https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=w2nKw-ElI3s
Welcome everyone. I’m here with my very good friend Rafe Kelly and he’s going to tell us about some very interesting and I think powerful opportunities that he’s making available to people. So Rafe. Yeah, thank you John. It’s a pleasure to to get a chance to be with you and basically after you introduced me to Jordan Peterson and we were on his podcast that sold out all of our retreats for the year and so we’ve been talking for a while about bringing back our two-day traveling workshops that I used to do from basically 2013 through 2018. I was traveling all over the world teaching these but after the birth of my youngest daughter having three kids at home from my wife was too much. We’re going to travel anymore and I didn’t yet have the staff who were trained up to to be able to lead workshops on their own but now we’ve got Aaron Cantor’s got 20 plus years of experience teaching in the movement industry and Kyle Cock who’s been teaching wilderness skills for 10 years now and has also been teaching with me for seven years who are going to be taking on I believe Kyle’s been on both of those. Yes, yes. Well, so really wonderful people. I’ll be doing a couple. I’ll be out in Europe in Copenhagen, Denmark and which actually has my favorite tree in the world so people really want to do some amazing tree running. Check out the Copenhagen event. I’ll also be in London with one of my students Ben Metter who was my second online student ever and has a really accomplished coach on his own and teaches a similar ecology of practices or something very influenced by a volume of play in London. So we’re going to be teaching at Hampstead Heath which is another incredible space. We’re going to Boston and Asheville on the East Coast. Aaron is from Boston so he knows that area well has a student base there. We’re going to San Francisco which is some of the best trees also that I’ve been around and to Boulder, Colorado. I just got back from Colorado, had a really amazing trip out there. Incredible community, the parkour community out there. So folks can get involved in our workshops by checking those out so if you were interested in the retreats, those are not available anymore but you know we’ll make those available again sometime late in the summer, in the fall but for now we have these workshops and as those fill up we have the opportunity to grow them and expand them. We’re just talking about we should obviously do one in Toronto. We didn’t schedule that yet and yeah we’ll try to keep this up and make it a lot more available and we have a really a ton of amazing young people who are coming into our system who are passionate about this ecology of practices who are educating up go and take it out in the world so that many more people get access to it. That’s great. Is there anything else people should know or anything else they could possibly consult to if they wanted to get a better idea about? Yeah, so evolveplay.com, I think it’s just workshops. We’ll put the link in the description and if they just go to the main page they’ll see it’ll be the second or top thing you can look at is the workshops. So we’ll be covering more of the physical practices in this one as opposed to some of the dialogical and storytelling aspects that we’re able to get into in the longer seminars but we’ll be taking people into the tree running aspects of what we do, parkour in nature, the rough and tumble play and we will be weaving in the dialoguing and mindfulness aspects as something that helps you understand and grow through that and playing with balls and sticks and ropes and bring those aspects in. One of my students who’s moving to town where I am recently just came and we’re playing a lot with different variations of ballgames and how those can stimulate hand-eye coordination and agility and just so much rich stuff that comes out of that so there’s always new things being generated there but we select the sites in part because they’re particularly rich places to do beautiful natural movement in the trees and also in that they’re in cities because most of the audience is going to live in cities and they often don’t realize they have access to nature where they are and trying to show people how to go out and find stuff in the area that you’re at. Okay everyone so this amazing opportunity many of you have heard me speak repeatedly about how Rafe is the real deal and the stuff he does is powerful and transformative it’s backed by very good you know reflective thought and design and a lot of experience and expertise so check out the links I encourage you to go to these workshops so thanks very a lot Rafe for sharing that with us. Yeah thank you so much John for helping share my work so much it’s been incredible to collaborate with you and have your support and getting what we’re doing out into the world. Welcome everybody very very excited about this I get to talk to my great friend Rafe Kelly. Rafe’s been on here before and he you know like we talk about so many things I’ve been on his channel and you all know how much I’ve talked about return to the source and the general things that Rafe does and recently Rafe was on Jordan Peterson and Rafe is gonna, well he’s gonna begin the conversation about how Rafe has been slowly explicating and elucidating and then articulating a way in which he’s synthesized Jordan Peterson’s my work and Jordan Peterson’s work and my work together and then how that is in fact also been integrated with what he has been creating and generating and we’re gonna start there and we might get into other things but that we both agree that’s a good place to start so my friend welcome so much it’s so so glad to be talking to you. Yeah John it’s always a pleasure when we get the chance to speak to each other and I was really glad that they were able to take the time to listen to my conversation with Jordan and the offering is really nice feedback about that and and I thought it’d be really fun to go over some of those ideas particularly because of as you mentioned I saw the conversation with Peterson in part actually really wanting to showcase a synthesis with your work as well as his and then how that plays out into physical practices and the necessity of getting people into body you know I mentioned this team many times and that I feel like within the liminal lab or the sense-medicating whatever whatever it is there’s a lot of sense that in body is important but there’s not a lot of people who have a really deep intense experience of body practices you know it still feels kind of shallowly developed and I feel like that’s the point I think it’s so fundamental and I think that’s you know my role is to come here and keep speaking for the body. Yeah and I welcome it I mean you made that made that specific call to me last year and that’s why I came to return to the source to really really get some sense of it from the inside so where would you how would you like to start framing this? Yeah I suppose where I’d like to start is it was interesting to prepare for my interview with Jordan I went back and read all the chapter headings for a bunch of me so he recommends the name of that book that you should read the chapter headings and give you the basic pieces of the book and then you go back and read chapters so I didn’t have a chance to read the whole book it’s quite a difficult book to read all of it but I went through chapter headings and what was striking is how often he’s talking about how meaning is actually its relevance to motor actions or the schemas that organize motor actions and he makes this point as well in one of his lectures in Matches to Meaning he talks about how emotions are basically downstream of action potentials they’re telling you you know based on some fundamental motivation whether you need to whether you can continue to move towards a goal whether you need to stop or whether you need to retreat because things have been become dangerous and so the point that I would that I wanted to make to him was in order to actually have the the the full four P’s of understanding of knowledge that you’ve developed there that you’ve articulated that it’s there’s no way that we can get that just from reading literature or you know practicing the traditional religions you know when we look at religion it’s interesting how that has become disembodied yes yes everything has education has to by far and large it’s just about philosophy right you’ve been making this point in a number of your recent lectures that ethical professors can have a profound propositional understanding of ethics and it has zero correlation to their capacity to act in a mathematical way yep and that that to me is like that’s a huge failure as you talked about like that philosophy has failed that it doesn’t actually deliver wisdom that’s right that’s right so more and more in that conversation I became more and more comfortable with the claim that I’ve been working towards with you over the last few years that like actually body practices are fun yep and then so and they’re fundamental because you know in order to you can you know you’ve been talking about the dialogue on courage and the specific one but it’s one of Plato’s dialogues black keys black keys la ch es that’s okay and so how do you educate someone in courage is it sitting down and creating a good definition of courage right is it writing about courage is it imagining courage or do you actually go do things that require courage up in order for the virtue to penetrate into the procedural perspectival participatory assets and human being there has to be a physical process that embodies and so I I’ve been talking to for a long time about the idea that there are say four fundamental physical types of practice right there’s a body to itself practice a body to the environment practice a body to object practice and a body to bottle practice and so in play research they talk well right away about the first the last three so the the body to the environment practice is referred to in play research is exploratory locomotor play and that’s one fundamental forms of play that we see everywhere the the manipulative practice they call object oriented play mm-hmm by with a fidget spinner right or legos yeah and then rough-and-tumble play is the kind of fundamental expression of that interactive aspect right and then for one time I’ve been kind of conceptualizing that those four pillars as related to or broader pillars of self-development that we work with in the ball play which is the the mindfulness practice mindful movement practice so that’s where all this sitting and then major connection and community practices right right right and what I realized as I was working through the connection between the four P’s of understanding the four E’s of cognitive science through mouse and meaning and that the ideas that meaning is that I think I have a the solid ground to say now that the the the the mindfulness aspects the connection aspects and community aspects the ritual aspects are all emergent from the underlying motor layer mm-hmm and that this I think is a it’s actually a pretty neat when you say motor you mean sensory motor right yes since remote yes yeah yeah so I was thinking about the this from a from a evolutionary perspective and from a neurodevelopmental perspective right so evolutionarily obviously movement precedes cognition but movement precedes the capacity to speak right even you know complex emotions come out of this basic this basic thing of having a motivation to be autopilot and then having some sort of fundamental movement capacity to be able to yep get resources and remove yourself from from saying so developmentally it’s move it’s the sensor and motor aspects that precedes the capacity for complex feelings and our missions the same thing is happening developmentally right so I was thinking about this idea that like babies don’t sad they cry they don’t feel angry their face balls up in their fists squeeze yeah yeah and so I I need to go back and do some more reading of their biology of this and so tell me if I’m if I’m off base here my sense is that what we’re seeing is that we learn to inhibit the physical expressions of emotion as we grow but I suspect that there is some leak to that right that we know that we feel sad because we have an urge to cry even if it’s deeply inhibited yeah so this is a specific thesis yeah it’s called the James Lang theory when James and another guy that we have sort of a physiological reaction and then we have a cognitive appraisal of it it’s not well supported because you can there’s there’s lots of stuff you can do to indicate that you know certain emotional states are present that don’t seem to be derived from any specific behavior that now there’s evidence that also supports it I can give you a stimulant and depending on the situation and it is in you’ll interpret it as anger or sexual arousal right so there’s that so there is definitely that dimension to it I think so I want to be very careful there is definitely a dimension of what it is to have an emotion that is this appraisal of a physiological embodied response but there’s there’s also evidence that that’s not the case because you could you for example you could if you rendered people sort of incapable of physiological awareness or movement would that sort of eradicate their capacity for feeling or emotion you so you can test it that way and the answer is no it doesn’t so you can give some people sort of the you know something not quite like but like Chirare in which they’re basically immobilized right and but also they be sort of some degree insensate of their bodies and ask them if they can be sad and they can and things like when they feel sad though the area of the brain that’s associated with that experience is that associated with the motor system the sensory motor system some of it is I’m like exists in some way independent of having been related to those on their line yeah it is it and it could be that we’re also I mean what could be we’re just playing with different ease within the four ease but you know some emotions don’t particularly trigger motor they because they trigger a social cognition guilt for example it doesn’t seem to cut and if I ask you know if I ask you well what’s what’s the what’s the embodied of guilt it’s like it’s hard to say right it’s really hard to say we have we have we have embodiment metaphors for shame I feel small right but guilt is sometimes people talk about being torn but that’s not that’s not very that’s not clear what that would map onto it’s not like we’ve all you know oh every time I feel go my my said something was torn in my chest or something like that so I’m saying that I think there I think that there has been acceptation which is not simple transfer exactation transfer would change and so I think for some emotions I think it’s very clear I think sadness is very so you picked one that’s very well it’s very hard to feel sadness without there being the deflation of the posture the parasitic the parasympathetic rebound like sadness seems to be just a part of that I’m not so sure for like that like for some emotions especially social emotions things like that yeah so we were talking when we talk about social emotions I’m curious about this because my sense is still that we’re looking at something that layers up from motor base it doesn’t exist independently of it because like something like guilt if I understand correctly is a relatively later developing it is it is but but the empathy that makes guilt possible seems to and I want to be clear and Paul Bloom is right guilt is not empathy empathy is not compassion and but these are cognitive ability it’s not a moral virtue let’s stop making that mistake so it’s it’s yeah it’s unclear that that how much of that I mean it’s embodied in the sense that I I generate in myself the same feelings that I’m attributing to you I don’t know if that’s what you mean by embodied yes I don’t know how much that’s directly sensory motor it could be I mean it could be the part of what I’m doing when I’m I’m thinking aloud here so I hope I hope I’m not right I it could be that when I’m exercising the empathy upon which you know shame and then guilt and other things are built that I’m not just generating feelings but I that I’m also generating sort of an orientation to the world that might set me up for interacting with the world in a certain way I think that’s I think that’s a reasonable hypothesis I don’t know if there’s any clear evidence for that many people would say that sort of let’s put it a really you know concrete crass version of the James Lang hypothesis has been empirically refuted but you’re it sounds like you’re proposing something much more sophisticated and one more point and then I’ll let you talk right I’m a little bit also worried about it being completely bottom-up in a Piagetian fashion because of all of it you know because oh well you know you can only do this when you’ve got sensory motor capacity well the large yarn was able to show kids to have something like object permanence at four and a half months in which they have very limited very limited sensory motor capacity and this is a very sophisticated cognitive ability and so I I suspect there’s also top-down stuff as well as bottom-up stuff happening sorry that was a very long and not very very linear answer because you’re making me think about this on the fly that’s that’s that’s good I mean I’m I like I don’t know the neurobiological literature nearly as well as you so I’m I’m I’m generating these thoughts okay what would it mean if this is the base of it and if we think about it from just just sort of a first first principles thinking about the evolutionary basis like how do how do how do we end up with guilt right yeah you know and we end up with guilt as a as an evolutionary sequence but then also in an environmental sequence from from the infant right yeah and so the sense that I had as I was thinking about this is that when we look at if we look at the the practice so so what I started to think in was and this is sorry I think I need to go in a slightly different direction to loop back and take your time you let me be enders I’m used you do this yeah so what I what I came to is and I’ve been working on this for a little bit but at this sense that so you’ve talked about the idea that meaning we have a meeting crisis right yes yes so it’s a crisis both in our conceptualization of the meaning of life we don’t have necessarily a shared narrative there but to what degree that’s connected to the crisis in the experience of meaning in life yes that that may be you know that’s debatable but there is it there’s both and that crisis in the meaning of the meaning in life I think is what you’re pointing to you as the as the primary driver of a lot of the disconnection from reality the impression the anxiety the suicidality that we’re seeing right and you’ve and you’ve made this claim and I’d like to do more research on this but the claim isn’t that the sense of meaning in life comes from how connected we feel yeah connectedness belongingness the research on this is mounting yes yes so what belongingness and mattering there’s there’s these independent one of the maddening things about psychologies there’s these two independent things they’re clearly talking about not exactly the same thing very overlapping and they’re not talking to each other which right but the jingle-jangle problem in psychology but go ahead yes I think the evidence for that is mounting yes so then it’s through encountering your work and encountering Jordan’s work and then through this ten years of teaching these seminars where this set of practices is kind of organically came together what I’ve come to think about is that fundamentally there’s something like five axes of relationship that we have towards being mm-hmm and that our capacity or the depth of our connection the sophistication of our connection in those areas I believe is what drives meaning unless that’s the thesis that came out of this this kind of thing yeah I at least at the level at which it’s being presented I’m in strong agreement with this yes so those those relationships are the relationships that are internal to the cell mm-hmm the relationships of the self to the physical environment in the sense of the world as we can move through it then the self in relationship in the world is that the things that we can manipulate and use as tools and the relationship of the self to other embodied agents and then last the relationship itself to transcend it yes I think that’s right so and then if we start looking at something like that first relationship we could say that that is related to what I was talking about as the body integration practices yep and I I want to be clear that I do think I wasn’t I wasn’t denying the role of embodiment in all of it is the other thought okay you’re trying to make sure that the the scientific justification is is well rounded it yeah I’m making claims that are better and that’s exactly what I want that’s the point in processing that yeah it’s true okay good so so we have so interestingly I was listening to you know we’re tall on the energy movement podcast and I need it was formerly a big influence of mine not so much anymore but he described something sounded very much like our body integrity practice as structural and semantic practice no I don’t know why but that particular language was very generative for me because it helped me understand why I was kind of binning certain things together hmm and so the idea is that these are all relationships that are in terms of self one is like okay well how integrated is your lack with your belief right that’s has something to do with your muscle synergies and your effectiveness and movement but also at the same time like what is the capacity of your body to express emotion to feel emotion yeah how does that actually play out in a movement in the way that your body moves excellent can you do those things and so the the semantic layer of the practice becomes and becomes more clearly foundational to having a good internal relationship to the Sun so let me the movie just made that was very juicy I liked that because we can get sort of bound up in you know the auto genetic origin of the okay you know it’s deep continuity it’s not identity and right but I thought the movie just made sort of wet and it did what you said you went to another place and then came back and I like this idea about whatever the relationship is between sensory motor movement and cognition and I think it’s simultaneously bottom-up and top-down and I’ve been making those arguments extensively I think this notion of the capacity to express and I would even say experience emotion is going to be dependent on the you just said the capacity for the body to well to embody the emotion Michael Washburn talked about this quite a while ago he he’s he deserves to be more well-known Ken Wilbur has sort of monopolized the transpersonal psychology space Washburn was the other significant the ego on the dynamic ground is really a really important book I read both the first and second edition he proposed a notion of what he called body armor what he basically proposed is that there is an important part of our spiritual development that involves us confronting and often breaking up loosening up re reforging the body armor the idea is that we actually prevent ourselves from having certain kinds of thoughts and experiences by toughening locking or neglecting certain parts of the body and that sounds very consonant with what you’re talking about right now yeah yeah I mean that’s something that is currently quite relevant for me right my wife is doing a type of work called somatic experiencing yeah she’s discovering that certain chronic pain and air lives are associated with motion states it’s something that like all the way 18 years ago when I started doing what I didn’t particularly have this experience but I had many friends who reported to me that three days friends or they would have emotional offsets that were very surprising they would be out training and then they would just be crying and that they would have a revelation of some relationship with that experience in the past and one of the things I’ve been personally working on is the sense that like I’ve protected myself from traumas that I had in my upbringing by becoming very callous emotional and this allowed me to to kind of navigate through right a pretty chaotic waters as a child but that it actually set me up for not showing up in the way that I needed to its formulation and so I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea of effective capacity right yes like how much emotion can you actually experience how much empathy can you can you go into this let me excellent I like this reformulation I think this I find this initially more plausible than the previous formulation this idea I really I really I think well first of all not only do I understand the right I’ve been doing a practice a heart-opening practice that’s very much about the you know the the the the psychosomatic experience of the heart area and the the the the connection between the the physical opening and the emotional opening are is quite powerful so this just this and I’ve already said you know learning to inhabit my body Tai Chi made me available to people in ways that I hadn’t foreseen so this part of the thesis and I think you could even strengthen your thesis I would on your behalf and see if this lands for you sure whether or not it’s a complete bottom-up dependency relation PJ or not you’re not going to bring about significant sapiential having to do with wisdom right existential having to do with meaning in life not risk right you’re not going to bring about sapiential existential transformation unless you get deeply into this re-inhabiting the body I’m trying to come up with a verb that’s respectable and participatory by re-inhabiting the body re-alming the body and making it exactly capable and I think it’s not only emotional expression rape I think it’s also cognitive expression I think the ability for your body to move around in space and to gesture and to sculpt it also has a significant capacity for enabling cognitive expression yes I believe you pointed out research that shows that when people gesture with their hey they do much better yeah they do much better. Their speech is improved right and their ability to be understood also goes up. Yes yeah so we are we are so so you take that layer of the structural schematics so when I was thinking again about the idea of the infant right so infants come really pretty wired up with their mouths right and so what do they do that put everything in their mouths one of the things they put in their mouths is their hands and their feet yeah yeah yeah yeah right and they’re mapping the work like this is this was the profound kind of connection between Jordan Peterson’s work and parkour that was really like yeah occurred to me early on is that parkour is actually a process of mapping meaning into the world. Say more about that. Yeah so you so when you will use urban parkour as an example because I think it’s a little bit it’s a little bit more of a revolutionary act but if you’ve been walking through a city for many years you see pathways as far as like here is a sidewalk here is a stairwell and then you see boundaries here is a wall right then mostly that the frame that you’re by the environment is invisible to you and it results in having a relatively meaningless movement through that space. Oh I see and but parkour re-aspectualizes your environment gives you the capacity to re-aspectualize your environment. Exactly so all of a sudden you walk to that same environment in that that stairwell which used to just get you to McDonald’s becomes a place that you can jump from one place to another so now there’s a new meaning that’s been mapped into it and then you go there and you explore and you find oh there’s multiple jumps there’s a vault there’s a pastor there’s all these things and every time that you do that you’re actually making that environment richer for you and so it becomes it’s literally enchanted by so that goes towards I remember I mentioned this too I think we talked a bit about it in the past video but when I came back from a return to the source I felt like the I put it like I felt like the geometry of my thought had expanded. Yeah in some sense that’s we are literally expanding the geometries the ways the type of relationships that we can have that is of the world when you do this there’s a there’s a stairwell in the city of Lees it’s just you know stairs up and then a landing and then stairs up and then it goes into a door and it’s metal rails around it and then there’s a wall next to it. You know a child could go through that or an adult could go through that for their entire life and it’s just a convenience to get from one place to another it’s kind of ugly there’s graffiti nearby it’s not done in an architecture in a beautiful way but that stairwell is a place where the early founders of parkour discovered dozens of jumps twists vaults right incredible movement and so now like for people who are from the early generation of parkour really that stairwell is iconic in Oman right right how a space can be reinterpreted for room so you’re you’re mapping that in and my wife she did her her name’s Margaret Elizabeth Kelly Beth Kelly she did her her master’s thesis on parkour as a final adult play and she’s looking to the ethology of play in animals to make the case that the type of thing that we’re seeing in parkour is similar to play behaviors that we see in animals which is this exploratory about good water play but particularly she was looking I believe at macaques and she found the macaques will run jump and climb through the same environments repeatedly and they will do basically just what a porpoise does they run up and they’ll add variations they’ll play with the different ways that they can move through the same space right right well the the thesis from the researchers if I remember correctly is that basically what they’re doing is they’re mapping the affordances that will become relevant potentially in the event of a predation event or the capacity to prep so they every time that they run through and test out and do different things on a tree limb they get a sense for what that tree limb is actually capable of which tells them if they can get far enough out on it to escape a labyrinth so so basically the play affords re-spectralization that opens up affordances for exactly right so so when we’re doing this we are actually boring where we’re layering new meanings so then for me like think about a tree right I so I took my parkour and I went into the trees so when I was young as a child I was really interested in animals and so I learned a lot about different animal species and then I realized I should probably learn something about the plant species so my dad’s an architect he’s a carpenter I asked him to tell me the difference between the different types of trees so the three dominant trees we have here in the northwest are the Douglas fir tree the hemlock tree and the western red cedar tree and so he explained to me that they had different shaped cones they have different shaped bark they have different shaped needles but for whatever reason I just couldn’t keep the differences straight in my head they just weren’t relevant to me right right of course now when I discovered parkour I found these beautiful trees you’ve been there volunteer work yeah right those are western red cedar trees now they’re not like most western red cedar trees so I was playing in these trees they were beautiful they were giving me this incredible experience and doing parkour and I was like how do I find more of these but I had to figure out what species they were and I figured out the third most common species here in the northwest it’s like well why are they like that there right right and then all of a sudden the the difference between a doug for a tree and a and a cedar and a hemlock all become relevant to me and all of that now pops out of the environment yeah I understand and and then so I have that experience for many years and I start learning about how the land and the sun unlie in the underlying soil and the rocks all that gives the shape to the tree and so I see that now when I walk by a tree I realize that most people just see a wall of green but then I start having students that come to me from the Willis awareness school tradition and they see the tree and they see the fiber that can be taken tree to see the type of wood that can be taken out tree my dad sees a tree and he sees the shapes that he can use architecturally from the tree and how the wood will react and what you know like a cedar tree is great for siding because it’s very rot resistant right whereas you know another type of tree might be good for internal leaves but not for sight and those those meanings are relevant to him so how many meanings do you actually have when encountering something like a tree well for most modern Westerners because they don’t have a a locomotor exploratory practice they don’t have any kind of physical crafts that involve their hands and being able to use the world but they don’t have any nature connection practices they don’t gather their own food we’re actually that’s why we’re stripping the meaning out of the environment the meaning is lost I get this yeah so so my sense is the you have a structural somatic which as a child you’re you’re rolling around you’re crying you’re experiencing things those things are expressing somatically you’re learning yourself through movement and so a lot of times we we over inhibit because of trauma we over inhibit because of cultural stuff and we actually lose access to parts of ourselves and so we can come to know ourselves through talk therapy you can come to know ourselves through philosophy to do those things but if we don’t have this underlying layer I think we’re missing one of the biggest pieces yeah that can actually result in true self-knowledge yeah Washburn had a great term for this um I remember it right it’s a regression in service of transcendence yeah right that you actually you have to go back but when you go back right not not in a Freudian sense there’s the regression because what it does is it allows you to re-exapt um and I made the argument that that’s one of the that when symbols are bound up in rituals that’s what symbols do for us they they allow us to re-access and then re-exapt um yeah regression regression in service of transcendence yes it’s interesting I I believe it’s Elliot T.S. Elliot who wrote one of his poems we shall not cease from wandering until we return to our beginnings and see them for the first time yes yes that is Elliot yeah yeah well one of the great prophets of the meeting crisis yeah and that that one rings for me and it’s interesting because you know the event that you came to is called Return of the Source yeah and that that was kind of an accident of history that it ended up with that name but it’s this like interesting symbol because it keeps yeah unwrapping and unraveling no way as that and as as having this yeah this powerful symbolic meaning um so so to go back to this these five axes right so to access the the internal relationships of the self the claim here is that movement is actually a more important event to access the true depth of understanding the world as a place of locomotion we absolutely have to move yeah and then then how can we relate to the physical objects around us we have to we have to move them we have to manipulate them we have to to to play with them and every in every culture in the world people basically play with balls and sticks and ropes because these are kind of um my friend Todd Ardor based the small pieces about balls of how because they have so many degrees of freedom they afford a lot uh variability of motor behavior which means that you can then essentially get a lot out of but if we think about it from a developmental perspective that hand-eye coordination capacity the capacity to map the relationship in the world and we get out of playing ball stick and rope that’s the foundation of all of the mechanical things that we learn all of the crafts right between locomotory and manipulatory or manipulative that’s where the wilderness crafts something that’s where bushcrafts and that’s where engineering culture is right and then then there’s a relationship to other people and this is something that came up in the conversation in Jordan we were talking about this if babies learn to relate they learn to connect they learn to develop a core before they can speak of course yeah yeah so they’re they have expressions and they have eye gazing which of course I mean that’s movement right you move your face to make an expression you move your eyes in order to connect with somebody and then they start to push and pull and obviously they’re other suckling but talking about the idea that in some sense like you can almost see even nursing as like an expression of where from the play it’s this dance that the mother and and the infant have to figure out it’s a type of in of coordination in between two agents and and so we are we’re beginning to map out the capacity to relate to other people and then small children have this incredibly strong desire to engage in intense wrestling and physical movement to be thrown and literally getting inundated and that’s actually mapping out their ability to recognize another nervous system in its physical tenets in the body right to recognize the body mind how it’s different you know to keep out theory of mind to experience empathy to regulate their own capacity for aggression so before we learn to dialogue before we learn philosophy the rough and tumble play is actually that kind of source of the interactive capacity of the human being so then when we come to the transcendent I think that’s where that’s where ritual starts to develop that’s where all these things and it’s interesting because like play a game with a group of people and the spirit develops by the teeth yeah yeah so that’s a that’s a first understanding of a collective intelligence go out and do the the nest robber’s game that we do right now you understand the collective intelligences that are intrinsic to the forest and you can start to relate to them and then you can see how those relate to and to to the the development of ritual how ritual puts us in a relationship between principles so the way that I’m looking at this now is that mindfulness and contemplative practices are in some sense dependent upon a semantic and sense of a semantic and structural practice and then the major connection practices or any craft really that you want to look at is dependent on the local logger and object-oriented play that proceeds it and then dialogue the dialogical which is really where you’re focusing I believe that’s actually starts in the rough and pump and play and so now instead of having movement as one pillar within these four pillars I actually see it as foundational to all of our needs these other aspects as as developmental as developmentally secondary to those fundamental movement aspects and to me that that feels like a very radical refrailing of how we pursue wisdom right how we pursue connection and also I think deeply points to why we’re in a meaning crisis because it because all those motor aspects are being impoverished by our educational system by our economic system it’s all moving us away from the it’s all moving us away from it and so I I’m happy to say more but I’d love to sort of invite you to to respond so there I don’t think you’re saying something but I want to make clear that you’re not saying that one thing is dependent on another you also don’t want to commit the genetic fallacy which has nothing to do with genetics right which is to say that that which develops from process x is completely reducible or replaceable by process x you’re not saying that so so not saying that one can gain the benefits of meditation just from the synod of experience that’s right has no independent that’s absolutely right and that that’s what I met when I was trying to emphasize sort of the exaptive relationship I think that all of our cognitive movements are accepted out of our so our sensory motor movements in a profound way and that if we if we want to get at the fundamental grammar of the cognitive movements look at what I’m doing we have to go back and reactivate and re-evolve re-exapt uh um and that’s a thesis when you proposed that you saw I lit up with that I think I mean I’m in deep agreement with that and um so yeah yeah that’s why I’d like to say it’s an exaptive relationship rather than a dependence relationship because the problem with many people here dependence is they hear reduction and I know that you’re not saying that um so um how does that land that’s that’s my initial response yeah absolutely like I I guess what I’m trying to point to is the sense that that it feels like a lot of these underlying deeper drivers of that those four Ps they they may have been so developmentally obvious in a past context that they weren’t captured as as as an important part of it but somehow without those parts it’s not working so you know the argument that I made at Return to Source last year is that philosophia hasn’t has an inherently important relationship with jemisia and it hasn’t as a project after it’s been removed from that relationship and this is something that the ancients appeared to understand and that was lost somewhere along the way right and I think that’s deeply right it wasn’t lost as much in the asian wisdom traditions um but I but we also talked about this return of the source right uh the academy was near the gymnasium which was also near a shrine um and and they all sort of uh co-emerged together there was also something about there was something that was uh uh whatever word I use is gonna be wrong but there’s something about the ability to apprehend beauty in the environment that also creates the space and the situation in which right uh in which the gymnasium finds an appropriate home I’m doing a lot of work on home right now so right and so for me let me see let me let me try it this way I think I think Plato’s right about uh Socrates says when you’re cultivating wisdom there’s no greater guide or ally than eros which of course doesn’t mean just sexual desire it means this finding things beautiful and you see for me beauty is is exactly this bottom up top down it’s clearly a sensory motor thing and that’s one of the why Plato says it beauty is one of the forms that can actually be visible you can actually experience it or where you can’t experience you can’t see justice but you can see beauty um and I think that’s right but there’s also something about beauty that isn’t just sensory motor um at least I take it to be the case there is something like there’s something like you know Ascari talks about this you see the beautiful tree she uses a tree as an example too when you see the beautiful tree it’s not just a sensory motor experience it’s it’s also this experience of I didn’t know trees could be like that there’s a cognitive thing about all of the particulars and the relationship to the universals and all of the previous trees come into this tree because you get this contrast of right but you don’t say it’s not a tree so you still you fit it in but you then bend the category in order to fit it in do you know what I mean and so there’s a cognitive dimension to that about sizing things up um and I’m that’s why I bring in I bring in I bring in I just about the station you’re making which when the sensory motor and the cognitive is up like I’m the cognitive leader right yeah yeah and so my sense is okay well when you’re looking at the tree it you know from an evolutionary psychology perspective the tree the tree is associated with environments that have resources that are rich for us certainly so like we actually see trees different than dogs do yes but let me try it another way and I’m not denying that I yeah I know you’re not denying I’m just trying to understand the okay so most people look out and they when they point at the animal they say it’s a cat yeah right and they pick that level of description as default because it gets the best trade-off relationship between similarity within the category and differences between the crowd and those are in a trade-off relationship so there’s no algorithm to finally resolve it and it will vary if you go to a dog show people drop to a lower level if you’re just running through the forest and something’s chasing you you don’t care if it’s a dog or a cat I get it but what I’m saying is there there is there’s there’s a trade-off relationship between how similar I’m finding things and how indifferent I’m finding things and I’m understanding that is a cognitive evaluation that is going into our assessment of beauty as well yeah so that’s like the relevance realization of the tree is dependent on this trade-off between your ability to see what’s general and what’s specific exactly and that is the case because and you can find that across the case of many different things that have different evolutionary provenance for you now what you should properly say to me is but that revolute that that relevance realization also has an evolutionary providence and I completely I yes yes yes but that’s how I’m trying to because I take relevance realization to be the criterion of the cognitive etc. yeah it’s just interesting that anything about that so the grove right the the grove right somehow did that right it did and it’s like oh like this is a good place to be right in that cognitive sense and then you know and then and probably and here’s where your argument is right the gymnasium comes first and then the academy comes after that and that’s instructive or the gymnasium or does it amaze or do they arise at the same time it’s interesting because we don’t know that’s true yeah what you wouldn’t think to like in this is a very interesting thing that I’m just starting to play with or just starting to kind of be aware of is that play and ritual are not so easily distinguished in like the anthropological literature yes yes whereas they feel very separate in a western perspective right I don’t I don’t think I think it is wrong to separate ritual from serious play from developmental play not from frivolous play so that’s part of the problem we also have a frivolous notion of play you and I are talking about play as a developmental aspirational engine right and and that’s what I mean by serious play I I think ritual is serious play that transfers broadly and deeply outside of the play context that’s what a ritual is that’s what makes it a ritual yeah yeah so well I’m thinking like imagine this grove of trees like I’ve been to groves of trees and I inspired a nice yeah it’s pretty spiritual and they invite me into it so there’s a there’s a spot that we often take people during our retreats it is a it’s a creek bat it’s a creek dropping down over a little bit of a waterfall and taking a bend and and there’s a big bed of sort of rock and sand there where the creek has meandered a lot and then there’s two big kind of rock shelves with with with soil on them and then big trees mostly maple trees that have arched over this posing in the forest yeah and creates this incredible shafts of light that come through there and so we call that place the cathedral right yes and you know it like I think it was again Jordan Peterson he will point it out to me the cathedrals right I found it in his work the cathedrals mimic the experience of being in a beautiful forest yes the way that you have this multicolored light coming down from these arching structures above you is like being in forest and so that’s so that’s the cathedral area and it it does two things it feels like a very good place to have a sacred experience I go out there do a drum circle you know do do some more processing whatever it is it’d be a good place right sit there and meditate but it’s also a place that’s really wonderful to run and jump and climb there’s a rope swing now I can imagine one of the passages that inspired me when I was first discovering or to think about an evolutionary and cross-cultural perspective was a passage from an ethnography I believe that to me people in northern Australia but I can’t remember for sure they live in an extremely arid landscape and they they basically have to walk a lot across flat dry ground and they said that when when the children see a big rock or a tree along the path they will run to it and immediately start climbing and jumping off and somersaulting and flipping off of these things and it just pointed to this this inherent attraction that humans have for potential complexity and how they can scaffold themselves up through interactions comobox physical and wirings and I’m imagining an olive grove in Greece yeah maybe 4 000 years ago 3 000 years ago and some people coming there and they have both this is a good place to do physical things this is a good place to play and also it’s a place that makes sense for ritual and it’s interesting to me because you wouldn’t think of a cathedral in our culture as a place that you get to wrestle or a place that you get to run races or do parkour we’ve separated those yeah and you know like Jonathan Paget talks about like circumambulating this is war aspect of of ritual and how that that binds literally does religion in the sense that it binds together right and rosary yeah nearly all those things are embodied rituals but as a post-protestant right the idea of church to me is like you go and sit and someone talks to you yeah for an hour and your body gets sore because you’re not supposed to move yeah and that’s a big mistake I guess I guess what I’m in complete agreement with this I guess the point I’m putting pushing on this is and you’re not saying this so I’m putting this out as I want you to push back to like are we so broadening the notion of sensory motor that it’s everything becomes sensory motor then the thesis just becomes true because we’ve broadened the definition so what what would count as important aspects of cognition that are not sensory motor so I think do you understand first the important of the question I understand exactly which is like we’ll have the same plane within like you know if uh if we start to talk about natural movement what does it mean to do natural yes exactly okay you can say typing is not a natural movement but then you could say well well what creates a computer or a typewriter yeah a human being what is a human being arise from human being arise from nature yeah where where do the materials for the computer come from they can come from nature so everything comes from nature everything is nature so everything’s natural yeah but then then it just doesn’t mean anything that’s right that’s yeah yeah exactly that’s a perfect analogy well done yeah so what I have done is try to make a distinction not between natural and unnatural I don’t think that’s particularly useful in this context but rather between natural and artificial and this is not a binary but now it is a spectrum that we can look so movements that are that that have been around and that precede us and that come out of the general life world are more natural for us movements that exist only because we’ve been able to artificially through arts through craft create a unique apparatus or not natural right there or they’re less natural to us sure I want to be clear is it is it the longevity of the provenance that is the distinguishing factor so for example is sitting around a fire natural you’re sitting around a fire in action for a human being I think absolutely it is because fire is a brief yeah exists across the water yeah very interesting because so we can we like uh this this this thing about how like uh again Jordan has talked it’s like if it’s been around longer it’s more real in some sense yeah yeah yeah um now if you look at human beings have a superpower physically movement loss which is the world we can necessarily like people think human beings are kind of unimpressive it’s not true at all we’re incredibly impressive isn’t it but in particular what we can do that no other animal can do is throw really hard and really accurate you can throw hard enough to kill another animal it’s just a stump and we can do it against a moving target there’s nothing else that can do it yes I agree with that so is is throwing a natural movement for a human being obviously but throwing is exacted out of the shoulder that can slay and hang and interestingly swinging and hanging seem to be much more sustainable and healthy for a human shoulder and throwing people who habitually throw a lot and at very high intensity which often let them injure in their shoulder and their elbow so throwing is something that’s really probably been maybe primary adaptation on us two million years ago and we’re actually still not that optimally adapted to it relative to the you know probably 20 million years that we’ve been suspensory in but so even though throwing is a natural movement even within natural we can see that there is this gradient of the things that are most natural to us the most important development mm-hmm so I don’t think that you actually have necessarily to be able to throw really hard to be a well-known general athlete but I think if you can’t hang and pull then you’re really going to see that show up in other areas you’re not going to be a good grappler if you’re not powerful and you are likely to get impingements in your shoulder if your shoulder isn’t adapted to hanging so that’s an interesting example so you take something when throwing that’s been around for a long time it comes out you know and we have art to create right we use craft to create things that we throw yes and then now you think about something like typing and carpal tunnel syndrome right how long how long have we been typing yeah right not very long ago so that is more artificial movement for a human being that’s not something we want to rely on on this library social movement nutrition so this is so so I draw that up to say that distinction so we can think of things as maybe a useful distinction would be from the sensor motor to the abstracted okay right everything is in some sense abstracted from the sensor motor jumps in the same way that everything comes out of nature yeah exactly that’s my concern yeah yes so so let me give you a concrete example yeah uh because you know uh right now I’m in I’m in the project for trying to integrate the scientific consensus paper and the consensus that sort of came out of respond and what one of the consensus was sort of the dime proposal the dialogical the imaginal the mindful and the embodied so the view from above by the stoics yeah I think that’s obviously perspectival and is transformative it seems to involve movement but it’s not actual physio physical movement because you can’t undertake those physical movements it’s impossible okay and so it’s properly imaginal it’s clearly exacted out of visual respectable imagery um but it’s clearly doing things that we couldn’t do ever do in a purely physiological way because we can’t get into that place now for you like how would you how would you respond to that do you see is it I mean would you would you say you could say everything you say is true John I’m exaptive I’m talking about exaptive dependence I’m not talking about some sort of physiological reductionism um and and then you could say but you might be able to improve your ability to do the view from above if you did more climbing actual climbing is that the kind of is that kind of the prediction that’s coming out of it yeah so um I’m trying to reverse engineer again the eyes but listen to another one Joe your capacity for dialogue right we want to have empathy we want to have capacity in in dialogue is that improved if you have better understanding and range of expression of emotion you have faith very much if you don’t have some that and if you actually opened up your throat and your your muscles so you can sing well and you can you can access your true full capacity verbally and how that connects to your emotion right that I think seems very plausible verbal fluency is actually uh is actually an important aspect of dialogical fields it is uh but you you don’t you you you have to be you have to be capable like Helen Keller who can only commute at it or Stephen Hawking yeah yeah um it’s one way to think about the services there there may be more than one path that’s that’s that’s exactly yeah which can point people to so I’m agreeing with this theoretical the reason I brought up the stoic was was not I wasn’t trying to refute you I was trying to say it sounds to me like there is a reverse engineering proposal in your project which is if you’re if it’s right I should be able to find any let’s say well-provenanced ritual and try and work backwards to what was its sensory motor base re-access that develop it and then take it back up to improve the ritual that’s what I was proposing is that a prediction that you’re making from your model? Yeah so my prediction is like if we want people who do dialogue well some level of wrestling background will help them do that yes I want people to understand the environment deeply we need them to move through and we want people who can actually engineer things well they need to work with their hands right Stuart Brown did this research on yeah yeah yeah I agree I agree well so we have lost us so much us in the broader context of the meaning process if we want people who experience life as deeply meaningful we need them to engage in these fundamental developmental processes that actually map the meaning into the world in the broadest sense. Right but I’m agreeing with this but I’m trying to give you I don’t think I’m getting being clear I’m trying to give you another a sort of avenue of access look here’s a response I don’t need all that movement stuff I meditate then I meditate and I meditate and it’s done wonders for me and you’re not going to deny that it could do significant things for people but what I hear you saying is yes it has but you know what if you actually did these other things with your visual tape and haptic sensory you would improve your interoception you would improve your mindful right that’s what I’m trying that’s what I’m saying you’re not saying throw away these practices and no no right and I write so you’re saying try to find their sensory motor root and reconnect to that root and then re-exact those practices out of it that’s what I’m hearing you say. And part of this is actually comes from this question of like parkour can be transformational it can fail the transform. Yes yes. It can fail the transform. Exactly. There’s a dark side to this some of the best parkour athletes in the world are flirting with death because they are in existential crisis. Yes. And that’s the only that’s that’s how they’re expressing right and I’ve seen this. Yeah and same thing with mindfulness you get the mick mindfulness you get the the the the the purpose of mindfulness is so that I can write I can render myself sort of numb to reality in in in in significant ways and become spiritual bypassing machinery totally. Yeah I’ve sat down with somebody you know as a big time teacher and kind of related space into iron, stone and stone and he’s like oh I don’t experience emotions right my meditation has taken me past that. Yeah. I’m not a healthy place to be. Yeah. I know people throw it on on on on you know silent meditation the postural retreats and psychotic breaks. Yeah totally totally totally. Okay the capacity these things will can turn very negative for you know psychedelics same thing right people think that they’re can see it but if they don’t have the right ritual container if they don’t have the right preparation of the individual space it can be absolutely distraught. And so I’m going to play on a metaphor here but it’s a good one but whatever that sapiential sacred framing is it has to ground in the century motor evolved provenance practices right. That’s exactly your your point and I agree with this I tell people I’m going to go and have a past retreat I say practice first of all practice the meditation for a year and take up a moving mindfulness practice yoga tai chi feldenkrais something or else you you you you you’re on it. Yeah exactly exactly. I see a lot of people who I feel like are really extremely wise propositionally. Yeah. Who are acting out foolishness in other ways and I see and I often see it as like a an unmet and developmental need in the body. And and these five access to me they explain why those things can fail and then you have the synergistic capacity within each of them to work on it and all of that to me then becomes it’s like a series of one of processing relationships that you have these are the different types of opponents the app the internal of one of processing the process with the environment of two different things. Oh yeah. So okay great juicy. Okay so you know there’s been the integration of PPRR right. Predictive processing relevance and the idea is you set up a predictive processing self organizing thing and what it will do is it it’ll figure it’ll find that there are trade off relationships right inevitable unavoidable trade off relationships and then it will it’ll set up opponent processing to try and capitalize this is the primordial conformity to my mind right right to capitalize those and you get the opponent processing and then what you’re saying is there’s these sort of core dimensions of opponent processing right and this is in the literature right. In fact Howie and others Michaels and Howie said that our sense of self actually comes out of we’re basically trying to predict the world and predict the body and we have to learn how to get that the self is basically how do I discount bodily effects that aren’t actually disclosing the world like when I blink the world didn’t disappear all right the self is right you have to self model enough to cancel out so you don’t conflate right and I think this is right but I’d like what you just did the opponent processing all these kinds of opponent processing and then there’s inevitable trade off relationships there like self and others there’s individuation participation trade-offs and then you have to get up the opponent this is very good and you’re saying that there’s five fundamental dimensions where there are important trade-offs that are disclosed in our sensory motor interaction with the world am I getting it right and that’s kind of like the actual pieces that came out of this conversation primarily like well I was in Nassimini again I was listening to the conversations you’d had with Jordan listening to our conversations and reading stuff that I’ve written and I was like that’s what crystallized for me I’m not I don’t know if this is completer but it feels like a very strong model of how we can think about the relationships and it helps understand why any one of those practices can easily fail our house because you could over specialize in and it helps guide like so George’s concept of the medigate right yeah so the internal relationships that’s one game right the physical world is another game that the objects right these are all these are all games then obviously there’s many sub games within those games now and those finite and infinite versions of each one of these games too yeah absolutely and if you ask people who who were in their 50s who have really rich practices of parkour there shall be other 50s around but you love you know surfing jujitsu yoga rock climbing etc you ask them why they do it you know and it’s like there’s a certain point at which it can be to jump further it can be to do more more extreme contortions it can’t be and everyone’s always saying well it transforms my character or it helps me become more to be or it’s like that’s what makes it a ritual that’s what makes it a ritual that it it transfers a broadly and deeply in a transformative fashion exactly but what I hear you saying is yeah but if you can get to the core right the capacity to make it properly transformatively transferable is increased significantly because all of these things will counterbalance each other powerfully that’s what I’m yes it helps us understand the failure road and it also helps guide us to the question of like what I think all those people are saying is I play this local game because I feel like it’s a it’s developmental for me a thematic game yeah yeah totally totally question is it actually the most developmental piece that you need or is it just something that you’re comfortable with yeah and you’re stuck in that you know exploit rather than explore the aspect yeah yeah yeah yeah and and have you and if you if you see that people are failing to get the triple transformations that they cling right so what I’ll give you an example you’ll I think you’ll recognize this you go to a self-defense zone right here are people who are highly concerned about the potential for violence and it’s you know and they’re going to preserve their life by being more capable of dealing with violence and half of them are significantly overweight and then you walk outside and half of them are smoking cigarettes yeah yeah yeah I know I know right and you’re like well are you really about self-defense because if you were you’d be prioritizing not smoking cigarettes and eat yeah and and that finding another way to gouge someone’s eye out would be really low on the priority list of things that you need to do I’ve had conversations with some martial artists and and I say you know I get it who’s I talking to about this oh I can’t remember um uh rich I think not blundell another rich um um yeah you know we we went too far into the woo woo with the martial arts and then we swung back to sort of self-defense purists and I said you know if all I got out of martial arts was enhanced self-defense I couldn’t justify it to myself because the number of self-defense situations I’ve been in my life you know they were important but they’re this much of my life and then there’s this much of my life and um if you ask me which mistakes I really regret they’re usually out here not there um and like for me if martial arts weren’t consciousness and cognitive cognition and character transformation I wouldn’t keep doing them uh uh exactly and so for me we’ve lost we by throwing out the woo woo we’ve lost the ritual and that’s a profound mistake about the martial arts yeah and and this is actually why one of the reasons why I think parkour is actually such a powerful and potentially profound practice because um it allows you to think deeply about the dough aspect the dial the way aspect of what you’re doing yeah without your relationship to reality I think you can do that in martial arts but it’s easier to end up in a place where you’re bullshitting yourself yeah because the thing about parkour is that you stand in front of the jump and you can make the jump or not and you can always you can always choose to stand in front of a jump where it will kill you if you don’t make it right you can make it very easy where it’s you know you’re there’s almost there’s zero chance of failure but you can make the failure death right so now reality is you just can’t lie in that situation and in the martial arts right you can’t ethically do that right you can go out and choose death matches yeah you could go out and have 30 death matches a day yeah and learn what’s happening in your mind when you go through them and so there’s a way in which the jitsu the technical aspect and the dough aspect are more accessible through a locomotor aspect than through the nothing this self-defense combative aspect I think I’m not making a claim that that you should only do this and not this I think they’re both fundamental no no they do different things type of thing that you get out of action grappling with somebody and that that and that actually these things are mutually synergistic in developing the type of aging you can optimally best move towards the good well it’s a meta meta optimally grip the world kind of well it’s optimal gripping at the level of the meta game right that’s what that’s what I mean by meta optimal gripping you’re doing optimal grip at the at the level of the meta game yeah the grip thing that that strikes him because there’s another thing that that you know in in in maps of winning george talks about the archetypal hero as the person who speaks magic words right has clear vision and has dexterous hands yeah yeah and within georgian’s model and within the philosophical models that I see clear vision and articulate and speech are highly valued right and that the capacity of the actual physical being to interact with the environment is not fully addressed yeah this that is for the growth was she did for us so in the eightfold path right understanding right aspiration the right is not moral righteousness it’s right-handedness it’s it’s the ability to grip well it’s a dexterity of grip that’s actually being emphasized there yeah I think this argument is very good thank you for allowing me to push back on it in places because it really helped clarify it a lot I got a much clearer understanding of what’s going on I think I think I’d like to to end it here and then I want to let you and I meet again very soon because we wanted to talk about and and let’s say we’ve got a very good framework here and we can go into the meeting crisis and we can talk maybe a bit about the role that this argument and embodiment in general would have in affording us the best possible response to AI AGI the advent of AGR yeah yeah I think yeah we in general we we’re in the so many other problems that we are because we fail to agree fully hear the voice of the body and to recognize the body that’s relationship to the physical world yeah there’s been a promethean spirit and that promethean spirit has been very much a disembodied almost at times uh gnostic spirit uh yeah that’s that’s my sense of it and so I think that the urge to to create these AGI’s is in some sense it’s it’s this I call it the escapist scatology right it’s like humanity will have achieved its its its exit point yeah um and digital consciousnesses give birth to digital consciousnesses that supersede us or exit the planet or some combination of worlds and I actually think that we’re all hanging mistaken as ways to address any of the perennial problems that human beings truly care about well that’s that’s a good basis for our next conversation she won um believe you that’s like that I think at the end of the movie yeah I’m trying to uh I’m trying to garner you know some responses to the video essay uh from people that I uh I respect and I welcome this from you I look forward to that