Pontus: It is strange that such a young person can be like a role model for me, like a grown adult, but she really is like a role model. And I feel like I want to be more like her. You can almost take Angelina out of the equation because now she has given this sort of vision of how to be as a person. So it doesn’t matter how she is as a person. Now I have this idea in myself, and I can go forward with this philosophy of how I want to be as a human being and how I want to meet my fellow humans in a new and better way, really.

Alan: Yeah. Once the blueprint has been conceived, we don’t need the actual paper that the blueprint was written on. We can digest the blueprint and integrate it, and then we can run with the blueprint. And it’s interesting because I have never seen her age as a limiting factor. I mean, for example, sometimes the Dalai Lama is seven or eight years old when he is crowned as the Dalai Lama. And so sometimes there is the, I wouldn’t say the innocence of youth, but sometimes there is something special about youth, which we old people cannot really remember. Sometimes a young person can… You know, for example, it’s like first love when you’re 15 and 20 years old, the way you can fall in love, it really can be quite different than when you’re 40 or 50.

Pontus: Part of the charm about young people and children is there are no filters there. There are no preconceived notions about how to be, they just ARE, so to speak. I’ve heard the description of the, what do you call it, the healing power of the forest. The notion that when we, as humans visit a forest, we are calmer, we are more at ease, being around nature. And I’ve heard that one of the explanations is that, the forest, it just IS. It doesn’t want anything. And it doesn’t have any expectations on you, so you can just be yourself there.

Alan: I really understand what you mean and I have had a similar thought. For example, if I go into the garden and I look at the tree, or I look at the grass or look at the flower, I think to myself, all of these are alive. All of these have life. It is a different type of being alive than me as a human being. If I look at a spider, or if I look at a bird, there are so many different variations of life and each one I can appreciate in their own way. And each one makes me appreciate MY life more. And in a way it’s similar, when you look at a baby and a young child- not only because they are alive and it’s a different type of life, but you look at them and think, ‘Ah, this is pure emotion, of how they are reacting without the obstruction and the nuisance of having a brain. I can watch how their emotional reaction is. And I can learn from that’.

Pontus: This past year and a half now, I think has been a great learning experience for me. Learning about myself and learning how I can live my life in a better way, to make other people better about themselves and in the end to make the world a better place. And I think that is so close to the vision that Angelina has. I never experienced that before that I want to share somebody else’s vision with people, because I think it’s a great thing to be a part of. But I really had that feeling early on with Angelina that this is something I must share with others. So that’s why I started the YouTube channel in the first place.

Alan: You and I have something in common, Pontus because I also started a YouTube channel, exactly for that same reason. Exactly for that same reason.

Pontus: Yeah. And maybe also just the fact that she is so creative in her way of interpreting songs and using her voice is also triggering me to be even more creative. I don’t know how you feel, but that was part of it, that I wanted to do something creative of this. Not just running around to my friends and pushing Angelina to them, but to really do something creative about it.

Alan: Yeah, I’ve certainly changed over the last 12 months. I’ve become more, I’ve come out of myself more. More of me is on the surface and I have access to more of who I am, through the Angelina Jordan experience.
I’ll tell you an interesting story, Pontus. When I was at university, someone who I knew was having a hallucinogenic drug experience. And he said that during those few hours, he could sit in his closet and watch the colors on his shirts and he could be completely occupied with that. Just watching the colors on his shirt for several hours. Now, my reaction to that was not to wonder what drugs he was taking. And this is not a statement about drugs, but this is a statement about how the simplest thing in life can and should be able to fulfill us. You know, whether it be looking at a blade of grass, or watching a cloud move. So whether it is something how the pandemic has retrained us to rearrange our thoughts or how the Angelina Jordan musical experience has retrained us to have a different experience. We’re not 98 years old where we have no access to any new universe. We are still alive and we’re breathing and we’re still in a transformation. We’re still able to have a transformation.

Pontus: I’m no religious man at all but one of the philosophies that sort of talks to me a lot now that I’m looking up to is the philosophy of just the wonder of it all. The wonder of life, really. And if you feel that way, then the struggles of everyday life, they get easier, I think. There’s so much in our society, that is like a competitive or we’re striving to success, whatever the hell that is. And it’s not about that at all. It’s about something else. And if we think that it is about striving for success, or money or fame or anything like that, then we’re fooling ourselves, really. We end up on our death beds and thinking, ‘What did I do? That was not important at all.’ The sooner we can get to that realization the better life we will have.

Alan: One of the things a possible Angelina Jordan effect is for us to re-evaluate what causes us stress. I mean, it’s one thing to be calm, but if we can say, ‘ Right, well, actually that is not important enough for me to be stressed about’, which reminds me of a joke. Are you sitting comfortably, Pontus?

Pontus: Yes.

Alan: This man went to a lecture and in the lecture, the scientist was saying to him that the sun will explode in 4 billion years and that the earth will be no more. So he goes home and he worries, and he feels really, really, bad. And then his wife says, why are you so upset? And he said, ‘The scientists say that the sun will be exploding in 4 million years’ And she says, ‘Oh, no. It’s 4 billion years’. He says, ‘Oh, what a relief!’

Pontus: Yeah.

Alan: So this is a story of, whether it’s 4 million years or 4 billion years. It doesn’t matter. One should not cause stress, but it is a certain frame of mind of whether you react to that with stress or not.

Pontus: Yeah, exactly. Some people have that as their life philosophy that I should be stressful about everything and they are negative about most things, and I think that’s almost like a default state in humans that we’re focusing on the negative side of things. I’m not sure why that is, but I guess it’s an evolutionary thing. That is something that we must, each and every day work with, towards feeling more at ease and focusing on the positive and not the negative.
We’ve all had that evaluation talk with our boss and they say twenty good things and they say one little negative thing. And what do we remember? We remember that one little detail that is not good enough.

Alan: If my wife hands me four poems to edit and I say, ‘Three of them I really, really like’ And she’ll say, ‘Oh, so you didn’t like the fourth one?’

Pontus: Exactly, yeah. And if I get like a hundred comments on my latest video, and one of them is like, ‘Why are you just sitting there and destroying the mood for everybody?’ Then that is the one that I’m now sharing with you and not the good ones. We must try to reprogram ourselves. And I think that is one thing that Angelina is helping us with, to think about these things really.

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Alan: She’s actually a very good example of the benefit of receiving a very pure level of love. And she is a wonderful example for every parent, of how they could and should bring up their child. The purity of the love that you give to the child gets magnified inside of the child. And for the child it’s like having money in the bank. When they grow up with that love, it is like the most solid foundation for their whole life. And this should be shouted from the rooftops and this should be taught in schools and universities. And it’s so basic and important and misunderstood.

Pontus: Yeah. I would like to get the secret of how you can bring up a child to be as, what do you call it, confident, that Angelina is already from the start at Norway’s Got Talent when she just walks out on stage and just, ‘This is it. I’m just singing here. There’s a lot of people here, but…’ I mean, she’s not afraid of anything really. What is the secret behind that kind of inner strength?

Alan: I can imagine, with someone who is very, very special, like Angelina Jordan, that all around her in her family, from her grandmother and her parents, et cetera, et cetera, I can imagine that she has never received any type of criticism. And if a child has no criticism, you need to be a really good parent to have that on your radar. And to keep that in focus every hour of every day. Because, you know, parents are very human and parents can lose their temper and parents can express frustration, et cetera, et cetera.
You have to think, everything that you say and do is like dropping that little pebble in the pond and it has a rippling effect on the child.

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Pontus: She was born to sing. That is one part of it, of course, for me anyway, that it’s something in the genes, something that maybe she inherited from her grandmother, who herself was like a prodigy. And that is also part of the fascination, the mystery about how this can be.
Because how can a child so young begin to sing a Whitney Houston song, and how can a child being three years old, even think about performing for Simon Cowell, and have that as a dream?
It’s beyond what we feel is possible, but of course this is the proof that it is possible. And it is a proof of the power in us as humans, what we can achieve in our lives, really.

Alan: Yeah. Do you know what I just thought of, and that’s maybe when Angelina Jordan was very, very young, maybe six months old or 12 months old, 18 months old, maybe she saw how much her grandmother really enjoyed listening to music. And maybe she then decided to sing and to please her grandmother and to bond with her grandmother through producing music almost as a type of a special language that they have between them.

Pontus: That’s a good theory. I like that. I know that my father, who was a painter, and he was very productive. And he had sort of a need to express his art. He said to me that his first art experience was when he was very, very young, three or four years old. And he saw his father doing like a, what do you call it, a puppet show? Yeah. His father was sort of handy and he made different dolls and he did like a theater with them. And my father said there was all of a sudden, like an epiphany. He saw something that he felt was like an art experience. And that is what he was trying all his life to recreate with his paintings, that kind of insight into some world that was mysterious to a child like that. So there are so many mysterious things going on in children’s minds, in our brain all the time. So that is part of the wonder of life.

Alan: We have, a joke in my family because my son is a fashion photographer. And I say I take after him to become a YouTuber.

Pontus: Yeah. Yeah.

Alan: Instead of him taking after me, I take after him.

Pontus: Yeah, that’s good.