it. Even back then, thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago, they knew the impact of storytelling. And they knew that if anyone's gonna learn, if anyone's gonna learn anything from this book, from the writings that we're putting down, from the history that we're saying, we can't just give them, we can't just give them straight facts. We can't just dot point list out things that happened. We have to present it in a way where it's gonna deliver the information, but also it's gonna change people as well. So that is why I love stories. And that is why I think there is a deep significance in storytelling. Anyway, I think I'll wrap it up. So Just remember, all of that's garbage and trash, except for these three things. Christ is King, Jesus loves you, and he's coming back soon. And I'll see you next time.