Return of Nick! (efiCLd5Tabs)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=efiCLd5Tabs

the rim in terms of experience. And that’s one of the things I like about Nick is that he just lays it all out there. Like, oh yeah, I did this and that didn’t work out well at all. And he does it with such a good lighthearted manner. It’s sort of easy to listen to him because he doesn’t seem to get as upset about some of these things as people would expect. So man, I don’t know what his technical problems are, but to be fair, nothing has worked recently on the interwebs. But yeah, I think his sort of whimsical approach to things is unique, especially given his cult stories are so good. If you haven’t checked them out, they’re really good. And the way he handled John Vervecki that interview time, that was really amazing. He really is a way of getting people into the nitty gritty without being confrontational, which I’m not a particular fan of, obviously. But I’m glad somebody can do it. Well, and that was at the point in time where we were struggling to pin Vervecki down. Because we noticed what the problems were and how they couldn’t work out. But we didn’t have a way to connect to Vervecki and to his framework. And Nick had the right words, and he could mention the right philosophers. And so he could use all of these ideas that we’ve been thinking about. And he just could apply them. And that’s also the nice thing about Nick. He’s gone for half a year or whatever, and he comes in, and he’s like, oh, yeah, this, and oh, yeah, that’s like, I got that. You’re doing that. OK. Well, he’s been a great mentor and friend to us on our little journeys through the meeting crisis resolutions. Maybe not personal, although maybe personal for one of us. But in helping people and figuring out how to express things to people and how people are stuck, he’s always kind of been out in front, comes in and checks in every once in a while. Where you guys at now? Oh, you’re there. And so it’s nice because he’s given us that feedback about whether or not we’re on the right path. And that’s been helpful because he’s allowed us to talk through some of this stuff. And we’ve been able to figure out if what we’re saying is actually contained within these other traditions, whether they’re Western philosophical traditions or Eastern spiritual traditions or standard Western religious traditions, because we have all of that. Finally, Nick gets here. All right. Well, we’re already done. So like we might as well. Yeah, yeah. We might as well. But just say bye to Nick. All right, Nick, take it away, my friend. It’s great to see you. Yeah, it’s been a good while. Oh, then he loses his camera. Look at this. Oh, and then he and then he. Wait, he runs. Oh, my Lord. Why? Why? I don’t know. What did you do to your camera, Nick? Turn on your camera, damn it. Are we going to have to be under what technical difficulties? And this is like the technical difficulties last stream, apparently. It’s it’s like. Been a while since I’ve had to. True, true. You’ve been you’ve been doing real world stuff, which we hope to get an update on. Yes. How much you’ve heard so far of the praise we’ve been heaping on you, but I’m sure we have more as we go. But like everybody can see that he’s plagued by demons. Right. Clearly, control. Does not work. That was it. I don’t know what you did. I’m not reading my camera. It did initially. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we saw you on camera for a few brief seconds. Brief moments. There’s like a dot dot dot next to your name. I think there’s a settings thing. If you’re in a computing. Yeah, it’s like my camera actually disconnected from the computer. Yeah, you hit it. So that might actually have happened. There we go. Now it came up as an option, at least. Oh, that’s good. Well, maybe we’ll start jam. There we go. There we go. Oh, wow. Nick, how have you been? I’m in a new background. How have you been? Where have you been? Where are you now? Give us the update, man. It’s great to see you. Yeah, it’s been a long few months. The short of it is the housing situation in Santa Cruz crumbled underneath me. Crumbled underneath me briefly or shortly after my fiance moved in so we could save some money. So we were planning on moving up here to the Pacific Northwest for quite a while. But our plan was to actually make the move from Santa Cruz this upcoming summer. So like six months from now. And basically, we just pushed that forward a year. We’re living with my dad up here at the moment and just kind of trying to set down some roots and stabilize everything and save up some money. And that’s where we’re at. Great. You still the master knife maker or what are you doing for work? I am currently working for a failing construction company. Excellent. So I’ve been doing that for the last six months. It’s been interesting. Basically no experience in construction up to this point. Obviously, I’ve worked with my hands a lot. So I had at least somewhat of a skill set that transitioned over to it. But it’s been very humbling. Being the dumb guy at the job site for six months around a bunch of people that have trouble with areas of information processing that I’m generally much more capable of. So it’s been an interesting blend. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, at the moment, I’m kind of looking around seeing what other job situations are available. Mostly just because the company really is, you know, when I hired on, we had 12 workers in the field and three project managers. Now we’re down to three guys in the field and two project managers. They closed down the office just recently. I’ve been laid off this week, which actually works out well because we got pretty crappy weather. But hopefully I’ll be back at it next week. Oh, I thought you’d be taking it over and turning it into the new Nick cult. But not yet. Maybe next week. Right. On tunnels like we’ve been talking about tunnels. They’re really important. Oh, no, not with the tunnels. The Catholics have more tunnels than anyone else. I’m just saying. Anyway, well, that’s good, Nick. That’s great. So you’re setting down new routes in the Pacific Midwest there, huh? Right. You know, I spent half of my teenagerhood here, I guess all of my teenagerhood. I lived here for 12 years before I moved to Santa Cruz. So I have a little bit of a basis here. We have a I have a bunch of family up here, which was one of the big draws to coming up here as we try and kind of get ready to move into the next realm of stage of life. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It’s been an adjustment, but, you know, a lot of benefits, a lot of a lot of recalibrating things. But no, that’s good. What? Well, we’ve been things have been wild. Really wild lately. Yeah. The timing of you popping back up with Manuel was like, what the hell’s going on? And I’m like, I don’t know. I don’t know why he would pop up now. That’s very interesting, given everything that’s been going on. I can just, you know, we can invoke the hand of the ineffable, I guess, because I got nothing. I got like I got I don’t know why you popped out of nowhere in this particular time and said, hey, let’s do a live stream like right away. Because usually you you pop up and you come into the Discord server and you’re like, all right, how are you guys doing? Where are you at? How far? How close are you? How far along have you got? You know? But no, you’re like, all right, let’s do a live stream. It’s like, all right, let’s let’s let’s chat. Let’s do a video. Let’s let’s do this. Yes. Yeah. We haven’t captured to open and tell us yet. Like, no, no. The open ended T. Los Elephant marches on. I’m glad to see he’s still there. He’s still there. Yeah, for me, it’s it was probably mostly just a you know, I had a week off. I’ve been craving these conversations. I was just talking last week with my fiance about how I feel like I I don’t even know if I can have these types of conversations anymore just because it’s been so long since I’ve engaged with them. Like my brain doesn’t think in that way. So I started, you know, writing comments and digging in a bit more. And I’m like, OK, my brain still works that way. It just hasn’t been used in a while. Oh, Michelle, Michelle is all happy to see you next. Thank you, Michelle. Lovely. Nice to see you. Hope you’re well. What have you been commenting on? Because I haven’t seen you in the in the comments, but I haven’t really been looking necessarily for people in comments lately. I was commenting on the whole TLC arguments. Oh, you were. Oh, so you saw some of the dust up there. Right. I’m I’m blubish, by the way, when YouTube rewrote its or redid its its thing, it got rid of my normal and be replaced it with whatever it is. I signed signed up with Google with many years ago. OK, so I have to admit that my memory isn’t good enough to reconstruct that in my head. What you commented. But tell us what. Oh, I was writing like small papers. OK. But basically, I was I was making the argument that I think basically I do think TLC exists this. I think it’s a loose pattern of relationships and networks. I think maybe why there’s been so much argument about it is that the labels been used so much that the concept is kind of reifying. And as it reifies, you kind of there becomes a stronger desire or a need to start having properly define it in relation to that reification. Right. So as it becomes more solid instead of just kind of this big bucket term. Right. And that’s what it was forever. It was mostly just a convenient word that we could just kind of like, well, it’s vaguely in this pattern of things, this kind of relational network. Right. Peterson’s in there. All these kind of, you know, general area of conversations. But it keeps getting used and then it keeps getting used in different ways. And then as it kind of it, right, it starts becoming denser and heavier and it starts feeling more like a thing instead of just like a general bucket term. And as it reifies like that, I think that’s where people start going. Well, wait, what the heck is this thing? No one’s properly set boundaries around it. Well, only I would say only certain people like some people want the boundaries. I mean, I think for me, right, and people wouldn’t understand this, right, because they haven’t gone through it. I’ve been through lots of online communities and just to use one that’s accessible. Awakening from Meaning Crisis, Discord blew up in exactly the same way, right? Like they started doing stuff and they started naming stuff. We effectively were too many rebels, too many snakes, right? And they just didn’t want a thing because yeah, they could be part of a thing and that would get rid of their domicile problem. And you know, maybe they maybe daddy approves of them again and they feel like the prodigal son or whatever. But ultimately they don’t want the structure and they don’t want the judgment, right? Because if they have all that, then the problem for them is, well, now they have to admit they did something wrong and then they have to repent. And that doesn’t guarantee redemption. And I think a lot of people just jump straight to redemption in whatever form, you know, there’s different forms that people think of redemption. But the way they’re talking, it’s about redemption for them. Like, oh no, I want TLC to be this because it did this thing for me. And so I wanted to do this thing for everybody else. And it’s like, what if that isn’t it? And what if it didn’t do that for everybody else? And what if, in fact, that thing didn’t that happened to you didn’t require TLC or whatever it is you think TLC is. And that’s where see, that’s where I’ve been really focusing. Like and a lot of these people for me, they’re just rejecting Peterson. I’m like, why are you rejecting the guy who Peterson is like none of her foundation? Yeah, but but let me try and frame it a little bit because I think when you see something right like when you see a spirit or maybe you better get an energy because I don’t I don’t know if it was an actual spirit. Right. Like I think that’s why you use the word loose. Right. There’s yeah, like and so when you see something like that, there’s a potential. Right. And so when when you name it, you’re trying to capture that potential. Like I was I was talking about that. Well, like then that potential needs to get ahead. Right. Like like it needs to gather under something to get a body. And and and that was a moment in time, right? A couple years ago, like three years ago, probably like and like it kind of happened with the bridges of meaning on some level, right? But it needs this had to gather under and then the name is actually real, right? Like it like it manifests under that name. But my analysis is that like that point has passed and when you keep using the name and you’re trying to mask manifest energy that no longer exists that that’s necromancy, right? Like now now we’re we’re trying to blow in a spirit in into something that’s dead and doesn’t even have a proper body. So and I think when when when I was talking like my argument was around what like we’re wasting energy. Like like right. It is all misdirected and and therefore satanic like right. Right. It doesn’t start that way. And this is where people get confused, right with the emergence in particular, right? Because I see this and that’s why I said look you guys are playing the Neoplatonic game. Like you’re doing exactly what Verveki and others are doing with this term Neoplatonic. Just I think we put it to bed. It’s a garbage term. It’s a garbage term. There is nothing in common after Plato to have a thing with right? Like the thing that all those people have in common is Plato. They don’t have anything else in common. And so they’re really just rebelling against Plato in one form or another or omitting Plato or whatever. How do you want to frame it? And and the reason I think why they’re doing that is because they’re noticing the many because the many is always there and always changing and always coming up because entropy is real guys. I don’t know what else to say. Like, you know time passes and time and change. Are they differentiable? I don’t think so. Like you can’t measure time without change. And change doesn’t wouldn’t be observable without time. Right. And so it looks like that’s just two sides to the same coin at some point. So what I’m picking up on I think is three kind of different variables here or or or maybe even just contexts. One is that you’re commenting on there at the end mark seems like the whole memetic drift problem, which is what does a word mean particularly words highlighting abstract patterns when the pattern itself changes now aren’t you that’s where the necromancy point gets in. Are you trying to revive the thing as it was or are you now referencing something different or what is that you’re still talking about? So that’s why good point. The other might be like how my brain was thinks about this is you have these like a layered ontology, right layers of of of being from the abstract down to the real. And so you have these over categories and then you have the instantiations of those categories as they move down. So TLC might be the giant umbrella term up at the top. It’s just this big chaotic constantly kind of shifting around pattern that doesn’t have a strong definition because there’s so many elements in it that are changing so dramatically and dynamically over time. Yet there’s some kind of binding to it. That’s in some sense where I would object. That’s right. So for example, and I do think that the problem is in ontology. One of the problems when people invoke ontology is they’re actually an object of material reality all of a sudden, right? And I think this is what I was alluding to like emergence happens all the time guys, you know, like like people do go fund me’s and it works without whatever they’re referring to as TLC like that happens. You know, it may not be as common as people like right because you got to have something to get it started and whatever but there’s something to get it started and there’s something that keeps it going. Those don’t have to be the same thing. That’s another thing where people get we’re compressing and flattening the world. So we want to be the same thing. But at a certain point in this, I think this is what Manuel was alluding to right. There’s a time component. Things are emerging all the time. Emergence isn’t interesting to me. What’s interesting is whether or not the emergence lasts and does it form or does it deform? Does it unform? Does it spread out or does it come together to make things better? Right. And this for me is related to reciprocal narrowing versus reciprocal opening. Right. I want I want to take like like a country for example, right? So you could say well like like there’s a border here, right? And then one side of the border, it’s it’s the same nature the same everything as the other side. But when you look at the people, no, no. And so so you can say no, like like literally no. Like the language that they use, right? Like like the way that I was making I was just making a joke about how how America’s current borders are are a little mushy. Right. Right. We’re non-existent. Yeah, but no, I take your point. Yeah. So so so so so there’s there’s something that’s common in in their identity, right? Because you could say well like they have their suffer the same fate, right? Like literally. But they’re they’re not the same, right? And and and and then you have this idea of of of a spiritual father, right? Which is a different way of binding than than the nation has right to this. There’s competing binding principles, right? Because the nation is is still territorially locked while while the spiritual Union doesn’t suffer from from the physical constraints in the same way. But but it’s important. It’s important to see that that from the outside you can observe something to be unified, right? You could that’s the argument like oh if aliens would come to Earth, what would they see? Right? What would they see? They would see certain unities that are not unities and and they would see certain disunities like America that are unity, right? It’s it’s it’s it’s really complicated with these identities and I think it is. Yeah, I will end to that point, you know in many ways many of the discussions would. Many of the arguments would in the same way say that the United States is not a thing. Right. It does not exist. Right. Yeah, just like the Gulf War didn’t happen like yeah. But because you can see something that was brought up by propaganda and it’s like well, yeah, but like we have to relate to things in the world’s true an interface and the mediation right because we don’t have direct experience. But the but the United States is a particularly good example, right? Because right now we’re going through this confusion around really the ethereal iconoclasm and materialism and it goes are all very close together linked, right? Materialism takes you into the destruction of the icons, right? Because you don’t want things pointing away from the material anymore. It’s flat flattening the world materialism flattens the world down to material. You know, why why are Sam and Frodo going on a thing together? They must have a sexual relationship. They have to be homosexual. It’s the same right. It’s just flattening everything down to a material cause or a formal cause or some combination of both right the reifying the rail. Yeah. Yeah. That’s the word you were using. Yeah, that’s that’s a good word too. Whereas what’s actually going on with the United States is it doesn’t coalesce around the presidency. That’s ridiculous, right? Because the presidency changes too quickly. In fact that the whole role of the president’s changed so much even over the past 70 years in the United States. It’s it’s almost an unrecognizable office in some sense. The whole idea of executive power is brand new. You know, I would say the fight over executive power is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It’s not newer than that. And it wasn’t taken up in the way that he did it until the 70s, right? That’s when it started to take that whole thing started to be taken up again. And but what is the United States? Well, really it’s the Confederation of States that is behind the idea that informs the Constitution. And if you start to understand it that way instead of who’s president because that’s going to determine the direction of the country. I don’t know what to tell you about the last say six elections in the United States for president. But boy did they not change the direction of the country. They reflected the direction of the country and people get sort of confused, right? Right. But when you don’t have that sense you you you think oh the you know, the United States is whoever’s president. Yeah, and I would say that’s definitely not how I think about so I would make the argument that the that the America as a title functions very much in a similar fashion to TLC as a title. Right. It has within it many conflicting. Tell I what is the tell losses. Tell Lloyd. Tell Lloyd. There we go. Some even overtly towards its own end that nonetheless are members of it. But I think you’re making a mistake because I don’t think those tell I create membership. Right. But it’s sort of like it’s sort of like if you have an island of prisoners. Right. They have something in common. They’re all criminals, but their crimes aren’t the same and the way they see the world isn’t the same and their highest values aren’t the same. And their virtues are probably not existing. And then you get Australia. Maybe maybe but but but but the problem is that you know, you have basically a bunch of people who don’t agree but are forced together in circumstances. And maybe they’re forced together there for very good reasons. I don’t know that that’s not particularly relevant, right? They’re forced together for circum and maybe it’s the only not open participation. Right. Maybe it’s the only place that will have them right or maybe it’s the only place they will stay because they don’t feel like they are being imposed upon or judged or whatever. Right. Or they feel welcome or whatever. But but does that mean that they have a thing together? Right. Because because again, and I made this argument earlier with the grocery store a lot of what they’re describing is literally experiences have going to the grocery store. Like this is not uncommon. Bump into people and make connections and find things in common around an area that has things that you have in common. Like, oh, I like tomatoes. There’s somebody there with getting tomatoes and you know, like that sort of thing actually happens all the time to be all kinds of people that I know, you know, like I went to a car show and I met this guy is really into Mustangs. I say, oh, shocker. You know. But other people went to the same car show and they never met each other and they’re all car people probably presumably. Although some people go to car shows are not car people, by the way. True. I’ve been to many car shows and I’m not much of a car person, but that’s right. And then and then the question is well, because it because this is going to be relevant. Obviously, too. Who’s there with a positive affect is trying to be generative, right? I think that was Manuel’s term generative for sure. Right. And who’s not and and and maybe they’re not and that’s okay because they’re not hostile to the generative. But what if they’re snakes? And I think one of the problems that we’ve run into in the world is that you know, you can take some world event. Like let’s just take the fake news flu, right? The fake the fake news virus scandemic and we could say boy, there were a lot of people doing a lot of bad things. You know, it doesn’t matter which side of those issues or whatever. If you want to put it inside, you’re on. It does not matter. The statement that I’m going to make is universal, right? Either way you look at it. A lot of people were possessed by something, right? And went down a bad path. And again, it doesn’t matter if you’re like ProMask or anti-mask. It applies in both directions, right? It’s which is mysterious in some sense. Why does it reply equally in both directions? And so the question would be. You know, do they actually have something in common? What’s really going on there? Why is it that that happened because some of those people are just too busy to figure it out. Even if they could like even if they had the cognitive capacity to fall one way or the other on whether or not masks were good. But they’re not going to. They’re going to put their cognition somewhere else. But some of the people are there to divide. And I think the problem is when you have five, we’ll say actual certified PhD scientists who do real research, like actually. Saying the same bad thing because it is another doesn’t matter which side of issue you’re on masks or no masks. You’re going to find five. Verifiable upstanding citizens, right? That aren’t doing it. Now the now the question becomes because like theoretically we can all agree there could be a snake in the garden, right? Right. But but the problem and I think this is the problem and I think it’s partly the internet. It’s partly this. Well, everybody can get along together or whatever. The believability of one snake at least theoretically is no problem. Now, I don’t think people are believing in real snakes in real life. But five are there fought because that’s not a sellable message anymore. But when the pot expands to the internet, five is certain. It’s certain. And so now now a sense making tool we might use rarity. Oh, yeah, you’ve got a garden of this size, which is you don’t with the internet, right? Got a garden of this size. So the odds that you’re going to find more than one snake are fairly low. So if five people are saying the same thing, it must be true because there aren’t five snakes, right? That’s not true anymore. Right. And you’re talking about basically distributed cognition how unstable it is in an environment like the internet because what ends up happening is there’s too. Too much of everything all at once. What it forces the person to do is to basically use precognitive filters to filter the information in the first place. Thus, basically boosting confirmation bias through the roof. Well, I don’t I don’t believe in precognitive filtering. But Joey Joey is glad to see you. Right. That’s a dream team. Nice to see you too, Joey. I’d like to believe Joey’s optimistic outlook on us. Sounds good to me. I’d like to be considered. Well, I want to bring in like I was in the Breakwater Festival in Germany. We had a Mandela circle thing where it’s basically there’s a group of people in the center. You get to go into the center and then you get to speak. And so everybody from the outside had the opportunity to go in and then you had this movement in and out. And so what happened, right? We have to recognize this. This is a highly selected group of people, right? Right. With relatively common purpose. And there was a division like a really stark division. And what was the division around? Well, some people wanted something. They wanted to get somewhere. And other people wanted to I don’t I don’t know how to articulate that correctly, but they they wanted to share. They wanted to share in one thing and like I guess it’s more like a universalist and getting everything every side in there or whatever. And implicitly assigning equal relevance to every single because that’s the consequence of that. But you can you can re-interpret that as a masculine impulse, right? And a feminine impulse. Right. And so so if you have a group of people, right? You need to organize spaces for this masculine and feminine thing to coexist. And the problem is that in order to have something it needs to be in a structure in a hierarchy, right? So the masculine has to make the space or the house or build the house that can house the feminine. And so if you if you start using the feminine as the house. Yeah, yeah. Like so this gets a while back. I was like there’s three variables here at play. One was the memetic drift. The other was levels of ontology. I think the third dynamic here is that you could like you can have the conversation at the level of what is ontology in the first place. What makes something real or not real, right? So that’s one way to have the conversation. The other is what is health, right? You decipher what these systems or patterns mean if they’re self terminating patterns, if they have a viral like a negative viral quality to them, right? If they’re parasitic, these are all totally totally fair judgments of a pattern. But it’s a different question than the ontological one. Now, they’re related. I want to correct this a little bit because I think there’s some some framing that you want to use here, right? So there’s emergent things, right? And they don’t have a standard, right? They don’t have a telos. They don’t have a way to be judged, right? So you can’t determine their health. And then you have things that come from above that emanate, right? And they are measured by the standards from which they emanate, right? And that allows you to determine the health of that emanation. But the health only exists in relation to the ideal. Like the health doesn’t make any sense without the ideal judging. Yeah, that’s the difference between emergence is good and being is good. Right. And so that depends on a good idea of what creation is, right? Because if creation doesn’t emanate from from above, then emergence has to be good because I mean babies emerge, man. So it must be OK. Right. Well, and I wouldn’t be so quick to make the the. Judgment in that sense, there’s an interesting thing here, because again, how I’m imagining I’m picking up what you guys are saying, definitely. What’s interesting, so when you use a title like TLC, it is absolutely it is it’s emanation or a while you’re trying emergent emergent. It has and the feminine quality is a great, great way to view it because it’s just a bucket term. But the cat, let me finish just for a minute so I can at least communicate how I’m picturing it. I’m not saying you have to believe it. Within that giant bucket term, you then have, say, bridges of meaning or estuary, right? And like if people want that feminine kind of sharing thing, they go to estuary because the whole point of it is the murky water, right? It’s it’s the place to do that. It has no goal other than this kind of meeting of two conflicting things. Perhaps something new emerges from it, but it doesn’t have a clear tip. Tell us on the other end, you would have like the the I forget what the heck it was called now, the X 90 project and then exit is the people exit is 90. Right project then like, you know, that certain group of people went and made their own little group or method to share how their progress was with it. And then they all supported each other with a very clear tell us in mind that they used their relationship to. So what if there’s no crossover at all between those groups, which is what I’m seeing. Like it just they have nothing in common. Well, the people. Do they all share in the same groups of ideas? Do they communicate across those groups? That’s not look. I mean, the argument all along has been look at all the people that left BOM for one reason or another. Right. Right. And look at why, you know, I put up the Peterson Sphere website in 15 minutes while I was on a live stream with Father Eric. And why was I able to do that? You know, well, you had a bunch of artwork and artwork from Sally Jo, which she had offered to the portal, which she had offered to BOM, which none of you guys wanted. Which is like I’m OK with it. I benefit. I got all the artwork for free. It was already done. Sally Jo and ironically and weirdly again, another weird synchronicity. Sally Jo just reaches out to me a few days earlier and says like, hey, I have all this great artwork. We’ve been talking about the Peterson Sphere sort of batten that around. Why don’t you have it all? And she made it all available to me. And it just so happened that for whatever reason, it kind of fit the website very nicely. And now we have the Peterson Sphere website and somebody else took it over. My original design got wiped out by bad, bad tools. But if you know, if you want to see it, I’ll post a link. But the thing was like she to this day sounds a little still upset. And she should be in my opinion that she was rejected by those people. All right. And not rejected by us. Like she still hangs out with us. And she insists, by the way, that she’s still the meanest in the group. So I agree with that. But she’s pretty mean, to be fair. But she’s looking for people to work with. And it’s not like this isn’t a pick on BOM thing. I mean, BOM was like the fifth place that they didn’t actually want to cooperate. They didn’t want to cooperate. Here’s somebody who wants to cooperate. You can say, I’ll cooperate with people desperate because she knows she needs that cooperation. She doesn’t get it anywhere. Right. And so she comes and hangs out with us. And we’re like, absolutely. We’ll do whatever we can do to help you out. Sort of a thing. Right. BOM is a particularly bizarre one because the success of a person using that tool as it was intended, that community as it was intended, was that they no longer participated with it. That was the condition of success. So you end up with now you’re in a, like we were talking about before with mimetic drift, you’re in a community that has an astronomical level of entropy in its meme because the people that actually used its telos appropriately are no longer there to hold its telos in place. And you get a least common denominator factor of the people that stay end up being the ones that couldn’t use its teleology correctly. Well, I would disagree. I mean, I don’t think all things have a teleology. Like I don’t think you can apply ontology universally. I think that’s one of the big problems with the thing. I don’t know if you follow my Twitter, the age of gnosis, like the problem with the age of gnosis is that the age of gnosis, one of the problems, the age of gnosis says everything has an ontology and I don’t think everything does have an ontology, which is ironic because on the one hand ontology is the thing everyone’s fighting because ontology is the description of the hierarchy. It’s a definition of the hierarchy. Right. And everybody’s trying to flatten the world and get rid of the hierarchy and at the same time going no ontology. Well, that’s because they’re trying to re-enchant the world scientifically. Right. But there’s another form of re-enchantment around this. We call it parabolic way of knowing right now. We call it the poetic way of knowing. There’s another way to do that. That’s non ontological by definition, anti ontology. And I think that’s the difference. I think the thing that Joey was very much on to thank you, Joey. Thank you. Thank you. I think the thing that I think was very much on to thank you, Joey, was the idea that, you know, the idea that you have to get to a new place. And I think that’s the thing that I think was very much on to thank you, Joey, was the idea that, you know, the idea that you have to get to a new place. And I think that’s the thing that I think was very much on to thank you, Joey, was the idea that, you know, the idea that you have to get to a new place. And I think that’s the thing that I think was very much on to thank you, Joey, was the idea that you have to get to a new place. And I think that’s the thing that I think was very much on to thank you, Joey, for the audience. Take it seriously for a minute. Now, I think what you’re seeing is some of those pillars that were that were they’re not even pillars, they’re called the bridges. There’s a caissons, right, that were holding the bridge on one side of the other. Right. And this goes right back to Peugeot and Peterson. Peugeot saying this is brought up again recently. I think Vanderkley brought it up. He’s got one foot on two islands and they’re spreading apart. I think the same thing’s happening. Right. Like the bridge can’t hold because I don’t think it’s spreading apart. Actually, it gets crumbling. Right. And that seems to coincide with crumbling of something else, by the way. Right. Right. Which is a totally fair argument. And I would agree that a community or a relational network of people that is built in this way, that is lacking those hierarchical qualities. This is why I was going towards health that we would describe as healthy. Yep. Will necessarily die a lot sooner than the healthy thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So that’s why I was bringing that other bit in. Again, I think where I struggle is with the problem of the ontological hierarchy and how it how it I do not like not using ontology. I don’t like that poetry has no ontological status, that it is anti-ontological. Because to me, that makes it sound like the only real thing is like the matter. Right. The chair is real. The chair has ontology, but the description of the chair has no ontology. Or the relationship of the chair to the person sitting on it has no ontology. But here you get into subjectivity. Because all I’m hearing is like, oh, there’s a group of people and they’re eating the same food. For example, Van der Glees videos. And here’s a group of people and they gather in the same location. For example, Bridges of Meaning. And it’s like, fine. But when you have a group of people eat the same food, what do they get out of it? Are they are they all liking it? No, they’re not. So they’re having completely opposing experiences, being exposed to the identical thing. Stimulus. Yeah. I know, but this doesn’t. But not only stimulus, like opposing, like conflicting, non-mergeable participation. Like it’s it’s you can’t unify these two things. Like I said, in the Mandela project, right. Like when when you want to get this one thing out of it, right. Like, oh, I feel insecure. Right. And I want to I want to get security from my participation. And you get to a place where you get truth thrown around like no business. You don’t feel secure. And these two things cannot coexist in the same space. Like and so when you when you take these two entities and you put them under the same name, that’s corrupt. Like that’s a corrupt entity like that that cannot maintain being. I agree. OK, I did. Right. I agree. But again, I’m not question. See, now it’s moving again in the direction of what I would consider health of like, yes, you can put those things under the same name. It’s just the half life of that. That category is astronomically low. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, but you’re putting them under a false name like like that’s just that’s just lying. Like that’s not like the fact that it has a low half life means that you’re not true. Like you. And I think the missing I think the missing part really is that is that nobody wants to take Peterson seriously when he says what you do matters. Because it matters what you name and it matters how you name it. So if you name something that shouldn’t have a name, because it’s not a thing. I don’t throw out the term Neoplatonism or postmodern or even modernism. I make all these arguments on my on my on my navigating patterns channel. Right. Like you can’t use the term modernism in a reasonably communicative manner. It’s not actually possible because what is modern is always now and it’s never in the past and it’s never in the future. So once time changes, and I’m pretty sure time just kind of change all the time, right. Like we’re not out of time. Right. We don’t there’s no objective material reality. We are not out of time. We cannot be outside of it. You can’t use the word modern because it only ever means now. It only ever means the present. And so the postmodern can’t make any sense either. Right. And pre-modern can’t make any sense either. And it’s not that those concepts are wrong. I mean, this is why I’m hoping someday I’ll get this age of diagnosis. Bad naming is one thing. Right. But what the referent is, is still just because something was given an ugly, stupid or bad name. Right. Right. Doesn’t mean that the thing that it’s referring to doesn’t have carry meaning or have. But that’s part of my point. I think the problem is there’s three conditions. Right. You can name something that just doesn’t exist. But absolutely do that. I’m no for a fact as you know, maybe you don’t know this about me, but I know for a fact about you. We’ve both seen people do that. We’ve both been around people who have named things. Very true. That do not exist in any form, in any imagination or maybe the only way they exist is in their imagination. I use my purple talking unicorn example there. Right. And that’s one condition. Another condition is poor naming. Right. And so my project of, you know, talking about the age of gnosis is no, no, no, this thing you guys keep calling modernism, which is the result of materialism or the things you’re describing are the result of materialism. But the actual right name is age of gnosis. You know, and you’ve got to put a little nuance around it. Right. Gnosis where knowledge is just propositional is the way I frame it. So when you look at it that way, a lot more things start to make sense. You can start to put times to it. Right. You can start to say, oh, there’s minor adoption here. There’s major adoption here. There’s that flipping that that, you know, that flip that happens. Right. Adoption here. Like you can do that with age of gnosis. You cannot do that with modernity because it’s because like like the invention, the telegraph does not have a huge effect when it’s invented. And it doesn’t have a huge effect when it’s adopted because it’s actually the adoption of the telephone. But you have to go back to the telegraph to get the telephone. You know, you get into these weird things when you try to make it material or or technology based or whatever. Right. Same thing happens when you try to do it. The complexity. Well, you know, you run into the fact that the tools don’t matter. But the same thing happens when you do it with churches. So the same thing happens. I mean, we ran into this problem. I’m sure you’re well aware of this. It’s not really the Protestant Reformation because it’s not actually a problem when it happens. I mean, there are problems when it happens. But the problems we have now are uniquely post 1960. But they’re not 1960 didn’t cause them. Right. Because and this is the brilliant part about for Vickie’s work, although I don’t think he even he understands how serious he is. He doesn’t understand how serious he should take this. There’s a groundwork that’s laid. But there’s something else going on on top of the groundwork. And it’s when those two things meet. And this is the third way of naming something. Right. So you don’t have an imaginary, you know, a purely imaginary object that only exists in the perception of one person. You don’t have a misnamed object. You have a properly named object. In other words, that the emanation and the emergence meet. Any emergence can be named. And there are better and worse names for emergencies. But if that name doesn’t match an emanation, you’ve got a whole different set of problems. And that’s what I think like modernism is. It’s just a bad name for an emergence. And nobody can pin it down and nobody can understand it because of the bad names. Because there is a relationship between the name, the goodness and whatever is your naming. If it’s material or ethereal doesn’t matter. Right. There is a three part relationship there. And that relationship has to be proper on all fronts. And that’s actually nine fronts, not three fronts. See my video on one, two and three on navigating patterns. Right. And so you get into this. That’s where the combinatorial explosion starts. It’s not where it ends. It’s where it starts. And so you can’t just throw names around. You can’t just say, well, you know what? It’s Calvinism. I mean, I can point to a bunch of evils of, quote, Calvinism. But as near as I can tell, for the most part, I agree with most of Calvin’s stuff. You know, like Calvin didn’t do too many things wrong. I mean, surely he’s not without sin or anything. But like, yeah, I’m Luther. I have a harder time with Luther. Let me tell you. But Calvin, Calvin and me, we’re buds. We’re cool Luther and me. Now I want to I want to backhand him for sure. But but but but those and those differences aren’t subtle. Thing was, and this is when everybody they always pull the trick. Well, it’s how he was interpreted after he didn’t believe that. I’m like, who cares? I like that damage was done and he was involved in it. Unless you can prove to me that had he not done what he did, this other thing wouldn’t have happened. You know, then, you know, and in some cases you can in some cases you can say, yeah, if Luther didn’t do what he did, Protestantism doesn’t emerge. I think I strongly suspect that’s true. Maybe it’s not a lot of the Protestants say, well, no, there was other guys until the bold move is made. I don’t think anybody moves outside their outside their open cage, which is really what they were in. And so they’re in the open prison. And they’re saying, help, help, we’re being trapped. And there’s no bars in front of them. Then they can walk out whatever they want. But instead of walking out, they pretend like they’re trapped. They launch a rebellion for no reason. Right. Which turns into a revolution of thought effectively. Right. Which is which is forwarded by the printing press, but printing press, not bad. And then a spirit emerges and you’ll label it and maybe the labels change. And now it’s called Protestantism or whatever. But now you it’s not even that you have an improper name, you have an improper thing. And it just keeps splitting and needing more names. Fair. So the way in which the problems of the Catholic Church were addressed by Luther, not not appropriate. Now, as you said, it gets confounded by novel technology. People in some sense realize they’ve been living under a very heavily reified and corrupt system for a long time. And now they’re getting to the point that they can actually see how corrupt and reified it is because they have direct more direct access to the information that they were never given access to, except from some smart guys speaking Latin at them. Yes. Yes. Well, that’s that’s the good fate argument, right? Yeah. Well, no, I’m not actors. Yeah. Keep going. Well, I was just saying that’s the the emotional impetus. Now, whether the revolution was necessary, carried out correctly, those are all that’s a whole other ballpark. Right. Right. Right. Well, that’s the state. Whether the response to the realization was appropriate is is I would probably say, no, that’s not the right way to do that. But at which hindsight’s 2020. But to go back to eating from the same food, right? It’s like, maybe the original author was in good faith. Right. But these these things that they’re taking from him, right, they get their own own spin. Right. Because because there’s opportunistic or or just people who don’t have complete understanding. Right. Who, who, of course, yeah, miss apply these things. Right. And so there’s there’s a parallel, well, not one, but many parallel spirits that manifest under the one spirit. So even if the one spirit is is pure, which I doubt, but like you still have all this other stuff. Yeah, I don’t think the spirits are ever pure. And at this level, maybe, maybe not ever. But but but but but yeah, well, that’s a problem. And I wanted to rephrase the argument that Mark made about naming. Right. And having an emergency and emanation coming together. And it’s like, I’ve been thinking about authority a lot. Right. Because by what authority does this name exist? Right. And so to have a crude argument, it’s by the frame. Right. Like it the frame framing, right. This little corner is a framing. Right. Framing. Right. So you say this is a valid framing and therefore I can give this name. And and then it’s OK. But where’s this framing coming from? Right. Like, is this framing under God’s authority? Right. Like, is that flowing from God or is that is that flowing from you? Right. Is this serving a purpose to you? And like, I think I think that’s the two poles of authority. Right. Like, there’s there’s autonomy. Right. Like naming yourself or naming things for yourself. And then there’s the divine name. And the problem is like what you try to validate, Nick, it’s all coming from the person. Right. So it’s it’s for my purpose. Right. Or for the way that I can see the world. TLC is useful. And it’s like, well, yeah, maybe. But it’s false. Right. And yeah, fair. But we you have thrown out almost all of your own cognition at that point. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, not at all. Nick, let me put it this way. All right. Awakening from the meaning crisis server, the religion that is not a religion. We’ve already got a suspicious name like that’s like like nobody like. Wow. I get what you’re doing, John. I get what you’re doing. But also no one likes that one. No one likes that. But but but they try to do it. And John explicitly says, I’m not going to leave this. I don’t want to become a cult figure. Blah, blah, blah. Right. So what you have is a naming. Someone does the name, gives the thing a name and walks away from it. I want nothing, no responsibility for this name. This is where the problem comes in, is that you need authority and you need leadership. Right. Because somebody has to set the bounds of the structure and somebody has to lead that structure. There has to be a head of the structure. Doesn’t have to be a person, the same person over time. There doesn’t have to be a single authority. The authority doesn’t have to be the leader. But in some cases it can. I would call those rare cases, by the way. But whatever doesn’t matter. And this is why I thought that Father Eric’s Friday question from a couple of weeks ago was perfect. What is the telos? What is the head? And what is the structure that you’re referring to? Because in order for thing-ness, in order to qualify as a thing, you need all three of those. And so if you’re naming and you don’t have those three elements or however you want to think of them, properties, I would call them aspects. I think that’s better. Although none of them are quite right, we’ll say. If those aren’t identifiable, and I did a live stream on identity in case you want to know more, then you have a problem. And that problem is you have an improper name. And I don’t see a way around that. I thought Father Eric really nailed that one. I mean his open mic video on his channel about this has well over 600 views already. And that was just Sunday. Like that video is unbelievably popular for some weird reason. Jacob’s follow-up video hasn’t approached that yet. I think it’s because it gets so deeply into the questions of ontology and epistemology. At what level do these things interact with each other? Right. But when you’re talking about ontology and epistemology, I think those are proxy scientific terms. And I use them all the time. You know that, right? Like hopefully everybody knows that. They’re very useful terms. I’m not saying don’t use those words. But when people use that, what I think they’re actually talking about most of the time, not Manuel and I because we don’t have this problem, is sanity. I think when Van der Kley says we outsource our sanity, I think you should end every video by saying that. And I believe we outsource our sanity. Like seriously, you should go whole hog on that one. And I believe Carthage must be destroyed because people don’t understand that. That, if you wanted to say, well what is the most common thing that the people who love the TLC moniker have in common, they’re all searching the bounds of their own sanity because they know that they’re not sure where that is. And like fair enough, I’m not like, poo-pooing on that. That’s a big problem. I agree. We might disagree on ways to solve that. And I would say if that’s your problem, that’s because you won’t submit to having your sanity helped along or determined in some sense or at least found out or discovered using the authority of other people who aren’t you. And so in essence, you’re rebelling against the one thing you need most. And this goes back to the misunderstanding of things like redemption. You don’t just get redeemed. First of all, I don’t think people can redeem other people. I think that’s ridiculous. You do have to repent and maybe you’ll get redeemed, but you have to repent and before you can repent, you have to acknowledge you did something wrong. And all of that is witnessed. All of it, including the redemption. It’s just two of those steps are yours and yours alone, but they can’t be done by yourself in a vacuum. And that’s where people get confused. Repentance or acceptance that I’ve done something wrong is mine alone in some sense. But if I do it by myself on a desert island, it doesn’t happen. And so I would disagree at some degree. I think you’re correct. There does have to be relationality. I don’t know if it has to be with people. No, no. All right. Now we’re in the Christian argument. And then, yes, I can afford you all the Christian arguments where the desert island argument works because Jesus is always with you sort of thing. Fine. Fair. Fair. But what people are doing is they’re- Well, relation in general is always with you. But yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. Fair enough. But what people are doing is they’re saying, no, no, no, I want you. And this is very explicit now. It’s extremely explicit now. You can see it all over those streams that we were talking about earlier, especially Jacob’s. Right? People very much want other people to change how they treat them based on their desire for redemption without repentance, without even acknowledging that they’ve done something wrong, even though internally they know they’ve done something wrong. They just don’t want to suffer any cost to reputation, and they don’t want to do anything about it. They just want to say, well, I am the way I am, and therefore I should be able to go to the church that I want, or I should be able to be where I want, or I should be able to label you the way I want. And that’s what- I mean, my whole objection is I don’t want to be dragged into this thing. At this point, there was a time when I did, and I tried to cooperate, and I tried to cooperate, and we started projects, and rejection, rejection, rejection, whining, bitching, moaning, complaining. And like I said, the deceptiveness is what bothers me. Don’t sit there. When I know full well you’ve called for me to be kicked off of the Discord server multiple times and say, you’re part of this. What is wrong with- I know you’ve told Paul Van der Kley you shouldn’t talk to me. I know this. And you’re out there in public telling everybody else that I’m part of your group. When I know you don’t want me to be part of whatever this is, I know that. I get it that they don’t know that, but I know you’re deceiving them. I don’t think that’s good. In fact, I think it’s kind of evil. Yeah, I agree. That’s my objection. The deception. Those are stakes. And the thing is, in that corner, or whatever it is, and it probably is a corner, it’s a viper pit. There’s not five snakes. There’s more. And it’s an unbelievable number. I agree. But also, that’s the number, guys. There’s a lot of bad actors. I think I have a different perception of what it- To me, that’s where categories like Bridge is a Meaning, Aft MC, more distinguished actual attempts at a distinct culture are. Maybe Jonathan Peugeot’s server, which I’ve never gone to. But to me, they sort of pulled it off. And I don’t mean to interrupt you, but I do want to highlight what Joey said here. A disproportionate percent of TLC-adjacent folks not only refuse to submit to outside authority, but also refuse to submit even to themselves. Well said, Joey. Endless inner rebellion reflected in an endless outward rebellion. Joey is always just so brilliant. That’s dead on. And I think that that’s what we’re seeing. And look, I hate to harp on this, we’re seeing that everywhere. That’s happening in the U.S. government. Ever. Right. That’s why people are saying culture war. But I’ve already made the argument elsewhere. I’ve had one live stream and one recorded video on this. There’s no culture war. There’s a fight to have unity, to have a culture, which is what a culture is, it’s a unity of a type, or not. Because you’re not all going to unify around whatever climate change or whatever Gaia religion is. Because they don’t have a telos. The problem of no telos is the problem we’re experiencing. But then, yeah, you look at something like Jonathan Pigeot, and he recently talked about this, how he doesn’t want to become a leader, and I like that’s a different problem that I’d love to dive into at some point. But they have symbolic world. They have a Discord server. I’m on it. They have a Facebook group. They have all these things. It didn’t take them long to build it. And they get work done. I understand all of that. But again, we’re back in the health thing. I think I would ask then, has there ever existed, no matter how well structured and well named, a human social system that was not terminal? Okay, but now we’re starting to talk about breeding, right? Like you have to breed. Which branch? Well, well, well, well, well, the fact that there are branches doesn’t mean it doesn’t persist. Well, burning off the deadwoods is part of Peterson’s thing. And so I think if you don’t have branches, you don’t have branches to burn off, you can’t persist. That would be my argument for open-ended, alos, symbolic world. But okay, so I want to put in some context still, because I like to reframe things, right? First of all, I want to do the favorite thing for everybody here, which is introduce the elephant metaphor. Right. So we’re all in a dark room, right? And we’re touching the elephant. But maybe there’s two elephants and we’re giving them the same name. Right. Right. And it’s like ten elephants. Right. Maybe everybody has their own elephant. Right. Like so. And then and then we start arguing like what’s the elephant like? And then that is like, well, OK, don’t touch my elephant, bro. Like maybe maybe like these elephants are all body parts of a bigger elephant. Right. But but instead of like naming the bigger elephant, we identify the body part as the whole body. Right. Right. And like that’s two two directions. Right. Like so one is down and the other one is up. Right. So that’s the layer of ontology that you that you’re talking about. And these these these questions aren’t easy. And the whole the whole point of that whole elephant metaphor, right? The open ended teleology. The reason it’s framed that way is it’s meant to be a synthetic term. Synthesis of to counter emination and and emergence. Right. It’s like you can’t be there like all naming that is just emanational done by a person is bad naming. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you can get lucky. You can get you can get lucky. That’s one fact. But look, there’s a fundamental difference between saying platonic thought and neoplatonic thought. One is possible, the other is not. Neoplatonic sounds open-ended. I’m not saying there aren’t better and worse. I’m just saying all of them are fundamentally degrading. I don’t think they’re degrading. I don’t believe that at all. I mean, I think that’s basically- Entropy doesn’t exist on certain names? Yes. I can say that entropy is less likely that it has better resistances, not that it doesn’t exist. No, no. There’s things that are outside of time. There are definitely things. Yes. Absolutely. Even when we say the word platonic, we no longer use Pneuma as a word. So when we read Plato- God is outside of time. He’s eternal. Some angels are eternal. God is outside of time. Yeah, but it’s also not a- Jesus was there at creation. He’s also outside of time. OK. Right. Well, the degradation of propositions- The word we use to describe emergent phenomena is also outside of time? I’m confused. No, the propositions- That’s the ghost’s words, right? Yeah. The confusion is around propositions. Propositions are based in language. Language is based in materiality. Materiality is subject to entropy. Therefore, any words you use to describe something are subject to entropy. That doesn’t mean they have to succumb to entropy, because they can change over time. And so while the Greeks had different words for these things, there is a translation. That’s not true for all languages, by the way. It might be true for most languages and most words in most languages. But it’s not true for all of them, which is really weird, because it gives you the sense that maybe these- and some things, because entropy exists, also decay. And so if there are no more polar bears, that concept goes away. The concept of a white bear that lives in the super cold climate and eats seals is gone, because there aren’t any anymore. And so both are subject to decay in some sense. But that doesn’t mean they have to decay. The fact that they can change, this goes back to the branches. Well, you have a branch. We start using the word gnosis. And then it just so happens that in a twist of ridiculous irony, it splits up. And now we have seven different meanings for the term gnosis. But actually, the concept is still there. You are literally describing what I was describing, which is that you have an open-ended teleology. No, it’s not. The teleology is not. No, no, the teleology is- Well, yes, the teleology is directed towards the pattern that’s changing. No, the pattern ain’t changing. How is the pattern not changing? You just said you can adapt and translate. Like, above is always above, dude. I don’t understand. Like, I’m having it never changing. I mean, humans, humans, they’re kind of changing. But actually, when we talk about humans, they’re not changing. And this is the problem with language, right? People go, humans. And they go, oh, yeah, well, humans are so similar that we’re all pretty much alike. And we know what we mean by human. And then any idiot can take five seconds and destroy that thesis really easily, right? Because you can go, well, if someone’s missing most of their brain, are they human? And then do, what if somebody just doesn’t have the IQ? Are they still human? What if they have the IQ, but they don’t have arms and legs? Right, deconstruction techniques to cross the boundaries. Yeah. Right, right. But at the abstraction layer, which is what we’re talking about, there’s definitely a human. There’s definitely a human. And we can argue about where those boundaries are, but those are the branches again. But the fact is the trunk still exists. The fact that you can lop off a branch or two does not affect the trunk, right? And so sure, the branches that you’re lopping off are definitely branches. And maybe some of them aren’t optional, although maybe you don’t know which. So maybe you shouldn’t be cutting branches, Chesterston’s fence, right? But ultimately, this trunk is still there either way. You have the fire in the cypress forest, which I saw, right? And there’s still a tree there, man. And will the tree continue to grow? It’s still up in the air in the forest I was in, according to the people I was talking to. They’re like, yeah, we don’t know if this one’s gonna survive, but you can see it anyway while it’s still alive. Because we know it’s alive right now, right? And we don’t know if it’ll be alive next year, right? We don’t know, and we don’t necessarily know when that is. That came out in Thunder Bay. No one knows what consciousness is and when it begins and ends. Fair enough, right? But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something to the concept. Now, I think this is a stupid word, but whatever. You always get into this thing with words, but that doesn’t mean those concepts aren’t there. And that’s the TLC argument. So in the same way that Platonism exists and Neoplatonism cannot, not redeemable. It’s actually not redeemable. You can’t come up with a set of things to make Neoplatonism reasonable and a reasonable mode of communication. You can’t. It’s not actually possible. In that same way, I’m making the same argument for TLC versus Peterson’s sphere. Peterson’s sphere has something that everything orbits in some sense, right? Or is part of this ever expanding? Because I do think it’s expanding. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but I do think it’s expanding. Maybe it’s not expanding, but it’s definitely outside of Peterson now. And before it wasn’t, for sure, right? Like he tried for years to get famous. Like this is well known. He just, for whatever reason, there’s a set of circumstances that come together, right? And then now there’s a sphere. Is it expanding? I think so, maybe not. Doesn’t matter. There is a sphere though. There are people as the result of Peterson that are now talking about things that are important and related. And what’s the distinction between this little corner and Peterson’s sphere, right? So the Peterson’s sphere has a center, right? So the identity is defined around the center. A corner is defined around the room. So you cannot have a little corner without the room. And it only exists in relation to the room. And so it doesn’t have its own identity. Like a corner cannot have an own identity. Like it’s already a wrong naming. No, it’s a geographical metaphor, right? The Southwest of the United States. And it’s closed in a corner. The Southwest of the United States can only exist in the United States. But what is the corner of? That’s the problem. The internet, right? No, it’s not. This little corner of the internet is the full type. No, it’s actually, yeah, but it’s not a corner of the internet as such, right? Because that’s not the actual reference. What do you mean? Like it’s not a reference towards the whole of the internet. Well, the room is the internet. It might be a room with 10 trillion corners, but you’re saying that the title makes no sense because it has no central reference. I’m saying it’s a geographical metaphor based on the internet. The room is the internet. That’s the room. That’s what it’s a corner of. But does the internet have corners? I don’t know. I don’t think so. No, it definitely doesn’t. That’s the first problem. But also remember, you like open-ended T-Losts. There’s nothing more closed than a corner. I mean, unless you wanted to find an actual closed box, like you’re not gonna get anything more confining, more restraining, and less opening. This is your tunnel versus cave metaphor. Right, and then how do they get around it? Immediately, immediately. Well, there’s corners in the corner. Obviously, it makes no sense at all. I think that’s just nonsensical self-referential garbage. Well, if the internet is shaped like a fractal, then there are corners of the corner. If it’s fractal, but it’s not, that’s the problem. Does the fractal have corners? I don’t think fractals can have corners. They have layers. Well, the oldest, the original fractal is, right, you start with a triangle, and then at every point of the triangle, you draw another two triangles. Joey’s got it right. Nobody puts baby in the corner of a corner. Nobody. I agree. Nobody puts baby in the corner of a corner? Nobody puts baby in the corner. No one puts something valuable there? Is that the point? No, the reference is dirty dancing. Nobody puts baby in a corner. Oh. Right, but see, it’s very closed-ended, and because it’s closed-ended, then people feel trapped, and so now you have to create corners of corners. But what you’re doing is fracturing. You’re not fracturing. Or you just leave the corner. Well, if it’ll let you. If you talk to Paul VanderKlay, if you respond to a video of his, if you’re friends with him, you’re automatically in no matter what. Automatically, and you can’t get out. This is the racism argument. Oh my God, you’re identifying me by my race, by my skin color, and it’s like, look at your skin color. That’s a valid category to apply you. And so I realized the word category is amazing, because it’s related to accuser, and a category is an accusation. It is an imposed identity. It’s like, you are that. I’m just gonna treat you as that. That’s what a category is. Which is evil. Which is what, that’s what it’s like. On the other end, you could say, I am of the category female now. I just decided. Right. Yeah, well, that’s auto-naming, right? Like autonomous. Right. Like, yes. That’s why that’s bad. We know that’s bad. Because again, we outsource our sanity, which means we outsource part of our identity. And that’s the problem. I know. You can’t sit there and self-identify as PLC. That’s the argument I’m making. I’m so confused. Okay, go make your argument again. Now, I wanna hear you weave it in now. Well, because if you’re outsourcing your identity, right? And your identity is formed, at least in this instance, by the relationships that you hold with a group of people, and the ideas that you congeal around, even if the group of people is Peterson, and you go with Peterson’s fear, if you like the name better. Fine. This little corner is an ugly name. Totally fine. You know? But they don’t. But they don’t identify. Like, this is my deep point. These people who are harping on PLC have one thing in common. They do not identify with Peterson. They don’t agree with him. They don’t like him anymore. Maybe they did once, right? And zero of them have any other path in, right? And some of them- Right, so it’s too entropic of a name. And some of them have tried to claim things like, no, no, I came in through Revege. There is no awakening from the meaning crisis series at all for real without Peterson. No, really. Again, I have insider knowledge. But also, no, really, it doesn’t happen. And so you can’t identify- Oh, Peugeot. Nobody finds out about- Peugeot doesn’t go on his quest to even be understood. He’s happy with him and his brother talking their secret symbolic language without Peterson. It doesn’t happen. It will not happen without that. It is fully dependent on Peterson, who is fully dependent upon a bunch of other things, which again, maybe we’ll get into it. Well, that’s the other problem, right? No, no, but that’s not a problem because that’s the argument. The argument is without that lightning rod, without that, in this case, great man, I don’t like that argument, but whatever, there’s something to it. Without that talos, without a referent that’s stable and clear, you can’t properly name the thing. You can’t. Yeah, but okay. But then in the same way that Vervecky, it’s certainly his recording of his lectures is 100% dependent on Peterson having done it first and becoming so popular, right? Does that not make Vervecky and his body of work in the same way that Peterson was dependent on a whole plethora of other things to have all that attention on him to become a meaningful center? Like it feels like you can- But now we’re talking about spirits, right? Or blood, right? To use Christian language, right? So there’s a father, right? Or multiple fathers that spiritually allow you to exist. And those are authorities, by the way, right? By virtue of their authority, you have existence. Right. It goes back to something like the car industry, right? Like somebody creates a car that actually works out for many different reasons. There’s all kinds of cars in the early days. Electric cars are older than anybody realizes, right? There’s steam powered cars, there’s human powered cars. And we’d be able to reasonably identify all of them as cars, by the way. But like the electric cars were never fast enough, right? They were too heavy, batteries were too heavy, but they existed, like people had them, like they were never mass produced. So at some point, somebody mass produces a car and somebody sees that success and copies it. But Toyota is not Mazda, is not Mercedes, is not BMW. They’re not. The thing they have in common is car-ness. Sure, fair, right? And then we can point at Henry Ford or whatever. We can point at any number of people. It doesn’t even matter at that point. But we can point at something. And so, sure, in the wake of the success of Peterson, however that happens, we have a bunch of other car manufacturers coming up with their own cars. But for Vekis, not on the same mission as Peterson, by a long shot, Peugeots not on the same mission. They don’t have the same audiences. There’s some minor overlap, but again, the defining feature, and I think it is a defining, this is the problem, it is a defining feature, was what Joey was talking about earlier. These people are rebels. They don’t want any structure, they don’t want any cooperation. They deny cooperation on a regular basis because they’re afraid someone’s gonna be in charge, or there’s some structure that’s gonna impose upon them by judging them. And at the same time, they’re desperate to be the prodigal son and to get father’s automatic approval and be redeemed, which again, is ridiculous. First you have to acknowledge you did something wrong, then you have to repent, then you have to come home. Well, you know, that’s the tall order. They’re not even at step one, much less step two, and step three, and then step four, redemption’s not guaranteed, and that terrifies people, and maybe it should, but you gotta do the work too. And part of this is, part of the other theme you see is people don’t wanna do the work, and maybe they’re not competent, and fair enough, but they don’t even wanna try to do the work. And if they see somebody else doing the work, they feel judged, and fair enough, you should feel judged if somebody else is doing work, and you’re not, I agree. But if you’re rebelling against that, if you’re upset about that, if you’re like, you’re a mean person, or you’re just trying to destroy things in the middle of building stuff, like, there’s something wrong at that point, right? There’s something demonstrably wrong. And then at the same time, you wanna say, well, this person building stuff is part of TLC. See, TLC can do things, and it’s like, now you’re just trying to take credit for something that you refuse to be involved in. Like, that’s ridiculously inappropriate. That’s just inappropriate, you know? And that’s not a good thing. I don’t disagree with you. Well, but that’s what’s happening. Like, that’s actually happening. We see that happening. I wanna go back to bodies, and I think, like, I don’t know if I wanna use the word person, or soul, or whatever, but those things have an inherent quality of identity, right? Like, a human, right? They assume an identity because they have a body, right? And that body has a structure, and that structure as a body is in relationship to outside of the body, right? So in relationship to the external world, that identity of that body gets identified. But you’re making a mistake when you extrapolate that to a group of people, right? Because that, like, if this little corner gets approached by Peterson or whatever, right? Then you could say, well, can it respond? Like, does it have the capacity to be an actor in the world and take the whole body with it in its action? Because if it can’t, it’s not a body, at least in relationship to Peterson at that point, right? Like, you can’t say it’s a valid body. And so, yes, that identity gets assigned by the relationship with the external world, but there needs to be a cohesion of something that is relating to the external world that allows the assumption of an identity. Because if there’s nothing that binds that, like, it cannot hold an identity. Now you can say, well, like, there’s things, and you’re using the word healthy, right? But there’s things that can sustain pressure, right? Like, it can sustain external pressure and maintain an identity, but that’s a completely different problem than having one. Well, but, okay, fair. However, at what point are we defining how it’s responding and interacting? Because every time Peterson puts out a new video, there’s this huge trickling of behaviors that would not have happened had he not put the video out that are distinct in the nature of the commentary within a certain relational group. But they’re not the same response, and some of them are in direct opposition to one another. And that’s the- Yeah, same inside of your body. No, no, no, see, and this is where my objection with opponent processing comes in. Why are these people enamored with Vervecki’s ridiculous opponent processing idea? First of all, it’s ridiculous. I’m sorry, it’s just ridiculous. Our cells do not oppose one another. The fact that there are limited resources and we switch the allocation does not mean there’s opposition. And just technically, biologically, the way Vervecki describes it is just wrong. I’m sorry, it’s just wrong, all right? So it’s just wrong. There is a mechanism that decides, actually, where resources go. And sometimes that mechanism gets things wrong, and sometimes it goes, hey, wire, whatever, I don’t care. I have an immune system disease. I know way more about this than you’d think, way more than I wanted to ever. I too have an immune system disease. I know, I know, I know. So sometimes the thing that reallocates your resources and does your signaling gets it wrong. And so you can say that, look, there’s opponent processing going on when I have an immune system flare up. I agree, that’s an error. That’s a disease. It is an actual dis-ease, right? There is ease, where there is no opponent going on within me. And there is a dis-ease when I am, one part of me is opposing the other part of me. This is not a good thing. The health versus unhealth, yeah. Right, right. This is not a good thing. And so when you have a group like that, in quote, opponent processing, and Vanu Klee has said publicly on at least one occasion, I prefer opponent processing to cooperative processing. Sorry, Mark. I go, well, I have a problem with that. Like I think that doesn’t have a good aspect to it at all. Like you want to cooperate and you want to encourage others to cooperate. Part of the whole idea, even if it’s a freaking illusion and none of it has any aspect to it that is useful, Christianity unifies. Like that’s the, and then it’s not the only thing that unifies by far. But the fact of the unity is important. The removal of opposition is actually the goal. So this opponent processing thing is automatically anti-Christian, automatically. Well, and I definitely prefer the term cooperative processing. I think that gets much closer to what is taking place. However, within cooperative processing, you do have opponents. You do have energies that are directed against each other. It’s not smooth and it needs that lack of smoothness because you need contrast to see. But opposition is a whole different thing. Like again, you can move resources around and maybe you should, maybe some days you should pay more attention to Jacob than you pay to Paul Vanu Klee. Maybe some days you should pay more attention to Jonathan Pigeot than you pay to Peterson. Like sure, but that’s not opposition. Even though there’s a conflict, not all conflict is opposition. Right. Well, wait. Let me phrase it this way. So what do you do when a snake bites your hand and it gets poisoned? You cut it off. Or suck it out. You cut it off. Or tie your arm and go and look for anti-venom. The hand is now corrupt. Killing you, it’s more than corrupt. It’s terminal. Right. And so you have to remove the body part that is terminal. And that’s what your body does. If there’s something in opposition, like a cancer, to your body, your body removes it. When your body is incapable of removing the parts of the body that oppose the body, like this is also true for the mind. If you cannot unify your mind, you will die. That’s all this death talk in the Bible is, the Satan is taking over. Like there’s a principality of anti-unity that is disrupting your health. And the whole Christian message is everything needs to be under one name. And it needs to worship that name. And in the worship of that name, they will find the unity that will produce health. And so health is like a second order effect of the unity. Yeah, I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying. I’m confused as to why. Okay, so what I’m saying is that within a unity, you can still have things that oppose each other. No, no, no. You can have things that are in conflict with one another to some extent, see, there’s a difference between that and opposition. So there’s a difference- That’s why I was using like synthetic. Synthetic. Right, but look, there’s a difference between me effectively yelling and screaming occasionally at Sally Jo, no, that’s not correct. When you’re drawing this, and I know nothing about drawing, we all know that. I can barely do circles on my board, obviously you can see that. You’re drawing this wrong, right? From, no, we don’t wanna see your work, we don’t wanna work with you, we don’t wanna help you. That’s opposition. What I’m doing is not opposing her. I’m putting her in tension with my ideas, which are usually wrong when it comes to Sally, unfortunately for me. And that’s what’s creating the art. It’s the tension, not opposition. It’s not opposition that’s creating that. It’s not opposition that allows you to stand, it’s tension. And tension is a different thing, that’s why we have a different word. And yes, I think there’s tension in the Peterson sphere for sure, right? And again, the Vervecki people do not want to hang out with the symbolic world people or with the Vanderklown people, they don’t want that. And that’s fine, like I don’t care. I don’t wanna hang out with them either, because we’re not hanging out with them anymore, because they allowed a bunch of snakes to come in and dictate the way that the community went. And then we got put in a situation where we had to leave, which is fine by me, life is better, but that was not tension, that was opposition. It didn’t make us better, it was done very unexpectedly, that was opposition, and that’s the problem. And so I think it’s also important to realize that, now we’re going back to ontologies and layers, right? Opposition within a greater whole is better termed tension. No, no, I don’t even know, like I wanna do an ontology move, right? So when we’re saying, right, like a person isn’t evil, they’re possessed by evil, right? Now, the willful participation in that possession is evil, right? But we’re making a distinction between the personhood and the quality of personhood and the being that they’re participating in. Right, in other words, the relationship to the evil, right? So evil can come down upon you, and if you fight it, you are not evil. If you embrace it, you are. What changed? The relationship. And so when your relationship is one of opposition, you are denying or rebelling against the unity. You are in rebellion, right? When you start making statements like, you don’t really mean that, or you, you know, without knowing the person in particular, right, or, you know, there’s no way you know that person’s mentally ill. Are you sure? Because I’ve actually talked to them, and I know you haven’t talked to them, and you’re making a claim about what I know about somebody that you definitely know nothing about. I think these are the sorts of, that’s opposition for the sake of opposition. That’s not tension. That’s not challenging me, right? And so the challenge for me would be, how do you know they’re mentally ill? Do you have evidence? And of course I always do, but whatever. We’ll pretend like I occasionally pull that out when I don’t have evidence, because that’s never happened, but so we’ll have to pretend. Yeah, I’m pretty serious when I say things, right? But do I automatically assume when anybody says something, they’re wrong because you don’t like it, and there’s a lot of people doing that. A lot. There’s a lot of snakes, not three or four, right? That’s a problem. That’s where there is no unity, and those people are deliberately trying to make sure there’s no unity. Deliberately, knowingly in some cases, unconsciously maybe in others, right? Like maybe people don’t realize they’re threatening people on camera while holding a knife or something, because that happens. Might have happened recently. Let me go grab my knife. You have a real knife. Right, he’s got a good knife. Right, but it’s clear what has happened. Clearly, you’re not a pacifist at that point. Clearly, you’re not seeing yourself clearly, for example. And so clearly, you’re in opposition. You are denying the unity on purpose. Tension would be, explain to me what you mean. I don’t like your framing. Your word usage is bad. Those are all fair ways to be in tension with somebody. So yeah, I think that if you’re in the unity, there’s no opposition. And I think I know what tension is. I think tension is a body part being unclear of its position in the body, right? So now there’s a level of doubt of the participation in the telos, and then you have tension, right? But there’s also something where the telos is shared, right? Like, for example, like what a government should do is like, okay, like we need to feed the homeless and we need to build this road. And it’s like, well, yeah, obviously, one part of the government is gonna say, I need money here, and the other part is saying there, but they don’t have to be in opposition. Like, they can be in opposition, and that’s actually what’s happening now. Like, there’s actual opposition, but they don’t have to. And they can still do exactly the same thing. Like, if the spirit is triggered. Well, then how’s it resolved? How’s it resolved and resolvable? Opposition’s only resolvable in war, guys. I hate to break it to you. Opposition is technically only resolvable with war. You want a war, that’s how you get a war. You start talking about opposition, you start talking about binaries, you start talking about, right? You divide the world that way, right? Yeah, but that’s war where two people don’t wanna fight. And how do you resolve tension? Fair enough, I’d say they’re meaningfully. The thing that resolves tension is the authority. The authority comes down, right? And then maybe the authority is not, we’ll say the final word, oddly enough, because it might be more than one authority, right? Ultimately, even the authority may bow to the leader. They say, well, this is definitely wrong, but you know what? For the sake of unity, even though the authority says this is the wrong thing to do, we have to follow the leader. We have, it’s not optional. We know the leader’s making a mistake, but bringing leadership down, and this goes back to my culture war argument, bringing the leadership down is not the solution. This is why I think Sam Harris’s talk about coming down the peak and going back up, not that it’s wrong, it strays into dangerous territory, because it says it’s valid for you to regress or go back, even though all these people say we can’t go back, weird. It’s valid, right, to do that in certain circumstances, but actually the thing we need is unity, and the only way to maintain unity is to some extent, ignore some small number of mistakes, right? But on the other hand, push back on certain other mistakes, and we’ve lost the ability to tell the difference between those two things, because at some point, we’re just like, well, I think the most important tell of a good person versus a bad person, or a good president versus a bad president, is whether or not they’ve had sexual relations with that woman, right? Whereas, well, I think it’s whether or not they, whether or not they had bad business dealings in the past, or what I think is whether or not they said they would do something that they didn’t do, right? And this goes on and on and on, but clearly some of these are more important than others, right, clearly there’s a relevance realization process that needs to happen, right? Relevance realization is just prioritization or ordering at some point, it’s not only that, but that some point relevance realization is tied up in prioritizing and ordering things and saying, this is more important than that, right? That’s gotta be part of relevance realization somewhere. And so that’s the skill we’ve lost, and I think that’s why Vivek is rediscovering it, Peterson kind of talks about it in different terms, right? Jonathan Pigeot uses the problem of attention, right, or the world is attention, right, all the, they’re saying roughly the same thing, not exactly the same, they’re all talking about the same thing. And again, that’s why it’s the sphere, you start looking at the overlaps between Vivek’s work and what Peterson says, and they’re pretty much 100% with slightly slight differences in language and slight differences in focus, same with Pigeot, right? And Pigeot knows this and kind of says it upfront, I would say, although, you know, he’s heavily focused obviously on the symbolism, whereas Vivek, he’s heavily focused on the science, but like that’s different from opposition, is like these presumptions that things are wrong or presumption that leadership itself is bad, right, or presumptions that, you know, who are you to be an authority, right? I’m just gonna rebel against the authority or the leader or both because they’re there. I don’t have a good reason. I have hypothetical reasons, like in the future they may do X. Right, it’s like, well, maybe, and maybe that’s inevitable, but maybe there’s no choice. Like maybe you don’t have a better option, but to go down that road with that leader or with that authority. And like, I wanna add this idea of the left hand and the right hand, right? Where there’s things that are internal that need to be maintained and then there’s the relationship to the outside and those have different rules, right? And so when you start using the right hand, right, in position of force or agency inside the body, which is what an operation is, right? You mess things up, right? Like you disease yourself, you hurt yourself. Now, sometimes with the snake example, that’s necessary, right, but when we’re stuck in an age of gnosis where we think we can know things and that we can use tools to organize things in the world, we start using right hand actions inside the body. And instead of handling things with grace, right, and giving this body part that has its identity by virtue of being part of the body, right? It’s the opportunity to recalibrate within the body and well, like move out of its tension and become peaceful again, right, like of one piece. If you remove that process, right, or you impose that process, it’s like, yeah, I’m gonna make you do that by law, right? Now we’re getting into problems and like that’s what everybody’s doing, right? Like that’s what naming people is. Like I’m gonna assign you or myself this identity because now I’m gonna pick this place in the body that I haven’t earned, right? Like I didn’t grow into it. I don’t have the intimate connections that that tissue needs to its environment and I’m gonna role play literally that role. And that’s what everybody’s do. And I think that time is the great confusion here. People see things come into existence and they think they can last and not all things that come into existence can last. They see that, well, I can just identify as a woman or non-binary or whatever, and they see it kind of works and people will kind of go along with it for a little while but then they want more, of course, because we all do, right? And then as that tries to expand out, it hits the limits and the next thing you know, you’ve got a fight over how to label bathrooms, right? Which turns into a real effect in the world because suddenly in North Carolina, they have to spend literally tens or hundreds of millions of dollars because every business has to make a change all to settle some person’s fantasy. And that’s a big problem, right? Is that why are we running into this issue? We don’t need to, we could just not do that, right? The problem doesn’t have to exist in some sense. And for me, that’s part of what’s wrapped up in this is that you can’t just name things and expect other people to go along. And the fact that anybody won’t go along, even one person, is already a problem. If people don’t like it, then maybe they don’t have a home. Maybe they don’t have a group. Maybe they’ve stuck themselves in domicile over and over again and they wanna be the prodigal son. They want daddy’s approval or whatever, but it’s not gonna be there. And that’s more the danger for me is the, yeah. And we know, we three know personally, snakes that are definitely making sure that that unity breaks apart. Anytime it looks like it’s gonna unify, people show up to make sure it ain’t gonna unify. And maybe they do that under the guise of helping or whatever. And that’s not one or two people. It’s more than that. And I know it’s hard to believe, but that is the problem. Yeah, well, and I would say that it’s a universal problem. It’s not universal. Well, maybe universal, perennial. It’s a perennial pattern for sure that we get into when we’re in rebellion. But the alternative is just to suck it up, sacrifice, realize that the head’s not always gonna agree with you. And you might even be right, but it doesn’t matter because the head is leading more than just you. That’s the thing, right? I think Perjoh mentioned this about Peter and him being the only person being called Satan by Jesus. And it’s like, okay, so he’s calling his second, or his descendant, Satan. And it’s like, what was Satan towards God? Satan was God’s second. Right. And there’s something really, really powerful there, right? So that, or Aaron and Moses, right? Like Aaron was Moses’ second. Like Aaron was the voice of Moses, literally. And when the voice disconnected from the head, and then strange stuff starts happening. So when Peter gets disconnected from Jesus, he sinks. So if we’re talking about bodies and about heads, that’s the nature of the head. So you can say, well, the body is following Aetalus. Like it’s upheld by Aetalus. And then the head has to worship that Aetalus. Because if it stops worshiping and it starts looking down, it starts becoming self-referential. Like it starts naming itself instead of receiving its name. And like I started seeing it as like, holy cow. And I think that that points to what I would say is the larger issue. We have been told that we have capabilities that we do not have. We have been told that we are smarter than we are. We’ve been told that anybody can be a leader. That’s the biggest bunch of BS ever, ever foisted on a society. We’ve been told that authorities aren’t authorities when in fact they are, and that you can be an authority. Because yeah, we’ve got the internet. Because the age of gnosis, propositional knowledge, makes you an authority. So the guy with the most Wikipedia pages in his head is an authority or something, right? And that’s false, it’s a lie. It denies the hierarchy. It’s more equality doctrine BS, where this is very much equality doctrine stuff. It’s very much, oh, well, you’re as equal to a PhD. And look, I know a lot of PhDs, and a lot of them are dumbasses and shouldn’t have been able to get a PhD. I can point out why. But also I still gotta listen to them. Even though I know they’re wrong. And you just don’t have a choice about that. And it’s really, that’s what people want a choice about, things that they don’t actually have a choice about. And when they try to assert their choice, they actually contribute to the destruction of the world. They contribute to the flood, and they contribute to the chaos. And I think that’s actually what this is about. And because the world is self-similar fractal, that idea of self-naming, of referential naming, of a naming that immediately splits itself, whether it’s religion that’s not a religion, or a corner of corner of corner of corners, that’s a tell. No, this is a corruption, it’s bad and wrong. It’s a tell immediately. It doesn’t take any time to know, oh, no, no, no, this can’t be good. Can’t be, can’t have any goodness in it. Will it be redeemed by God? Maybe, I don’t know, I’m not God, I don’t know, I don’t know. But that’s not our job. It’s not our job to decide, but it is our job to act. And we have to act with the information that we have. We see something like that that’s clearly not good. We should act in a way that’s appropriate, and try to bring about the good, rather than try to feed the thing. You don’t wanna feed the bad thing. You don’t wanna fall to the woke, in essence. You don’t wanna say, oh yeah, absolutely. You can name yourself whatever you want. You can just be non-binary. In fact, because you can do that, and you’re equal to everybody else in the world, they have to play along. Because that’s effectively what we’re doing. And I’m like, well, first of all, this doesn’t work with me, I don’t have to play along. If you wanna make me, you can try. I don’t think it’ll end well for you, because I’m rather well physically trained to kill people. And if you try to force me to do something, you better shoot me, because it’s not gonna work any other way. But then of course, you won’t be able to force me to do anything, because I’ll be dead. The cooperation is inherent. Well, I feel like this is very similar to the argument I was trying to make, in the sense that, for example, if TLC is just a group of relationships and interactions people have around a certain set of figures, and then you’re sustaining those relationships and connections, then it seems like you would necessarily have to submit to the title, or else divorce yourself from the relations and networks. Like a divorce isn’t a divorce unless you properly cut off the relationship. I don’t, well, again, are you saying that every person I talk to, I’m part of whatever identities they care to make me part of? No, I would say that if you’re a person No, I would say that if you are automatic, I’ll do it. It’s defined as having a relationship. I’ll do it. I’ll stop talking to VanderKlay entirely. I’ll never talk to him again. I’ll never look at a video. That’s not the argument I’m making. I will. If that’s what it takes to get out of this madness, I will do that. I will. I don’t know why I should have to, but if people are going to impose on me repeatedly over and over again, well, yeah, then you’ll leave me with no choice. That’s good for Paul VanderKlay. I think he doesn’t benefit from that. No, I don’t think it is, and that’s not the point I’m making. I’m making a point about what forms membership in something in the first place, and then you’re arguing on the point of self-definition, and that’s where I’m like, well, wait, doesn’t that still apply? Membership is subscription. America is an unhealthy thing. What does it take for me to no longer consider myself an American? Membership is a subscription. I’m being forced with the title of American. No, you’re not. No, you’re not. You can move. You can leave anytime you want. That’s who people miss. No, no, no. You can renounce yourself. Why can’t I stay here with the relationships in the geography, but just say I’m no longer an American? Because there’s hard constraints in the world, right? Now, on the internet, you don’t have the same nature of relationship. So again, if I watch somebody’s videos, why does that put me in their group? Like, what if I disagree with the videos? Why am I actually part of a group that I know I disagree with, that I publicly disagree with in many cases? Obviously, I’m not. Like, I can watch Ben Shapiro and go, Ben’s a lunatic, because sometimes I think he’s a lunatic. I can do that, but I’m not a lunatic. I can do that. That doesn’t put me in the daily wire lovers group or in the daily wire group. It doesn’t put me there. The quality of the relationship, the intimacy, actually matters. And that’s why the quality of the relationship is the one quality that all of these relationships actually have in common is still Peterson. It’s still not anything else. It’s not closed-ended, so it can’t be a corner, and it doesn’t splinter, right? Because Peterson’s fear, I argue, is ever expanding. It is an open-ended T-Lost, actually. And TLC cannot have that property ever. Again, that’s totally fine. If it’s a better name, that’s fine. I’m not trying to, I’m using the term TLC just because it’s been what’s used. I think it’s highlighting a pattern that exists out there in the world that we interact or do not interact or interact in a certain way with or don’t interact with a certain way with. You can call it Peterson’s fear. You can call it whatever, right? I’m just trying to make, I’m trying to clarify how you guys are splitting. No, you can’t call it whatever, and you can’t include everything in it. And again, that’s really where the argument is. The people who don’t agree with Peterson fundamentally aren’t in the sphere because they don’t agree with Peterson. But it’s more important, right? So, like Nick said, something important, right? So there is a quality of connection, right? That defines something. Then the name is the quality of connection. That has to be the name. And if you cannot find the essence of that name, then that quality of connection isn’t real because it’s not identifiable. So, yes, I’m completely with you that there is something like that, right? So for example, Seeker, right? Like Seeker would be a quality of connection that is shared by a lot of people who want to be identified in the TLC. But that’s not TLC, that’s Seeker, right? Like that identity already exists. It is shared outside of whatever sphere or whatever. Well, I’m not a universal, but like a non-conditional category or something, right? It’s just like you have a universal relationship towards something else, and that’s recognizable by everybody, and therefore we can say that that is a quality that you exhibit, and therefore we can classify you as that. And to go back to the America thing, right? Like at a certain point, America is imposed by force. Right. So like the reason that you have that identity is because slavery. Right. Well, and ethos plays a part here. And again, and this has been asked many times, what’s the ethos? And if you can’t name one, maybe if you can’t describe one rather, maybe your name’s invalid, right? Because that would still always be my argument. It would always be my argument. If you can’t outline a clear ethos, if you can’t outline anything that is identifiable, in your description, then you don’t have a thing. Right? So the fact that there are relationships in the world does not give you the right to name them. I’m sorry, it just doesn’t. I go to the grocery store. You can’t say I’m part of the, whatever name you’re gonna put on the grocery store. You’re part of the grocery shoppers. I might be categorized as a grocery shopper, I might be categorized that way in grocery shoppers. Okay, but you’re part of the grocery shoppers. So that’s a completely useless identity. That’s the problem, is that not all identities have the ability to function in the world. It’s useless under the vast majority of contexts. Sometimes it’s very useful. Well, but not if you’re not bound to that identity. Like, if it’s just a convenient identity. And at the point that you identify by that. So that when you’re trying to reference that group of things, you have something there so other people know that you’re talking about that group of things. Yeah, but if you put me in that group, and I don’t wanna be in that group, I remove myself at the point that you put me in it. And so it is an impossible thing to put me in that group. Right, and again, grocery shoppers have an ethos to get groceries, right? So what about the people that protest outside of grocery stores, but don’t actually shop there? Because that’s what the argument is. There’s a bunch of people protesting outside of the grocery store that say, you’re all protesters out there at the grocery store. And I’m like, no, I’m not, I’m a grocery shopper. I’m a cooperator, I’m not an opponent. And the funny part is, part of this is they’re pissed off that we’re not oppressing them, or opposing them, or imposing upon them. That’s part of this whole argument. And I’m like, yeah, and you don’t want anybody to do that. So why is there a problem? You don’t wanna be part of a group. Yeah, it’s very bizarre. Right, right, right. I’m not saying. Well, I mean, here’s Joey, right? TLC equals these little consumers of SNS content. But you can see how the abstraction, in order to get people in the group, you get so abstract that the abstractions becomes useless in the process of identification, in the process of contrasting this person from that person or this group of people from that group of people, it just falls apart. Because again, the symbolic world folks are nice and happy, and they’re doing what they’re doing, and they don’t want anything to do with these other groups for the most part. I mean, there might be some. I wanna go into the symbolic people actually a little bit, because Peugeot didn’t wanna have them. He’s gonna love this because he was afraid that they’re gonna be a cult. Why is he afraid of that? Well, he’s afraid because he doesn’t believe, literally he doesn’t believe, that he can be the head. And so that means that there’s something wrong there. Like either he’s not contained in something higher that allows him to be a head. Play the role of a head. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is the critique. This is the critique I have for Pastor Paul and for Peterson and for Reveke and for Peugeot is they don’t wanna take responsibility for leadership as such. And look, that’s a valid thing. Like being responsible as a leader, being a leader is a huge sacrifice. Unbelievably huge sacrifice as anybody who’s actually done a leadership knows, right? Like it’s unbelievably huge sacrifice. You can’t trust people anymore. Even people you used to trust, you can’t trust them anymore in the same way. Your relationships to everybody around you that has anything to do with that automatically changes. Like there are some major, major, major sacrifices there. And that’s really what we’re getting at is that, no, no, no, you guys are making the problem worse by not stepping up. And everybody says there’s a crisis of leadership, but they also don’t want leaders at the same time. And I’m like, well, there’s a crisis of leadership and you don’t want leaders. You’re in heaven. Like I don’t understand why you’re complaining about that at that point. Because you’re not there. Well, that’s usually because what they mean by there’s a crisis of leadership is I should be the leader. That’s usually what they mean. Right, well, first answer Luke’s first question. Of myself with no responsibility for others, which definitely doesn’t cause the problem or the crisis of leadership. Well, look, Luke’s asking why you haven’t been around the various areas, whatever the hell that even means. I haven’t been interacting with you in years. So answer that and then I’ll answer his question to me. Well, I’ve been very busy the last six months, but I’m always happy to have a conversation. Honestly, Mark and Manuel, one, we had a very long regular interaction and they keep up with me in the discord. So when I do have free time, it’s like, oh, I’ll go talk to those guys. That’s really it. It’s really valuable. And I don’t wanna hold on, Manuel, let me get to Luke’s other thing. Can you elaborate your understanding of leadership? Dude, I’ve done this like a million times. This isn’t hard. PVK says he’s not a leader. He says that, you keep saying he is. He doesn’t want that title, okay? I think Jacob’s comment on this was freaking clear and he’s actually correct. I agree with him with his assessment. If you try to make somebody into something they do not want, you are trying to subjugate them to your will. Please do not do that. The fact that some people are leading by example is ridiculous, right? It’s ridiculous. Everybody is always doing things in the world. They’re always available for exemplification. The question is, do you call attention to that? Are you? On YouTube, in the town square, do you run an organization, a church, a men’s group, right? Those things start to stray into deliberate, intentional doing of something. Now, if at the same time you’re not taking responsibility for the thing you’re doing, then you’re not a leader. Or at least you’re not a good leader. You can’t on the one hand say people are following me, but I’m not a leader. Explicitly, which was done on Twitter recently, in the past week. That’s ridiculous. Wait, but… People are following me, but I’m not a leader. Isn’t that the people forcing the leadership role onto the person that doesn’t wanna be a leader? It depends on the circumstances. If the person has a YouTube channel and they’re talking on the YouTube channel and interacting with their audience, and it has to be both of those things, I think. If you’re just pretending to be a transmission device and your face isn’t on YouTube, and you’re not trying to build a brand for yourself and stuff, and fair enough, some people… And there are lots of people like that on YouTube, by the way, and in newspapers and other places. Then, yeah, your culpability certainly goes down because you’re just kinda transmitting. When you’re interacting with people and when you’re encouraging people, and this is Jacob’s argument, not mine, but I agree with him 100%, when you’re saying, hey, if you emerge something, I’ll support you, and then you don’t, that’s a deeply irresponsible thing to do, whether you wanna classify it as a lie or not, it is, by the way, but whatever, I don’t care. It’s still irresponsible and wrong. Do not do that, please, ever. Any time you do that, you are wrong, and you need to repent, by the way, for doing that. You do not say to people, oh, I’m gonna help you out, that’s just a crappy thing to do to anybody under any circumstance. And so, sure, if you find somebody in the woods and you grab them and say, you’re now the village leader, well, yeah, that’s your ridiculousness, but if there’s somebody up on the pulpit, for example, or on a pole in the middle of town screaming at you, and then everybody goes, you’re definitely our leader, that’s on the guy on the pole, man. That ain’t on the people down below. There’s no way, there’s no way. And it’s hard to discern because there are these conditions, but also, it’s not hard to discern because there are these conditions. And I think we also have to distinguish the leading by example, because what are you doing when you’re leading by example? You’re embodying a spirit, right? And so, at that point, where does the glory go to? Does it go to you or the spirit that inspires others? And it’s not you, I can tell you that. Like the glory goes to that spirit. And taking ownership or credit for what that spirit does is dishonest. Right. Oh, there’s so many inverted arguments in this. Well, it’s not an inverted argument. Look, you build a YouTube channel, you interact with them, you formed a group rather explicitly. Like period, end of state, there’s no question of formation. You put out a whole series of YouTube videos, 50 hours or 52 hours actually, I think. And then you hold a freaking meditation session afterwards online, on a live stream, you formed a group. This isn’t ambiguous. This isn’t, again, this isn’t like I was walking along in the woods, suddenly there were 10 people following me. I’m not saying that can’t happen. I’m saying that didn’t happen here. So I understand your hypothetical, but you’re fantasizing. We know what happened. We can observe it. I can point to it. Well, okay, with Vervecky, Vervecky is fairly, is a lot more discernible, I would say, than Paul is. Oh yeah. Paul’s- That’s why we put this on. External output is much more of him just thinking out loud. Now he did form church groups. He is a leader under the conditions that he recognizes he’s playing the role. Right. Right. But that’s a different thing. Or he set up his meetups initially, which ended up becoming estuary groups. Someone set up meetups. I don’t think it was Paul. I like Joey’s comment here. Manuel’s embodiment comment is spot on and my favorite thing ever said. Right, well, and this goes to the point, Luke, who’s taking credit? Well, all kinds of people are taking credit for all kinds of things. And some of them are snakes and you don’t know that. And that’s the problem is that, and this is well known and well studied in psychology, by the way, if you have a leaderless group, the most psychotic people will take over. And that is the problem. When you have a locus of people gathering around something, there is an automatic inherent responsibility somewhere, I’m not gonna say where, but there is one somewhere to make sure that that doesn’t become a cult, right? Or a mob or any number of things. And so there has to be an authority somewhere that does something. Maybe the authority announces a leader, right? Or maybe another leader comes in and says, this group should not exist. Either way, the rebels are gonna say, yeah, either of those answers is unacceptable to me. I know they will. That’s how you know they’re rebels. Okay, so I need to go over this because Paul Van der Kley literally did claim a credit for being part of my success story, literally in relation to me on video. And he was corrected by you and said you need to give the glory to God, Paul. So he doesn’t do that, Luke. I wish he did, that would be better, but it’s not that way. That sucks, by the way. I’m unhappy about it, but it happened. And it’s on video, so whatever. I can’t see the comments. Can’t see the comments. Is this a YouTube stream? No, it’s on the comments in the… They’re on the right. Oh, I have it on the private chat tab. That’s a YouTube stream. Chat tab, that helps. Oh, well, we’re not typing there. Jeez, Nick. You missed all the good comments. Oh, I haven’t seen any of this. Holy crap. Oh no, well, Joey’s been… Where’s Joey? I saw the ones you guys were highlighting at the bottom. Joey’s not a rebel. He’s on the Navigating Patterns channel where everybody belongs. This is how you know rebels, man. You can tell them right away. I wanna be Rando. I wanna be this. I wanna be that. It’s my stream, damn it. We can just… This is his response to you. There we go. Sorry, I’m trying to read through them rapidly. Oh no, that’s gonna take a long time. But again, look, the really funny part about all this, which just honest to God just makes me laugh every time I think about it. Paul Vanu Clay had these critiques that I have given to Paul. He takes them very seriously and has said on a video, I don’t know if you guys didn’t watch it or you missed it, has said, boy, Mark says, I’m not taking responsibility for leadership and he might be right about that. And I’m worried that that is the case. And good for Paul for noticing that. Although I would say since that happened, because that was quite some time ago, he’s gone away from that. As the video with Manuel in the Netherlands there kind of showed, was that Netherlands or were you guys in Germany at that point? Netherlands, I was in the Netherlands. That’s what I thought. I thought you were still in the Netherlands. Yeah, I mean, that’s what that showed is that, well, he’s kind of taking credit for things or trying to, maybe in spite… But it doesn’t even matter whether he’s trying to or not. It’s in his subconscious, that’s what’s happening. And he gave expression to it. And whether that was with his intent or not, doesn’t matter, right? But it means that there’s a spirit inside of him that pushes him that way. And he’s gonna give expression to that spirit. Right, right. And Luke’s not worried about spiritual snakes. Well, you should be. But how about actual non-spiritual snakes? Cause we got those two dude, you guys keep discounting the snake part, right? If they do me, they do me. Yeah, but what if they do everybody? And what if they do you and you harm somebody as a result? You just can take no responsibility for that too? Like, I don’t understand. Cause your actions affect other people. Like you’re on this planet with everybody. Especially if you wanna claim this little corner. Right, and you wanna claim the little corner. And then you wanna say, oh, my actions are isolated. You can’t have both. You really gotta kind of pick one. And that’s really what this is about. What, where is constraint? Cause there is some somewhere. Like it can’t be unconstrained everywhere. And that’s part of the problem is that, and I do think it’s a recognition problem. Like when you have a place with lots of snakes, like when CNN actually just turns into mostly talking heads with agendas, and you pointed out, like there’s almost no journalism going on on CNN. It takes a long time for people to believe you because, and I’ve heard people actually make this argument. Well, it can’t be 90% of the people on CNN. No, it was, and it was like 15 years ago. And you didn’t notice then either. Right, and it just got more and more obvious and worse and worse and worse. But actually the whole time those snakes were there, the snakes didn’t change at all. So I want to- Your sight, you became able to see the snakes were there the whole time. So I want to go back to this thing that Nick was talking about between relations and connections and a loose network thing. Cause the way I think about that is where you bind yourself to certain relationships. And then that’s the authority that designates who you are, informs you. So like when I hear you say there is this, right? Like isn’t the relevant part the binding, not the existence of the connection? Right. I would, although I would say, yes. Yes, that is what is giving it its identity, is the binding. As far as, I think that’s why it’s, I think that’s what I was also trying to make the argument of. If it’s defined as the binding given through these relationships, then you submit to the binding. Or you break the relationship. But relationships don’t give binding. Like your will does that. Your will gives the binding. Not, that’s why again, you can be in opposition to the daily wire and still watch the daily wire. Are you a daily wire guy? Like, I don’t. But now you’re making a, okay, fair enough. So the will, right. You have some kind of relation that has a quality, right. And your will is in many ways defining the quality of that relationship. And the existence, right? Or the participation or the continued participation in it, unless you’re possessed. Sometimes, right. But you’re possessed or otherwise forced into the identity. Yeah. Right, right, right. And then people like that is clear answers. But is that your identity at that point? Like, I think Christianity says it’s not your identity at that point, literally. Right. And that’s the problem is that people like nice clean answers. We don’t have them. And I don’t want to take Joey’s ears. You’re high openness. People have repeatedly caused me some level of personal harm by their negligence and lack of discernment. It needs to be a balance. Exactly. And it’s the balance. It’s the work. It’s the work that everybody’s rebelling. I don’t want to do that work. That’s hard. I agree that it’s hard. Nicole, so does TLC revolve around PBK? That’s a good question. Because if we believe it does, I can understand why you believe he should be responsible. Well, he’s the one naming it and saying it over and over again. He definitely boosted it. I don’t think a lot of people said it on accident, including myself. He adopted it. But the most disgusting part that I experienced was for Vicky welcoming people into this little corner. Like that was… Oh my God. Welcome to this little corner, he was saying. And it’s like, what? What gives you the authority to welcome people into the thing? And I mean, it’s slavery. Again, it’s slavery. Like, oh, you’re part of TLC. Or in what videos? I think it was him, Vanda Clay, and some new person. And he did the invitation to the person. Like he tried… Like that’s magic, right? Like that’s… He magics TLC and that person into the identity of TLC. Right, explicitly on a video. Well, yeah, the two of us were just like, what the hell did we even just… Did that happen? Like, we know John. Did John do that? John wouldn’t do that. But he did. It’s like, wow. I think what makes it so easy for that conception is that it is in some sense a geographical metaphor. It’s like, welcome to this. It’s like, you meet at a coffee shop and you go, welcome to the coffee shop. It has, that’s the underlying meaning of the grouping. But no, because… Meaning of the grouping. No, but because first of all, the… It’s not geographical. Now we’re back at the grocery store thing. Okay. No, no, no, but there’s a distinction, right? So, because the coffee shop is owned by someone, right? So he can extend the authority to welcome someone in the coffee shop. But also being welcome in the coffee shop doesn’t grant you privileges or a title. Right, being part of this little corner is the bestowing of a title. Right. How? Like, oh, welcome. Now you’re part of this little corner of the internet too. Right, it’s like, let me welcome you into this identity. Right. And now you can go out into the world. It’s not temporally locked like the coffee shop is. Well, it’s not, no, but the coffee shop is different, right? You’re welcome, right? So you’re subjected under the coffee shop. But when you’re part of this little corner, there’s no authority that you’re subject to. Yeah, you’re walking down the street past a coffee shop as somebody grabs you and puts you in there. It’s like, wait a minute, right? And puts a suit on you and like, now you have a uniform. Right. And maybe they’re like, oh, now you need to serve coffee. Yeah, that’s why I’m saying the title, the words, this little corner has a strong geographical metaphor quality to it. We don’t have to use coffee shop. We could say, welcome to this parking lot or welcome to, you know, I think that’s why people feel so comfortable using it is that when they say it, they’re at least using the title in such a way that they imagine it as not carrying. Here’s your apron, you know, the milk’s in the fridge. Make sure you smile and say thank you every time someone comes through the door, right? Now that might, some of that stuff might actually be there. And now you really have a problem because you’re sneaking in a geographical metaphor with a role that you are enforcing upon the person. That’s fair. That’s a totally fair criticism. Yeah, and that’s what that’s what conscription is, right? But just imagine that I conquer your city and then conscript you. Right, and there’s lots of forms of conscription. And literally all we’re saying is there is a difference between these things. You can discern them from one another. You can discern a bad name from a good name. You can discern TLC from Peterson’s fear. I think they are not of the same quality. They do not have the same functionalities, right? One is easy to understand and I think that’s the key. Easy to understand and totally works. And people can easily go, yes. The other one I can’t go yes to because there are no bounds. It’s too ambiguous and people can, snakes can make use of it to hijack it in one direction or another. Well, as people could with Peterson’s fear as well. They can use you and your words to justify their snake behavior. And again, it’s like someone tries to bomb a federal building. I don’t want the FBI talking to me because they claim to be part of the same group. I don’t want that. And I think more importantly, we go back to the point of Heldnig, right? And like this is, I mean, we go away from the group problem. It’s like, okay, we are having a problem with discernment. Right? So I wanna be, and to go back to Peterson, right? Speak the truth or at least don’t lie. I wanna use words that allow me to be in right relationship with reality. Now, let’s say DLC has some right relationship, right? The thing that you’re claiming with reality. Right. If I’m using it, it might have right relationship because I’m just who I am. Right. You’re like next to God and you can do that. Right? But the problem is, and you pointed out this, right? Like it’s not the same- It’s too ambiguous and is thus way too easy to hijack. Yeah. And so now you have the mimetic, it’s not even drift anymore. It’s actual mimetic control by bad actors that are able to- No, no, but no, no, don’t think about the bad actors. It’s like you said that the identity isn’t stable. Right. Right? So using it as a reference for yourself is unhealthy. Because you’re using an unstable reference. I’m using a reference of where I’m at at the moment, which is necessarily gonna have a quality of unstableness to it. Unless it’s in relation to something that is stable. And that’s the point with the Peterson sphere, is that there is something that is stable. It’s not that it’s completely stable or completely consistent and reliable, right? Because I’m not a sciencey person in that way, right? But it does have a level of identifiable stability to it. Stability. And it is more like, it’s like, look, you put an audience out there for people to hijack. That is irresponsible, right? And then you tell the snakes, go ahead and hijack them. I don’t care, because I’m not gonna lead them. I’m not gonna take responsibility for the people that I’ve gathered. That to me is dangerous. I mean, this is what, you know this. This is our deep critique of her work. Cultures are happy to take control from the top down. However, well, yeah. And they’re usually not this type of case. Sometimes they are. All the ones I’ve encountered are actually like, auto-didact controlling of an entire culture that they then ask you to be part of or not. So much more formal in the sense of like, it has a clear structure and down chain of command. All I was gonna say is, you know, and to some of these comments, it is a very novel situation. People don’t know how to navigate. You know, we’re sitting here. This is a lot easier to navigate than most things, except, and it helps, we have a comment thing, we can read so that we have some contact with the people watching. But otherwise, I’m talking to you and you, and I’m doing it through this weird thing sitting on my computer. It’s almost absolutely impossible to have any context or even a sense of responsibility for the people in the room, right? Yes. This imaginary room. I agree. But the only reason our conversations work is because of the hours and hours and hours we spent over and over again talking both on camera and off on Discord servers, right? Like we built that up. And this is where it gets sticky again. There’s a way, look, I grew up online to an extent almost none of these other people can even imagine, right? Like there’s a way in which you can build online group. Some of my oldest friends I met on BBSes, for real. Yeah. They still use my BBS handle when they’re on the phone. I use my BBS handle when they talk to me. It’s funny, it’s fun. Same, actually. One of my best friends from up here, I met on a forum for doing flips, like acrobatics. Right, right. When I was 12, still one of my best friends. And so there’s a way in which relationships, even ones that never result in people getting together physically, can form. And that’s very unique and novel in the world, there’s pen pals, there’s a couple of other things. But this with the video in particular is very novel. And we’re still working that through. And we won’t know for 20, 30, 50 years what that was. Because we’ll have to understand it in hindsight. A lot of things you cannot understand except in hindsight. Kind of that squishing of time problem. And so that’s really the issue, is that there is a thing here, and how should we be responsible for it? How should we relate to it? Is it okay to shut down rebel wisdom? I don’t know. So I wanna highlight this speed aspect, right? So I think a lot of stuff around conspiracy theories and what people see things, and they see movements and patterns, and they assign identities to that. Yeah. Right? And the problem with that is that- The internet is borderline schizophrenic. Yeah. Yeah, but the problem with that is that some of those identities can hold. They can manifest things. And so this is what I said. Like I’m TLC three years ago, is different than TLC now. Because I believe there was an impetus, that there was a spirit that could have been given a body. I don’t think that’s true anymore. That’s why I disassociated. Right. And so- Yeah, same. And this goes to belief, right? So like someone with authority has to claim an amination, and then people have to bind themselves to it. Right? And even if the amination is false, the formation of the body, because the body has to be divinely informed, has a self-corrective course. Right? Like that body is self-healing by binding its internal structure. Right? Like I make these examples about things in my head. Like some ideas, if you have to start them with faith, you bootstrap them with faith, right? And you build a castle on a cloud in your head. And at a certain point, there’s an internal integrity of these ideas that they’re solid, right? Like they create their own ground because of the integrity. And so that- And this I would also say is how solipsism happens. Yes. And so regularly. Right. Yeah, fair point. Who are the villains, according to Socrates in the Republic? It’s the lowest form of life. It’s the sophists. Oh, okay. It’s the sophists, right? There’s the two philosophers, and then there’s those reprehensible sophists. I mean, they’re so reprehensible in the Republic. They all, it’s almost like we won’t mention them. As much as possible, we will avoid mentioning them. I’m also getting a kinda, is it Odysseus’ boat problem? These is, these is his ship. These is his ship, thank you. Which is, you know- That’s the spirit. Even, so say that bridge is a meaning, we’ll close it in a little from the larger TLC moniker. Right, for the, Mark had the beautiful metaphor earlier of the pillars. I can’t remember what it’s called when it’s a pillar meant to hold up a bridge. Casing? Case on, yeah. Okay. And right, you, one gets removed or disappears or whatever the case is, someone else steps in to try and hold up the bridge. This pattern repeats over and over again. At what point is this no longer the same bridge? And is it even appropriate to still call it the same thing? Right, so that’s where we get it. Now we’re getting into that really confusing territory between what makes a thing a thing. Like is it the pattern of it or is it the instantiation of it? And then the more mundane, how do you know what thing it is as opposed to another thing? Which, now it’s just messy, messy, messy. Yeah, but the problem with Odysseus’ ship is like, you can identify things by their body or you can identify them by the pattern that the body participates in. No, it’s not the pattern. It’s not the pattern. It’s actually the representation, what it represents. Okay, so, and these is the ship example, I think everybody just gets it confused. It’s really just the question of perspective, right? And it’s the question of idolatry because those are linked, right? If you believe the purpose of Theseus’ ship is to accurately and precisely represent the boat that Theseus used, then it’s not the same. It isn’t that hard, then it’s not the same ship, right? If you understand that the purpose of the ship and having it where it’s at is to celebrate the journey, in some cases, irrespective of outcome, that’s why we have monuments to failed battles, then the physicality and the authenticity of the physicality aren’t relevant anymore. And that’s the problem of perspective, which is the problem of relevance realization. So relevance realization is to some extent, although not exclusively, the problem of the post-moderns took away our frames and we need them back because we can’t have meaning or definitions for that matter without them. So, and then you have another secondary problem, which is if Theseus’ ship was post-adventure, still exists there and has its parts replaced to iconically symbolize the journey, what happens as the people celebrating that journey or that adventure, form a different concept of what an adventure is. Now, is it still Theseus’ ship? No, no, no, no, no, no, but like this is interesting because this happened to the Bible. Right, I know, that’s why I’m bringing it up. It really does happen a lot more often than we would. That’s my example with the eating, right, of the same food and having a different experience that are sometimes opposed, right? And when you get something as big as the Bible, as complex as the Bible, the amount of distinct perspectives that you can hold upon the whole thing is just insane, right? Like, right. And so there’s, and that’s why the Holy Spirit is so important, like, and revelation, but also like the Bible isn’t important, right? Like the Bible is important in as much as it reveals God, right, like that, like it’s a method to relate God. The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon type of situation. Right, I agree. And it doesn’t matter, like, whether you grab the tail or the trunk of the elephant, it’s not relevant. It’s like, okay. So long as you can write it into a new field. And to go with the open and the talos, right? Like, I think there’s a relationship with the closed and the open and the talos, right? Because you need to close talos in order to act. Like actions have to be discreet, right? Right. Like if we level this up to the level of human, right? We have people that are high in openness, right? And we have conservatives, right? Like we need the conservatives to have the structure so that the openness people don’t die or get eaten by lions or rice star or whatever. Like, and they cannot exist without the virtue of the structure that sustains them. And so, and that’s also the earthly, right? Like, so like we need to work, we need to work the land in order to have physical food so that we can access the spiritual food so that we can properly access the physical food. Exactly. The fountain. Yeah. Right, the head should. But also how do you know it’s a fountain? What makes a fountain a fountain? Because it points up. Yeah, the directionality. Right, the fact that it, well, it’s not- Otherwise you’d eat your own poop and think you were a fountain. Exactly. Yeah, it’s not mere direction, it’s orientation, right? That’s the key. That’s why it’s navigating patterns and not directioning patterns or something stupid, right? Like finding patterns, pointing patterns. You can’t point at the things I talk about, right? They have to be oriented towards, or you can orient not towards them, that’s fine too. There’s more, there’s more not. And you can also have- But that’s also like a specific form of project. You can also have a person that all they do is just try and identify patterns. And then they let other people go, I don’t know, go play with those Lego blocks however you want. Right, right, right. But that’s also irresponsible, again. It is irresponsible, it’s potentially irresponsible. No, no, no, no, it is, no, it is not potentially. It is actually irresponsible. Yeah, yeah. Because there’s forbidden knowledge, right? Like in order to properly relate to a pattern, you need to embody it, or have an embodied relationship to it. If you don’t have an embodied relationship to it, and you just gather the hand to you, which is what science does actually, right? Just give you this formula. And then go ahead. If you don’t have- All power with no wisdom. Yes. Yeah, fair. Well, and I don’t mean it’s power, it’s… Yeah, it’s something. Agency or something. Agency. Or access to agency. Well, and that’s really what all the battles are about. I don’t wanna limit this in scope, because we don’t have to. That’s a microcosm, as it were, or part of the self-similar fractal nature of what’s happening. Like, how do we identify? I mean, this is the argument over Ukraine. Is Ukraine a country? I’m still not as the boundaries are now. And maybe what Russia’s doing is trying to restore Ukraine to countryhood, and say, these two parts, I’ve already taken the third part that I wanted, right, that weren’t part of Ukraine. These parts don’t belong to these other parts, and the proper boundaries must be maintained and drawn. That’s an argument. Like, is that the argument he’s making? I don’t know. But that’s- Or his intent, his teleology. Right, or- It’s how he argues, probably in support of a hidden teleology. Right, well, and every single person, not every single person, but every single person I met, who was from Ukraine, told me they were from Russia. And said they were from Ukraine until the war, which is a really strange way to identify. I go, why are you identifying as Russian until there’s a war, and suddenly you’re Ukrainian? That’s a weird thing to do. Especially given the crime, is it because of the Crimean annexation? No, no, they didn’t do that until the recent attack. Most of them don’t recognize the war began in 2014, and so they should. Well, I guess I was wondering if the northern part of the country was identified as Russian through the Crimean annexation. I don’t know. Until they became the one getting annexed, and then suddenly they have an identity. No, I think Teddy from Israel actually talked about this. Obviously, he’s not Israeli. He never identified himself as strictly Israeli. He said where he came from, and I’m Israeli, which I thought that’s the correct way to do it. You can have multiple, I’m French Canadian. Yeah, I’m- Canadian American. But let me finish the point, Manuel. So the point is, they don’t have literature. They don’t have a literary sort of history, and his point was that’s why they’re not. They’re almost a country, but for that. And my argument, I think that’s actually a good argument. I don’t have a disagreement with that. My argument is more along the lines of they wanted a historical grounding that they could appeal to that lasted through times. They wanted to make a stronger appeal to personal identity. That’s why they said they were Russian. I’m not coming down on either side of that argument. I’m just saying, boy, it’s mysterious. It’s weird. Yeah. I’ll be right back, guys. Oh, sure, sure. I have gone three hours without smoking a cigarette, which is actually pretty incredible. All right, well done. Well done. Now’s your time to quit, Nick. This is the miracle you’ve been waiting for. Signs and wonders. Sign, make the wonder happen, dude. Oh, God. But to be a little bit about this Putin thing, right? It’s like, okay, so Putin is promoting a tell-all for a potentially hidden tell-all. And it’s like, there’s an implicit primacy in that argument, right? So it’s like, okay, the hidden tell-all is more relevant than the outspoken one. And I’m starting to object at that point, right? Because what is the thing that moves the world? Well, the thing that moves the world is the thing that other people relate to, right? Like that they identify as real, right? So if, and to be fair, a lot of people don’t listen to Putin. So they’re identifying something different than what he’s speaking. And you better damn well make sure that you’re correct if you’re gonna not trust someone at work. Not because people can’t lie or whatever, right? But Putin isn’t trying to lie. Like, he’s serious. Like he’s not playing a game when he’s making a three-hour argument. No, like, you’re like, damn right. And the objection is the objection around strong leadership, ironically. And again, I just say, this is coming up everywhere, this rebellion. Like, I have to say, what Putin’s asking for, the fact that those regions have been firing rockets at Kiev for years since 2014, is really telling to me, right, because what’s telling to me is not the identification on the map, but how the actual humans are behaving, right? I don’t believe what you say. I believe what you do, another Peterson quote, right? That’s war. They’re in opponent process. I mean, war, yes. Yeah, but it’s already at that point, part of the same body, because like, I don’t like it. And that’s what the fight is, right? Explicitly, I mean, that’s why I find this amusing that we have to even have this conversation. It’s actually happening around us. Opponent processing is war. I was gonna wait till Nick got back, but yes. Nick O’Teen withdrawals indeed, that happens. And that’s the problem, is that we’re not watching what people are doing. We’re not believing our simple observation over our fantastical theory in our head. And it’s a fantastical theory in your head. You have a fantastical theory that there’s some like lizard people running the White House. It’s ridiculous, you know? And it’s unnecessary. What are you doing, Manuel? What are you, are you just pointing your screen? Look, Nick O’Teen is back from his withdrawals. So, Joey’s correct. Do you have a bottle to that, or have you just been identified correctly in your relationship network? Almost certainly properly identified. Excellent, the combination is clear. It’s observed from the action, right? That the action is rebellion, but it doesn’t have a name. If the action is like participating with the cigarette, then clearly we’ve avoided a withdrawal, a Nick O’Teen withdrawal. Have you drawled any conclusions? Well, I think there’s several points that were you guys made that are very strong. The importance of naming is a very big one. That’s a great point. And how it has an effect on how we perceive and conceive and properly relate to patterns that we identify. I’ve always been particularly terrible at naming. So maybe that’s why I prefer things that just kind of bubble up and convenient enough. I kind of know what I’m referencing. Well, and I don’t think that’s bad. I think another deep confusion we have is that there is a liminal space. In other words, there’s a space that exists between me and you that is not the same as the space we’re in now, because this is public. First of all, Manuel’s here. That wouldn’t affect anything between you and I necessarily because all three of us are pretty tight at the end of the day. But the fact that we’re now broadcasting does change. And this is what I keep explaining to people. It’s one thing if I privately on my Discord with 10 people even say, Jordan Peterson does this and I think it’s wrong. That’s one thing, but that is completely different from maybe my private critique. Blowing up Twitter. I’m like, whoa, wait a minute. Let’s go all the way down, which is different from my private critique, which I’m like, I don’t know how I feel about this critique of Peterson. So maybe I won’t even share it with my Discord yet because maybe I know my ideas aren’t that well formed. Does anybody else go through this? Because I think a lot of people are missing that step. They just blab out whatever comes to mind, right? Yeah, we all do. That’s why present company accepted. But then you go up the stack. Well, is it okay to tweet about it? Is it okay to make videos about it? Is it okay to have an audience of a certain size, say a thousand views or something and make videos critiquing Peterson, right? Is it okay to critique something when you’re out of it? When you had the opportunity to critique it while you were there? And this showed up in Arc, right? Because Jonathan Pigeot does this brilliant speech. The most brilliant speech he’s ever given was in Arc. Criticizing Arc, like breaking it all down, criticizing the whole thing and clearly articulating his critiques. That’s valid. Coming back home and whining about how when you were at Arc you were unhappy, that’s invalid. I think that’s inappropriate. I have never seen a Paul VanderKlay, Jordan Peterson critique video, not one. Right. Yeah, true. The way I’ve conceptual or mapped, because you’re totally right, totally different boundaries depending on the context and the interaction you’re having with the world. Four simple categories, private, private, private, public, public, public, public. And you have different sets of rules. You may have to determine them. You may have, well, at some point you have the determination and then you have the feedback and the fitting. The negotiation. The world. That’s what people don’t like. But you also have etiquette. And you negotiate your identity too. Ethic. Like etiquette. Oh etiquette, yes. Yeah, like there’s an established way of being that you can conform to, which allows you to navigate these spaces without having to understand your position in them. Right, and that’s the important part. See, that’s the part that people don’t like. They’re like, well, I don’t want to participate until I understand. You know, and it’s like, what if you can’t ever do that? What if you actually, the only way to properly understand is to participate? That’s why I think again. It’s even worse. Like it’s even worse. Because like I have participatory understanding. Right. Right. When I, like I described myself like a week ago as going up the hill, looking to the, up the mountain, looking to the hill next to it, drawing a map in my head and understanding, and then deciding to climb, which is kind of what Sam Harris wants to do with his stupid landscape thing. Right. But like it’s so flawed in so many ways, because like whatever vision you can gain, right? Like however true it is, it’s not the path up this hill. Like it’s not. Like and the walking and the participating in the being of the hill is going to be different. So it’s not a solution, even if you’re correct. And I know like, cause I like to be correct. And the participation, this is why I like for Vicky’s participatory knowledge, even though I fundamentally disagree with his even describing knowledge. The idea that that exists is important because that does help to draw the point that does help to draw the propositional line in your head, that there’s a difference between the things in your head and the things that aren’t in your head and you can’t mix them up. And Gabriel Stuckley was talking to Michael Saturi. He sent me the link on Twitter and I was watching some of it, I haven’t finished the video, but he quoted something that really stuck out to me that I think I sort of forgot. So I’m glad he mentioned it, which is, participation is the way we intuitively know something. That’s how you gain intuitive understanding of something is through participating and you can’t gain it any other way. So there’s actually, there’s more to the world and there’s a bifurcation at some point or there’s a boundary. And when we’re talking about things like the good, right? You first have to conceive of the good before you can participate in it. So if you never properly relate to the category or the form of- I wanted to highlight that comment as well. Yeah, yeah. Well, let’s go over it. Joey A, etiquette matters, being a good host is what I think he means there. Gracious host and a good guest are all key early ideas of BOM. And yes, the irony compared to how that’s enforced in an online space. And that’s the issue. How do we get along when we don’t know each other? That’s- I would call it etiquette, I would call it politeness. Etiquette’s a specific instance of a type of politeness is how I divided it up. I think that’s really important, right? Because your etiquette can change, but having an etiquette makes you polite. Whereas etiquette by itself, it changes too much, right? From place to place, it’s very context dependent. Politeness is the larger abstract bucket. And it isn’t imposition, it is a tyranny. Well, oh yeah, like I like that word, imposition, right? So that’s also a good way to realize, right? Like there’s, when, what are we doing when we’re making a category or claiming the name of TLC is we’re imposing. And so what are we doing when we self identify, we’re imposing a relationship or an expectation, maybe that’s the better word, onto other people. And some expectations are appropriate, they’re justified. Right, like, okay, if we’re in the space, we have a container or something that contains us. And in order to remain healthy, right? To have something wholesome, we need to adhere to certain etiquette because like else it won’t function, like can’t. Well, and again, to my mind, that was, this is why I was trying to point out ontological levels, was the TLC is just how I imagined it is just a big old bucket. There’s no etiquette, there’s at most it’s just, did you, do you regularly talk to these people and talk about these ideas or broadcast about these concepts or, and then you have instantiations of communities within it that do have the etiquette and the mission and the, right? All these other qualities that actually, that’s where the actual telos starts forming is in the instantiation of how those conversations or relationships are conducted. And those things have names, but I, and I think this is, you know, Joey, Mark being a quote, polite guest means adopting. Yeah, well, politeness is a two-way thing, right? Like politeness isn’t, politeness is an abstract. So it’s in the way that is abstract, it is a universal, right, which is not to say it’s a given because, and this is where I’d fight back. Like there is no standard of politeness. There is no standard etiquette, but there’s also no standard of politeness that you can identify, you know, in TLC because there are people making sure that doesn’t happen actively. I agree wholeheartedly with that comment. Then that’s the problem. So that’s why I say, no, you don’t have a container because every time you try to form one, every time a TLO starts, every time somebody says whatever, somebody comes in and there’s multiples of these agents to break it apart. And I like what Chad said in the Friday morning nameless, a little while back where he said, look, when Joey left, there was a spirit to BOM and that spirit has changed. I would argue that spirit is gone since Joey left. And that was a while ago and it took a while for people to actually notice, right? So structures have momentum. And so just because somebody leaves doesn’t mean it crumbles immediately. But I would argue it did crumble after Joey left as the result of that. And that’s not, it’s not necessarily the case that somebody could have stepped into Joey’s shoes or something and fixed that problem. Like I don’t believe that that is necessarily true. I’m not saying it wasn’t an option, might’ve been, but I don’t think it, you know, it’s certainly not arbitrary. You couldn’t have just had Dennis step in and do all those things and it would have been okay. I don’t believe that for a second. I believe it matters who and the conditions. And that’s part of the problem. The reason why Dennis was chosen was for a different reason than Joey was there, right? Like that’s also, there’s a different role associated with that that he tried to embody. Cause I talked to him a lot and they wanted to make changes. And then like those changes changed the spirit. Joey’s agreeing with you, Nick. TLC has no host, it has no etiquette and no guests. It is a category of non-human relationships with content. Merely reflect, a mere reflection of the actual human relationships. Which is an objective material reality. Right. Right. And so existence denied. And that’s still the problem. It’s like, yes, any way you try to slice it, you’re gonna come up empty. And that’s deliberate, but also a misnaming. I mean, it’s clear evidence for me of a misnaming. And that’s descriptive. Like it is something descriptive. But now we’re getting back into the relevance realization. Right, it’s cause like, how do you decide what to describe? And then it’s like, okay, there’s an authority again that you need to reference in order to make your value for your description. And then you just end up like, I want this to be a thing. Like that’s the authority. An identification against is not an identification explicitly, and that’s what we keep coming back to is it always ends up as an identification against. Which is fine, but it’s not an identity then explicitly. Right, it can never be an identity when it’s an identity. And actually the word adversary was mentioned a while back in the comments. And I looked up the etymology and it is one who opposes, or one who stands towards the other, faces the other. And what is that? That is an identity against the other, like literally. It’s not a good thing, that’s what it is, not a good thing. Do we wanna close this down? I don’t think so, I don’t ever wanna close this down. I wanna talk to Nick as long as I can, as long as he’ll let me pass him. I don’t have a lot of free time. That’s the problem, I’m like, oh, we’ve got him, let’s keep him as long as we can. He’s like the fish that got away. I was like, oh, we can do this, I don’t know, Saturday or whatever. We might be able to, I go up to my cousins and try and keep making knives, usually on the weekends. Some weekends, yeah, that’s where my shop is now. He’s got five acres about 15 miles north of here and he’s got a big shop on it. He let me put all my stuff in there. But yeah, you know, work in construction, 40 plus hours a week is a very exhausting thing to do. Yeah, yeah, that came up in the Michael Sartori talk with Gabriel was, yeah, man, you can use your energy up physically or mentally, but usually not both. Both, and it’s difficult, because I build up angst and frustration and not, in the same way that if you sit talking on your computer all day long, you start getting, your legs start wanting, you get motions as they’re like, hey, can we get some like activity or blood flowing through us? But I’ve been very, very heavy on that. And then the weekend, I’ve got to do all the household chores and laundry and go up to my cousins and make sure everything’s taken care of. By the time it’s all done, I’m basically just ready to start the cycle over again. But you know, I definitely crave these. Certainly after six months, it was like, I’ll sit here writing papers on YouTube comments just so I can engage some part of my brain again. Come help us on all our documents and our notes and stuff, Nick. We got on the Google Docs, you can put your attention to instead. It’s all about time, energy and attention on navigating patterns, man. To put it towards our projects, that’s our. We still got the 300 and what is it? 16 pages of notes we gotta go through, Manuel. We gotta schedule that again. We used to sit down a couple of times a week. Yeah, maybe we should do that on the live stream. That would be fun. We could totally do that on a live stream. Yeah, Nick, if you’ve got more time today or this week or whatever, we’ll try to fit you in. You can be on my live stream on Friday. This week, I could squeeze in another day for sure. Yeah. We’ll make that happen. Friday’s probably actually a pretty good day for me. I don’t know what works for you guys. My live stream at seven, my live stream at 7 p.m. Eastern is on reflection. I won’t be there. Contemplation and rumination. And Manuel will already have gone to bed because he doesn’t like reflection, contemplation, rumination, but we do. And you can jump in on that, of course. I like dreaming. You need to add that one because I actually do that when I wake up. My mind swaps in this mode and it’s just like, I don’t control it, but things happen, I can tell you. In the liminal space? I don’t know if it’s a liminal space, but. Or do you mean once you wake up? No, it’s like my brain does things and I’m participating, but not really. It’s like- Yeah, it’s kind of flowing along in its own little process. Well, all right. I gotta go. Yeah, let’s try and set something up for Friday. It’d be cool if Manuel could join us again. If not, then I can hop in on- I can do two streams on Friday. I can totally do that. I can hop in on your stream either or. But I’ll try and get one more of these in here before I start. I’m probably going out to the coast for all of next week. Oh, great. Oh, I’m babysitting my nephew on Friday. No, you don’t like that idea? That’s gonna be fascinating. Sorry. What will be? I will be babysitting my nephew on Friday. Oh. I will have time, but I might need to change a diaper. So. Right. That sounds awesome. That’ll be, yeah. Nick, it was great to have you back and I’m glad I know who you are now in the comments. I can go look for your comments. I got one of my comments called out on Twitter on the PVK Peugeot video. Thank you, Michelle. And thank you, Nick. Thank you, everybody for watching. We have so much more that we wanna talk to Nick about so that he can tell us whether or not we’re on the right track. We did the TLC thing and I really didn’t wanna do it. It ended up being a fun conversation though, so. But again, I don’t think it’s limited to that. I think actually that is the problem. You’re seeing it all layers. That’s just a small version of what you’re seeing in Ukraine and in the United States and in Europe and in communities all over the place. Like I really, like don’t, don’t, don’t. We’re giving you a nice example that you guys are kinda tied up in, but actually, that’s actually what everyone’s tied up in at the larger scale. And so I don’t feel bad about that. And that’s what I was trying to focus on when I was initially responding is just like, okay, this is an interesting problem about the nature of ontology, how things are granted realness, in what way we consider them real, et cetera, et cetera. So that was all very meaningful and fun. No, I love it. Next time we can talk about why it’s all actually just the printing press. It’ll be fantastic. Yeah, exactly. All just the printing press. All right, gentlemen, we’ll have a good rest of your days. But that sounded weird. Like we’ll never talk again until we all die. Friday. Friday. Friday, we’ll figure something out for Friday, whether we do a thing with Manuel or you just jump in my stream, we’ll figure something out. All right, sounds good. Thank you everybody for watching. It’s been wonderful. Everybody should have been watching on Navigating Patterns or Twitter, but if you weren’t, then I would like to communicate you from the Peterson sphere as I can do that, I guess. I don’t know. Have a lovely, lovely day. Thank you again, Nick. Thanks, Manuel, for making the time and go to bed and sleep well. And we’ll see you all.