Hi, this is against everyone with Connor Habib.

Friends, I'm so excited about this episode featuring all kinds of different takes on fantasy.

And by fantasy, I mean sexual fantasies, fantasy fiction, fantasy role-playing games, psychoanalytic fantasies.

I brought on esoteric scholar Peter Beavergal and countercultural pastor Barry

Taylor to talk about all of this on the uses of fantasy, the way fantasy breaks through into

reality and gives it its contours. In some ways, of course, reality is just an aggregate

of different sorts of fantasies. That's certainly what

psychoanalysis indicates to us. But here, we will talk about the use of fantasy from all these

different angles, and especially how it connects with art. In Barry's terms, it's fantasy as world

navigating.

The surge of the fantastic in its various iterations is perhaps the way we're finding our way,

you know, into this liminal state in varying ways.

And Peter talks a lot about how fantasy leads us to creating meaningful

art, and that meaningful art can be a sort of indicator as to whether or not the fantasies

we're curating are worthwhile. You know, let's just look at the history of art. The idea that socialist

Mexicans, Muslims are trying to come to the United States to, you know, steal children, has never,

I've never seen any good art come out of that.

But I've seen a lot of good art come out of a belief in the Virgin Mary, whether it's true or not.

And as an extension of those, well, you may not be surprised to hear that I'm interested in fantasy as far as the uses of the pornographic

and what that gives us that other kinds of fantasy intersections with art don't.

In pornography, people are like, wow, I really resonate. I project myself into what I see

and I also take it in and imagine it's happening in front

...