Finnegans Wake

“Okay, so I can link this back. All right, so there's a book called Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce. It's like arguably the greatest work of literature in the Western canon. It's a wonderful book. And a guy called Joseph Campbell studied it for his PhD.”

“And he wrote about the myths inherent in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. And he wrote this book. He wrote his dissertation on this book. Took him years. And then afterwards, he did a like too long, didn't read version of it, which is called The Hero Has a Thousand Faces and The Hero's Journey.”

“And then George Lucas picked up those books and he made Star Wars. So Star Wars is a too long didn't read version of Finnegan's Wake, which is a version of Vico. And Finnegan's Wake's got these incredible things in it: of like, he sort of predicts AI.”

“Hey, do you want to know an interesting, here's an tangential factor there? So I only find this out recently. So Finnegan's Wake is a book that I've read around a lot. I haven't read Finnegan's Wake, but I read about it a lot. It's kind of the great work of literature. It's James Joyce, obviously. So I didn't realize that Finnegan's Wake is Star Wars.”

“But basically, Star Wars is a sort of dumbed-down version of those books. Well, before Joseph Campbell wrote The Hero's Journey, his thesis was on the myths within James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. So he basically wrote that first, and then he thought, oh, this is really good, this thesis.”