Action, Live Navigation! (pZXEM5A6gGI)

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young man speaking in the city square trying to tell somebody that he cares it’s all world’s waking to a newborn babe and I solemnly swear it’ll be their way you better help that voice of youth find what is true and the lonely voice of youth cries what is true all right well hopefully we are live and doing fine check it looks good all the broadcasting is working out a little bit of technical problems as always because we always have technical problems happy Friday I don’t know about the three garnets of the soul but that’s interesting good to see you Casey all right so we’re gonna be talking about action where do we get this from we got this from discernment judgment action and I’ll eat an addition so I had it edited into my notes which are extensive hopefully they’re good we’ll find out and we’ve been on this journey right and the journey has been from discernment to judgment and we’re gonna round it out with action I’ve talked about other things before like boundaries all important and I’m gonna touch on something past action which is results which I sort of came to while I was out getting things lots of things other things which are now requirements for the stream you know got my big big super huge Sam Pell bottle here so when we’re talking about action I think the best way to frame it as actions are the fruits of our thought of our imagination of our discernment and our judgment and this is the bridge between your internal state and the external world so the stuff inside you imagination you come up with thoughts you’re going on maybe I’m hungry right what do you do when you’re hungry you probably think about oh I should go get something to eat there’s an action in stopping whatever you’re doing right to go get something to eat and then there’s a bunch of actions that follow now discernment comes from inside of you something makes you hungry and we can break it down to chemicals or whatever that’s dumb don’t do that the fact is you get a hunger signal you stop what you’re doing and you get something to eat and that’s the action and it’s really a set of actions because action is usually not just one sort of thing you can’t neoplatonic your way into action isn’t gonna work very hard to categorize things now there is a state an internal state and I’m going to talk more about the confusion between the internal state and the external state which is exemplified by action but hidden by results I’m going to get into all that that boundary that wall that gap that difference between what’s in your head like your desire to eat or to take a drink of san pal and the process of actually doing it which I exemplified that’s a boundary it’s a gap it’s a limit it’s a constraint it’s a barrier there’s something you need to adjust because it cannot adjust to you it is unconditional little aside unconditional is now my favorite term the reason why unconditional is my favorite term is because and I forget where I heard it I think it was kale zeldin actually who’s wonderful I love kale zeldin he’s great um not not a fan of the live stream today for various reasons which if you were in the live chat you probably saw but this idea of unconditional might be the perfect solution to objective there are things that are not in your head that you don’t have control over like gravity or the heat of a fire and it seems like you have control over them because if I don’t like gravity I can get in a plane I don’t have control over that though because I didn’t make the plane I’m not flying the plane I didn’t make the fuel for the plane I didn’t build the airport the runway the so the society has provided me with a plane and society together can get me around the gravity but the gravity’s unconditional because if you stay in the same place the gravity isn’t changing you can change your relationship to the gravity that’s what makes you an agent and agents are what can do action it’s a good way to think of agent agency and action is things that do actions are agents gravity doesn’t act it’s just a hard barrier something you can’t get around no matter how much you imagine gravity is still there and that’s a hard boundary it’s unconditional the fire burns at a certain temperature maybe for a certain time but that temperature doesn’t change for a given distance right it stays roughly the same it’s unconditional what is conditional is your interaction with it so you can take an action to move further away from the fire and then it gets cooler to you but it doesn’t get cooler you’ve just moved where the temperature reaches it’s unconditional but the trick to action is that it goes both ways in other words you can use the actions of others to infer judgment and find boundaries just as you can with yourself like you can use your action of punching the door to find a boundary in that your hand will punch the door you can use your action of punching the door to find a boundary in that your hand will probably hurt unless you’re not good at punching doors in which case i suggest bone up but it doesn’t help you fix discernment because it’s too far away the fact that action comes after judgment means you can kind of look back and kind of get an idea for judgment which is great because action helps you to understand your judgment and to some extent the judgment of others although that has a different set of problems but to some extent because action is related to judgment so you can look back and go oh i put this on my resume i sent out my resume i didn’t get any interaction my judgment that i should put that on my resume is bad and this is where we kind of get confused now that bad judgment that you’ve noticed from action can now lead you to better discernment but you have to go from the judgment you can’t go from the action you can’t go all right you know what i put this on my resume and i don’t have a job and therefore i don’t know what jobs are or how to get them that’s not reasonable leap it’s too far it’s too many logical jumps and these understandings of judgment again allow you to figure out discernment and you understand judgment by taking the next step from the judgment which is the action that’s the action you can make judgment without taking an action that’s fine but you can’t judge the judgment you can’t use judgment to judge judgment you need action to be able to say to calibrate your judgment in the same way you need judgment in order to calibrate your discernment and you can’t leap over them you can’t leap straight from results you know to bad judgment or bad discernment that’s not going to work and result is what happens after the action so i punch the door maybe i punch a hole in it maybe i my fingers bleed or my knuckles bleed maybe i break my hand um maybe all of that happens all right those are results of an action and we need to differentiate all of that we need to discern all of that we need to understand these pieces all action is an expression of your willpower through your ego and ego is not necessarily a bad thing we need ego how much we need different problem different problem ego allows you to act what a problem that is will more ego allow me to act better probably not better ego might allow me to act better but now we’re into the qualitative discussion of what better is and we’re not doing that today we’re sticking with action and the problem with action is we don’t always see it when we think we do so i’m going to talk about two sides of action here what we usually see are the results of actions that’s one layer up or out however you want to think of it and now we cannot judge the action or know the discernment so what prompted this was i was coming home from getting this and other things and i was sitting at a light and i said this light set up wrong as i often do and then i thought about it for a second and i said how am i making that determination that the lights wrong because it could turn out that the person that set up that light and timed it that particular way which i happen to disagree with because it happens being convenient to me in the moment there’s a good tell if something’s bothering you in the moment are you in a good position to judge it maybe not the result of the planning puts the stoplight timed the way it’s timed with ridiculousness it may be the result of a remainder of of an equation to make the maximum number of stoplights in the area efficient it could be i highly doubt it but it is possible and i have seen that done it’s rare that people are that good at thinking these things through hate to say it we live in an irrational world full of irrational people who suck but it’s possible that that’s what that is and there’s the idea of the remainder if you’re familiar with johnson pidgeot’s work it’s definitely there so the issue becomes the result from the action it’s hard to judge now had i been there when they were setting up the light or deciding on the light or timing the light maybe i’m in a position now to judge because i can view and ask questions hopefully what prompted you to time the light this way or put the light here or you know whatever it is you can’t do that after the fact especially because if the light was put in 10 years ago when the traffic patterns were completely different and the housing was totally different here it might have made sense and the fact that they haven’t changed it is different from the fact that it’s not right for today and we get those things confused and we have a problem squishing time down to nothing where we’re not paying attention to these things and we can’t know the discernment what was he thinking putting the light here with this timing what was he looking i can’t know that i don’t know when the light was set up i don’t know what the considerations were i don’t know how it affects all the other lights around it i like to think that i could know that and you know it’s possible that i could but it sounds like a lot of work i’m not going to do it why am i judging what action am i going to take as the result of my judgment that’s going to get into pragmatism but we’ll cover that later when you try to judge the results thinking that you understand the action that you did not witness and were not aware of the results of the results of the results of the results of the results of the real disasters such as water temple that you augmented past and the realassemble books doodles we realize that government we realize that darkness and why do they emerges with you really thought me thestephanian woman twice did they for sure, like we just are. When you’re reading a book, you’re stuck in imagination. The things that seem like actions to you are not actions. They’re part of your imagination and in your imagination you’re taking actions as an agent trying to predict the world. You’re doing discernment, you’re having judgment, you’re taking actions in your head, you’re testing it out, right? We cast our ideas into our imagination so that the bad ideas die, so that we don’t have to. This is what Jordan Peterson says. I very much agree with that, obviously. So imagination is dangerous because you’re out of the real world and back into your head and you have to be careful of that because it’s too easy to get in that world. And that’s what’s so interesting about having these different ways of thinking. They don’t actually want to call them categories. They don’t think that’s correct. Having a bit of a breakup with my darling first love of science, which is roughly speaking a set of categories and category categories, is a very interesting way of thinking about what’s going on in your head. So, you’re not just a darling first love of science, which is roughly speaking a set of categories and category creation, ontology, small o, if you will. All power is expressed in action. No action, no power. You can still have influence with words. You can still use words and move people. Power isn’t power. That’s motivating others to use their agency to move power. Very different thing. And if you don’t think it’s different, you probably don’t understand something fundamental about the world. Nassim Taleb, read all his books. They’re great. He talks about Skin in the Game. He’s got a whole book called Skin in the Game. Wonderful book. I have to reread that, actually. I think that was, yeah, that’s the last one. I haven’t reread that one. I reread his others. Which is highly unusual. I almost never read books twice, but his books are so good. They don’t have skin in the game. If I tell you to go shoot someone, I’m not going to suffer the consequences of that. You’re going to go to jail for murder, potentially, or attempted murder, or shooting somebody, or whatever, and I’m scot-free. And you could say, well, your words have power because you moved somebody to do so. Okay, all words have power. Now what? Now we’re all equal again in power. But we’re actually not, so it’s not a useful way to think about it. Power is in the action. That’s how the power manifests. Action is the manifestation outside of your head. There’s a manifestation inside your head. I get that. That’s called imagination. There’s nothing wrong with imagination. I use it all the time. You use imagination to correct yourself when you’re sitting at a light going, well, this is a stupid way to time a light. And then you realize, you’re a muppet. I’m a muppet. We’re all muppets. No. I wasn’t there when the action was taken. I can’t judge why they did what they did from the result. I just don’t have enough information. And even if I could, what’s going to change? Is changing the timing of a street light or a set of lights a function of, oh, here’s where you made the initial assumption, and here’s what changed demographically, and here’s why you need to know. That could work. Sure. The easiest way is to say, oh, I was sitting at this light and it took too long. Can you change it? Because neighborhoods do that all the time. They don’t go back to the beginning and say, here’s where you made the first mistake. That doesn’t happen. You don’t require the full history of the thing to go back. Sometimes history is useful. Look, I’m a big fan of history. Navigating patterns. Watch my talks with Adam. They’re awesome. Adam’s awesome. He’s very, very, very smart. We talk about history. We alternative historical interpretations to some extent are not interpretations, but I would say perspectives. It’s probably a better way to say it. No action, no power. Still have influence. You still have some control over things. And now we’re set a lot of sort of negative things about action, but one advantage, say one reason to hone your judgment using your action and judging the results of the action to tune your judgment, right, is that once you get good judgment, you get right action. When you don’t have good judgment, your action will be limited and your results won’t match your prediction. If you cannot identify the action of somebody, but you move emotionally, they might be a sorcerer, at least to you. Some people can enchant others. And so you can use the signal of action or lack of action to calibrate whether or not you’re being manipulated. Are you being moved to shoot somebody that you don’t know by being manipulated? Now, I’m not a believer that all manipulation is bad. I manipulate people towards the good all the time. Hopefully so do you. And if you’re not, you’re not going to be manipulated. I manipulate people towards the good all the time. Hopefully so do you. And if you’re not doing that, there might be a problem in your life. You should encourage people to move towards the good. That’s what you should do. I don’t have any doubt about that. So the lack of an action, the pointing to an action that hasn’t been taken or the inference of an action where you infer an action from what somebody said is dangerous. When you don’t have discernment, do not engage. You don’t have to write the person off, but you also don’t have to play that game. Do their actions match their words? Do yours? Can you discern an action from a statement? Your imagination isn’t an action, even though it feels that way to you. So if somebody associates you with Fox News and then says, well, because you watch Fox News, well, because you watch Fox News, you are therefore a conservative. They’re judging your actions without you having acted or them having witnessed your actions. That’s not good. That’s not right. How the hell are they doing that? And you’ve been convinced that that is valid. And that is not valid. What if somebody accuses you of doing something? Can you defend your action? What if it isn’t something you did? What if there’s no defense? Worse, what if they didn’t accuse you of an action at all? Now, this should be easy to see, and most people miss it. It’s easy to see if you can ask yourself, what was the action? What was the result? And how did things unfold? And how did things unfold? So if somebody accuses you or somebody else of being a Fox News watcher, or worse yet, a Daily Wire watcher, because apparently they’re evil now too somehow. What if you don’t watch Fox News or the Daily Wire? And they just said that. What if that person doesn’t engage in that action, but they said, oh yeah, they absolutely do. And you went, aha, now I’m judging them and I know what to do. What if you’re wrong? This is the problem with anonymous complaints. Oh yeah, I’ve heard from 30 people that, you know, this person is terrible at doing things. You know, this person is terrible and beats people up. I, okay, maybe I didn’t view the action and I didn’t review the results. So at that point, it’s just rumor. I’m not saying you can’t act on rumor, but are you gonna? What was the action? What was the result? How did things unfold? If you don’t know, maybe just back off from that person and what they’re telling you, because it’s no good. And on the other side, maybe they’re telling you something like, you know what, that company, they dump X amount of CO2 in the air and that’s warming up the climate. Is that something you can take action about? No, it’s not. I know you think so. Like, oh, I can protest. Okay, that’s not likely to change what the company does. And I’m not saying don’t protest, but the problem is if you don’t relate to actions, you’re stuck relating to words. If you can’t link words to action, maybe the words aren’t important. Words are great for abstraction, but then they’re disconnected from the world. So you need a discernment, because if it’s not actionable by you, maybe the words are pointless. And if they’re pointing at something that isn’t an action or that isn’t a set of measurable results from an action, how do you know what happened? How do they know what happened? Maybe they’re making it up. People see things and make stuff up literally all the time. All the time. They don’t even know they’re doing it. They fooled themselves into thinking things happened that didn’t happen. That’s why action is important. What was the action? It’s easy to start rumors about people. It’s simple. It’s easy to start rumors about people. It’s simple. I remember the movie Repo Man. In the movie Repo Man, towards the end, I believe, they’re sitting around a campfire and the one guy says something about, I went to do work at John Wayne’s house and he came to the door in a dress. I don’t know why I love that line so much, but I really do. Did that happen? Is that an urban myth? I don’t even know. I never bothered to look it up or attempt to figure it out. It’s a funny line though. Just the way he says it too, and he come to the door in a dress. It’s like, what? It’s obviously a play on John Wayne as archetype, as we’ll say, male cowboy archetype or something. Subverting it through a rumor because I wasn’t there for the result or the action of him coming to the door. The result might be a picture of him at the door with a dress. Nowadays, that’s useless because he fakes. We need words. We need results. We need action. We need judgment. We need discernment. A lot of pieces. I get it. I get it. I’m not here to make the world simpler for you. I’m here to give you right relationship to the elements of the world that matter the most. And you can judge that for yourself and say, your system sucks. You pirate captain bastard muppet. I’m not listening to you. That’s fine. I’ll never know. I’ll never care. But these are the pieces that people tend to be missing. They’re not thinking this through correctly. They’ve been given bad ways of thinking about the world. When you don’t link words to actions, it’s hard to know if those words are important, relevant, interesting, reasonable, whether they’re propositions about what you should do or what you could do or their statements about other people and what they have done or why the results you see exist. You can always say, oh, everybody hates that person because they eat cilantro. I mean, okay. You don’t want to end up assigning an outcome to the wrong action or agent or actor. Agents are the things that take action. You don’t want to blame the bad implementation on the person who started but did not finish the action. So somebody starts a company. Let’s suppose they start a company that invests in other companies. And then they set a rule in place for that company. Like we’re never going to acquire companies and we’re never going to lay anybody off or fire anybody unless they’re obviously incompetent. And then they run that company for 10 years, they leave, and now that company that was originally started with the key loss of we’re not going to fire anybody or lay anybody off unfairly starts buying companies and laying them off immediately. And then you go back to that agent and you say, look at this. Look what you built. That wasn’t their action. The action that led to that result was them abandoning the company, right? And the company abandoning the T loss. Two actions led to that result. And they’ll bring that up because it’s a bugaboo of mine with Mitt Romney who has since gone insane but didn’t used to be. He actually got dinged for, you know, like they saved Dunkin’ Donuts, which is a big favorite up in New England, donkeys. And then during the presidential campaign, when he was running, they went after him for, oh, the company fired all these people and laid them off. He wasn’t there anymore. And there’s a memo when he started the company, when he was one of the executives saying basically, we’re not going to lay anybody off or buy a company. That’s a primary goal. And some evil businessmen turns out aren’t evil. So actually really good people doing really good things in the world with their money. Might want to have a little gratitude. Those people who have money don’t think money is everything. Some of them do, but very few. There’s always some bad apples in every barrel. Stop making perfect barrels. They’re not real. They won’t work out in action. And action sucks because it’s all after the factory. Set the thing up, actions happen. Then you see the results. It’s like, oh, like Jack Dorsey on Twitter. Sets up this wonderful technology or so he thinks. Technology is running along. He thinks, oh, this is great. This is going to manifest the utopic idea of everybody getting along in one place from all around the world and sharing cool ideas. Okay. And then people happen who also happen to be Muppets. And then suddenly, boom, Twitter’s a dumpster fire. Is that Jack Dorsey’s fault of setting up the platform? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think it’s his fault for being naive enough to believe that good was going to manifest from a random emergence because emergence is not good. Emergence could be good. Emergence could also be bad. It could be evil. Most emergencies are neutral and don’t last long. That’s the problem with emergence. But emergence is not good. Goodness can emerge, but that’s not the same as emergence is good. Because the actions that you can see and the actions that you can involve yourself in and the results from those actions don’t have a particular T-loss from mere emergence. And just because you’re trying to manifest the good and emerge the good doesn’t mean you’ll have any success. Otherwise, that’d have a billion subscribers and it’d take over the world. Re-enchanting the world makes a bunch of stuff harder, but overall it focuses you on what’s important. Discernment, judgment, action, result. Link words to actions. Not all the time. I mean, look, I like to discuss fantasy novels. Those aren’t linked to actions. I’m not going to be, you know, a rogue in some far-off world. I will in a game, though. I like playing rogues and paladins. Those are my two favorite characters. And then you could link your fantasy to an action of playing a game with other people in community. You’re one layer out, though, right? You’re better off gardening with the people. If you can’t, you can’t. Take what you can get. Link it to action. If there is no one around to take responsibility for an action, problems arise. This is one of the deep problems with emergence. Now there’s a gap. A power vacuum appears, right? People can take credit without blame. Ha, I was involved in that. And that’s what the gap is, because there’s no link between what happened, the actions, and the results, and the aging. So if you don’t know what agent took the action, as I said in the previous example, it’s no good. Right? If I start up a company that buys other companies, and I say, we’re never going to lay anybody off. We’re just going to make the companies work with the current workforce. You know, a few firings here and there for incompetence, whatever. That happens. And then we do that, and then I leave, and then they change the rules. It’s corporation could do what it wants, right? Or what the board wants, to be more precise. And then I blame the agent for what happened when the agent wasn’t there. That’s ridiculous. Or I blame the agent when the agent didn’t take an action. That’s ridiculous. Or I judge the result of the action as bad, even though I wasn’t there for the possible actions, to realize the result that happened was the least bad result possible. May have been a bad result, but all the other results from all the possible actions could have been worse. That happens. We tend to judge things on perfection. We don’t live in a perfect world. We’re muppets. We don’t live in a perfect world. We don’t do perfect things. We’re not perfect. Our actions aren’t perfect. Those results aren’t going to be perfect. And there are other constraints in the world. There are material constraints to the world. I would love to live in a world where I had perfect anti-grav belts. That’d be wonderful. I could be Superman and fly around. We don’t live in that world. It’s not the world we were in. And we’re here now. We have to deal with this. We have to take actions here. We have to discern what we’ve got. We have to judge what we’ve got. We have to take actions with what we have. We have to view those results. We can adjust the judgment, which may help our discernment as we get better at judging. But we weren’t born into the perfect place. And if you’re here watching this, you weren’t born in the perfect place either, in case that’s not clear. That doesn’t mean that you were born in the wrong body or that you’re an alien or you’re just stuck here with the rest of us muppets. It’s okay to be a muppet. We’re all muppets. It’s cool. Be a muppet. It’s better. Be a nice imperfect muppet like everybody around you is. No matter what Instagram awesomeness or Facebook wonderful big posts. We all put on clothes. We all eat food. We all go to the bathroom. We all screw up. We all talk about our wrong side of our body. It happens. We all have runny noses and smelly feet. What sense does that make? What sense does that make? We all drive on parkways and park and driveways. You have to beware of the gap between action, result, and agent. It’s very easy to say, oh, well, George W. Bush defunded NASA. That is technically true and by all ethical and moral constraints false because every president at the end of his term pretty much defunds everything. It’s just a little thing the government does in the United States. Why? It’s out of respect, basically. You get to set the budget as the new president. Barack Obama comes in, doesn’t refund, doesn’t fund NASA to the same degree. Whatever you may think of Democrats and Republicans, you can look that. It happened. So who defunded NASA? That’s a good question. Right. And it’s not always easy to discern these things. Right. And that’s the issue. That’s the issue. You don’t want that relationship hijacked, the relationship between agent, result, and action. Very important. On the postmodern trick of removing framing or making everything equal means that actions are arbitrary because there’s no judgment if everything’s equal. If everything’s equal, everything’s arbitrary. Do you want to live in an arbitrary world? I don’t. I won’t. I refuse. Things are not arbitrary. Don’t be stupid. That can’t be true. And if it were true, it would be completely useless for you to act as if it were true. Reject the postmodern all frames are equal bullshit. It’s bullshit. It’s a lie. It’s an obvious lie. It’s observably false. You cannot randomly interpret Moby Dick any way you want and come to the same result. Same goes for the rest of the Western canon. Framing matters. Context matters. You can’t judge things outside of a context because you’ve never been outside of a context and you’ll never be outside of a context. That isn’t the world you were born into. You were born into a world of deep constraints and very sorry for you. However, I can’t be sorry for you because I was born in the same world with the same constraints. Get over it. Beware those who give you descriptions. Those are not always actionable. Pure descriptive frames are correct. They’re right. They seem helpful, but they’re not. You get a feeling for connection, relationship, and intelligibility, but you cannot take an action. I’ll give you the best example of this right now. There’s a video on navigating patterns. It is an excellent video. It is the video that I personally put the most time into and has an equal if not greater amount of time put into it by Manuel Post about game A and game B. And there’s a game B video that was put out by the Stoa, I believe. It’s an 8-bit cartoon video. It’s very cute. We did commentary on it. Very important commentary, I would say. The problem with something like game B is that when you talk to the game B people and you ask them, okay, so your description is game A is this horrible money-based capitalistic, the Christians might call it mamanistic or something. I would call it materialistic way of interacting and interfacing with other people. And if we just change that game, because apparently life is a game, because why wouldn’t we cast it as a game? We all grew up on video games or something. It’s a dumb way to think about the world, but we’ll grant them that way. How do I participate in game B? Oh, we don’t know. So now I can’t take an action. That’s just a description. The description is not wrong. They didn’t describe game B. They described the results of game B, but they didn’t describe what game B does, how it acts. They didn’t describe the action of game B. They just said, we have game B utopia. Does that sound like a familiar pattern? Oh, we have to get to racial purity because utopia. Oh, you know what we have to do? We have to separate church and state because utopia. Well, we really just have to get rid of these four people who are doing whatever, talking too much. And then we’ll have utopia and our little community. We are going to instantiate the perfect place. But first you have to take all these actions. What are the actions? What are the actions after I take the actions? How do I live in that world? In game B, there’s no world to live in. It’s a fantasy. You can’t take action to get there. You can’t take action once you’re there. The results are disconnected from the actions. Explicitly in that case, which is sort of shocking for people like me, but I’m a pragmatist. Pragmatists look at these things. What actions could I take? When I take those actions, what results can I expect? Are those results realistic in the world? Because you can judge results like, oh, so basically what you’re saying is when we all do game B, no one’s going to fight. Everyone’s going to get along and humanism wins. I don’t think that’s a state that we want. I don’t think it’s a state that we can have. I don’t think if we can have such a state or a state similar enough to that, that it manifests in the here and now. That’s all. Seeing action exemplified in the world allows you to create better metaphors for understanding. So we’re walking back on the positive side of action. Engagement with actions in materiality helps you properly discern the world. It helps you understand the world. It helps you understand the world. It also recalibrates your models of the world. When you’re making models of the world purely in your imagination, they eventually, inevitably have to become disconnected from the real world. And then you end up imagining game B and what it’s going to look like and how once we’re all there, everything’s going to be wonderful without taking into consideration we’re all Muppets. Are you sure Muppets can instantiate game B? And are you sure that when they do, that they’re going to go the way you predict? If that’s what you think, send me a million dollars instead. Okay? Because you’re a little on the easy to convince side. I’ve worked on teams with people. People make so many mistakes it’s insane. A lot of people are like, oh, I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this. I’ve worked on teams with people. People make so many mistakes it’s insane. A lot of people do stuff and they don’t know how. And they couldn’t reproduce it to save their ever loving soul. Throw the gun to their head and say, if you don’t do that exactly the way you did it before, you’re going to die. They’re going to die because they can’t. And it’s likely you can’t either. Have you ever looked at your actions and tried to reproduce them perfectly? Hey, look, sometimes some people can. I have OCD. OCD is wonderful, by the way. Had to redo the billing for my buddy’s ISP once. And, you know, the woman he hired took four months to do it. I did it in two hours. Why? Because I set up a process and I can just do process over and over again pretty close to perfectly. Not perfectly because I’m not perfect because I’m a muppet. Two hours instead of four months. Granted, I should work part-time, but two hours, not 20 hours. Two. You have to recalibrate your models of the world. Trade-offs are inevitable in the real world. When you’re not dealing with the trade-offs that have to be made to say, involve somebody else in your idea. The minute I involve somebody else in my idea, they’re going to object to my language, use my language differently, right? They’re going to push the boundaries of my ideas, right? Or they’re going to implement what they hear from what I say and screw it up. And if I’m not aware that if I did what I thought was right, I’d also screw it up because I’m a muppet. Then I don’t have any appreciation for the trade-offs required to cooperate with people in action. The advantage to keeping your action grounded in nature, in reality, in the external, and not in some video game, not in some imaginative game in your head, game A, game B, whatever it is, utopia, and yes, utopia is useful for contrast, right? You’ve got to have utopias to get it, but if you’re promising utopias or someone’s promising you utopias, there’s something wrong. We’re not of the type of creature or agent that can be in utopia. There’s a constraint that we have. What you link your metaphors to matters. How is it grounded? That matters. Nature is good grounding. Abstraction is bad grounding. I know in theory in my head that if you’re not aware of your own head that I can do all the gardening that needs done in my yard right now. I went up to New England for a couple of weeks. I think most of you know that. It’s basically still spring in South Carolina, and I come back and I need to get gas for the mower. I need to do a bunch of work around the yard. I need to get outside. I need to unclog the drain for the pond. It’s a mess because you can’t really go away for two weeks in the middle of spring and not expect a complete catastrophe when you get back when you own 12 acres of wild land that is largely intended because you’re half lazy and half incapable of doing the right thing. So you’ve got to stay grounded. So the abstraction in my head. Oh yeah, this is easy. I can just go down, get some gas, you know, there’s a bunch of stuff I have to do. When I get the mower, I can’t just take the mower out. I got to rip the yard first to make sure I don’t like hit a rock or a big stick or something that’s going to kill the mower because that can happen. You got to stay grounded. So that’s sort of the key is that the grounding determines your metaphors. So how you think about the world is informed by the actions you take in the world. If you’re in a video game, that’s not the type of world that is the same type as the world that is outside of your video game or the world that’s outside of your head. That’s kind of a big deal. The most wise people that I have ever talked to work with their hands outside or inside, but they largely work with their hands and usually they do a lot of driving or a lot of sort of downtime stuff where they’re not constantly busy, which is great. Like if you’re out fixing a feed machine or something, you’re going to be able to do that. You’re going to be working on machines for chickens, which my good friend, the Redneck Philosopher King does for a living, doing a lot of driving. Then you’re working on machines with your hands. Then you do a lot more driving. You get plenty of time to listen to podcasts and ponder things in your head. Much, much wiser than most people. When you’re able to do good metaphors that match the real world, that’s important. When you’re doing metaphors that don’t match the real world, but match a video game or the imagined world in your head, you’re not well enough grounded to cooperate with people in nature, in the real world where it matters the most. The results of your work, the things that matter the most, the results of actions are in the real world. If other people didn’t interact with the action, if they weren’t involved, if nature wasn’t involved, if the results didn’t change something outside of your head, you didn’t take an action. That didn’t happen. The things that you think are actions in your head are not actions, because they do not affect things other than you. Everything that affects you is not an action. There are emotions that affect you. Did you do that? Do you make yourself hungry? You go hunger on in your head and it turns like I don’t understand. Of course not. Do you inflame and control your passions? I don’t think so. I mean, there’s thousands of years of philosophical history that says noop. Grounding is important because actions can contrast. They can exemplify mistakes. We can talk about them, make judgments, adjust. You adjust your judgment by looking at the results of your action compared to your prediction and saying, oh, I misjudged something. If we’re skeptical or cynical about the fact that we all make mistakes, which are also required for learning, you want to learn? Screw up. No, really. You want to learn? Make a mistake. When you do things right, you just get a big hit. We get in trouble. We get in trouble. We get in trouble when we’re skeptical or cynical. We lose discernment about what is a mistake and what isn’t. Now, every action is a rational, perfect, intentional, known, knowable step towards some specific, understandable, rational, known, and knowable goal. There’s no room for a whole class of action called exploration. There’s no space for learning. There’s no method for contrasting right versus wrong action. It’s conspiracy all the way down. Why do they like that? Rationality, control, influence. The world is rational, and I’m a rational agent. I have some say in the world. Fair enough. The world’s not rational. The world’s not rational. You may or may not at any given time be a rational agent, probably most of the time not, and you still have control of the world. You don’t need the rationality. You’re still here influencing, controlling, impacting the world. You don’t need the rationality. I’m not saying throw out all rationality, but you don’t need it, and you’re not using it as much as you think, and you’re not living in the rational world. When we do not understand that when we take an action in the world and it doesn’t go well, it might be a mistake, that’s possible. It might be a random coincidence that our prediction didn’t match, and if we did it again, it would. That’s possible. More likely your worldview is wrong, and you need to change it. Your prediction didn’t come true because your initial axiomatic assumptions are wrong. I made somebody use my preferred pronouns, and I’m still depressed. That’s because your worldview is stupid. It’s not any other reason. It’s not their fault. It’s not your fault, other than your worldview is wrong. It’s not, oh, I made a mistake, and if I just convinced them to use my pronouns under only these circumstances, and then, oh, well, maybe I picked the wrong pronouns. No, your worldview is wrong. It’s simple. Nobody’s living in that world, and you’re not going to either. Maybe telling other people how to refer to you when you’re not around is an error. I would say it’s always an error. I would say it’s evil. You don’t have the right to tell other people what to do and how to do it when you’re not around. You don’t even have that right when you are around, necessarily. Maybe to some extent you do, but not to a large extent. It’s always a negotiation. When you’re not around, it’s not a negotiation. You’re not there. You can’t take an action. You don’t have any control over their action. Get over it. All communication is an action, and all communicative actions are of the same equal effort, not equal impact. I’m not saying if you say four words like go dog go, or I say quick, run, hide, now, that has the same impact on you emotionally or in your action. That’s my influence. It’s a function of how I talk. But the effort that I put into those words from the external observer, and this is where it gets tricky because people view their own things from their internal view without considering, what if I was outside of me looking at me, yet I’ve heard a couple of times about it, outside of me looking at me, yet effort appears the same. It’s four words. You can say, oh, well, there’s more effort in saying it with more passion, maybe slightly, but not really. That’s where we get confused. Well, these words were more impactful, so they must be more rational. That’s wrong. Rational words are not impactful. Everybody talks about this all the time, or at least they used to. Yeah, I don’t want to read that science book. It’s boring. It’s dry. Really. It’s dry. Interesting. Interesting framing. Interesting way to phrase it. And it is interesting. I agree. It’s not as interesting as good earth spice tea, but it is interesting. Our impact does not and cannot reflect the amount of energy that’s put in. This causes a great deal of consternation since we need to be able to predict others. How serious are they about this idea? Well, every time somebody challenges them on it, they swear they must be pretty serious. Did they do anything? Did they take an action? Are they just spouting words? Other than the action of speech, did they actually do anything? You know what? I’m going to get up tomorrow and go to the gym. Sounds good. I’m not going to get up tomorrow, and I’m not going to go to the gym, by the way, but I can say I am. How the hell do you know? I know I’m not going to the gym, because I don’t have a gym membership, and I’m lazy. So it’s not going to happen. Oftentimes, we’re overprivileging the prediction from the words we hear relative to the observation in the world. And that’s dangerous, because when we fail to observe what actually happens, we substitute what’s in our imagination. And then it doesn’t matter what happened. It makes no difference. It makes no difference. You can accuse somebody of being mean and point to sort of examples that indicate that they were mean. But maybe if you were there, they weren’t mean at all. You didn’t view the actions, or maybe you did view the actions, but you preferred the narrative in your head, because you’re overprivileging your imagination how things could be if my predictions were correct. Maybe the reason why nobody’s on this Discord server is because somebody’s using up all the oxygen in the Discord server. I’ve heard this before. So the fact that there are many rooms on a Discord server where people can talk, all with equal oxygen from any reasonable standard of that metaphor, would indicate that that’s not possible. Because it’s not. And the observation that people can do different things in different channels is not enough to override your, oh, but the big meanies are on the server taking up all the oxygen. What? It doesn’t even make any sense. You’re privileging this framing, this imaginal framing in your head over your observations. This has happened recently. We all need to mask up. Every observation ever made about masking, putting on masks, says it doesn’t work. Every single one. All the data’s in. I know there are interpretations of the data out there that are bogus, but also they’re bogus, and you can see that. Every single paper written before the great scamdemic of the fake news flu virus, masks aren’t effective. People were wearing masks and getting sick, and everybody was like, oh, no, but masks work. No, they don’t. The action and the results say they don’t work. Your judgment’s wrong. And this isn’t, we’ll say, consistent throughout even the United States, where some people have masks, still have masks, mask regulations for three years, and some people have them for 90 days, and some people never have them. When we project, we cause, through our predictive imagination, or imaginative capacity, the need to rationalize our way around observation as such. We do things like, oh, that’s anecdotal. Do you know what anecdotes are? Anecdotes are observations that the person who calls them an anecdote doesn’t have. Do you know what anecdotes are? Anecdotes are observations that the person who calls them an anecdote doesn’t like, usually because they counter their own observations. Okay, this is an observation you don’t like. And I don’t have a pony. Are we equal? Now we’re all unhappy. Anecdotes are observations. Calling them anecdotes is a way of saying, oh, well, that’s anecdotal. That’s not important. I have my imaginative version of the universe in my head. That trumps your observation of how things actually work in the real world, because it’s my head. That’s bullshit. It’s not to say your anecdotes are right, but that’s what you have. Anecdotes are the observations of the results, or the actions, or both, that you have access to. And maybe things are so localized, because some things are this localized, that that’s what you need to pay attention to, irrespective of the global condition. The global condition could be different from your region for any number of reasons. I could list dozens of them all day long. That’s not what this stream is about. We’re talking about discernment judgment action. You don’t want to project your results, your desires, into the stream of action such that you make an excuse for an action, or you ignore an action that is otherwise observable. You need action and results to adjust your judgment. And the way you should prefer to adjust your judgment is to say, is my worldview missing something, or wrong, or broken? The way you should prefer to adjust your judgment is to say, is my worldview missing something, or wrong, or broken? That should always be on the table when your predictions don’t match. Always. How can I change my worldview to fix this? Because maybe it’ll fix a bunch of other things I don’t even know are wrong. You don’t want to rationalize your way around observation. When people start making excuses, oh, my model of the world doesn’t work, because I didn’t count for the third derivative of the fifth variable in the equation. All right, but isn’t that a little complicated? Is the world that complicated? Because we’ve been on this planet for thousands of years, us Muppets, and we’ve been able to survive, and we didn’t have all that fancy math. I don’t know. I’m a little skeptical as to how neat it is if nobody had it before, and I’m here. It seems a little weird. When we project, we go back to relying on the mental picture we have, rather than just engaging with the actions of the world. I don’t know how many times I’ve been talking to people at companies, and they’ve been like, well, I can’t ask for a day off, because the manager will fire me, and then somebody else on the team asks for a day off, and the manager doesn’t fire them, and I say, it doesn’t seem like the manager fires people for asking for a day off, but they still won’t ask for the day off. They prefer their imaginal world to the observations in the real world that say that their worldview is wrong. The manager’s not some monster who fires people because they ask for the day off. That doesn’t mean that they didn’t get an observation where somebody got fired after they asked for a day off, but they were probably a slacker to begin with. I look into some of these things sometimes, and I’m like, really? You think that’s an example? That person was never on time once for work. Of course they got fired. Yeah, they happened to ask for a day off. They had already asked for like six days off. Of course they got fired. They weren’t working. Of course they got fired. You work. You can ask for days off. They’re not going to care. That’s judgment. That’s judgment of action and results. There is a confusion of action in your imagination versus action in the real world. Beauty has power over you because it’s wrapped up in action. The quality of beauty is only manifest in experience, in action. Your agency is what allows for relationship that can submit to beauty. If you don’t submit to beauty, you don’t see beauty. If you don’t see the potential of the rose to both hurt you and provide you with a transcendent experience with the ineffable, I posted a rose today on Twitter, by the way. We happen to have one. It’s dangerous to take pictures of roses. It is. There’s thorns all around the damn things. I got like four or five rose bushes over there. I don’t know. I didn’t plant them. I grabbed a thorn bush earlier today because idiot me was like, oh, that looks like a vine. I got to get that out of the garden. I didn’t go inside and get my gardening gloves. I wasn’t planning on doing any gardening. The potential for harm exemplifies the beauty. It gives that contrast. But it’s your agency that allows for the relationship that can submit to beauty. So beauty is the action of submitting to the potential despite the thorns. We confuse symbols, decadence and beauty. When we don’t see beauty, we see decadence instead. Are you sure it’s decadent? It might be. I’m not saying it’s decadent. It’s not. I’m just saying that sometimes it’s beauty and we’re not seeing it because we’re not submitted. We’re not open and affording beauty in our lives. This is a poor relationship with beauty when we are denying the hierarchy, flattening the world, bringing the margin into the center, being reductionistic and making a smaller world, a closed world system, reciprocally narrowing its potential. We’re not seeing it because we’re not submitting. We’re not seeing it because a closed world system, reciprocally narrowing, as John Verbeke would call it, takes conscious interaction to not interact with action. Actions work unconsciously. They seep into your brain, into your system, into your mind without your knowledge and they engage you in a way that you don’t notice. When you see somebody help an old lady cross the street, that impacts you in ways you do not understand because there’s non-verbal information coming into your brain using different systems of your mind. Having an impact on you. When somebody smiles at you, same things happen. When you smile, same thing happens. When you smile, you get happier. People who smile more during the day are happier. We can’t explain that. We can’t explain that any more than we can explain the placebo effect. I have no idea how that happens. Many people act on the conservation of action principle. You mean conservation of matter? No, I mean conservation of action. People seem to think that if those people taking an action in the world weren’t taking an action, that they would somehow get that action or the fruits of it or like they’d be able to take that place of that person instead of that person taking it away from them or something. Sadly, that’s not how the world works. Most people won’t take an action. They’re either too stupid, too lazy, too afraid, too incapable. If I don’t write that software, it may never get written at all by anybody ever. That happens all the time in every industry, in every possible way. If nobody goes through the trouble of opening a grocery store, that grocery store may never exist. Duh. Just because the potential for the grocery store is there doesn’t mean anybody can fill that potential. Action is required to fill potential. Potential is everywhere. You have to take an action to manifest something in that potential, with that potential. That changes the available potentials in the future. Oh my goodness. In our action, we’re co-manifesting reality. Yes, we are. Everything you do matters, Jordan Peterson. Everything you do matters. Your actions manifest reality from potential, within potential. What’s potential bigger than you and me? I don’t know. There are constraints, but we’re not going to be able to do that. What’s potential bigger than you and me? I don’t know. There are constraints. We talked about that in the beginning. Can’t take any random action. I can’t just jump up into the sky and fly, like maybe The Matrix tells you at the end of the first movie. I’m not Neo. I don’t want to be Neo. Thank you very much. Right action is right relationship from result to intent. In other words, final cause matters. Result to intent. I intend something. I discern. I judge. I take an action. I get a result. No. Also, the other way. Final cause matters. Things do not have a single cause. Things do not only have a material cause. Things do not only have a formal cause. Things do not only have an efficient cause. They also have a final cause. It’s four causes from Aristotle for a reason. The agent is key to making the action right. Determining what the action is. Judging the action and tuning your discernment. That’s what agency is. It’s the ability to discern. It’s the ability to judge. It’s the ability to act. It’s the ability to look at the results. Compare the results. Take an imaginative world. Compare the results to that. Compare the results to what you thought they were going to be outside of the imaginative world. There’s that old joke about if you’re going to do a building project, you price out all your components and you triple the number. It’s not a joke. That’s what you should do. That way you have a chance of being under budget. No, really. You take the ideal world. You say, I’m a Muppet and I don’t live in an ideal world. So that number is unattainable. Oh, I know this software project is going to take two weeks. No, it’s not. You don’t know that. It might take less than two weeks. That’s possible. It’s happened to me once or twice. But of the thousands of software projects I’ve worked on, it’s literally like less than 10. So not likely, buddy. Your judgment sucks. And if you’re not tuning it by checking results and checking the results against some pragmatic understanding, and pragmatic means we’re going to take the utopia, the perfect case condition, and we’re going to say that’s unattainable because we’re a Muppet in an imperfect world. And so we’re going to put in some fudge or a margin or however you want to frame it. That’s much better. Still won’t get you the right answer, but it might get you close enough that it doesn’t matter. When you’re constantly looking at your results and going, I’m disappointed, I’m disappointed, I’m disappointed, you’re making bad judgments, adjust your judgments. And maybe the reason you’re making bad judgments is because of a stupid worldview that doesn’t work. Lots of people have that. Most people have that problem. And a lot of people say, well, the world isn’t right. The world doesn’t let me do what I want. Really. The world doesn’t let any of us do what we want. Now what? You’re just like the rest of us. Get over yourself. Really. When things go wrong, don’t think of solutions or how you could have done it differently. First think how your model was wrong. I know I said that earlier. Can’t piece that enough. Actions convey stronger signals than words. They are more unconscious than conscious. Education not linked to action doesn’t work out well. Those who can’t do it, they’re not going to be successful. It doesn’t work out well. Those who can do, those who can’t teach. Not universal. It’s a good rule of thumb. It quickly strays into imagination, creating fantasy, which can always be made rational. If you have a specific outcome in mind, and you do, you’re always dealing with final cause, whether you realize it or not. You can rationalize why you should have wings and be able to fly, or why you should be able to do what Neo does in the Matrix. Easy peasy. Why you should be the hero. A la Batman vs Superman. See my video on navigating patterns. It’s excellent. You don’t want to stray into fantasy. You don’t want to use rationality in a fantasy frame. Because rationality works in any frame. You can rationalize anything. It’s not that hard. Look, the Nazis rationalized the genocide. They did. Wasn’t hard. Democratically elected. Just saying. It’s a democracy thing, not the solution you think of. Oh, that wasn’t true democracy. Okay, define true democracy, no true Scotsman. I’ll wait here. That’s why I’m a pragmatist. The rationality doesn’t tell me anything. Other than consistency. Doesn’t even tell you reliability. And that’s the problem. Pragmatism looks at action first. It doesn’t worry about the how or the why quite so much. I don’t have access to your how and your why. I don’t have access to my how and why sometimes. Most of the time probably. You’re a muppet. We’re all muppets. Awareness is not an action. Knowing has no overlap with doing. None at all. You can do without knowing and you can know without doing. So these people who know a lot, I don’t care. I care what you did. What did you do? Did you do something or did you just know things? Game of Thrones. I drink and I know things. Funny character. Love him. Thinking about action can limit your view so that you can take an action. However, taking an action expands your view by giving you participatory knowledge. In other words narrowing the field so that you can exercise agency and take an action is helpful because narrowing your view in the short term allows you to stand in a different place and open your view back up on the other side. So there’s the reciprocal narrowing that you need to take an action in the world. Hopefully you don’t fall into binary thinking. I have a video on that. Don’t do that. Then once you’re there you can reciprocally open or widen expand into the world. Find new potential. That’s why exploration is important. It’s not just move away from pain and move to its pleasure. Bullshit. That’s garbage. That’s completely divine. It’s flight, fight, freeze. Not two things. Three. Potential can open up over time. Time is real. Participating finds new potential. Participating is exploration. Gathering around words only ruling out participation is mob rule. Leaders act. Action forces responsibility. It’s not always enough. You might want to shield people from responsibility but that weakens them. Disconnects them from reality. It’s dangerous. People need to experience the consequences, the results of their actions in order to learn. And maybe not the full results and maybe not all the time and maybe there are exceptions for children. I should hope so. And we don’t account for children. Apparently Plato does in the Republic and everybody misses it. But I’m beginning to think everyone’s stupid and doesn’t know how to read. By the way, Texas Meaning Community YouTube channel, book club tomorrow. We’re going to be doing that. Join us on Discord. This is the problem with action. Action needs to be grounded. In nature, in reality, action is external to your damned head. Action is not what’s in your imagination. Action results contrast. Judgment, discernment. You have to have all those pieces. You have to deal with them responsibly. When you take an action and you must take action, just inevitable as a creature in the world, that has results. Those results have consequences. You can deny those consequences. You can ignore those consequences. You can try to make other people responsible for those consequences. But you won’t learn. Your actions won’t get better. Your predictions will degrade over time. Your ability to interact with the world will degrade over time. Everything will get worse. That’s what I have to say about action. Now, if you’d like to join and talk about action or discernment or judgment, there is a link. The link is good. I can’t ping the link everywhere, but I can pin it on my channel because I have ultimate power over navigating patterns. I know I skipped a bunch of questions. I understand that. There was important stuff to get through, and I knew it was going to take god-awful forever, but you did. So I’ll do my best to blow through this. Muppet. Yes, Anselm, we’re all muppets. Yeah, bubbleviz. Yeah, judge a tree by its fruit. Yeah, I mean action is the way you should judge people, not words and not the words of others and not the rumors of others, not what others say, others said about the person. Right, there’s all kinds of that. That’s rumored. You weren’t there. You don’t know. And maybe it’s right. Is it actionable? I don’t know. Mills. We have covered discernment, which informs judgment, and then right action follows. No, right action doesn’t follow. Action follows. What if your discernment is wrong and causing you problems? Yeah, what is informing the discernment? Well, again, the results. You’ve got a predictive model. You’ve got results. You’ve got your ability to appreciate implementation versus how you thought things were going to go. All of those things inform, and a lot of things inform discernment. You can’t really train your discernment except through action, I would say, is the problem or the key. Right? Yes, Mills. Repo Man is an incredibly wacky film, and it is also a cult classic. I agree. It’s quite an interesting. Bubbleviz. Say someone bitch slaps you in the face and says there was a mosquito on your face. Judge by action or by words. Look. You can discern in many cases whether there was a mosquito on your face or they were a jerk. There’s the discernment. That’s the discernment you have to make. And then the thing is you can judge them to be a jerk and still not act against them and smack them back. This is why it’s important. You can have proper discernment and proper judgment and improper action. And maybe that’s appropriate. I don’t know. Maybe they’re useful and you don’t want to smack them back because I do this all the time. There are times when people say things and I’m just like, you’re a freaking idiot and I should just rip you apart and teach you a lesson. And I’m like, nah. I need them for later. And Bubbleviz, I would just forget the whole thing. Right. I’m not saying that there’s a direct connection between discernment and judgment and action. I’m saying that at each stage, and they are stages, you can interact to make those stages better in yourself. Casey, only ideas won by walking have any value. Yes. Walk a mile in the shoes. That is correct. Mills, perfect barrels aren’t real. Yes. They’re not. That is true. There’s a bad apple in every barrel. Bubbleviz, Twitter has improved a lot since Elon. Well, look, I have a video about that by the way. I’m navigating patterns, of course. Twitter improved because the tea loss changed, because the final cause changed, because there was hope and joy injected into Twitter. That is a result of Elon buying Twitter, yes, but it is a result of him injecting joy in. One of the ways he injected joy in was people felt more comfortable telling jokes. And so it wasn’t just Elon at that point. My good friend Casey, vice in abundance is easy to get. The road is smooth and begins beside you, but gods have put the sweat between us and virtue. Well said, sir. I like that. Yeah. Yeah, it’s hard to be virtuous. And if you’re not putting in the work, if you’re living hidden or whatever, you’re probably not virtuous. Sorry, Casey, but what good can be in the world without virtuous action? Exactly. Or without action in general. You need to learn. What do we got? Bubbleviz, context matters when you’re judging. Yeah, framing matters. Right? Yes, Matt, I can see that side of the chat. I can see the whole chat. I can see everything, despite my disability of my one bad pirate eye. I like this. Bubbleviz, some Muppets are quick to judge without context. We judge without context all the time. We kind of have to. But the question is, do we take an action? A lot of people tell me things and I’m like, yes, interesting. If it’s true, I would beat that person up or not talk to them again or whatever. And I don’t do that because I can’t. The Rock, we can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. Well, that’s super well said. I billion percent agree with that. Casey, leading you down a garden path to nowhere. That’s Utopia, baby. I remember when you said that because I was keeping a half eye on a half of one eye on the chat. The Rock, never assume you’re struck with the way things are. Right, life changes and so can you. That is true. If the parable is interrupted wrong, it becomes dead and the resurrection of the dead is the return of the spirit. Well said. I think that is correct. Bubbleviz, any Utopia has to either change human biology or be congruent with it. Well, change human biology and change nature and probably change time and all kinds of other things. That’s the problem. The Rock, darkness cannot drive out darkness. That is true. Only light can do that. That is correct. Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that. Ever seen Pinocchio? Yes, indeed, indeed, indeed. Pinocchio is good. I rather like Jordan Peterson’s breakdown. What else we got? So many comments. The Rock, Adam and Eve. Eve is wisdom described as a woman. Yeah, sure. Control your conscience. It’s Adam and his wisdom. The first man came from the dust of the earth. The second man came from heaven. Oh, maybe. Sounds like biblical stuff to me. I didn’t read that book. Bubbleviz, Utopia for contrast. That’s a great way to put it succinctly. Yeah. You need three things. It’s orientation all the way down. It’s navigating patterns. It’s not go north, young man. It’s directional. It’s not directional. The world is not directional. People get confused. Direction is nice and easy. We can understand it. Anselman. I’ve seen lots of screw ups by people not being aware of what the task actually involves. Well, they didn’t understand the final cause. They hadn’t been told properly or hadn’t listened. They just had an idea and ran with it, catastrophically. Yes, that happens all the time. Oh, no. Uh-oh. Invasion. Oh, and he put himself up. Oh, well, pardon me. You couldn’t wait half a second while I moved my mouse. Welcome, Father Eric. How are you doing, my friend? I just got back from a wedding rehearsal dinner. And, yeah. I’m not dreading the wedding tomorrow, so two thumbs up. That’s great. That’s good to hear. We have all of these wacky comments I’m trying to get through. Casey, rigidity of thought, rational classification, calcification will lead to actions out of place with reality. That is true. Insanity, not changing the axioms when your actions don’t work. I like that, Casey. I’m going to steal that from you. I’ll never credit you. That’s excellent. Oh, I said that on a stream? My bad. I’m going to do it anyway. Mills, Lewis CK said you don’t get to decide whether or not you’re an a-hole. Other people get to. Well, yeah. This gets back to identity is negotiated, right? Insanity is outsourced. So, oh, the rock, my friend. You’re saying wonderful things, however, to religiousy, even though we let the priest on here, the heretical priest against the ecumenical cheese pizza. Benjamin Franklin, is having a discussion with somebody recently about the subject of a-hole. I think there is some plot holes. Yes, there are always plot holes. Anselman, I’m never masked and never jabbed. Well, you and me both, my friend. I shouldn’t have done that anyway because I was way at risk for jabs. Mills, I’m intrigued, but I’m probably commenting too much during the monologue to start a side conversation. Maybe later in the open forum version. Yes, you guys can talk during the monologue. I don’t care. Ethan, Mark, are you deadheading your roses? I don’t do anything to my roses. I let nature be nature. I probably shouldn’t, but yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about that. Nature is better with us interfering. And everyone’s like, we can’t interfere with nature. And I’m like, no, you really should because nature is more efficient and better and everything. Oh man, we get all the trouble makers. Welcome, Danny. Did you catch up? Oh no, you listened the whole way because you were in the gym, right? Is that what you said? No, I got home at 6.03 and then I listened to it all. You didn’t have to catch up. Excellent. What did you think? No one’s giving me a comment like this. I was just thinking just now, what does a good coach do at halftime to turn a game around? So earlier I mentioned to you Tony Robbins’ model of what he calls the wheel of success or failure. I think it’s like potential limits, or belief produces action, produces results, and then it’s limited by potential. But I mean, I’m kind of in the mind’s, like thoughts become things camp. So when a coach gives a nice pep talk that’s going to create a physiological change, if you look at Tony Robbins type of people who are saying, okay, well let’s say your prediction is off of your action and we want to improve your performance, let’s say, in some area. They say change your state, right? That’s one way. That’s a tool. Maybe watch your food, avoid inflammation and stuff like that. But in terms of getting towards like, good that Father Eric’s here, like maybe Romans 12, personal responsibility. What exactly is going on when a coach gives, you know, at a halftime when you’re down and you’re losing a game and then it works? Because I’ve seen this happen all the time, you know? What’s going on there? What do you think? Well, I would say that’s influence. Right. There’s an influence that’s being exerted. He’s taking an action in pointing at something, hopefully an ideal of winning the game or something similar. Right. And then from that, that influence has people either taking control of themselves or he’s taking control of them, right? And that’s what a pep talk is. It’s the manifestation of the aspiration to the ideal by the authority. So you’ve got an authority, the coach, and he’s pointing at the ideal of winning the game, right? And that is recalibrating people, allowing them to navigate what does it mean? Oh, it means stop screwing up or oh, it means try harder or oh, it means whatever. It could mean anything in a game. Yeah, yeah. I think it has to be a little more specific than just manifesting the ideal. The one thing that’s really drilled into my memory is junior year of high school, state semifinal football. We get to halftime and Coach Lockway comes out and says, you guys, your butt holes are all like this. You need to relax. And he was pointing to something that the people who were actually out on the field, because I was on the sidelines for that, were too tense and overthinking things. And then once he pointed to that and named it, says you guys need to relax, that actually, it had the effect of clearing out an obstacle to performance. Right. And he’s pointing to an ideal of a more relaxed team. And yeah, he’s naming maybe specific problems, maybe not. It works both ways, right? And that’s how that works. It’s like, oh, now I have my attention moved to something. And maybe that’s a utopic vision of being more relaxed. And then I can do it because the authority told me to. And that’s part of the advantage of distributed cognition is that the authority can tell you things and instead of thinking or trying to think about them yourself, you can go, well, he says it must be right and therefore. And look, that sucks because sometimes they’re wrong. Welcome to Muppetland, Muppet, with all the other Muppets. No kidding. You’re not getting around the problem of someone being wrong, whether it’s you or them or someone else. You might be able to get around some of their mistakes by using your own judgment, but that might just add more mistakes on your side. And that’s the problem. Oh, geez. Now we got the floaty artist. Oh, my goodness. Hey, Sally, how are you doing? Good. Good. It is nice to see you. Did you like my overly long monologue or was it just right? I’m not sure yet. What good is that? Well, I listened to it. I haven’t made any decisions yet. Jesse’s nice. He said it was the best monologue this year, so I’ll take it. I mean, somebody has to be nice. That’s cool. Can I ask about, Father mentioned in a metaphor, he said you guys are like this. You’re in a contracted state. Like, if you’re, for example, maybe you don’t have your voice. If you’re insecure, you want to be on the inside of the crowd, you’re seeking safety, you’re not confident. There’s something to that where people can tell in your voice, right? Like if you’re not speaking on authority of something that you actually know, right? Like people can pick this up. You mentioned something along, I think you said something like, if I say something like this versus if I say something like that, it’s less effort. But there is this internal friction thing, right? Oops, sorry, buddy. You okay? Sorry. I lost my train of thought. Oh, so I was, yeah, so about this like, this internal friction thing, is this, is that at all related to emanation or the Ubermensch? Is an Ubermensch one, is an Ubermensch one who just, who doesn’t have that in Nietzsche’s model? Is that what he’s putting forth as an ideal? Is to eliminate that, is that his solution? I don’t know. I’m just asking the question. Does that even make sense, what I’m asking? I don’t think that’s what Nietzsche was talking about. He was talking about the sort of person who could create their own values out of thin air. Right. Instead of receiving them from someplace else. So it’s not a matter of, like, it’s not a matter of Nietzsche’s ideal, it’s not a matter of just taking a particular moral framework and just saying, this is the exemplar, this is the best of that moral framework. Nietzsche’s idea of an Ubermensch is like, this is somebody who can carve himself out of the marble he’s made out of and turn himself into his own unique individual. Which is impossible and dumb and nobody can do that. So. Yeah, Nietzsche’s, yeah, Nietzsche’s just mistaken, right? He’s emerging, he’s emergence from nothing equals something lovely. And, you know, maybe. I don’t know, do we take a chance on this guy, Father? I’ll be ready. Alright, you’ll take responsibility. Okay, okay, I don’t want my face on here just to let you know, but I did not intend to porn bomb, I don’t want to do anything to mess up your stream, I just wanted to join it, alright? Sure, if you can contribute in a positive fashion, that would be wonderful, we welcome you. Yes, absolutely. What do y’all think of the theory that Jesus was an Uberman? Like from Nietzsche’s point of view, wouldn’t he count as an Uberman? Because then he set the standard for society for thousands of years? I mean, I’m not going to like that, obviously. But I mean, I’m a Christian, you know, I’m not a massive fan of Nietzsche, but someone did bring that up to me and by Nietzsche’s definition of him being like a, of an Uberman basically being like a model for society, like a model, what’s it called? Like someone who sets the morals and the tone for what the ideal man should be like. Wouldn’t that make Jesus and his disciples all Uberman? Because they did say so. You wouldn’t think so? I think it would be better to talk about them as exemplars rather than as Uberman because Jesus himself says, I do nothing of my own authority but only that which I have received from my father. So according to Jesus’s own self-understanding, he is actually receiving everything and handing it on to us rather than this ideal of making himself. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn’t mean it in terms of like the atheist way that Nietzsche looked at it, but I just mean in terms of like the basic ideal of like this is what a human should aspire to be like and that’s basically how I meant it. I think this comes to you, it is quite possible you should not use other people’s terms and you should not play their games. Yeah, exactly, Sally. Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, Nietzsche was writing about a lot of stuff and he started to do really bad axioms. And trying to understand him in a context that he didn’t have obviously, right, is difficult because he is an emergence is good person and you can emerge yourself into something bigger than you, which is obviously observably false. Nothing in the universe does that. So trying to hijack his terms is, you know, not the best thing in the world. Right, right. So, yeah, I did want to address this, Benjamin Franklin, for actions such as the action to make the grocery store, right, there must be some kind of reward being sought. Not necessarily. The subject must be rewarded disproportionately for taking the action. No, that’s, none of that is correct. I think people are not taking action because there is an emphasis on equality. That’s true. Equality means disproportionate rewards, no disproportionate rewards for action. Well, yes, that’s also true. Maybe one reward is that you no longer have to act as much. Well, look, a lot of the reason why people aren’t taking action is because of judgment. They don’t want to be judged or they’re okay being judged, except they need to be judged on certain terms, right. And that’s when you want to be judged on your own terms, right, or you want to engage or be engaged in a certain way, like you want somebody to use your pronouns. That can become a problem, obviously, because you don’t have that ability. And that’s an issue. And it’s a big issue. IRLpolitik would like to jump in the stream, but he’s passing time between the playoff sports ball games. Aha, it won’t last long. And yeah, well, this is what happens when you’re in New England, is you have alternative sports religions to deal with, aside from your normal religions. In the intro, there was a delineation between your thoughts about an action and an action. I’m tracking it, but then there’s also this thing where if you have an idea and then you have a belief that you can do the idea, that is a precursor to an action. And I’m wondering is it just that they’re separate until they’re not? Or how is that follow through? Like, I’m not saying this well, but I wrote it with arrows and it made sense. Sorry. Well, it was funny, Sally, it was at the grocery store before the stream, and I was thinking about how you talk about these concepts, and I’m like, maybe I can’t tell. And then you draw it, and I’m like, yes or no, right? And we go back and forth on these drawings sometimes. Does it always work? No, no, it doesn’t always work. I very clearly have idea and then an arrow to belief and then an arrow to action. I’m like, there, that’s enough. I know what I’m talking about. No. No. Well, but I think it’s tied up with what Matt C is talking about here. What did you think of me and others from a week ago? Yeah, well, look, the me and others thing, I mean, that’s the problem. We’re not, we aren’t discerning ourselves differently from others. We’re just, we’re stuck in this equality world where everyone’s equal, and you know, the world is wonderful because everyone’s equal, but if everyone’s equal, there is no discernment between you and me and me and Father Eric. There is a discernment. There dang well better be some discernment between you and me. Yes, I will get you lost in a wits. That is correct. The pronoun delineations but is in the anthem book, and in the anthem book, they have no word I until like the last chapter or paragraphs or something. It’s only us, and it’s fascinating the turmoil that these people have because they can’t decipher between themselves and the authority and themselves and the circumstances and themselves and each other. Right. And the final resolution is the rediscovery of the word I. The differentiation, right, this is where the neoplatonism gets tricky, because it’s useful. It’s like, oh, there’s a difference between the part and the whole. Yes, but discerning that difference is actually harder than you think, and proper discernment of the difference is really hard, because you can say there’s a difference between sex and gender, but is there? Are you sure? Do you know where it is? Do you know where these lines are? Father Eric is very popular with bubble this. Honestly, it’s just really like to the point where everyone just decides that things are subjective like up until recently sex and gender was unanimous, there’s no difference. It’s just now that everything’s subjective, nothing is true. No, no, no, no, no, no, I want to hear what you’re saying. No, I don’t have to. See, I’m being subjective. It doesn’t work. Yeah. No, I don’t believe in a subjective reality. I believe in objective reality defined by Jesus Christ and the Bible. I believe in what you just said. No, I just said that I was saying why it got to the point with sex and gender. I’m not saying I agree with that. I’m just saying that. You just said we’re living in a time when everything’s subjective. Why did you say that? What’s causing you to go back? I believe, well, mainly because now whenever I try to talk to people about Christianity and stuff, they usually just say, oh, that’s subjective. Don’t push your religion on me. That’s usually my experience with such things. Yeah. Well, why don’t you just do that? Don’t push religion on people. That’s easy. I don’t push religion on people. If I talk to a friend or something, I know a Muslim, and whenever I talk to, and whenever religion gets brought up, he just always says, no, that’s subjective. Don’t bring that up. Well, then he thinks you’re bringing it up. What if you are bringing it up and you just don’t realize it? Well, that’s entirely possible. Thank you for helping me check my privilege. Good, sir. No, that’s not checking privilege. That’s axiomatic worldview. Like, oh, the result of me talking is that people think I’m talking religiously. What if that’s actually true? And the problem is that I’m making that error and I need to correct that. And that’s what I was talking about with action. It’s like, oh, well, you can judge your actions by the results and by the exemplification or the contrast rather with the ideal. Say, oh, the ideal utopia is that I never do this and here’s somebody telling me I might be doing this and then that’s not an expected result. So maybe I’m starting from the wrong place or my set of what talking religion means is totally different from everybody else and you can learn from stuff like that. For real. Well, reality is important. Matt C. Apparently, Mark is being resorted to holy fool status and I’m okay with this. Oh, who’s doing that, Matt? I’d love to hear your opinion on how that is manifesting because there’s lots of possibilities. I’m jumping in again. Is that all right? Hi, everyone. Hi. Nice to see you, Sally and Casey. I haven’t talked to you properly yet. Casey, Danny, Father Eric, all these laughs. Okay, so Lewis, you’ve raided my question. Could you ask it again? I’m sorry. I must have misunderstood it. For a third time, what is causing you to believe that things are more subjective right now? No, no, I don’t believe things are subjective. I believe other people believe things are subjective. Does that make any sense? I believe that everyone has their own… Now everyone, we used to be much more… There used to be a lot less individualistic thought now. Now everyone believes in their own version of events for different things. That’s what I was saying. I don’t quite know what you’re trying to get at. I think the fact that we’re having a panel right now with each one of us, each with our own very unique political and philosophical opinions is proof that everyone is becoming more subjective because 100 years ago, if all of us were born 100 years ago, we would all more or less believe the exact same thing depending on which part of the world we were born in. No way. I think so. Nope. Have you heard of this idea called a community? Common… Yes. Yes. So by definition, you cannot be subjective. I’m saying we would all be a lot more… We would all be a lot more objective if we were born in a community 100 years ago. We would all believe very similar things than today given the fact that we are all very different people from different parts of the world. I don’t think so. Sally’s muted. There’s no way it would be a non-issue because we wouldn’t be communicating or talking. Like a bunch of problems we resolved if we all just went home. I don’t think we’re going to. No, no, no. There’s no way I would know any of you because of the internet. That’s just kind of a non-issue. Yeah, I don’t think the solution is to say the problem is modernity and therefore had we existed in a space in common, we wouldn’t have had these problems because we would have and we know this from writing. When you start looking at history from contemporary writings of, we’ll say, maybe not ordinary but mostly ordinary people, you get very different results about what would have happened in the past. These discussions are not new. Plato and Aristotle kind of put all this stuff to bed. I know people are still talking about it. But also, it’s kind of all put to bed. Weren’t Plato and Aristotle the outliers and not the average of their societies? Like what’s everyone in ancient Greece Does that mean they didn’t resolve and discuss a lot of this stuff? No, no. I never said that. I’m just saying that the majority of people wouldn’t hold the opinions they held. Intellectual thought has been encouraged like this a lot more through the internet. Using outliers, using incredibly intelligent people in days past to be like, oh, there would be disagreements back then. I think that’s… No, no, no. That’s not what I did. What I did was I said the writers of the time said these sorts of disagreements existed. And people like Plato and Aristotle had solutions to these problems or at least solutions to the things that could be solved and then said, well, the rest is still there and you’re stuck with it. And people don’t account for that. When I think about how much variety of beliefs and practices existed and what we would look at from our perspective is a very monolithic culture in medieval Europe. We could even take one region of medieval Europe. We could take Florence in the area around it. And from our perspective, we would probably look at these people and say that they’re all really pious Catholics because we can’t tell the difference. But Dante saw fit to throw a whole bunch of Florentinians into hell because they weren’t living up to the standard. They got thrown into hell for all sorts of different things. Vices that we would even recognize today as being. And so I think the problem with the past is that we don’t live there and that it’s really complicated and big and we can’t talk to anybody from the past. But I think people having different opinions and profound disagreements with each other is something that we just always have to deal with. And we can kind of name it subjectivism now, but I think people having profound disagreements with each other about how society ought to be organized is not new. Oh yes, yes, absolutely. I never implied that it was new. I just said that it’s way more widespread in the modern day. If that makes any sense. Were you trying to say something like we’re not all grounded or we’re not all pointing towards one ethic or good or something like that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. At least back in the day, say the Catholics or the Muslims or whatever, they could all come together and agree, yeah, this is correct, but now even the baseline is not considered correct by a lot of people today. I think such things, I think there have been ages when that has been the case though, when people couldn’t agree on it. They’re not fun ages to live in and they tend to involve a lot of falling to pieces, but I think you could think of like Rome, perhaps. Yeah, yeah. Towards the last stages. I mean you could think of like the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire even. And there was a fair amount of civil warring going on there that wouldn’t be fun to live through that. Some people would be hardcore old school Romans would be like, no, this is all bad. And people are like, it’s the way of the future and everybody having all these different opinions there. So I think this is, I mean, I don’t like it. I wish everybody would point at the church and say that’s the ideal, but I don’t think this is the first time this has happened. Oh, yeah, yeah, no. I’m just saying that like the norm throughout most of human history is for like everyone to like cluster around some religion and like everyone can agree on that. Like that’s how normal healthy society is. I think the norm is probably… We’ll never know what the norm is. What? How does that even happen? Yeah, I couldn’t hear her. But norm is a void of blackness. Apparently. No, what we need is to recognize what John Breveke was talking about in Awakening from the Meeting Crisis series, which is, drama site exists. And after Alexander comes in and changes the world, because he does, people don’t know if they have common values anymore because things are over connected and it causes a great deal of turmoil. Now she’s back. Sally has ascended to a higher plane of existence. Praise God. Sally’s not back, but her video is. Now she’s back. Sorry, family emergency. No problem. I was trying to say, I think that holy wars are the human norm. And I think this ism schism is just a holy war. That’s a good way to look at it. Ism schism. It’s going to be the name of my first album. Ism schism. Mark, didn’t you say something the other day on the live stream about if they’re called perennial problems and they just keep existing, aren’t they basically just a feature of existence? Yes, I did. And Pastor Paul VanderSaint, which he shall be until he squirrels or trolls or clowns out, used that clip in one of his videos. And interestingly, John Vervecki on that video used perennial problems about four times in his comment because I think he was upset. Even if it’s obviously wrong. A problem has a solution. Things that don’t have a solution aren’t problems. It’s really not that hard. And language matters. Ironic that John would object. And cultural cognitive grammar, which is what navigating patterns the channel is all about, matters. And yeah, we go through these patterns, as Sally’s pointing out, and historically the pattern is religious war. Because when it comes right down to it, the most important thing is virtues and values. And virtues and values is the thing that we should be fighting about the most. And I do like what Chris said here, a bond villain next to a priest next to a coyote that keeps burning in reddish hell. Now this is what I’m talking about. It is diversity. We’ve got the wholesome female character, who’s also a crazy artist, and we’ve got the unabashed crazy artist, and then we’ve got the working man. It’s fantastic. I love it. Bubbleviz. Ism-shism. Schism, yeah. Ism-schism is good. It’s part of the Voldemortisms, which is a hijacking of the Harry Potter religion. Which is interesting because the Harry Potter religion actually is generational, which is kind of surprising to some extent. But also the Voldemort thing is the current zeitgeist, because it’s anything that cannot be memed, is like, if something is to like, don’t say that, you’ll hurt people. Anything that’s don’t say that, you’ll hurt people is probably wrong. That’s just where I’m at with it at this point. Yeah, it’s unrealistic. I mean, it’s evil to tell you not to say something, because anything you say is going to hurt somebody, I guarantee you. Like, if they hurt it, right? How could you say that? How could you say that? I never hurt anybody. Yeah, right. Exactly. Well, and that’s the problem. Any statement is a judgment. So, you’re always hurting people because you’re always judging them. People don’t like to be judged, and like, that sucks. But also, the world you live in, and get over it. Right? Because we’re all in the same boat. Everyone’s acting like, no, my boat’s special. Your boat’s not special. You’re a Muppet like the rest of us. So, I was thinking of the action thing in regards to the kids and medication thing that came up on P.A.L.S. recently. So, we have a whole group of things that aren’t, their action isn’t being taken, but then also like little kids in ADHD medicine, actually the action would have been to just not take action. That would have been the appropriate action. But instead, we’re taking action in completely the inappropriate places. So, that’s freaking fascinating to me. No, that’s not right, Sally. The thing that causes us to medicate small boys, we need to move around. Yeah. Because of their act. Because we want them to meet our inaction? No, no, it’s worse. The schools are taking an action that they and state and setting rules that they shouldn’t do that. And then they’re using those rules to judge that because they shouldn’t do that and they’re doing that and the girls aren’t, then they’re obviously a problem. And it’s interesting. So, I met a woman a few years ago, but down here in South Carolina. And she said, oh yeah, I used to be a teacher. Maybe she’s still a teacher, I forget. But she said, when the boys were backed up, I just tell them, you need to go out the hall and run around two times. And then they were fine. And it’s like, yes, that’s the proper way to deal with that. And when I was in school, we used to have recess. This is a problem. Because we’ve taken certain things out of the school. EMI video on education versus training. And the things we’ve taken out of the schools are gym, recess, teaching of religion, right? Art and music. Now, maybe they’re not removed entirely, but we’ve certainly reduced the amount. And that has created ADHD. Somehow. Well, of course it has. Like, duh. If you didn’t see that, that’s because your worldview is wrong and you instead tried to adjust your implementation rather than your worldview. You tried to imagine a world where kids would just sit there in the Prussian school oppression, which I think is the proper way to think about it, and behave exactly as little robots, which is what you want. Because you want them all to an educational standard. And the educational standard in the U.S. has been changed from being set by communities to being set by states to being set by the federal government. So now we have one standard to rule them all. Does that sound like a familiar, evil motif from maybe something well known? I don’t know. Maybe it does. And I’m betting you when they invented the Prussian school system, those kids were just getting the snot beaten out of them. Anytime they went any sort of deviation, go pick a switch. Like, that’s how they actually kept the kids in their desks, staying still. It’s possible. And I would argue that that is the trauma that happened in the Catholic schools according to my relatives. Is that they got beaten and forced and whatever and uh-oh. Ah, there we go. There’s the man himself, Mr. Tolke. Excellent, excellent. I did want to address it. You have a very pleasant blend of people on your streams, Mark. Thank you. That is always the case, although sometimes it’s just me and Jesse. Oh, Anselman’s upset because he called him Muppet. Anselman knows he’s a Muppet. He’s an excellent human, so he already realizes this. My name’s Foddy, I’m a Muppet. There you go. Yes, I love it. We’ll go around the room and introduce ourselves and admit that we’re Muppets. That would be great. I like what Chris has to say here. As the state consolidates power, everyone has to fit in smaller boxes to maximize efficiency. That is also true. And I heard a clip on Jonathan Pujol’s clips channel, the Symbolic World Clips channel, him talking to Rafe Kelly, I think it was, about this, about the normalization and the over-normalization of things. That’s what’s leading to this. Oh, you’re supposed to be normal. And then you start talking about neurodivergence, which is a dumb way to talk because there’s no normal for neuro anything. There’s no neuronormal to be divergent from. There’s an objective material reality and you’re not there, stupidity. We’re all neurodivergent, like every single person, and therefore there’s no neuronormal, and therefore there’s no divergent, because there’s no contrast. So, dumb way to think about the world. But we’ve tried to regulate everything and control everything to such a degree there’s a tyranny of government right now, and maybe that has to get flipped over. And that’s part of the clown world, the flipping and all that. To hear Louis’ point in a positive light, I think we were far more discerning in the previous eras, in the old world. It wasn’t that we were more or less subjective, we were far more discerning, because we had common unity on different subjects. And slowly, you’re nucleated in different things. But you’re pointing to the wrong mechanism, you’re pointing to the wrong signal. Basically, all I was trying to say is that in the old world, the majority of societies had baseline values, like the church, which everyone could basically point to and be like, yeah, this is good for us. And in the modern day, we don’t have things like that. We don’t have discernment like that, if you will. There was an anchor, Mark, is that what you’re saying? There’s an anchor on my bottle. In fact, the cap has an anchor to it. There’s an anchor imprinted on the cap. And I didn’t notice this until I got it home. So I was like, oh, look, it’s caffeine. So apparently I was meant to drink this particular kombucha. Look, I don’t even think it’s discernment as such, Jesse, just to push back, Jesse doesn’t mind when I push back. I think it’s what we’re discerning. Are we discerning what’s in video games? Are we discerning what’s in economics? Are we discerning what’s in politics? Are we discerning, so I’m watching this Paul, Pastor Paul van der Saint stream today. And I was furious because they kept jumping frames like it’s the state, it’s the government, it’s economics. And I’m like, guys, would you calm down? No, this is all wrong. Your frames are all over the place. You keep jumping frames. Not that your statements are wrong, but they’re descriptive and not prescriptive or predictive, right? Or particularly actionable, right? To the point of the stream. You have to frame things in a way that actions make sense relative to results and that you can act to make a change. Otherwise, you’re just being a pundit or pontificating or playing mystic or something. You’re not moving the needle. We have to be able to move the needle. And when we don’t have a common grounding, and Sally Jo and I were talking about this recently, right, we don’t have a common grounding, say, with nature, that we can discuss things from. We can say, oh, well, this is like riding a horse across a range. This is like tagging a cow. Or, you know, this is like a branding. When we don’t have that in common and we try to talk, things are going to get messy because our discernment is different. Like you try to talk to somebody about a city. Tim Poole used to do a very good job, but I don’t listen to Tim Poole anymore. He used to talk about the reason why people in cities don’t understand gun control is because they have cops ready at hand, so they don’t, in theory, need guns to protect themselves. That’s kind of true, right? Whereas, if you lived where Tim had lived previously, somewhere in Florida in the middle of nowhere, he said it’s 25 minutes to get the cops there, minimum. If somebody comes onto your property and they mean you any kind of harm, whether they have a gun or not, and you don’t have a gun, you’re in trouble. And he had problems where, you know, and then of course he lived later, I think in I think it was Jersey outside of Philadelphia or maybe it was Pennsylvania outside of some city in Jersey. And somebody in the middle of the night, like 2 a.m., came to his property and like, you know, meant him harm. And he had to call the cops and the cops effectively told him, you know, you might want to have a way to deal with that yourself because it takes us a while to get here. And he was in a suburb with cops. So, you know, these are problems. And when we’re not looking at the same things and discerning at the same level because we’re too busy looking at video games or discerning porn or trying to figure out the culture war or trying to figure out why the political system is working the way it was working or whether or not the economy is going to collapse. You’re discerning all wrong things because you are not doing anything about that ever. Not that you’re not connected to it, not that you don’t contribute to it, but you’re not going to fix it. The thing that will fix it is looking at the higher things, the virtues and values, and enacting them no matter what. That will fix it. Automatically. Now you don’t have to worry about politics. You don’t have to worry about economics. You have to worry about the state of your state. You don’t have to worry about whether or not the world’s going to hell in a handbasket. You, independently, can do the good to the best of your ability and use your discernment, judgment, action, and result. And the contrast with utopia, maybe you get utopia from a book, there’s a well-published book I hear, the best selling book of all time, that might help you understand what utopia should look like or maybe it even gives you details on how to get as close as you can in the real world today until the utopia manifests or something. That would be a neat outline for a book. I wonder if such a thing exists. That is more helpful than trying to discern all of these other things because, look, I’m going to make this case eventually. I have it in my head. It’ll be a video eventually. It’s almost certain that your cognitive load is limited. And it’s almost certain that the cognitive load that other people have is limited to a different degree. In other words, I don’t have the same cognitive load as Father Eric. He doesn’t have the same cognitive load as me. Neither of us has the same cognitive load as Danny, Casey, Sally Jo. I mean, I can’t even keep up with Sally Jo. She’s got wonderful intuitions that do not exist in my head and are not available to me. Right? And that’s the problem. Is that if that’s true and it kind of has to be unless all of evolutionary theory is incorrect and every piece of evolution is totally wrong, and I don’t believe that that is the case, then what that means is what you pay attention to matters and you’re limited. And you want to use that limited attention to the best, most efficient, most reasonable action that you can. And that means your discernment should be set on pragmatic things where the end result is something achievable by you. And the sum of those end results is culture. So the culture degrades because the individuals in it degrade. The culture doesn’t degrade you unless you let it. And sometimes you don’t have to fight against it because it’s doing pretty good. Maybe we could call that Christendom or something in the West. Right? And sometimes you have to fight against it a lot. Maybe that’s a different mode where Christendom has failed and now you have to fight to be good. Whereas in a past time you didn’t have to fight so hard to be good. And maybe that could be mapped scientifically as the increase in entropy. I don’t know. I’m still up in the air about that one. I’m like, oh, maybe entropy is actually increasing. How would you know? Yeah, Mark, you’ve got this big old rant and it can be pretty well summed up by like just a little quip. And which of you by being anxious can add one qubit to his span of life? Yes, well, that’s true. What is this critique? Double this. Mark, your monologues are too long for a hangout. I don’t know what exactly that means. He’s telling you you’re talking too much. That’s what I.I. Captain. There we go. Okay. So I’m thinking about action versus ideas and you have your ideas and then you have your belief that you can accomplish the idea. And then you have availability to act. And then people get distracted with politics and fantasy and the culture work. And so how to go back to applying determining determination where you can take action. And this brings me back to the poster that I don’t have finished yet. And so I made another food drawing of so starting with Peterson’s model, you have clean your room and that is like the first place you can take action. And then we’re adding on to that then set your house in order. And then if you manage to accomplish setting your house in order anytime in your lifetime, you can begin to contribute to your community. And I was sharing this with some children who were worried about Biden for some godforsaken reason. And I’m thinking to myself, you’re six. And so I was like, I drew them this picture and I laid it on their table and I crossed their house. And then I told them, Biden’s over here. So like, don’t stress about it. Because I was like, one of the best things you can do for anxiety and stuff is figure out where you actually can take action and then just go do that. Yeah. No, that’s a good point, Sally. The solution to anxiety is to move physically. That’s the single best solution to anxiety. And it’s easy to be in your distraught room looking at the community or god forbid politics in Harry Potter above you. And like, I can’t affect it. I can’t affect it. That’s what that magical glowing screen does to you is it makes all of this scary news super immediate because it’s right there. Psychologically, we can’t tolerate the intrusion into our personal bubble. It’s very unhealthy that it’s in your personal space because if you get a text from an enemy, your brain registered as your enemy is right there at that proximity to you. There’s a huge argument for screens outside the bedroom, maybe even outside your house. They should have a porch with screens in it and they don’t ever come inside like gargoyles. Maybe that’s the optimum use. I don’t know. I mean, just spend less time on technology and you’ll be happier. Honestly, that’s just from personal experience. Just don’t spend so much time on it and you’ll be happier. Well, it’s the jump though because even with real life personal relationships that have struggled, even 40 years ago, if you had a lot of anxiety with your parents or your aunt or your really, really odd cousin and if they called you and they were going to visit, it would be on your house phone downstairs. Whereas right now, they’re texting it to six inches from you at 2 a.m. It’s just a massively different scenario. So, proximity really does affect you. We think we’re all rational beings and know your human creature that you are is like, snakes, snakes right here in my box. Then you’re confused on if the box is part of you or not. That’s a problem because when we use tools, they become kind of part of us. So, it does behoove a person to actually physically pluck them off of ourselves for little periods of time. I’ve had to actually unplug my computer and put it in the closet before. Just get rid of it. Funnily enough, I happen to be much more productive and happy during that time. Absolutely. The industrial revolution’s consequences, yada yada yada. Well, the stress of immense power. Yes, which comes about through the industrial revolution. We’ve always had problems with dealing with technology, right? What’s the Babylonian epic called? Gilgamesh? We will always invent things. Even in the Epic of Gilgamesh, they were lamenting about the invention of bread. The problem is that we will always invent things, but we invent things so quickly these days. It’s so hard for you to adapt. I don’t know if it was in the medieval… I read a thing that was from basically an ancient father who was lamenting that the ewes no longer seek to hunt. Now they are lazy and they just feed their goats. Their goats just sit bad in the pens. I think that was Egyptian, actually. I know what you’re talking about. It’s a great little spiel though, because it is just like classic. Because damn kids, I got it too good. And that’s the problem. Look, technology doesn’t drive us. We drive it. If it’s going wrong, that’s because we’re driving it wrong. This is my point about Twitter. See my video on Twitter? And that’s the problem. We’re not taking that into account. Technology is our slave. It doesn’t enslave us. That doesn’t happen. That is just backwards thinking about how the world works. Even Mark Zuckerberg said that he doesn’t spend time on Facebook because it’s too addicting. It doesn’t enslave the person who creates it, yes. But us as a collective… You enslave yourself. And you lose after you. But you get to pick to what? Yes, Casey, yes. You can enslave yourself to whatever you want. You can enslave yourself to alcohol, cigarettes, cocaine. You can enslave yourself to the church. You can enslave yourself to your job. You can enslave yourself to pirates. All of you. Look, I’m taking your time, energy, and attention right now. I hope there’s a good trade in there somewhere for you. I don’t think you’d be here otherwise. So I think there is. And that’s the problem. You can’t be anti-technology because technology is something driven by us. This is the problem. We want a solution outside of ourselves to solve a problem inside of ourselves. And that’s not going to happen. There’s a problem inside of us, each individual person. I’d absolutely agree with that. I was just saying that things like the nuclear bomb, you know, don’t you think that maybe that was a bad idea that now we have weapons that can do that? You don’t think that’s a bad idea? Fewer people died as a result of the nuclear bomb than would have died otherwise. That’s so true. But I would prefer people just tear each other apart in the land war instead of us having weapons that can cause such destruction. I would. The reason this is an ideas war, holy war, instead of a blood and gore holy war is probably because of nuclear weapons. And I’m not sad. Yes, you’re weak. How long can we keep this up? It’s just the simple fact that you love technology. That’s what it comes down to. Lewis, please answer me a question. How far have you ever walked with 40 pounds? Myself? About 20 miles, I think. I like to jog a lot personally. I like to stay in shape. I don’t like letting myself be 15 weeks. Yes, absolutely. And my peers have become weak because I have their reliance on technology. That’s why my peers. No, no. Maybe because they allowed themselves to get addicted to it. Yes. But here’s the thing. If someone’s addicted to heroin, do you blame them because they got addicted to heroin? Yes. They have personal responsibility. They do have personal responsibility. Blaming them, I don’t blame the heroin. Blaming the heroin is the war on drugs. The war on drugs failed. You already know that doesn’t work. We have no agency over. This is part of action. And I want to use that to segue over to answer Sally Jo’s question. Look, Sally, you’re doing the artsy thing with connecting the discernment and the results. And I said in the monologue, you’ve got to go backwards. Can I take an action that will result in something that will address whatever it is I’m being told? So let me give you an example that will probably make you laugh. But you’ve got enough self-control. So let’s suppose, for example, that on a stream, some dirty hippie says to everybody, like, oh, you know, this person, and suppose you’re the object of this, right? This person has had many complaints against them. People have told me that this person, their presence is disruptive, and they can’t do what they want because this person is around. Let’s just suppose something like that happens to a hypothetical situation. How do I know that’s bogus bullshit? It takes about 10 seconds. There’s no action in that. They’re not saying I did anything wrong, right, other than existing. Well, too bad I was born. Piss off. Too late. You can’t do anything about that unless you’re going to kill me, in which case, get on with it. Otherwise, shut up because you’re not taking an action, right? The other way I know is that they’re not connecting anything action-wise that I can change to deal with what they classify as a problem. Oh, you’re a problem, or there’s a problem, or this is problematic because people have complained about your existence. Okay. Are you telling me to commit suicide? Because otherwise you’re not pointing to an action that I can take. And if you’re saying that, maybe you’re evil. Just throwing that out there because dirty hippies can be evil. In fact, I would argue many of them are without realizing. So you have to look at the end result first sometimes, and you have to go backwards. And this is no problem for me because I’m dyslexic, so I go backwards all the time by accident, right? But you can’t mix up the ordering, right? You have to say, all right, well, I can reason backwards from what action could I take to help the climate, right? And then if I do that, all of the actions that result from saying I want to help the climate are things that I can do in my house. You know what none of them are? None of them are on a global scale. Zero. Zero of them are on a global scale because I can’t take actions on a global scale. Because not only am I a muppet, but I’m a tiny little muppet on a huge planet with eight billion other muppets. What the hell am I going to do to affect eight billion muppets? This stream is not going to get that big. And if it does, I can talk all day long and people may go, oh, that’s really nice. You know what? I’m going to go out tomorrow and recycle. And then they’ll never do it. Now some of them will. And you can always argue something’s better than none. Sure. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that. But all of the things that you would do if you took the climate people seriously are wrapped up in things you would do at home as a normal part of your day, your week, your month, your year. None of them are protests. None of them are posts on Facebook. None of them are come on a stream and yell at everybody for not recycling or putting out too much CO2. None of them are telling my buddy Brian Moe’s in East River, South Dakota, sorry, Sally, to stop farming or doing cows or whatever. None of them are that. Zero. That’s not my responsibility. It’s not something I have control over. It’s not something I should be doing. So there’s proper discernment. Oh, now I discern that these climate muppets, that these dirty hippies are bullshitters. They’re talking about something that cannot lead to the actions either that they’ve connected or no actions are connected. No actions connected to my existence. Okay, I exist. Now what? I’m going to do what I want. If you don’t like it, you can piss off because it’s still going to happen. And if you want to stop me, you can, you know, you’re welcome to try and kill me. But, you know, and I’ve said this before to people like bring a gun, shoot first and don’t miss. Because if you think you’re going to get away with an attempt on me and not have repercussions, you got another thing coming. Like you’re going to make that mistake exactly once and then you’re going to make zero mistakes for the rest of your life. Not recommended. You can do that. I’m telling you, you can’t do something. I’m saying there are consequences. Those are the results of your actions. So, yeah, you want to take a shot at me? Go right ahead. If you think I’m not going to shoot back, you get another thing coming. Whether you’re a dirty hippie or a climate person or a WEF nut job or one of these, you know, people who want a great reset or you’re some fed, Sally, just to add to that. Some fed who wants me to wear a mask. Piss off. Alrighty. It’s almost like actions. Your final cause is first in the order of intention and the last in the order of execution. Is that what you mean to say? That is exactly correct, Father Eric. I know you share my quest to make final cause great again. Yeah, it’s almost like some brilliant Greek philosopher came up with that 2300 years ago. I know. We just haven’t been listening. We have this chronological snobbery, I think I stole that from Kale Zeldin too, around old books. And we just don’t read them or listen to them or understand them. And I like what Matt said. Mark is right. At this point, I’m pretty sure orthogonal thinking has to be done offline. Yes, it does. Everything else feeds the machine. Well, and a lot of things feed the machine. And all right. Anselman says I’m telling it like it is. I agree. Mark speaks for me. You’ve got the pirate, the pirate Muppet King speaking for you. I don’t know. Eric, you said action is first in the order of intention and last on the order of what? Final cause, final cause. What you’re intending to do is first in the order of intention and last in the order of execution. Okay. Right. So I intend to go to Chicago. I only get to that intention when I actually arrive there. A dozen things have to happen first, including getting into my car and driving. Or getting on a plane or right. Like, and that’s the other thing we miss is like there’s usually a lot of ways to get to the same good result. A lot of people are like stuck in this. No, no, no. You have to do exactly this way. And it’s like the way I get to Thunder Bay, I still get there on time and and bring Ethan with me, even though I have to stop at Sally Joe’s and put up with her crazy. What you’re about to do is first. What you are about to do is first. What would you say then? Final cause, final cause is first in the order of intention. Right. But last in the order of execution. And look, another way to think of final cause is the word T. L. O. S. This is why we talk about T. L. O. S. all the time on the discord server. It’s like, what is the T. L. O. S. And the T. L. O. S. isn’t like nearly your intent. Right. The T. L. O. S. is what is the idea behind the final cause in manifestation? And that’s how you start with final cause first in thought, in your imagination. And then you finish up, right. Going back and starting at discernment, judgment, right. And then action. And apparently, Kale Zeldin stole chronological snobbery from C. S. Lewis. Whatever. I’m taking it for my own and I’m calling it the pirate Muppet King saying and crediting no one. So. Oh, Anselman is advertising his channel has a reading of C. S. Lewis on reading old books. So the final cause is like. Aim. No, it’s not like aim. Sorry, I’m shorting out over this. Yeah, yeah. The final cause is sort of like the vision of what is supposed to become real. You know, if I on a domiciled thing, sorry, did you want to respond to that? I’m sharing this chain. OK, keep going. The domiciled thing. So, OK, I had this funeral last weekend and at the funeral, there was another guy who was started, you know, in the friend group, basically, saying like, if I died, no one would know. And so I would like, you know, try to offer some encouragement to him. And then in doing so, he would open up more and continue and say, like, well, I’m the last male in my line and my prospects aren’t looking good. Stuff like that. Right. You know, other issues. Right. But so in terms of action, I think in that you’re saying final cause, one of the elements of final causes intention action in that case was something like the me being having some degree of courage to have an uncomfortable conversation and say things I didn’t want to say. Now, they were true. So the things that I was saying to him was true. Like, hey, look at the guy that died. Look at. Well, here’s why it’s important to stick around, because look at how much of of he is a part of this whole group. So Sally was mentioning like ideas. And that’s where my mind is. Like, for mostly is worth my attention. You know, like in terms of acting, I don’t think is just vigorous output, you know, necessarily. Like, I think I think more important if you know, I don’t think the solution to somebody with a beaten spirit is to is raw, raw, pep, pep, pep, pep, right? You know, it’s it’s it’s it’s. And there’s something that hamstrings us. Like, I think Lewis was saying when he suggested the world’s more subjective or, you know, we have we’re not grounded. No more centralized newspapers is more chaos. Now we have this distributed Internet thing that reminds me of this line from the Gladiator, Russell Crowe. I don’t remember the context, but he said when he’s looking at the emperor, he says the soldier has to be a soldier. He says the soldier has the advantage of looking his enemy in the eye. You know, and so there’s this other aspect of, you know, like maybe the politician or something like that, this more chaotic element. I think maybe that’s where we are. You know, more more so. It’s not it’s not like we’re looking our our our problems in the face. I think I think everybody there’s this thick fog, you know. Yeah, yeah. Well, so, Danny, I want to you’ve wrapped up a lot of stuff there. So I want to go ahead. OK, good. Yeah, no, let me let me stop you there because you wrapped up enough stuff and I need to disentangle it. I’m going to use that sees comment to do so. I like Father Eric. Everybody likes Father Eric. He’s awesome. Maybe all the Internet is organized around intention and society is organizing around this, too. Well, no, the problem is that the Internet allows you to organize around any intention that you may fancy. So if you fancy yourself a wolf, you can organize around the intention of being a furry. And if you don’t know about furries, don’t look them up. They’re horrific. But, you know, you can pretend to be a wolf or you can pretend to be a cat girl or you can pretend to be a mage. You can pretend like there’s all kinds of intentions you can now engage in. You can’t engage in without the technology. But that was that’s been true for a very long time. But the problem is relatively easy. And so it’s worth asking ourselves, well, what the hell changed? And the answer is what changed is that people are now willing to engage in those things. And because they’re willing and they have the technological platform to do so, but they can do it without the technological platform. They they’re doing and there’s nothing constraining them. And and and that’s an issue. There’s no constraints. They’re not constraining themselves. And so you get into this problem of trying to live in a world, for example, that BF Skinner alluded to, which he proved is not possible, by the way, right? Where you’re positive only. Everyone’s pot. Everyone. You know what you should do? You should support my will, my desire to be a non binary wolf so that I’ll support your desire to be an Apache attack helicopter. And then in that way, we’re supporting each other and we can stand on each other’s shoulders and build the utopias that we want individually. Now, of course, none of that makes any sense or works at all. But that is what people are trying to do. They are trying to be positive and positive only. And that is not useful. You need negative signals. You respond more to negative signals than you do to positive signals. We know this evolution would not work if that were not the case. Evolutionary theory, all of it fails immediately if that’s not the case. Evolution seems to be actually a good observation of the world. Maybe it’s not predictive. Maybe it’s not prescriptive. And if you try to make it prescriptive, maybe that’s called eugenics. I don’t know. You know, but it is a good description of a bunch of observations that are insufficient to explain the world, but sufficient to explain a bunch of interesting things in the world. But maybe they’re not important things because maybe we did without them just fine. And therefore I was questioned. Well, if the universe was fine before this, why did we need this? And I’m not saying we didn’t, but is it all encompassing or is it just like a nice to have? Is it a plus one? Is it a minus one? Is it a minus a billion? I don’t know, but it’s worth thinking about. Plenty of things that should just be left for the nerds to deal with. Well, yeah. And the rise of nerd culture and the veneration of high IQ individuals and expertise as such has created a lot of these problems where suddenly the guy who goes to work every day, or the guy who grows your food, or the guy who tends the cows that you provide your milk, or the animals that go to the slaughter that provide your meat are not heroes anymore. And they are the heroes because everything else depends on them. Without them, there’s no Superman. Without them, there’s no Batman. Without them, there’s no city. And without Superman and Batman, who is the real hero? The real hero is the person who supports all of the things that can make the hero the hero. This was a wonderful line from the 1960 Magnificent Seven. There’s these three boys that decide to hang out with one of the gunslingers, basically. And in one of the last scenes, the boys’ dads have decided to get rid of the gunslingers because they’re scared. And the boys say, we’re embarrassed of our dads because he’s a coward. And he immediately, because it’s a 1960s movie, he immediately spanks the boy and tells the boys that their dads are all braver than he’s ever been. Because he’s never had the courage to take on a family or a farm or any of this responsibility. And it’s just a wonderful little insert because these gunslingers dealing with these farmers fear and this back and forth. It just makes it a wonderful story. That’s great. Well, and what happens in the story backs up the words. In other words, they’re not words. They’re words connected to an action. This is what it is, an action. The action is spanking the child. Why would you spank a child? You spank a child to break it out of its frame. You can be critical of that all day long. I’ve had dogs all my life. I trained dogs. The reason why you hopefully you don’t smack a dog, but you tap them on the tail or the ass or even the ear, you flick their ears, whatever. The reason why you do that is to get them to pay attention to something else. It’s not punishment. And so they’ll move away from the negative and towards something else. It’s to get their attention. That’s what spanking does. It breaks your frame. And then if you insert words while you’re breaking someone’s frame, you know, that’s powerful. I remember getting the belt when I was young. And it only happened a few times because I was a well-behaved child. But I remember that. That’s important. That’s the way you remember things because you get it out of your frame. There’s lots of things that draw your frame. They’re not all negative. Those negative signals are important. Like Danny was kind of pointing out. Like, no, you know, you don’t want to tell everybody, oh, you know what? It’s going to be OK. No, it’s not going to be OK. It’s going to be a struggle. But you know what? It’s a struggle for me, too. It’s a struggle for everybody else around you. So like, I get it. But also get over yourself and rise to the occasion because it’s not another answer here anyway. You don’t get out alive. Obviously, right. We all seem to die. It’s the one talent we all have in common to quote Blake Seven, the latest science fiction show of all time. This is the extreme frustration that bubbles up in me with these people that say they want a ground war, say they want World War Three. And these are cowards that won’t even take on the responsibility of a basic household. Right. Right. The enormous responsibility, the thing that’s actually way harder than war, because there’s nothing easier than grabbing a gun and shooting at somebody. Yeah, like you’re not clean. Triggers don’t weigh a lot. You’re not the basics. And usually have you ever rocked to get something. But good for him that it didn’t. I’m more than happy to find somebody able to bear weight of any kind. So but but that’s the thing. It’s like if you can’t deal with the responsibility of a household, you think you’re going to deal with the responsibility of war. And also war is a much less thing, honestly, because your life in your household is your entirety of your life. It might be 20, 30 years, but those are kind of remarkable and rare. Yeah. Yeah. And and one’s destruction and one’s creation. What do you want to be involved in? You want to be involved in destruction or do you want to be involved in creation? Like, you know, you have these choices. I want to. Which one makes you braver? Right. Right. Right. Do it a hard thing because because creation is hard and destruction is easy. And I want to address this Mills. Social validation is a factor. Sure. Social validation is a factor because we outsource our sanity. And so the definition of sanity changes based on what society you’re in. And you can try to change that by rewriting the DSM, right? The diagnostic manual for psychology. And that’s been tried. And it doesn’t work, by the way. You need to have a way of exemplification. And if your society doesn’t have that, you have what looks like a culture war. It’s not a culture war. It’s not cultures warring for supremacy. That’s a top down, postmodern way of thinking about the world. That’s not what’s happening. There’s just a fight over whether or not we’re going to have a culture. And I have a video about that, by the way. So just saying. Navigating patterns. Yes. Yes. One of the things, Peterson, I think it was on Joe Rogan. I think he said, why are you always painting these melancholy frames? Why do you have to say that life is tragic? And he says, because it works in the worst case scenarios. Right. And I think, I mean, the disconnection from death and incapacity for seriousness. Well, I mean, it’s prevalent, but I don’t know. I don’t know. What do you think the solution is for? Well, I don’t know. I kind of lost my train of thought there. Sorry. I don’t know where I was going with that. That was just a starting point. And I forgot where I was going to lead it into. Are you looking for the solution to despair? Well. Well, let me, something comes to mind is, well, there’s like one time I was, I had a friend of mine. He went through like the ranger school and he said the hardest thing he did in his life was this training thing. You know, to have him to take lots of action. He said when he started, there was this, this, that I guess I had to do this long rock and they have a truck behind them that, you know, yells at him and tries to get him to quit. You can get on the truck, that kind of thing. And so this is like the equivalent of Hell Week to Navy SEALs training. He said at first when he started, he said, I wanted to be the best and set the record. So he was like driven by ego. And then as like half of the people dropped out, he said, I didn’t want to let the guy next to me down. And that’s what was running through my mind. And then towards the end, like when it was almost everybody, 80 percent plus had had like dropped out of this thing. He said, like, I didn’t want to be like my father. You know, he said that. And that’s what kind of got me through to the end of it. You know, yeah. So in the end, you just want to make a way in. And it’s all about you versus yourself. It always is in those cases. Right. I’m not certain why I want to tell you this, but I do. When we were looking at the emblems for these different virtues, Father Eric actually helped me find this out. The emblem, like the symbolic emblem for hope is an anchor. And I found this very validating because I have always been well, I’ve been arguing for some time with Mark that hope has a certain weight to it. And maybe I was incorrect about weight. But there is a heaviness or some there’s a strain to hope. I don’t know. Mark hates this idea that I have. But I you have to be able to hold on to it. And it does have this significant mass for some reason, psychologically. Well, I think, look, I think I think Peterson talks about some of this, right? He talks about don’t compare yourself to who to who somebody else is today. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday. And when we lose that, that grounding and that anchor, when we then you’re in trouble. When we talk about images of hope in modernity, people think of doves, handles and these frail wispy things. And it is quite wonderful to think, no, it is a ship’s of iron. Right. Because you need you need you need that commonality, that common ground, that way to be stable and steady, not not too free like the dove who’s up in the sky can go in any direction and not too rigid. Right. Like like stuck in a cage. Right. And a thing to send down through the depths of the sea, which is the icon for chaos. Right. Right. It doesn’t move. It doesn’t move. Possibly. So you could use it for navigation. Yes. Right. Everything that we use for navigation has to at least temporarily be stationary, because if everything’s moving that you can’t. You can’t navigate. You can’t navigate. Yeah, it’s not possible. Right. Does St. Paul use the symbol of an anchor? It’s in the letter to the Hebrews. I already wrote that. It’s in the letter. Okay. So he does. That sounds like the answer is he does. Well, it depends on your opinion on the authorship of the letter to the Hebrews. Oh, we don’t see how it would be. That’s actually scientific study, the historical critical method. Yeah. I’m going to destroy all science out of sheer anger that it’s been corrupted. Yeah, I mean, that’s the issue is that being tethered to something allows you a bunch of freedoms that freedom doesn’t make any sense if you’re not tethered to something. And again, this is what I was talking about with you reciprocally narrow to take an action. And once you’ve taken that action, you now have a new place to stand in potential that you can then enact a bunch of other things from. And so the narrowing to get to action is actually the kilos of more potential. It sounds very contradictory, but it’s not. I’ve found with hope and belief there are two things that give me solace. One is that you only need the mustard seed of it to move mountains. And I have no need to move mountains. So probably the amount that I have is sufficient. But then also, I find it can be borrowed. It seems strange. But in absence of your own, try for a loner. Well, yeah. Well, it’s interesting, right? Because I think I’ve talked about this before, right? You can lend agency to people. You lend agent. I mean, that’s what a good a good priest or pastor does is lend agency to people sometimes. Right. So that they’re able to do things, you know, like, look, I mean, maybe I can go to the hospital on my own, but maybe I can go to the hospital quicker or better with other people. Right. And so they’re lending me part of their agency to increase my agency. And action is wrapped up in agents. And so like everything else, you can go ahead and engage in that way. And that’s really important. And that’s and that’s the problem is that people don’t realize that. Like, it’s kind of your obligation to lend your agency to people with less of it. You want to you want to be all socialistic and communistic. There you go. Do it by yourself. Just don’t tell others to problem solve. Lend your agency to others. Live in service to their needs, you know, not entirely. You take care of yourself first or you can help other people. Right. But on your own mask before helping somebody with theirs. Yeah, sure. Absolutely. But, you know, that’s a that’s a problem. Benjamin Franklin. Oh, my goodness. I want to make it so the Muppet Theory of Epistemology. I don’t have a theory of epistemology. It doesn’t exist. Earlier, you were saying something along the lines. You have no influence because you have a small audience. But I don’t think I said that. I think the small ripples create big waves. Well, that’s true. If you influence 10 people, well, yeah, you can you can look at the, you know, you tell 10, they tell 10. That never happens, by the way, in the real world. But that just isn’t how I have utopian. Yeah, you were thinking utopian thought where people are just like, I have an idea. Everybody’s going to get on this program and it’s going to fix everything. And there will be puppies for everybody. And that’s like they’ll convey that and they’ll convey that correctly. And the person that it’s conveyed to will interpret it correctly. And that everybody involved in hearing it will act. And none of that is likely to happen. And note those highly influential people are also Muppet. Everyone’s a Muppet. Yeah. Well, that’s that’s the problem is that we’re all Muppets. And when we venerate Muppets, instead of venerating their ideas, or we’ll say they’re good ideas and hopefully not bad ideas, then we make a mistake. Like, look, I support Peterson, even when I disagree with him, because he’s so right that whatever mistakes he makes, because we all make mistakes, they aren’t important to point out. I know he makes mistakes. I know John Brevig can make mistakes. I know Paul VanderKlein makes mistakes. I understand this. Why am I going to critique people who make mistakes? How good is that? Now, if there’s some dirty hippie not making mistakes, but manipulating people, I might critique that, but I don’t like dirty hippies anyway. So, you know, that could happen, right? If there’s some pompous jerk on the Internet like Sam Harris running around telling people you can do things that you cannot do, you say this can be done, show me in your actions that it can be done. You say somebody, you know, somebody ran around and like scarred you in the church. Show me that happening, because otherwise there’s nothing I can do about it. And if there’s nothing I can do about it, why are you telling me about it? I’m a pragmatist. If I can’t do anything about it, I’m going to ignore you. Politely, maybe. Maybe you’ll never know. But I’m going to ignore you. Have we talked about internal and external actions? Have we gone through that a bit? No. Because you can take an internal action and meditate and contemplate, which is a form of an action, or you can pragmatically go out in the world. OK, well, there we go. No, I rejected outright that there is such a thing as internal action. I just said axiomatically not real. Not a thing, not important. Don’t think about it that way. What is meditation? What is contemplation then? Well, I don’t think there are actions. I think, look, in Eastern thought, if you actually read it correctly and you weren’t a Western Buddhist, which almost nobody was a Western Buddhist. Come on, I didn’t read that book. Well, right. Look, if you’re not a Western Buddhist, in Eastern thought, the act of meditation is the act of emptying and taking no action. That’s actually what they say. They say it in India, they say it in Tibet, they say it in China, they say it in Japan. I don’t know what else to tell you. If you didn’t see that or read that in the book, you’ll have a low reading comprehension, or you have a bad worldview, because it’s right in the freaking text. I promise you it’s there, it’s clear as day in all the translations. It’s right there. According to them, that is not taking an action. And I would argue, and I will argue, and maybe Fr. Eric will argue back, that that’s what prayer is. It’s the practice of not taking an action to add contrast, so that when you do take an action, it’s more likely to be right action. But it needs an action in itself to meditate, to contemplate, to mediate. I know anything internal to your head is not an action, because it doesn’t have an impact on the outside world. And if you don’t do that… Why do people then say that I need to go pray about this, for example, or I’ve meditated on this and therefore I take an action? I’m not saying it’s not a valid way to interact with the world. I’m saying it’s not an action in the world. In other words… It’s a part of your discernment model. You’re saying this is your discernment before you’ve taken an action. Sure. You have to have a discernment that isn’t action or action doesn’t exist. Right. Right. Okay. That’s where you’re putting it. Like public prayer, communal prayer, that would end up being an action, right? Sure. If it’s public and communal, if you’re speaking it out loud in the presence where people can hear you, because that’s moving the world in a materialistic way. And I would say action is fundamentally materialistic. It has an impact on the material world. I pray it creates a spirit to residency, especially if it’s communal. Right. It’s prayer of invitation, prayer of blessing. Like my Irish Book of Blessings, which I’ll bring up at some point. I love my Irish Book of Blessings. I want to get all the books of blessings. Yeah, I wanted to I wanted to find a way with that, because it’s a very important thing that we’ve lost is this this ability to mediate and contemplate where we’re at. Because it’s part of the trade-offs, understanding trade-offs. We’ve replaced it with knowledge, and we think that knowledge leads to action. Or materials. And we’ve mistaken knowledge for action. Knowledge is definitely not action. And knowledge is the highest thing. No, the highest thing is action. I can I can prove that to you. If I shoot you in the head, you’re dead. You don’t have any more knowledge, kid. You’re done. It’s over. So what what’s so important about knowledge? If I beat you to death and you’re dead, your knowledge is worth nothing. Nothing. It is valueless. And I would say that’s the most important thing. It is valueless. And I would argue it’s almost certainly valueless before that. What Trump’s knowledge is always action. The man who knows everything and does nothing still does nothing. The man who knows nothing and does everything or something still does something. That’s not that hard. I do want to segue and address this. So would you agree the Bolsheviks acted too much? No, I would not. And that they did not think correctly. No, I would not. They didn’t see errors in their thoughts and acted too much. No, I would not. This is really easy. This is a common pattern in history. The Bolsheviks are anarchists. Anarchists are retarded. Anarchy can’t work at all, ever. It’s not a thing. So what happens is some smart guy like Trotsky says, well, I’m lazy and useless. I’m not going to fight anybody. But you know what? Anarchists love to fight everybody. That’s what they do. And if you look at the hit, this is why when people associate with anarchists, I’m like, why are you assisting with murderers and people who bomb people? This is not a gold star kind of a thing. This is a very big negative. These are the worst of the worst people in society are anarchists. Sorry. They just are historically. You just look. So what they do is they weaponize. They weaponize the anarchists to do all the hard work of taking action in the world. So they bamboozle them. They enchant them. And they say, you can have utopia. You can have all the gold or all the power, whatever the hell lure you want to or bait you want to put on that hook or lure you want to put on that on that hook. Doesn’t matter. Right. And then they get the Bolsheviks do all the work. And then they know anarchists are by definition disorganized. And therefore, they can’t take over a structure because you have to have hierarchy in order to have a structure. And you have to have structure in order to have a society. If you want to do anything with other people, hierarchy has to exist. It’s not an optional thing. Hierarchy is not optional. I said it in a live stream earlier today. Right. And so what does that mean? They take over and they kill all the Bolsheviks. Why? Because the Bolsheviks are the only ones that are willing to kill otherwise. And so once you have a power structure of religion, we get all these anarchists and most of them are very hippies too. Right. So we got to get rid of them. And then the reason people say, well, normally I wouldn’t kill somebody. But you’re right. They’ve killed people and they’re dangerous. If we don’t kill them, they might kill us. That’s actually correct. And then the hijack is complete. And you see this all the time. People often enchant other people to get them to do their dirty work. That happened in a stream recently. Right. Where somebody tricked somebody else who didn’t really realize it into defaming me over A, something I wasn’t even guilty of that was all psychological projection and B, why? I didn’t go after them. Why are you going after me? You know, like this doesn’t make any sense. And that’s the problem. Right. That’s the problem. All right. What’s this? Double this. Meditation is an activity. But Mark defines an action when you modify the world outside. Yeah, that’s correct. That is correct. That is kind of where I was going with the ideas, belief thing. And I’m still chewing on the final cause first in the order of intention last in execution. So is that like, let’s say the activity is chopping a piece of wood. How would you say that phrase within that? Sure. So you’re going to go chop wood. So the first thing that you do is you think about chopping wood. And the next thing you do is you think about where the wood is and where the axis. And then you go. No. And you get the wood and then you chop it. And then it’s actually done. No. Right. The first thing you think about is whatever you’re going to use the word for. That’s the T-Laws. I’m going to need to meet the house either now or later. And then it’s, oh, in order to eat the house later, I have to first chop the wood. Point conceded. Right. You’ve got to go all the way to the final cause, Father Eric, not just the formal cause. All the way back. I want to address this, though. So, Maxie, Alexander the Great knew everything and did everything. It was still kind of cringe. Well, no, Alexander the Great changed the world for the better. He certainly didn’t know everything. But he was apparently taught by Aristotle. And that may have had something to do with it. Look, Aristotle is not perfect. He made some mistakes like Plato. Didn’t Trotsky have incorrect knowledge? No, Trotsky had correct knowledge. He just had a stupid worldview that’s impossible. And he pondered utopia, which is, isn’t, we don’t live in a world where utopia is possible. He didn’t have incorrect knowledge and maybe you would not have an influence. No. Look, influence is independent of knowledge. Knowledge has nothing to do with influence. The most knowledgeable people in the world don’t have the most money and they don’t have the most influence. Observable. Observably false. Knowledge is worthless. Stop it. Just get rid of it. You don’t need it. It’s fine. It’ll be fine. Everything will be fine. A fleabus, as anybody figured out what the Christian anarchy is. Christian anarchy is a lie told by people who want a fantasy to exist that cannot definitionally exist because they refuse to use words correctly because they’re so freaking rebellious that they can’t fathom that the world is not the way they want it to be. And so they’re just like, the world’s not the way it wanted to be, so I’m going to rebel against every aspect of it and come up with an obvious contradiction. Okay. Good luck living that contradiction. Anarchists are violent and they kill people with bombings because they’re cowards. Don’t associate with them. Bad, bad, bad. What is this film? Nitrum. I don’t know. I haven’t seen it. You haven’t seen. I haven’t seen. There’s, you know, actually, I don’t know if you’ll believe this, Mark, but I haven’t seen the majority of films. I do believe it because you hadn’t seen Real Genius, which I watched again recently with my cousin. I’m glad that I got that one in. But yeah, the majority of films I haven’t seen. We watched Bridges Spies, which is an excellent film. I had no idea how good it was with Tom Hanks. It’s fantastic. And then I made him watch Real Genius because he’s just scrolling through these movies to get this goofy set up. He’s all in the media and he’s just scrolling through and scrolling through for like, seemed like a few years. And finally, I was like, oh, Real Genius is good enough. Let’s watch that. And then I had seen it, you know, in January here. Yeah. Yeah. It was as delightful as always. I absolutely loved that. But lots of good lessons in Real Genius. Lots of good lessons in War Games, especially the end, which I had to quote earlier today in the in the in the Vanderstain livestream. Right. A strange game. The only way to win is not to play economics. Strange game. The only way to win is not to play politics. Strange game. Yes. Let’s go on and on and on. All bad frames, by the way, because you can’t take an action that, you know, or the actions don’t match what you’d want for real. What you’d want for results. Right. All the actions you take won’t have the results you want. So, yeah, it’s it’s it’s that difficult. There we go. Hanselman. I don’t feel so unusual then, Father Eric. There you go. I’m not I’m not well-movied either. I got to catch up because Jesse’s given me a bunch of movies to watch and I haven’t. I’m bringing it up because I never get an example of an evil person. Look, evil is easy. I don’t know why you guys make this difficult. Like anything that’s self-referential or parasitic and only those things or both of those things is evil. And I like I like the way Peterson put it when he was talking about Foucault and he said there’s a place you can go. It’s so dark that you know it’s dark and that you’re going there to do more dark things. That’s evil. Mark, I have to nitpick now. Go ahead. If you’re one of those weird people, they can like think about it and meditate and actually lower your heartbeat. Is that an action? No. Okay. I can do that. Or I used to be able to do that. I can’t do that anymore. I have this. Strange because that isn’t the way the word and I’m not saying the word actions should be used this way, but it seems counter to the way the word is used often. And that’s why I have to pick it. No, no, that’s fair. Well, I think that’s part of the confusion. I think it Casey, it’s not you. I think it’s Jesse who’s leaking audio. Yeah. Yeah. Was Jesse. I knew it was Jesse. He’s always the troublemaker. Aziz are like that. Yeah. I would. The problem with action is how you’re viewing it. And what happens is we stop viewing the world from external perspectives, right? And projecting an external perspective outside and then judging. And we start going, oh, you know what? I can just judge this from within my head. You can’t do that. It’s all imagination. And like you need to be able to triangulate. You need two other points of reference in order to navigate to orient to triangulate. So this is good because this is what carries over into words or violence, opinions or violence. Bigotry is violent. Because actually if bigotry is not. To the void again. How did she do that? My anytime I try and do a thing, that’s when my family is like, We must call Sally now. I should probably leave and go be part of my family because apparently I’m wanted. So I guess to get to my two cents, I can raise and lower my heartbeat and body temperature. Oh, there she goes. I was going to respond to that. Keep going. So I mean, it’s common among like martial artists and maybe some monks and stuff like that. People can raise their heartbeat and body temperature and maybe you’ll feel a salacious And maybe you’ll feel a saliva in your mouth like in between maybe like if you in martial arts training or if you’re in between sets, if you’re pretty experienced, I would I was I think a lot of people look at this in terms of proactive passivity, which is a form of very intense concentration as opposed to apathy. You know, you know, I think Danny, the problem with all of that is discernment is impossible. Right. Your heartbeat changes all the time without conscious effort. Is that an action? If it’s how is it your action? How is hunger your action? How like that? Right. But those things are outside because they’re further away from from from intention. And you can discern that. No, it’s not. No, no, no. This is what I’m saying. Like intention, discernment, judgment. Those aren’t actions. They can’t be because they don’t affect the outside world. If you’re trying to discern inside world with action, words are violence. That is correct. Unfortunately, it’s wrong. Like, no, we can’t live that way. That is not a way that we can live with a definition like that. It’s not possible to get along if words are violence, because then we can’t communicate with words anymore. We kind of need the things. We use them all the time. So you can’t make that mistake because it causes an inevitable unresolvable confusion. Action has to affect the outside world. The fact that your heart rate went down, I can’t measure or know. And in cases that I can, I can’t interact with that. So what? I don’t give your heart rate went down. Good. Does that do me? It doesn’t mean any good at all. Is this working? Yes. No echo now? No echo. You’re the best. I’ll take that. I’ll take that on this. So what’s happening in meditation then? It depends. Sometimes nothing. Sometimes it’s just a little bit of a But again, you’re creating contrast. It’s explicit in the Easter. Like I don’t understand. Read the texts. It is, you know, they’re not like Sam Harris is like misconstruing everything to Western views. When he’s not wrong, when it’s the view from nowhere. The view from nowhere is a place where you cannot act. It is the contrast for action as such. That’s what it is. Definitionally, it is actually putting yourself in a place where action is not possible on purpose so that you can discern action. I’m going to be annoying. So why does why does meditating getting into a flows? What is the difference then? Then because the flow state is not a place from nowhere. The flows to yeah, but a flow state isn’t a meditation. Meditation may facilitate. You meditate to get into a flow state. No, you don’t know. And if you do that, you’re going to you can’t you can’t you’re going to destroy yourself mentally. You’re going to become a bad person almost instantaneously. That’s Steve Jobs. That’s what these people did. Right. Yeah. If you if your T loss for your meditation is that you will corrupt yourself in the meditation guaranteed every time. So the T loss for meditation would be discernment or contrast. He said that. Yes. The T loss for property loss for meditation is discernment or contrast. And the proper T loss for meditation is positive second order effects like John Verbeke talks about. Meditation series is great. I’m here. Something I like about and I’m just wondering what your thoughts are. Mark. So in some forms of Catholic medication, you have to put a certain amount of effort into picturing a scene, right? Placing yourself in a biblical scene with Jesus. And so if we’re not going to classify that as action, OK, what are we going to classify that effort and that concentration? Effort. That’s why we have a different word. You just used a different word. Use that word. Don’t use the word action. It’s not an action problem. I do. I do want to I do want to address this. In general, I don’t like it when words meaning get changed to support a philosophy. Well, I’m not changing anything like how Mark is changing. I’m not changing anything like how Mark is changing. I’m not changing the definition of action. I am telling you that there is no reducing the overcomplication of yourself and yourself alone, which would include meditation. It would include your thoughts, would include your imagination. Now, whether or not you can change your heartbeat is not useful as an action in the world because it doesn’t affect the world. It only affects you. Lots of things only affect you. Does that mean every time you exist, you’re in action? No. If you’re sitting in your basement eating Cheetos, I mean, maybe you’re taking an action of eating Cheetos, whatever, but you’re not actually affecting the outside world. Playing a video game by yourself, you’re doing anything that affects the outside world, rather than using up electricity and destroying yourself. Probably not. So there’s a there’s a chasm between action and embodiment. And you’re trying to point. So keep that don’t get too confused. Well, look, I’m look because you can embody if action isn’t able to be discerned by someone other than you. It has no utility in the world to be thought of by you because you can’t validate it. It’s just insanity. Definitionally, if if I take an action like let’s suppose I shoot somebody in the head. But I didn’t shoot anybody in the head. There’s no dead people that I take an action or not. If I thought about it and thought thinking is action, then what does that mean? Like, how are you using that? What is the utility in thinking about things that way? Well, I get it. I’m trying to go for it. Yeah. So another question is, are non actions that play place inside of our head able to make us less virtuous? Because you were talking about Steve Jobs, right? And he is doing his his entirely self referential rumination. And you said that that makes him a bad person that made him less virtuous. So the very minimum it it it corrupted his potential for doing good in the world, which is not a first order kind of action. But it would be kind of like a second order thing. It’s all second. Meditation is all second order effects. Not to say that there aren’t second. There are first order effects. There can be meditation is all second order effects. And so what I’m saying embodied, they’ve been embodied after the meditation. Steve Jobs had a bad T loss for his meditation. And so the potential that he manifested was that and he was not a good person, which is not to say he wasn’t better as the result of the meditation. It’s to say that it didn’t make him into the type of person one would expect from a good meditator, assuming there is such a thing as good meditation. A lot of assumptions in there. But that’s the problem is that when you get tied up with things in your head and then trying to take them out of your head, you have all kinds of problems. Like, yeah, I mean, I should be able to dictate the pronouns you use for me while I’m not there. If it’s all inside my head, then that’s true. But my actions are not inside my head. If you think of actions that way, you will corrupt the world. Period. There’s no other choice. The thing that corrupts you is not. Engaging in meditation for the sake of meditation, the thing that corrupts you is that the T loss for the meditation is corrupt and therefore you’re wasting the potential. In something other than contrasting good action. Or right action might be the better, the better terminology to use. That’s the issue. Yeah. I want to address this. So, Matt C. Then you get to introduce what is permissible after you first demonstrated that nothing is permissible without authoritative permission. To self referential. Ethan likes the live stream. It’s been epic and the participation has been some wacky symbol that’s probably awesome. He’s taking an action by planting a tree. Just to let you know. Go ahead, Jenny. Sorry. I never respond to the anchor thing. But one thing, an anchor has to be perceived. In other words, it’s downstream from epistemology. And we live in a world that has lacks a lot of epistemic confidence. It’s like in the Christian world, it’s like the doctrine of assurance. In the same way that you cannot logic someone into faith or you can’t explain to somebody with reason. Like the doctrine of assurance, so to speak. Because it’s downstream from your assumptions. Like, okay, I’m reading this text. I assume it has a Christocentric thread. And there’s these things that point in the same direction. But fundamentally, is it not just predicated upon a trusting hierarchy? Where you just say, I’m going to submit to a hierarchy. And you just decide. So fundamentally, it’s just resolve. You just make a decision. Is that not really what’s at the bottom of that? You first, and this is when Jesse was saying internal action, is you just decide, this is it. This is who I am. And I mean, you cannot, you can’t just rationalize. I’ll point that to embodiment. You have to embody that. You don’t just decide, you embody it and it becomes a part of your matrix of thought. It’s not just one decision or one action. It’s the repeated behavior, repeated belief in what you’re doing that causes you to have that phenomena in the world. It’s a lot wrong. First of all, epistemology is no word. It’s just a non, don’t even think about astrology ever. It’s just a garbage way to think about the world. The bottom line is action matters and knowledge and thought don’t. Period. It’s not that they’re not useful. It’s that the thing that matters primarily. Would it be helpful to say it this way, is that the measure of your knowledge and thought is in the actions that they actually lead to? Yes. Well, yes. And that flows into this. So bubble this action, definition and meaning. Well, you’re not going to find meaning in the dictionary. Meaning can’t exist in the dictionary. You can only find a definition, which is content. The working of one thing on another so as to produce a change. Here’s the problem. Change implies measurement. It requires measurement. If there’s only one observer making a measurement, there’s no measurement possible. The single observer problem exists in physics. It exists everywhere. It’s the same as the statement of theory of relativity. Gauge theory is real. Right. And so if I measure something at one inch and Casey measures something at one inch and we’re using different rulers that say an inch, but the inch isn’t the same size, that is not helpful. Right. And this is what I’m saying. Yes. Change. You can’t measure change by yourself on your own ever. Gauge theory is very clear about this. I know people are confused. They think there’s some objective measure. There’s no such thing as an objective measure. And that’s why it’s important that things are outside of your own experience to be an action because then they’re measurable. Right. Or you can at least find a way to make them measurable between the two of you. And you are outstretching your sanity because if you are measuring everything, you think you’re getting better and you’re still Steve Jobs and destroying the world. Not a fan. This is how we get into this. Danny, we’re trying to point to purposes. No, I wasn’t pointing to purposes. I was pointing to I don’t like. So, for example, if you if you like, once I when I was in college, for example, I did a bunch of research on, you know, probably for many, many hours on the doctrine of assurance, trying to understand it. And then I asked about it. Right. Sorry, it was a little bit loud. I couldn’t understand that. Sorry. Was your study of reassurement. Did it reassure you or did it cause you to be bored? Yeah, absolutely not. Right. So, of course not. You’re right. And so it’s true what I knew. Right. But it was so it was one of those it was a you know, it was younger back then. But, you know, it was it’s an obvious paradox at some point. The response that I got wasn’t some logical response. The response that I got was why do you feel that way? Which I didn’t see coming. It was like the only response that I hadn’t foreseen. And then I was like, oh, that’s interesting. He just like maybe maybe the answer to the question just doesn’t even matter. Maybe it’s just an irrelevant question, actually. Maybe it’s a dumb question, actually. Well, it’s not a dumb question. Maybe. Right. But so but fundamentally at the bottom of the question, I think, is that the question is, is it a question of what you think is the answer? At the bottom. At the. Yeah. Go ahead. At the bottom of it. Yeah. At the bottom of it was feeling that and it’s these things that are like, you know, like kindergarten level type of stuff. You know, that’s really what was that? What’s at the bottom of again? Like, you know, when I say like, okay, you don’t like epistemic making sense, whatever word you want to use for sense making and being confident with respect to your sense making. I’ll use the word epistemic. What would you whatever what would you would would be a better word? Well, that’s not a worldview. A formation of a worldview. Epistemology is knowledge. So what what do you mean? Sense. I think you’re trying to talk about purposes. You reassurance, right? You wanting some. It’s like reassurance is the Christian safety inner safety religion. I am safe now in this life or my thoughts because I have this reassurance. I don’t have to go on and be in this faith and conflict and wrestling with God and suffering because I have this reassurance. Now doing the right things. That’s because you’re trying to find a purpose to leave it out of rather than knowing that you’re actually enacting your purposes. Well, I don’t know that I would agree with that personally. I mean, that’s just I don’t personally resonate with that. But I think I mean, but I mean, but I mean, I do disagree with that. Thoughts are not very important. I mean, I think that there I think that there are more it’s like it’s like training training the mind versus, you know, no, it’s not. Thoughts aren’t important. It’s thoughts aren’t action. Right. Like that’s different. Action is more important than thought. It’s thought also like primary action important. And that’s the and that’s the issue. And then, you know, if you’re asking the question of how can I be sure of something, which is our sure ends right or reassurance is how can I again be assured of something or certain of something? Right. That’s a different question because, you know, I mean, then you’re asking, is there an objective material reality or something? Exactly. There’s an objective material reality. Is there a purpose to things? Is there a purpose to my life? The purpose for going to sleep. Nice to see you father. God bless. What did you what do you mean by assurance? I don’t know what this is. Is it like justification or something? Is that what you’re talking about? Depends on your Christian metaphysics. Yeah, I can do it. Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure. Well, that’s what you’re going to see. I know it’s a highly Protestant minefield. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think it’s I don’t I could respond to that, but I kind of don’t want to open it up. I’m not trying to avoid it, but what are you trying to get at? That’s the question. Well, with respect to action, well, I was my understanding of your idea of action is that it’s a test for your judgment slash discernment stack. Let’s say it’s a way to test whether that’s no, no, because you don’t have to use it that way. And people don’t they take action and they ruin the world and they never adjust anything. I’m saying that you should do that. You should use it as a test. Right. You can’t adjust your discernment, your judgment, unless you’re looking at the results of your action and judging them using your judgment on them relative to your prediction relative to an ideal. Like in the ideal world where everything were perfect and I was a perfect Muppet or not a Muppet because I’m perfect. Right. And the world was perfect and rational. I expect utopia to fair enough or whatever that looks like for what you’re trying to enact the world to tell us. Right. Your final cause. Right. And then your prediction. Well, I’m probably not going to be able to do it in this budget. So I’ll triple my budget. Right. So I can maybe meet my budget or maybe come in under budget. Fair enough. Right. And then it happens and you go over budget anyway. You’re like, holy crap. You don’t have to do that. You can just go with, yeah, I just took an action, ruined the world and went right on with my life. I know lots of people who do this. Most people in fact do that. They never go back and look at the results of their actions and make adjustments to either their world or their judgment or their discernment. And then you go, you know what? That person makes bad decisions. What do you think bad decisions are? They’re either bad judgment or bad discernment or both. I would argue that discernment is going to lead to bad judgment except by accident most of the time. Right. But I can’t tell externally. And this is where it gets tricky. I can’t tell external whether it’s bad discernment or bad judgment or bad luck. I don’t know. It could be that you’re absolutely right. And had you done it at any other point in time, it would have worked. That’s luck. Luck happens. Right. Randomness is a factor. Read Nassim Taleb’s books. They’re all great. Right. And that’s the problem is that you internally have a bigger problem because you can’t by default do any of those measures on your own. It’s not possible. This is why the perspective of action as external to you is important because otherwise you’ll try to determine whether or not you’re taking an action without any validation from the outside world. And then words are violence. That’s actually the case. We cannot live in a world where words are violence. That’s not going to work for us. We will become tribal and we will all kill each other in a war. I’m still a no on that. Call me crazy. Especially when we’re always judging whether we want to admit it or not. There are judgments spinning around thoughts like judgments, patterns, ways of belief, even purposes, conflicting purposes we have. This is all happening at conscious and unconscious levels. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s all happening outside and internal and I have to learn to what to enact on what not to enact on it’s still an action. It’s just been choosing not to embody all to mediate between. Look, you know, the bottom line is contemplation is explicitly judging your past whatever in relation to your current whatever. It can be about something you did, right? It is creating that space to contrast so that you can fine tune your discernment and judgment. And I talked about this in judgment last week, is that, yeah, you judge all the time. And when you think you don’t, all you’re doing is destroying your own discernment. And the next thing you know, you don’t understand why drag queen story hour isn’t a good idea, even though it should be obvious to anybody with a brain that that is not a good thing. And then you lose the ability to critique. But you’re critiquing for sure. You’re judging for sure because you’re acting in the world. And this is where it becomes a problem. And again, this is like I’m telling myself I’m not judging. So I’m taking an action in my head of not judging. No, you’re not. That’s why you can’t cast action as something only inside you. Because you can’t tell. You need somebody from the outside to help you because you’re a muppet and you can’t see yourself clearly. So you can’t use internally calibrated senses alone to navigate the world. That’s not navigation. I understand why people like Sam Harris, because he says all you need is direction. You, you personally, you, you can go ahead and figure out what the worst evil is. No, you can’t. That is the dumbest, most obviously stupid thing that anybody could possibly say. I will prove to you it will take hours, maybe days, but I’ll wear your ass out. Anything you cast at the worst possible evil, I’ll make worse. This is a known mathematical property of the universe. No, really, this has been done. The math is real. You cannot get to the worst possible evil. And therefore, there’s no starting point to move away from it. And therefore, even if he was right about direction and he’s not, his system cannot work. Cannot. There’s no solution fixed, way to redeem it, way to make it work. It cannot work. This is the problem with self-referencing systems. They can’t calibrate. You live in the world with other things and other people. You live in a world with other people. You live in the world of nature. You live in the world with your passions. Do you think your passions are under control? Because by definition, there are things you don’t control. Not that you have no control, but your passions come up. Sometimes I just want to punch Sam Harris in the face. Well, Jim Pearson, right? Sadness is outsourced. You maintain your sadness outsourced. Or common sense, common unity. Because people will tell you if you’re in community with them, hey, don’t go there. Don’t do that. Yeah. And don’t embody those actions or stop embodying those actions. That’s their purpose. So Bruce says you can’t evaluate actions of yourself or others without a measurement and shared standard or commonality. If not, then you’re only fighting on behalf of a number, any number of vitals. Well, and also you’re unable to discern and judge and adjust your discernment and judgment. Because whatever action you take is always correct in your head. Always. This is why people double down on their ideologies. Because their ideologies are never wrong. My ideology is not wrong ever. It can’t be wrong. It’s in my head. There’s nothing in my head to push back on what’s in my head. That’s foolish. That’s why opponent processing doesn’t exist. It’s not that we don’t process and it’s not that processing doesn’t have conflict. It’s that processing leads to cooperation. And so the part of your head that’s the devil that says, ooh, this is a great ideology. And the part of your head that’s an angel and says, maybe this ideology isn’t so good. You can consider something friendlier. The angel’s going to lose because the devil’s going to drag it down. Because you both need to get along. So the tendency is to go down. And you’re not struggling upwards if you’re sitting in your head going, you know what? Or worse yet, you’re sitting with a bunch of people who already believe what you believe. You’ve preselected the final cause. You’ve preselected the telos. And now utopia is real because these other six people have used their sanity to validate my sanity. That’s called group insanity, guys. You want mass formation? That’s what mass formation is. We’ve already assumed the end, and now we’re moving towards it. That’s what a conspiracy theory is. I need an explanation to rationalize what I’m seeing in the world. And when I look at the White House in the United States, literally right now, and I’m not joking, the best rational explanation for what’s going on in the White House right at this moment since however long you want to go back, but we can just go back to the last election, is lizard people run the world. That is actually the most rational explanation that there is. Well, people hijack the Olympic system for sure. But the lizard brain, yeah. It’s lizard people who are running things. I don’t know what they want. I’m refraining. I can kind of guess by what actions are being taken what they want. But I can’t know that because I’m not there to view their actions. I can view the results of their actions, which is their manipulation of the White House and surmise and infer all kinds of things. Absolutely. And now I can justify any number of interactions that the White House is making and why they might have blown up the pipeline from Russia because the lizard people needed that gas. I could go on forever. The problem is, while I’m doing that, I can’t move towards the highest. I can’t instantiate virtues and values. I mean, this is the problem that Dennis Prager is running into with his ridiculous comments on porn, right? Like, yeah, you can do those other things, but now you’re not… your kilos is not towards the highest anymore. You’re not instantiating virtues and values in action. Instead, you’re instantiating something bad. And you can always argue, well, it’s less bad than the most bad thing. Thanks, Sam Harris Prager. No. I was going to quote the great Kamala Harris and say, Space is exciting. It’s big. Double viz. Lizard people are over-acting. What actions would I… I agree. There’s Bruce. Oh boy. Oh, that’s great. We’re ready to… You look about as evil as you can. Fantastic. We’ve already got Devil Boy Danny, so… I’m by the fire. No, this is the fire of eternal passion. Not evil. Excellent. I want to make a case for Judge… Let’s do it. A case for judging? Judge Dredd. Judge Dredd. No more Batman. We’re back on that again? Oh, okay. I’m a Protestant. I’m pro-Batman all the way. You know that. And I argue that Judge Dredd is doing the same thing Batman’s doing. Oh, no. Oh, yes. Sweet summer. Did you see my video on Batman versus Superman? Yeah. I did not. I need to watch it. I did see the notification though. Oh, okay. Yeah, that’s… You’re not going to like that video. Okay, fair enough. You know where Bruce stands already. We don’t even have to have him watch the video. There are all sorts of problems with Batman. Don’t get me wrong, but you know… Yeah, Superman’s far too naive. For all intents and purposes, he’s an alien. Therefore, not good. I agree. There’s way more wrapped up. Yeah, after you watch that video, I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts. Oh, okay. Sure. Yeah. I hate to get into the symbology archetypical stuff so much, but it’s unavoidable. So, I’ll get into it. I think it’s the most important thing actually, especially now because we’ve avoided symbolism so much that we’re not able to see simple religious patterns like washing of feet and BLM and, you know, ridiculous things. Yeah, it’s interesting. I see that. I actually think that we’ve gone way too far into symbolism because of the way things are today, which is why people are so easily swayed by archetypical symbols. In fact, they’ve done the Indiana Jones thing with the idol and they’ve just swapped worldview symbol and they still do the same symbols. Yeah, but they’re not doing that consciously, Bruce. That’s the point. I mean, yeah. That’s the difference. Okay, okay. I don’t know. It’s constant. In some ways it may be, but I understand what you’re saying. There’s definitely a subversive element to that. Well, no, I mean, my point is just, yeah, symbolism is inevitable, like pattern, pattern, pattern, pattern, like the meme says. So, yeah, but then they’re not doing it consciously and then they’re denying that they’re doing it because it’s not conscious and it’s not a rationality issue and they think they’re rational and therefore they can’t be doing that. And then it’s like, no, you’re acting out of religion. I mean, it’s, yeah, it’s as old as time, if you ask me, rationalizing the problem. Of course it is. Adam rationalizes, oh, it’s Eve’s fault. Right, right. Eve says it’s the snake’s fault. But it’s important to understand that the reason why we’re in this trouble is because we think we’re rational when we’re not. And instead we’ve been captured by patterns and we’re not taking that into account. We’re not saying, oh, patterns are important and our rationality needs to account for that. Well, could you even blame folks for, I mean, it’s like telling a fish they’re swimming in water. Yeah. Well, you can if you’re denying that they’re swimming in water or that there’s such a thing as a fish that’s swimming in water or that there’s an aquarium that exists, which is what they’re doing. Yeah, exactly. But it’s very, it’s extremely difficult to do. I didn’t say it was easy. I said it was necessary. Those are different things. It is. It’s a struggle. Sure. Life is a struggle and we have to struggle against the other Muppets because we’re all Muppets together in the Muppet land. So what else are we going to do? Yeah, I mean, the people like you are necessary, you know. Well, that didn’t sound very flattering, but thank you, I think. Yeah, it was meant to be. Yeah, it was meant to be. I know, it didn’t come off that way, my friend. It wasn’t backhanded. It was, it was on it. No, I don’t think it was. I’m just saying it didn’t come off very well. Yeah. I think what I was, your Harris comment was interesting because if he doesn’t, he never will admit, especially his sycophants won’t either, that they’re providing solutions. They’ll never state that. Although they are, but they’ll always squirm out of that and say, well, we’re not telling you what to do. Yeah, yeah. But they are. They are. You can do a thing. And it’s like, well, that’s a subtle difference. Yeah, yeah. But, and that’s not my objection. Like I tell people they can do things all the time. My objection is you’re telling them that they can do something that they definitely cannot ever do. That’s my objection because that’s a lie. That’s fraud. That’s not good. Well, it’s, but at least you’re admitting that you’re providing solutions. It’s even more disingenuous on their part because they’re stating they’re not. No, no, exactly. But that’s what I mean. Like that’s the, that’s the whole thing. And Ethan’s going to critique you. He sounds like Tyler. We need people like Mark. He did. That is what he did. He did sound a bit like Tyler in his backhanded dirty hippie attack. Oh, I don’t know Tyler. Oh, thank God. Your life is better for it, my friend. I’m sure you’re, I’m sure you’ve been affected by him indirectly and not knowing it because he’s a sneaky little son of a bitch. If I, if I have, I don’t remember him. Yeah. Trying to remember the podcast he was on with, with Brett from Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, but it’s not coming to me. Oh, that guy. I don’t, I don’t, I’ve only heard his name. I don’t think I’ve talked to him. He’s destroyed many an online community according to many, many people who’ve told me that, no, no, I was there and I know this. I’m like, maybe, I don’t know. His actions through his actions. Well, or worse yet, he manipulates other people and taking actions and like, like still, still an action, right? Influence is the ultimate action actually. It is. Yeah. I mean, in the model, I kind of made the, but in the model, like I kind of made the case that, yeah, you know, there’s a, you’re not taking an action in that case. You’re doing something sneaky. Like you’re getting around the responsibility of taking an action. And look, I would make this argument for a lot of people, right? I would say when you’re not leading the thing that you’re pointing at, that’s a problem already because you’re trying to get around taking the action for yourself because you would have to be responsible. And that’s what this is what Bruce was talking about with Sam Harris. They deny that they’re telling you to take an action to get around the responsibility of telling you that you can do something that will result in an action that may or may not work out for you. I won’t work out for you. That’s worse. It won’t work out. Yeah, it is worse. And it’s not zero action because I said communication is action. It’s just low value action and all communication is equal in action. And I said that for a reason to exemplify the fact that I can move somebody or not move somebody or just describe something. And that has the same value. Like I can call Danny some devilish technology wizard. OK, and that’s the same as saying Jesse is a bizarre, twisted. Artist. And that’s no different from saying I’m sitting in a room with a whiteboard in terms of action, not in terms of impact, because those are different things. The action that you sensed in the world is equal. The impact of the action was different because I’m using deliberately using tone. I’m deliberately using certain certain words in a certain way to to move you. Right. But but the weight of the action from your perspective takes the same amount of energy for me to say roughly the same amount of things. Roughly. I get there’s a little bit. Danny and I have keyboards now. That’s that’s it. Right. Keyboard keyboard. Like you point to actions that we make. Right. The descriptions of characteristics. Right. And you can use description only to manipulate people into actions. You can write and then they and then they jump in and they start accusing people of things because you pointed at something and gave them a frame. And that’s very duplicitous. But you pointed at something by communicating to speaking as an action. Right. It’s just a low value action. And when you look at an action and go, oh, you know what? He gave me a frame for attacking somebody. Maybe that action is important. Why? That action is no more value than him telling you that flowers are blue or something like it. You know, you shouldn’t overvalue that. Right. Because what you’re doing is you’re responding to the impact and not the action. And that’s how you get people sweet talking you and enchanting you with their low, slow voice. And they’re talking about stars. Now they’re connected to the cells in your body and how it’s really all the same relationship. It’s all bullshit. Right. It’s it’s listen to Jordan Hall. He talks way up here for a reason. Right. And like I get it. But also, no, like I’m not specific. Yeah, it’s not specific. For a reason, not like the action. Yeah. Yeah. And in fact, you have to be quite specific. But that’s a tell from manipulation when it’s when what they’re talking about is not linked to an action. Right. Like I can see. Listen, a bunch of people told me about you, Bruce. They told me about what you did on those Discord servers. They told me about your interactions with them in the comments on YouTube. Yes, that’s not linked to an action. It’s just a rumor because I didn’t experience the result. I’m saying somebody else told me they experienced a result. It’s two or three steps removed from reality. And when somebody does something that’s that abstract, they’re they it’s a good possibility that they’re trying to manipulate you. And not all manipulation is bad. So not saying, you know, that that’s a bad thing, but it should ring bells that maybe they’re trying to go to you like maybe me saying that goes, Jesse, into attacking you for something that you maybe actually did or maybe didn’t do because he’s projecting on Batman. He’s a comic hater. He doesn’t understand Batman. No, no, no, no, no. I just prefer he man. I’m going to protest and I may go full protest. Yeah, that’s an interesting parallel. Anyway, these are just me being silly. Mark’s always so straight and direct and ready to laugh. He’s got his like, are you the ship? And I’m like, OK, cool. Yeah, he’s the straight man. We need we need the joke, man. Yeah, we need to. No, I’m not the joke, man. I’m definitely the king of Muppets or something willing to willing to be humbled. This is the this is the job of the number two. The job of the number two is willing to be humbled, but willing to ask the questions that other people are afraid to speak up. That’s right. Yeah. Who’s the hero? Who’s the hero in the Lord of the Rings? Is it Frodo or is it Sam? And, you know, we had an interesting conversation about this, right? Because there is a Gandalf. Sam. Right. Well, Aragorn, obviously, it’s obviously not Aragorn, which is fascinating. It’s it’s obviously Gandalf. Well, I don’t know. I don’t think so. I mean, I think it’s obviously Sam. And that’s part. That’s because you’re valuing you’re valuing the the self sacrificial work of Sam. No. Oh, no. No, because everything pivots on Sam’s support of Frodo. Frodo can’t be Frodo without Sam. Right. There’s no like you can say Frodo, Frodo and therefore very individualistic, but also wrong. And we were talking about this in terms of loyalty and we were having a big discussion about loyalty the other day. It was very tense. But the fundamental problem is the relationship of Sam and Frodo came up, obviously, in loyalty, because there’s an example of loyalty for sure. And what’s that relationship? That relationship is at one point, Frodo tells him to go home. And Sam obeys. And then Sam changes his mind and obeys is loyal to the higher value. So he doesn’t he’s not disloyal to Frodo because he goes home or starts to go home. And then he whatever happens, right? Whatever whatever conscious or unconscious decision making is going on. He then turns around and saves Frodo. And the ring separately and then gives the ring back because he’s loyal. Even though he already understands the danger of the ring is already apparent to Sam. And yet he’s loyal enough to give back the ring because Frodo’s not wrong when Frodo basically says, this is my burden. You can’t carry it. And that, of course, turns around later as he picks him up and carries him. It says, maybe I can’t carry the ring, but I can carry you. And therefore Frodo is not Frodo without Sam. It’s they’re not disconnected. So who’s the hero? The person supporting the hero is the hero because the hero doesn’t exist in a vacuum, contrary to what Batman and Superman might tell you. Yeah, but neither one of them exists without Gandalf. No, no, they do exist without Gandalf. All Gandalf does is point. He takes the feminine role. I want to address Benjamin Franklin. What if Sauron is the real hero after all? He’s not. It’s that simple. Sauron? Oh, come on. For the sake of ruining discernment. Yeah, that’s nuts. You’re not going to get anywhere with the hermeneutics of suspicion and the cynical skepticism of Socrates. Like screw those people. They never built anything. They never built anything for a reason. Why, why you would watch the Amazon series? Beyond my comprehension. Why would you want something that’s completely devoid of the actions and intentions of the order or the even the the pro-grammar of the narrative? You could say this is what Tolkien is. It’s the act of destruction of the link between action, discernment and judgment. Like that’s the hermeneutics of suspicion is. It’s like, well, I’m suspicious of why Moby Dick was written. Maybe it was meant to be an early treaties on gender. It’s like the fact that you can turn it into that doesn’t mean anything. That is excellent. That’s so good. I can do it. I can. Oh, it’s easy. It’s easy. Well, that’s the thing. Yeah, I know. I can see it. I can see it. Yeah. Any three year old can do that. Foucault and Derrida are just three year olds. Honestly, three year olds with big vocabulary who write big, long words. But the reason why nobody can figure out what the hell they’re writing. And I mean that literally because most people are smart enough to claim they don’t fully understand their work is because their work is garbage and doesn’t make any sense. It’s not because those people are idiots. I don’t think they’re stupid. I think they’re smarter than Foucault and Derrida. And if I’m much smarter than you, maybe I can’t understand what you’re saying. You ever talk to a three year old and try to make out what the hell they’re saying? Sometimes I can’t. I’m like, uh-oh. And I don’t think three year olds wrong. I think I’m an idiot. Cause I am sometimes like that happens. I’m a muppet. I was once doing some film studies course and they would do like 30 to 40 minutes and then they’d break the whole film down what works. And then they would spend the last 15 to 20 minutes doing now let’s do feminist interpretation. And that would always be the most passionate emphasis. It would completely. Deride undercut black highlighter, the entire half an hour of learning that you’ve just done. And I, I never finished, I never finished the series of the course. Cause it’s like, I couldn’t every single time it was like, yeah, this is really interesting. Oh, okay. Cool. And then, okay. Now forget all that. We’re going to completely whitewash all that out. That the thing, so it’s like, well, okay. What am I actually learning then? So do I just need to jump to the last 15 minutes? If that’s the final thing, the final emphasis of your presentation? I can’t not just, okay. Like this is what people have either. You just, you just don’t watch the bad parts. You just turn off all, you just skip the bad songs on the album. It’s like, no, no, that’s not possible. It’s getting in whether you like it or not. Well, and that’s the, that’s the, I would call that the problem of modern philosophy. So Skyler talks about this, right? He had an excellent philosophy teacher who would teach the philosophy as though he believed it. And then at the end of whatever that teaching was, right. The end of learning about whatever philosophy he would say, I don’t believe any of that, here’s why it’s garbage. And then, and then move on to the next one and use that to destroy the previous thing. Now that has its utility of frame breaking. And that frame breaking is appropriate in quote modern philosophy. Now I think all modern philosophy should be destroyed immediately and expunged from the universe, different discussion. That is a valid thing to do. Okay. But only in philosophy. And when you take that hermeneutics of suspicion and that method of frame break learning, which John Vaviki talks about, and you apply it everywhere, you destroy the world because it’s a very postmodern thing to do. I’m not against frame breaking. I’m against postmodern frame breaking for sure. Right. In other words, breaking the frame to break the frame. No, if you’re going to break someone’s frame, you need to give them a new frame immediately, or better yet, you better set up the frame and break it very carefully so that they don’t spin out. Or, or you reform the frame. Right. Right. You manipulate the frame instead of breaking it. Sure. Yeah. Reform is much more sustainable. It’s slower moving though. It’s much slower than revolution. Much slower. Right. I would say restore. I think restore is probably a better sense there. You can’t reform something that’s been broken. It’s a different thing. You can retell a narrative, but you can’t redo the narrative. Sorry. Well, the reason for the restoring is a restoration assumes that it was decayed or dead. Reforming would state that it never died, but it was misshapen. It must remain intact, not be replaced or restored to some original state because it was broken, but reformed back to what it should be. So that’s how I see that. Yeah. These are, you could say aesthetic preferences. Somewhat semantic, but there is a difference though. There is a little difference though between restoration and reformation and revolution. Right. And so all of those things, or death and resurrection, I think those are somewhat different. In a way. Danny? I haven’t heard from you for a while, so I was just giving the floor to you. Well, I mean on Moby Dick, I read Moby Dick and I don’t know what it means, but it was an impressive work and I don’t know how exactly to explain that. My interpretation of it, I mean, it’s probably going to sound cheesy. But my interpretation was completely, I couldn’t find anything like it in the literature of Google academia. I thought he was saying something along the lines of, well, he was making many observations in the way that he at least made many observations along the lines of spiritual enlightenment is boundless. There’s no end to your chase or to the depths of the ocean, which is, maybe that sounds weird, that sounds cheesy. This has been forever. I can’t really remember very well. But I don’t know that, you know, everything has to necessarily be assigned a meaning or that, you know, I mean, especially when it comes to art and things that are rhetorical in nature. I mean, I think that, I mean, I think that there’s a way of evaluating things where we don’t have to, without making reference to action and then impact. I don’t, perhaps, I don’t know, it’s just a thought. If you’re, if you’re, if you’re, I mean, you’re, you’re, you’re trapped in empiricism. If, right, if, if, if, if, if we’re, you know, if action is in, in, I don’t know, that’s to me, that seems not very useful because empiricism is simple and pretty easy for educated people to figure out these days. You know, when it comes to solving problems, I don’t find, I don’t really find that empiricism to be a useful tool. That’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s where I get hung up because I’m, I’m obviously, I’m a big pusher of this mopper crap. I just mean the, people just, I just mean the scientific method. That’s it. What you learn in A.E. is great. That’s all I mean. That’s all I mean. Well, sorry, you said it. What you remember, what you remember from A.E. is probably. Well, are you stating that there’s merely, if you’re merely a pragmatist that doesn’t resolve all issues, right? Is that what you’re saying? Well, I mean, it’s just not, I mean, I just, I’m just not really resonating with the model just very well. Just I’m just not finding, finding a lot of applications. I’m searching for applications for this model and not able to find, you know. What model do you embody? Well, Tony Robbins has one that’s very simple. Belief informs action, which informs results, which loops back to beliefs. And so the key being there, the connection between the, the interconnection between the belief and the result and the action, it’s all intertwined. It’s a, it’s a circle. It’s, you have to, you have to consider them all together. And I mean, I’m not going to die on this. I’m just saying that this is, this is just a pragmatic model that I’ve used. I’m not going to like prove, write a proof for it. I’m just saying I discovered it when I was pretty young and I found it to be super simple, super useful, you know, very, very basic. Right. I have a, I have like a million, you know, thinking tool questions and, you know, my year thinking toolkit and right. But it’s the, it’s the, there’s a, there’s a strong coupling between the embodiment and belief and action. You know, there’s a very like, I mean, and that’s, that’s very core to my worldview. But what you believe about the results can change over time. Absolutely. And you can, and you can manipulate the soul for others to believe about the results that have happened. Right. Like I can believe I wasted years of my life during depression and I could say I was depressed then, or I was depressed then. But these are all beliefs about the result. Like your model doesn’t have an end point. There is like how you actually. I don’t think anybody’s model has an end point. No, you can say like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can definitely say that result had a purpose in my life and I’m able to move forward or build from let go off. If you’re always circling around your beliefs, you’re going to be circular. You can say, okay, that was the season I was in and actually had that purpose. I can see that now whether I want to integrate that or not is a different thing, but I won’t let that, that result actually inform my. In your model, you could let that belief, let that result dictate your future beliefs because you’re always in circling beliefs rather than saying that had that result. But I’m not going to choose to believe. And then act on that more or further. Yeah, you can you can use this model to spiral in depression and kill yourself for sure. People do it all the time. You can use it. Yeah, it has momentum. Yeah, this explains momentum. Yes. Yeah, right. But look, Danny, there’s a difference between descriptive, prescriptive and predictive. And there’s also a difference between things that are process based, right? Like Tony Robbins outline and things that are based on end results. Right. And you need both. Like this is the, this is my criticism of stoicism. Stoicism is great. If you’re in trouble, go stoicism, like go be a stoic. It will help you. It will buy you time. The problem is it gives you a how, but it doesn’t give you a why. Yeah. And, you know, right. There’s, there’s the, I think it’s Nietzsche, right? He says, with a why you can bear almost any how. Right. There you go. Yeah, I agree. In my worldview, the why is all that there is. It’s not the how is by no, the how is entirely informed by the why in spite of your own actions. But I would say Bruce that, that, that, look, I mean, there’s definitely a how, but there isn’t only one how. Because there isn’t only one person and there isn’t only one way, there isn’t only one starting point. And so even if all your ending points are the same, it can’t be only one path. You all have to be on the one path. And I know that in Eastern thought, Well, there’s a, yeah, there’s, there’s a, well, the thing is the path is led by a particular figure that unifies the many paths, but it also burns off the, the, the improper paths. Right. So while it may seem as though there’s many paths, it’s one path that’s unified. So it’s just particulars we’re talking about there. There are wrong ways. There are wrong ways. There are wrong ways. Yeah. I agree that there are wrong ways. Oh, who’s got feedback? What happened there, Jesse? What did you do? I don’t know. I just heard like. I can’t see you. Yeah, that just went through the roof. What? No. Setting, settings, settings, audio. Automatically. No, I turned that off. This is better. The more automatically you adjust my volume is, is on. We had this last time, Danny, you know, I got. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it’s a bug or something. Yeah. Okay. But we blame you. I, yeah, I do see a failing in mere pragmatism, but I can see, I can see a, um, a utility in that in many ways, but it’s, you know, I, I would say that, that, that the only useful things are pragmatic because pragmatism deals with the outcome first. It says, is there an action possible by me? If not, I’m not going to engage with it. Right. And then it’s not for everything. Like you can engage in entertainment or philosophy, which I sometimes do, but I don’t think engaging with philosophy is, is pragmatic. Not everything has to be pragmatic. That you’re not a pragmatist, right? But that’s what prevents people from spinning off is saying, look. Well, I mean, how is there, there could be a practical, there could be a practical application after engaging in philosophy, right? Right. But that’s, that’s beside the pragmatic point. The pragmatic point is about whether or not you’ve taken action in that. I think it’s best to look at it as seasonal. Even in your day, where are you? Your, your game went up. What? You’re like eating the mic. It’s weird that it changes. You need simpler equipment. You need $30micsandlike$30 cameras, and then it won’t freak out. I don’t know why. I’m using air pod right now. I could install that. I could turn that on and be so fancy, but I don’t. You don’t have to be fancy. We just want you to work. And what OS are you using? I want me to work. What OS are you using? Is this a phone? Is this windows? I’m to me. No, I’m Mac. I’m sorry. No, I use Mac too, but I’m just wondering. I’ve got one. You’re fine now. Yeah. Now it’s all right. It is a stream yard gain level problem. It just goes up and then it’s probably, if you have a noise gate on your chain and it’s automatically adjusting, when it hears nothing, it pumps the gain up. Let’s do that for you. For us, for what we have a compressor. I’m sitting in a room of like $30,000ofgear.Ismelllike{I}^{\prime }mdoingwell.Thatdoes{n}^{\prime }tmeaneventhebestgearrequires.Imean,tobefair,likether{e}^{\prime }s$2 million Bugatti’s that you can’t drive every day without massive amounts of work on them. That’s the curse of wealth right there. People don’t understand. You’re trapped. Have we all got automatically adjust my volume? You need to take an action and make sure we’re all on the right orientation. Um, automatically adjust my volume echo cancellation. I turn those off for myself. Hopefully that works. I don’t know. We want them on. I don’t want that stuff on. On the AirPods, I keep that stuff on, on my machine. Um, I don’t. Mark, if somebody, if somebody, sorry, go ahead. No, go for it. Go for it. If somebody says in this model of, uh, I’ve been thinking about this issue, uh, and I have now resolved what I’m going to do about it, that’s a judgment, right? So, yeah. Right. Okay. Yeah. Well, thinking is a judge thinking is, you know, look, discernment requires judgment, right? Like everything’s wrapped up at judgments in the middle, but it’s wrapped up in both sides because, you know, and I went over this in the judgment monologue, right? Like it affects discernment and it affects action. And, and the feedbacks have to be there from both sides as well. And, and another feedback from the results, because if you’re looking at the results that somebody else did, that you weren’t there for the action, you know, your ability to judge their action and their judgment is limited and you probably can’t understand their judgment at all. It may have been perfectly okay at the time they took the action. Like, I don’t know. And I can’t know. Like this is where we go. I went, like I said, this happened today. I was sitting at the lights and well, this is stupid. Why is the light like this? And then I had to remind myself because you’re a muppet and maybe the lights like that because it’s actually the end remainder of an actual algorithmic equation done by a civil engineer. And I know this is unlikely that if this light is inefficient, every other light is efficient that happens in math all the time. If you don’t know that happens, you know, so little math, you shouldn’t think anymore, like this is all over the literature. This is like, you know, very close to mid-level algebra. And I know that because I can’t do anything more than mid-level algebra. And that takes me so much brain power that I never bothered. So except to pass my stupid algebra test, where do I get algebra? Algebra must die. So does all action, does all action have a corresponding upstream judgment or like, so for example, a lot of what we do, our behavior is maybe, I don’t know, subconscious, but like say, say like the example that I used earlier of the voice of hiding in the crowd, many people, for example, like we’re going to have, they’re going to carry these patterns, these actions, these habit patterns, and they have like in a lot of the way that they behave, they’re seeking safety. Do they know that? I don’t know. No, they’re not. No, they’re not. See, people do not succeed. That is not, that is not a mode that people inhabit. It’s just, it’s just bad way to think. It’s a psychological way to think about the world. It’s absolutely wrong. Look, every action is preceded by judgment. It’s discernment, judgment, action. It’s not optional. That’s happening. The question is, are you acknowledging it? And are you cultivating discernment and judgment before you act? And if you’re telling yourself you don’t judge, but you’re acting in the world and you are always acting in the world, then that’s a problem because you’re destroying discernment. You’re admitting that you do not discern. And because it’s required, you’re actually not able to tell the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, good and bad, less and more, now and then, and later. Like those things vanish. The metaphor of an NPC you would say is just, was, was, well, would you say, would that be somebody who lacks discernment or lacks judgment? How would you know if somebody were an NPC? Okay. So you just, okay. What is the statement of an NPC? Most people follow common patterns to get around in life because they’re survivable. Okay, sure. And why is that a bad thing? Like people are pretending like, oh, you’re an NPC. All they’re saying is I’m smarter than you and you’re a retard. Yeah, fair enough. That might even be true, but it’s not helpful. Like, so what, what are you going to do? Lend them your IQ points? No. The statement that some people are smarter than others is a universal truth that is not actionable. Why are you making the judgment if there’s no action associated with the judgment? You’ve wasted your mental energy. Now who’s the NPC and who’s the moron? Well, it’s like the addiction thing. It’s the heroin addict is to be held responsible for his addiction and therefore, or similarly, would not the nihilist must therefore be held responsible for his nihilism? You acted, you’re responsible, period. It’s not that hard. How much responsibility is what everyone’s arguing over? And they don’t realize it because they’re doing the binary thinking and they’re thinking, well, either I acted or something or someone else acted. And it’s like, no, your actions are not responsible. You’re wrapped up in a bunch of things, including manipulations from other people. So I got attacked on a stream the other day. That person was manipulated by somebody else in the stream to attack me. And he doesn’t even realize it, but he’s still responsible because he still took the action. Like, like when is it appropriate ever to publicly chastise somebody that you’ve never spoken to privately about an issue you have with them? I would say that can’t ever be the right answer. Yeah, I agree entirely. Yeah. I mean, sure. That’s one of the that’s one of the basic biblical tenets. And it’s very it’s lost on people today. Lost. You should try to deal with something in private first. Right. You never say anything about somebody in public that you wouldn’t say to their face in private. Right. You approach them in private first and then discuss the issue. And then maybe, maybe, maybe not always you have a you have an authority to talk about it in public, although maybe you never air dirty laundry in public. That’s the thing, too. Like, and I’m not saying that’s true. Right. And once it’s in public, there’s utility to pushing back on what was made public. You know, and maybe you don’t do it in the moment because maybe that’s a tactical error. Right. Maybe the person’s going to get you involved to make you look back and you’re not enough to wait, wait it out and then not make the not make the unforced error and then let them reveal all that they’re going to reveal. And then you can go after them in your own stream later. Not saying that happened here or anything, but. Well, just follow me with this for a second. It seems to me that people that are that are so against this idea of being judged, right, that they’ll take that idea and apply it to themselves. And so therefore they can state, I’m not judging anyone. Therefore, I cannot be judged. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That’s exactly what it’s all projection. I don’t want to be judged. Therefore, I’m not going to judge people. Therefore, a good person wouldn’t judge me. Right. I’m a good person. Obviously. Right. And then that would go so far as to state, well, then when actions are created or done or performed, they can’t be evaluated. Right. That’s right. Who are you to judge? Well, you’ve taken judgment off the table. Yeah. And that that gets you out of the responsibility for your action, but it also takes the responsibility for everybody else’s action away from them. And now who are you going to blame? Oh, I know who to blame. We’ll blame the system. We’ll blame the people. We’ll blame the institution. We’ll blame the government. We’ll blame politics. We’ll blame economics. We’ll blame the climate. We’ll blame the fact that people aren’t doing what I want in the climate. We’ll blame whatever. Right. It’s we’ll blame demons. We’ll blame. Yeah. We’ll blame Satan. Yeah. All the responsibility isn’t in the people anymore. Right. And so you’re going to end up blaming the things that aren’t people. I’m going to blame Twitter. That’s why Twitter is a dumpster fire because Twitter makes people make Twitter a dumpster. No, this is foolish nonsense. Sure. Yeah. It is. And so your actions have no value. There’s no evaluation. They have no merit. But the but the I guess maybe it’s not irony, but the hubris of it is that people want their actions to have ultimate merit, which is which is very, very funny considering their lack of judgment. Right. Right. They’re removed judgment from their own ability to judge whether or not they’re decent people. And then they’re going to stray towards not being decent people. Yeah. But they want you to evaluate their actions as ultimately important. Right. That you must affirm what I do. Yeah. Well, where’s the judgment then? Wait, you’ve just asked me not to judge. How can I affirm you? Yeah. Oh, I can’t. So now what? Exactly. Well, and this is this is how you know it’s foolish nonsense. This is why I get up partially upset with people when they engage and they do this a lot. They will engage with we’ll say woke thinking. Right. And they’ll say, oh, all right, the rules are X. Therefore, I’ll follow the rules. They’re not following rules. Why are you trying to follow their rules when they’re not making any rules? You’re inferring their rules from their action or believing what they say about what they believe. But it’s clear from their actions that they don’t believe those things. Right. You can say all day long, you care about the climate. But when you’re jumping on a jet all the time, everywhere you go, or you have seven houses or whatever, you don’t care about the climate. You’re lying. Yeah. It’s not hard. It’s a formative contradiction. And therefore you’re not being true. Right. Well, and there’s there’s a an absolutist position that they’re asking for. Yet they’re not acting as though that’s the case. Right. If that were the case, if it were truly objective, as they claim, then these people should be living in the woods and all of their efforts should be at destroying any and all things that are hurting the planet. But they’re not doing that. They should be the Unabomber. They should be. Yes, they should totally be Kaczynski. And everyone should be. Yeah. And they should be writing manifestos and on street corners and blowing up farms and all the above. But they don’t. They don’t believe it. Right. And very few do. Very few do. And I’ve and I’ve said this before. Look, if you really believe that, like if you really believe you’re an individual, go be an individual. And then I won’t interact with you because you won’t. You’ll be an individual. I won’t have to interact with you. Right. You win because you’re living out your dreams. I win because I don’t have to listen to your idiocy. It’s a win-win situation. If you want a win-win situation and you believe that, go act it out. I will be happier. You will be happier. And the world will actually be a better place. Yep. We don’t get to this intimacy crisis without people thinking that they’re individuals. Man, your mic’s really low. How does Jesse end up with problems? How is this now? We’re fine. That’s good. That’s good. Good. Fine. That’s good. I was trying to say this is how we get to the intimacy crisis where people, everyone’s, if they think you’re an individual, you’ll act like an individual in the world. You’ll take actions and then you’ll wonder why you’re so lonely or don’t have a partner or unable to connect with people or spend all your time on video games or other forms of addictions. All addictions are manifestations of individual beliefs. Exactly. No, exactly. Exactly. What I was trying to say before is that the best way I see in enacting the world is seasonal. Where are you in the day? Where are you in the cycle? Are you in winter? Are you in spring? Where are we in the year? Where are we in this? You know, you could say in the bull and bear markets, these waves. Where are you? What’s going on? And what are the appropriate actions to take? What age are you? Okay, cool. It’s a good indicator of like, hey, there are some actions you probably need to make. The actions you make in your 20s should not be the same actions you’re in your 40s. I thought you’d be individualistic. Yeah. Right. Well, the maturity. Right. Oh, go ahead. How’s this little corner of the Potemkin village tonight? Yeah. I don’t know what that is. I don’t know that reference. What’s Potemkin? It’s putting up a false front basically. Right. So, idiomatic. Any false construct devised to disguise a shortcoming or improve appearances? No, that’s not what we do here. Oh, we’re disingenuous. Oh, I see. Maybe. Exactly. It’s more, Hermeneut it’s a suspicion. It’s more skeptical cynicism. It’s more of the same garbage that I personally rally against. Can you put that person’s name up? Can you put that up? Hey, so and so, if you think we’re so disingenuous, come on, tell us. Stop being a coward. Also true. Sorry. Keyboard warriors are rampant. There is a link. Keyboard warriors are… It’s disingenuous. We’re doing this for a community. We’re doing this to actually have a conversation and dialogue. Sorry, Bruce, I’ve interrupted you. No, no, no. It’s there. They’re the… Yeah. The keyboard warriors are the STDs of the internet. It’s absolutely horrible. I love it. Totally stealing that. I hate it. I, you know, I really do. That’s why I love things that have audio and video. I’m on a video because I’m outside in the dark, but yeah. I mean, put your face out there, use your words, act, have, take action. Yeah. Right. Well, and that’s it. That’s really the issue is that it is, it’s that low value signal from communication, whether it’s verbal or typing, right? That people are, you know, they’re trying to boost that signal. Well, what are they really saying? Um, are they being sarcastic? Right? You have to boost that signal because it’s a low quality signal. Yeah. And that’s part of the problem that people don’t understand. It’s like, yeah, that action has equal value. My typing and your typing has equal value. It doesn’t matter what we type. Right? From the external perspective, that action is equal. The communication action is equal. The impact’s not equal necessarily, but part of that impact is you. When I say something that you resonate with, it impacts you more than people that you don’t resonate with it. That’s a problem, but it’s also the way things are. Yeah. Yeah. These people are looking, looking for, looking for ways to stir the pot, to get some sort of unearned superiority in their own brains. You know, it’s like, it’s a dopamine hit. Can I go back to the, uh, discernment, judgment, action thing? Let’s say, let’s say somebody is trapped in a negative spiral where they discern that they’re unworthy. They form judgments that maybe are bad and then they take bad actions and they, what’s, what do you do to help somebody in that kind of, uh, loop? Give them better framing. Is it so, go ahead. Sorry. Your mic went low again. Dammit, Jesse. Is it just me? Cause I need to like, yes. Make sweet verbal love to your mic. It would depend. I would think one of the first steps is getting them to realize, recognize and admit that they did indeed fall short. That’s, that’s the first step. They got to realize that it was wrong. Yeah. Many things together. Yeah. I would say you have to, you have to find where they are. Yes. You have to locate their struckness. And again, you need to use results and you need to get them to say, well, if this result is bad, maybe do something different, right? So if you’re like, oh, I can’t do anything right at work, well then quit. So, so all this is under an ideal, right? So if somebody says, is feeling in a negative way, it’s the camp, right? Is that, it’s not necessarily under an ideal. Do they see the ideal? If you’re depressed, you don’t see the ideal. Well, you have to work with their current ideal and lead them to better ones. They have, they have, sometimes they’re, they’re enacting on judgments, ideals, values, right? And they actually have to see and enact those with someone recognized in themselves. The things that I’m doing or have done or might do won’t be, won’t help me in the future. I will still be stuck if I keep enacting on this value or this ideal. Cause you actually have to work with, it’s really laborious. It’s like it’s participation. Ultimately, you have to participate with them to say, Hey, look, right. Yes. Fine. If you, if you’re going to continue to sit there, I’ll see you in month. It will still be X pounds over a weight, or you could participate with me and we could go for a walk, like the shortest amount of participation necessary to start developing a different ideal. Well, and, and, and look, let me, let me try to do this right now. Here’s gray night again. I’m saying this little corner is a digital Potemkin village. It gives the appearance of an organic community so that people stumble through and be deceived in the stain before they see, see through it. Okay. What? We’re doing this and doing this action says that you’re wrong. And then you say your textbook responses speak volumes. Tell me what textbooks our responses are from. And I will say, I don’t care what our words are because that’s a low value signal, which was the point of the monologue, which you didn’t listen to, obviously, or maybe you listened to it and didn’t understand it. Fair enough. Not everyone’s going to understand what I’m saying. Um, the exemplification of what we’re doing shows that you’re stuck in a negative loop as Danny has suggested, and maybe there’s a better way to look at it. As so we’re here cooperating together, right? We had a much larger group earlier, right? And we’re actually not putting on any, you know, any errors, right? Where we’re not having the appearance of community. We are in the community right now in this conversation. So some people are, are engaging in good faith in text. You are not, by the way, you’re engaging in bad faith from the beginning as stated by yourself. Uh, so I don’t have to, there’s not much guessing there, right? And so you can tell people that. So I’m working with a friend of mine who I’ve known for years and years and years and it’s, Oh, I’m bad at my job. And everybody tells me I’m bad at my job. And I feel like I should be able to do this and I can’t say, okay, yeah, you should quit. It’s not hard. You should quit. It’s that simple. You should quit. And it’s very hard to get somebody to realize that. Yeah. And they don’t want to because they’re, they’re stuck in this pattern where, no, I need to work. Uh, working defines me as part of my identity and like, fair enough, maybe. Right. And I don’t know what else I do. Right. There’s lots of other options, like other jobs. I would say develop a side skill or develop a skill in the job. On responsibility. But once you, once you’re stuck and you feel like you’re no good, developing a skill is not an option in your head anymore. Right. And so you have to give that person a framing, right? Yes. And force them into an action point where they take an action and now they can engage in a new set of potentials because that’s part of what action does. You narrow down the action and then all of a sudden you can, uh, you can engage with new potential and, and that’s the, that’s the, that’s the right thing to do. So I guess, I guess like, um, the, uh, nihilist, let’s say is who, or somebody who’s maybe a kind of a jellyfish. Um, maybe they’re not outputting much action. And it is, is this, is that one of those you, you can’t lead a, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make a horse drink things. Of course. That’s always true. Yeah. Like I can tell you things, Danny, and that won’t necessarily result in you understanding them or listening to them worse yet, or engaging in it, integrating it, and then taking action on it. There’s a lot of steps and people get confused. They think, well, just because I told somebody something, that means they went off and did an action and the action they did was the action that I intended in telling them, and that’s going to have the result that I intended because I know enough to know that that’s going to, these are ridiculous ways to think about it. And we have to have some humility. If you want to help people, that’s great, but your hit rate is going to suck. That’s true. And you can always go and say, well, your hit rate sucks. And it’s like, you know, it’s like criticizing AA. Like I don’t criticize alcoholics anonymous. Why? Because they’re twice as good as everybody else at what they do. It’s a terrible answer, but it’s the best answer to addiction that anybody’s come up with today. What do you want from me? That’s the world, dude. Cause got nothing to do with me. And it’s the same for a lot of things. And yeah, helping people, a sucks, but you can lend them your agency and that might work, it’s probably not going to work, but it’s better than doing nothing. And that sucks. Fair enough. It totally sucks. And that is the problem. Like, yeah, these are not easy answers. These are not straightforward ways of engagement. These are not things that you can learn. These are not things that are going to lead to certain outcomes. And all you can do is be reliable and consistent for people. And if they are able to resonate with that reliable, consistent signal, maybe, maybe you can make them better. Look, I could have all kinds of arguments about signals and filters and why we’ll say my success rate in helping certain types of people is much higher than other peoples, or I can make the same argument for Peterson, which I’m going to do on VanderKlaes stream at some point or VanderSaint. Sorry. We’ve changed his last name there to reflect his awesomeness. The third wayism of Jordan Peterson shows you a different way to help people that is so completely out of the realm of understanding for people like Paul VanderSaint, right, or somebody like Andrew Tate or like these people do not understand what he’s doing. That would be my argument. Oh, Raj, welcome, Raj. It’s good to have you here. Thank you for showing up. Danny, my sort of thing was I would always always try to put some sort of trade off or time frame on the table with them, constantly lead them back to some like practical things like, okay, where do you want to be in the next week, next month? And what trade-offs are you making now? I just go, it’s annoying, it’s really annoying because you often, I’ve done it with people, you have to go back to saying things, and you use the time frame, like do you realize last month you did X thing? I have a friend who’s constantly dating girls. I’m like, dude, the problem is not the girls. The problem is either A, people that you’re picking or you because you refuse to do other actions or trade-offs that would actually help you with your loneliness. Well, and that’s akin to what Peterson does in the past, present and future authoring program, right? You need to embed them in a story big enough so that, and not too big because that can lead to horror instead of awe, right? John Brevig talks about that, the axis of horror and awe, right? You need to give them a story they can live within to make themselves better. And that’s part of the issue. Maybe I should email Peterson, be like, look, you should give people two hours to complete and have a timer. And if you don’t complete it in two hours, it doesn’t save. Does something sound like, because you could just spend forever like I would the original, the past authoring and put everything there and then you just get lost in writing everything down rather than, oh, okay, cool. I’ve only got a certain time limit to accomplish my goal. Otherwise I might not ever complete it because I might just get stuck in my own thought patterns or at least the past or the future. Let me address this. So Benjamin Franklin, maybe I’m failing at discernment. Oh, you fail at discernment all the time, sir. That’s why we’re here. I don’t understand what action means. Well, I mean, I went over the model pretty heavily. We discussed it about a billion times, but I guess one way of thinking about action is being a good worker until you die. No, that’s not the way to think about action. That’s so limiting a frame that you can’t live within it. And so, no, it’s not good. What’s good is a frame you can live within. If your only actions are around work, then action is so much bigger than work. There is a cycle of action. No. To be born. No, that’s not an action. To work and pay taxes. No. To die. No. But notice that it has to be born is not necessarily an action you perform. Maybe an action is performed on you. This is a dumb way of thinking about the world. Just like get a better frame. Like really, like this is like I hear a lot of this. I don’t know who is coming up with it. But this is part and parcel to the attempt to believe that you as an individual, which you cannot be, has a chance in hell at understanding a significant part of the universe that you’re in. You don’t. The universe is big. There’s 8 billion people. I don’t know what else to tell you. Like there was a bunch of stuff here before you were born that you know nothing about, whose history you know nothing about. You haven’t even studied it probably. And this is where you get these crazy small frames that can’t encompass any part of your life. And then they seem to explain something. Everything explains something. But it might do so out of randomness. And so how useful is it if it’s not consistent and reliable? This is why pragmatism is super important, right? Because it’s linked back to Talos, the final cause. But I like what you said about attempting to locating somebody’s stuckness and then give somebody a story they can put themselves into. I really like what you said there. I mean, linking that to what Ben Franklin is saying here about there’s sometimes you could call it grace maybe. When I was in high school, I played rec league soccer and I didn’t think I was good enough to play for the high school because the sixth grade, biggest state in the school. I said, oh, that’s for all the club players. And I was at a table with like 30 soccer players. And they’re all like, hey, you should come out to try out. I think you’re better than you think you are. And I’m like, oh, no, that’s for club players. I’m a rec player. Right. And they insisted I come out. I’m like, dude, there’s 900 people that come out for three teams of 30. Just a waste of my time. It takes five days. I don’t have five days to waste. So they drug me out and I made the team and it was great. And then through that, I learned a bunch of great skills. The physical conditioning was insanely difficult, which was, I think, changed the trajectory of my life. And it was because somebody believed in me before I believed in myself. And that’s a story that works well. Yeah. Somebody saw you clearer than you did. And because they have the ability to judge you in relation to other people, because they’re a third party. Third party. When it’s just you looking at the world, there’s only two parties. All you have is direction. Direction is not sufficient to do anything in your life. It’s not optional. Like we’re going to move in a direction. But without orientation, the direction you move in is effectively random. And that’s a problem. And that’s why you need to give people a story that they can use to orient their life. And help them by giving them some of your discernment, some of your perspective, some of your agency, some of your judgment so that you can exemplify judgment. Oh, I judge things like this. Here’s the story of my life where I had to make a judgment or where I was incapable of making a proper judgment. Somebody made it for me. There’s all kinds of formulas like this. And I do like Raj, you’re being awfully quiet. Please jump in. Well, I had a question about how discipline relates to all of this, because it was listening to your discernment talk last week. And this week, I’ve been noticing that when I am engaged in my prior discipline in the morning, then usually I discern and take better action throughout the day. And this sort of the difference between action and then repeated action as discipline. Okay. So, I mean, how did you want me to handle that? Because I’m not sure I heard a question in there. Because there’s a lot there that I could go into. Yeah, there is a lot there. So I guess, is it important to take root? Not is it important, but like, what is it that action is? How does action update our discernment and judgment? Because you’re talking about how three of them are interrelated with one another. What are these feedback mechanisms? Right. Okay. So, I mean, I think I covered that earlier, but fair enough. I’ll go over it again. Results, right? So you use results and you contrast result with the ideal with your prediction. And if your prediction matches the ideal, you’re screwed because you need orientation. You need three things. Can’t do two. Not a dualist. There’s no binaries in the world. See my video, binary thinking bad. So you have an ideal. Like ideally, I would go down, buy one lottery ticket, fill it in, get the numbers. More likely, I’m going to need to repeat that over and over again anyway. Right? And then it’s less likely that I’m going to win the big prize than I think. And so that’s what’s tied up in all that. Is this whole idea of checking the results against your prediction against the ideal. Then you can actually orient and not get stuck in direction. And the thing that discipline does and discipline, first you have to understand, right? Action, discernment, judgment and action and results. And then you can add in processes like discipline, which is a process, which requires willpower. Right? Is how we use, how we jump the gap from imagination and judgment to action. Right? Then you can use all that. And then the feedback that you get from the community that you’re nested in then allows you to better judge the results that you’ve got. Right. So it can, I mean, you don’t necessarily need the community to judge the results if you’re doing it right. But you don’t know if you’re doing it right. Because this is why people stray into idealism. Right. Because in utopianism, because it’s really hard to know if your predictions are just utopian. By yourself. That’s why you need other people. That’s why distributed cognition is a thing. And that’s why it’s important. Because somebody can tell you, no, that’s utopian. Right. Somebody told me the other day, like, oh, I’m going to blow your mind. And then they said something. I was like, yeah, my mind’s going to blow. Sorry. You know, and that’s important feedback for them. Right. And that’s the issue. Is that that’s actually important. So you want other people to help calibrate and to help loan you. Look, you know, years ago now, I was mentioning this to Manuel. I said, well, one of the things I really like about my house is I wake up, I look out my kitchen window or my living room window and my pond is there. And I’m always very happy to see my pond. I usually say, hello, pond. You know, and live here for a reason. And the next day, he said, you know, did you appreciate your pond? And I hadn’t. So I was very grateful for that. Right. He lent me some of his agency because I had forgotten the discipline of being appreciative for where I live. And it’s got lots of downsides, for sure. But it’s an issue. I did want to quickly address this. This is Elizabeth. Without action, we can’t perceive. No, we perceive things all the time without action. Right. But I would call that discernment. What we can’t do with it. Well, action is not optional. But we can destroy our perception by pretending we don’t judge. And that’s actually I would call it a modern problem. It’s a problem because it’s a solution. It’s called pay attention to the fact that you judge. Don’t tell yourself you’re not judging. That’s what we call it. That’s garbage. You are judging because you’re taking action in the world. Anyway. I like that link, by the way. Earlier I said I was searching for ways to apply this model. And I think that’s a key link that is not in Robin’s model, for example. Okay, good. Well, that’s great. I’m glad that’s helpful. And yeah. In Robin’s model, if you just have belief, action, result, again, there’s no judgment in there, right? Right. So there’s no discernment and judgment. And you need to hone your discernment and judgment. And judgment’s like it’s a dirty word in modern spaces for whatever stupid reason. But we do it. And so we need to take care of it. When we’re not attending to our judgment and our discernment, we corrupt them. Or they can get corrupted very easily. And we don’t want to do this in the same way that when we don’t pay attention to the fact that we need prediction and we need an ideal to contrast the prediction to, and both of those need to contrast the results, we go astray. And we can’t do that reliably and consistently forever, which is why we need other people. We even need Jesse, even though he’s annoying sometimes and tells me to watch silly movies. Like? I don’t know. Perfect Blue. Perfect Blue. You must underrate MMA out there. I’m just assuming they’re silly. I haven’t watched them all yet. Of course they’re silly. Have you got the list? I don’t have a formal list, but I have them. So I just go look and I go, have I seen this one? No. Next. 13th floor. Right, that’s on the list. It’s important. It’s important. It’s not good, but it’s important to know when that came out and why that came out. Yeah, yeah. No, I agree. Well, I was surprised with what was the vanilla sky there too. Vanilla Sky is definitely underrated. I was trying to bring up American Pie the other day too. How much that influenced things. It’s a little bit random to this conversation, but I guess it did. It caused people to enact in the world in a way that they hadn’t in the past. And we were discussing the Discord server, how it was a meme. One way to understand what people buy a meme is it’s an idea without a telos. Yes. Yes. Yeah. You could say because before American Pie came out, a couple of films called Porkies, a couple of college-based films, but they had clear intentions behind those films. And they also carry on this tradition of a high school drama, except this time it’s just, we can show some flash. But the American Pie is a little bit more disingenuous with what it’s trying to do and say. It basically is, yeah, I think it predicts early meme culture. It’s just an idea taken away. It’s it’s done. It doesn’t serve any purpose other than what you project into it, which is what memes do. You know, you basically, you can laugh at a meme, but not laugh. You can get it or not get it. Am I waffling too much? So the- Yeah, American Pie comes out the same time as The Matrix, by the way. Oh, I didn’t realize that. Yeah. That’s a frame break movie that causes a bunch of changes for sure. And, you know, I was talking about Superbad and how, yeah, it’s a comedy, but actually it’s not. Like, it’s not, it’s like the first time I saw Superbad, I literally thought it was the funniest movie ever. And then I watched it again and realized it’s not. And I was fascinated by that, by that contrast, by that, by that contradiction. And I really, I mean, I’m not even claiming that I can figure it out now. It’s like, what the hell happened there? Because I was laughing so hard in the beginning, you know, and it, you can take something like Robot Chicken. The first time I saw Robot Chicken, Robot Chicken is very short. First time I saw Robot Chicken, my chest hurt for 30 minutes because I just laughed that hard. It was the first episode of Robot Chicken. I don’t know how I caught it, but that’s, that’s the problem is that, but Robot Chicken is always still funny. Like it’s actual comedy. Superbad is not, and I can’t, I’m like struggling with the difference to this day. So we’ve got Benjamin Franklin. Perfect Blue is a great animated pair with films. Alpius by Jorgis Land, Deimos and the Cronenberg Jr. film professor. I don’t know what any of that means. They’re all pointing to a similar underlying theme. Are they pointing to the good? Because I don’t care if they’re similar. They’re all pointing similarly to Seaton. Okay, I’m out. I wouldn’t say that. I’ve not watched, I don’t know. I’m just saying like that’s not a good selling point. For me, the good selling point is goodness. And then you don’t need to worry about those things. Yeah, well, my, yeah, I differ on views of art. Art can be tragic. Art is allowed to be sad and bad and you can appreciate that. It doesn’t mean it’s good though. You can, you know, you have to get art. No, no, I think, I think, For it to be good, there’s a, No, no, no, no, no, no. You’re confusing definitions of good, right? I would say that goodness can manifest in tragedy. Not because it can be a good tragedy, right? In which case the exemplification of the negative signal is important. And when you remove it, because you go, Oh, all negative signals are not good. It’s like, you know, negative signals are good. Even though the results may not be, they’re important. You need to know what’s going to kill you. That’s what a negative signal is. It’s something that kills you or hurts you or, you know, diminishes your ability to survive or procreate or both. Right? And so that’s important. Like that’s, that’s what, so good, you know, this is, we equivocate on the word good. It’s a bad, yeah, it’s bad. Good versus bad or good versus evil. Those are, because good versus bad is horizontal and good versus evil is vertical. Quality. Yeah. Right. Yeah, great. Yeah, I have. Very tragic. Oh. Oh, yeah. Oh, man. But it still points to what it’s like to be a good brother, even though the brother fails. Yeah, well, this is the thing. People not participating in stories that don’t have a positive outcome. It’s like, well, you know, there are seasons in your life, there are many chapters, stories in your life that might not have positive outcomes and you have to have a way of integrating them. Yeah. I was thinking of Chernobyl. It’s like, that’s it. I know people that could not watch or finish that TV series, but I pretty much always tell people you have to watch that. Like you have to realize that even though they’ve taken certain historical liberties and certain crunch some things down, the general point of that series and how it’s applied and the aesthetic behind it is very vital to understand, especially in terms of a historical setting, but also just there’s different aspects to it. It’s an important story and you shouldn’t turn your back on an important story or in some sense that, yeah, not even saying an important moment in history. I’m just saying an important story. Like, you shouldn’t turn your back on Mosaic. It’s telling you some pretty practical and pretty ideal aesthetics, places in time in the history. Yeah, that lead to the true, the good and the beautiful. Sometimes we can learn a lot from heroes losing the end, of course, but we learn a lot from loss all the time. For me, the asesifis even the story of Adam and Eve. Well, yeah, of course, but the question is what are you learning? This is the other problem. Like people say, oh, you can learn from this, but the thing you learn from the thing I learned from may be different. Like apparently everybody I’ve ever met read Plato’s Republic and missed the freaking point. At least a book too. Maybe not everybody. I could ask you, Lantern Jack there. He probably sees it. He’s great. But yeah, these people like I don’t know what the hell is wrong with them. They clearly miss something that’s obvious in the book, but I don’t know. I don’t know how they miss that. So it’s not enough to just point to that. Oh, now we have a hard problem. The rock. If killing people is wrong, then why do we kill people to kill people? Well, to stop the cycle. Like, I don’t know. It seems pretty clear to me. Like you have to have an endpoint to something that recurses. And that’s certainly an endpoint. I can’t remember which stream we discussed this on, but we discussed dueling and the changes in society. Yes. Moving localized conflict. Go watch that. Localized versus global, right? Taleb’s been twittering lately and usually he’s terrible on Twitter. His books are great. But usually on Twitter he’s terrible. But he was saying recently, basically, yeah, when you stop small losses, you just get a much larger loss later and its orders of magnitude bigger. Same thing with economics too. Well, I mean, carrying a small versus keeping the debt down the road. Yeah, that’s usually his wheelhouse. It’s not economics because he hates economics, but finance. Benjamin Franklin, of course, Camus believes that Sisyphus didn’t lose in the end. Camus is an idiot. But I think his interpretation is a massive cope. Camus is an idiot. Not hard. Like nobody’s going to miss Camus. He’s also an absurdist. So he would say something absurd like that for a reason. Either to just be a prankster or to get a reaction out of you or to make a point that you probably miss later on. So yeah, quote things in their proper context, Mr. Benjamin Franklin. You do this a lot. Raj, where are you? Are you American or Canadian? I’m American. I’m in California. I’m actually… I heard an accent. I’m actually near Paul’s neck of the woods, PBK’s neck of the woods. Have you met the saint? I was at the estuary meeting last night. I get to go to the local estuary regularly. Well, this is my dumb version of an estuary of Mark. You’re like pro or anti-iff. Or does it get such bad framing? You don’t like their model of estuary? No, it’s miserable. Only Protestants would come up with something with no hierarchy and think it was good. I don’t even understand how are you going to manifest the good with no hierarchy. God, explain that to me. They never can. I’ve asked them literally hundreds of times. And they just… It’s not a hard question. And when you can’t answer easy questions, I get suspicious. It’s not 100%, but it’s 99%. And I’ll take being 99% right. I love those odds in the lottery. I’m okay with it. Is that true, Raj? Do they not have a formal leadership structure or someone that kind of guides the group? So the way it usually tends to work is everyone goes around, introduces themselves. Everyone goes around and puts something on the table. They all offer a topic. And I think it works better when you have regular meetings with the same people over and over again. Because then you start to develop a relationship with those people. And then you can kind of notice where the threads are from the last conversation. And then like last night, everyone, we were talking about narratives and kingship. And the false narratives we tell ourselves. And these were all different things that people had put on the table. And we were able to sort of discover a thread that unified everything. And so there’s almost a discovery or a revelatory aspect to how the conversation develops. Rather than just being like, this is what we’re going to talk about. Sure. Sure. But that’s… How do you just say a bad act is? Yeah. What’s up? How do you just… Oh, how do we deal with bad… We haven’t really had to deal with that in the local estuaries. Initially, the filter is the bad people won’t show up initially. Right? Right. But the other thing is when you say over time, you develop a relationship with the people who are showing up over and over again, I say, yes, that’s called hierarchy. Relationships are wrapped up in hierarchy. And if you’re counting on emergence to just do the right hierarchy thing, I think that that will inevitably corrupt. And this is an emergence is good attitude towards the world. And I am not emergence is good. I am being is good. And being has a hierarchy to it fundamentally. There’s a hierarchy of being. And therefore, hierarchy should be thought of first in relation to groups. And I don’t think there’s any way around that at all. And I think if you try to get around that, you’re making a mistake. Yeah, I guess with the local estuary, there’s kind of a familiarity because of the relationship and the hierarchy that it develops. And so the thing that usually ends up working out is a topic that has to do with not only what people are interested in, but also something that is potent either on a communal level in terms of narratives like what’s going on politically in our nation, or it can be something potent in relationship to our how we’re navigating in our personal lives. No, that’s good. No, I mean, I understand the quote structure doesn’t have much of estuary. And I get that people are already interested in discussing ideas and get together and have good idea discussions. Yeah. The problem is that I think that they’re assuming that that’s what part of the Peterson crowd and part of how Peterson works. And that’s obviously wrong. It’s observably incorrect. Yes, I’ll be. And it’s not that you’re going to do it or it’s bad or anything. I’m just saying the thing you’re trying to do is not going to happen. You don’t understand what it is that you’re emulating and what was being exemplified by Peterson. And the fact that it worked the way it did initially, we’ll say in Sacramento, may have nothing to do with your observations because you may have mis-observed what was going on or misunderstood what you were observing and misinterpreted it. And you may have put it in a frame that you didn’t understand. And that’s why, look, I mean, I hope that CINO goes well, but I’m not confident that it will. Right. I hope I’m wrong. I really hope I’m wrong. But I’m not confident at all that it will go well. In fact, I found out some stuff recently where I was like, well, that’s not a good sign. That’s a much worse sign than I thought. And a good sign is Catherine’s there. And I was at Thunder Bay. I know what magic she can perform. So she is a magical creature. So we’ll see. I mean, I won’t see because I’m not going. But we’ll get reports and see what manifests. And I’m not particularly encouraged by the conversation, the spiritual home conversation that got released. But, you know, I mean, hopefully everything will go way better than I could expect. That would be wonderful. Yeah, it will be interesting to contrast the sort of estuary conversations that developed there with mostly strangers versus the ones where we have developed relationships with one another. I’ll bring you a report. I’ll bring you a report. That would be great. No, I’m really looking for a report. Yeah. Yeah, please come back on and tell us. We need perspective and we need different perspectives for the same event. It was one of the things that was sort of remarkable and notable about Thunder Bay was the consistency of the reports about, you know, I have to talk about this in a distraction because that’s the only thing that can contain the spirit or talk, maybe not contain, maybe contains the wrong word, that can talk about the spirit to help you understand how wonderful it was. Because it was in what you’re saying in that case is it’s so transcendent that only abstract language is appropriate to even try to talk about it. Which I think is like that’s what you want. Like if you drop some acid and try to have a transcendent experience, you don’t want to be able to describe it by saying, yeah, man, it was wicked wild. You know, or yeah, I saw colors and felt my tongue for the first time ever. And I considered how awesome I am in, you know, embedded in the universe. I was like, yeah, okay, that doesn’t sound transcendent. It sounds like, you know, a bunch of random garbage, right? You want to be able to say, wow, I really felt how one I was with the universe and how that connects me back to my friends and, you know, things like that. Danny, we can perfectly hear you drinking your water bottle. It’s excellent. I love it. It tastes amazing. I bet it does. It makes me very happy. Did you water? And that’s where I’m from. Reverse osmosis water. Got the oral. It’s great. Oh, okay. Well, I know it’s like anyway, so I had no more drinking fluoride. It’s nice. It’s like one of the finer. Anyway, it makes me happy every time I drink water. I don’t drink fluoride. I have a well. Well, I didn’t realize how the fluoride was bothering me until I got rid of it. Anyway, sorry. My parents, they’re drinking water got contaminated because of all the storms here in California that we had this past winter. And the local government couldn’t really clean the water. So what they just did was blast the water with chlorine until everyone that it was better. Wow, America. All right, let’s get beyond politics. It’s interesting that how the theory of AstroBerry versus the practice and I often wonder what are they going to do with conflict resolution? Because you are right now, you have a selection bias of people that are either in faith or post faith will coming back. Doesn’t matter what I have to describe that category of person. But I suspect. Yeah, I suspect. What’s the newcomer intake like? Because you eventually will start to and we like Mark sees it all the time on here. You have rent friggin gray night person coming on just being genuine. The call is just the classic trap. You guys are just in general. We’re talking and communicating and you’re just writing graffiti on a digital wall like thanks and making us look at it. Yeah, really great. So the actions of that group is fun. And I was trying to bring that into this in this little. So I mean people show up and it doesn’t take like there are people who show up and they’ll realize this isn’t really their bag and they’ll not show up again. But then we definitely had some newcomers who have stuck around and been coming repeatedly. And also there are people who come who they seem like they fit in and then they disappear too. There are people who seem to get really get the spirit of the whole enterprise. But for whatever reason, they don’t show up again, too. But no one’s really come in and be like this is they don’t try to impose. We haven’t had that situation yet. At least I haven’t observed it maybe in the past. Yes, when someone comes in and tries to impose their conversation. And Paul usually. Paul throws a little joke in when he’s describing the second or third round where he says, And you got to make sure you listen very carefully because you’re going to bid on other people’s ideas and not on your own because it’s kind of rude to come and say that you want to talk about your own idea. And so he does give that caveat. Yeah, it seems to be strong enough to. It exerts enough social pressure that no one’s really tried to do that. No one’s really tried to do that. Right. Well, he’s an authority, too. And so there’s leadership and hierarchy right there. And he’d deny it all day long. But you can’t be non-hierarchical. That’s not a possible configuration. You were born into the world you were born into and there’s hierarchy there. Sorry, it’s too late. It’s not optional. Can I ask, is the Estuary Protocol, they elect topics for discussion and is the primary criticism, is that correct? Number one and number two is the criticism. No. Mark Shaking said. No, they put they just you just say what you want to talk about. It’s not a democratic thing. Okay. Yeah. Well, okay. So it’s negotiated though. It’s a form of negotiation. Right. Yes. And is the primary criticism that there’s lack of leadership or what’s the problem with it? Because there’s lots of criticism. There’s a hierarchy and they’re pretending that it doesn’t exist. Okay. So that’s going to have side effects. And one of those side effects, you know, I got to be careful here. What do I want to say? I want to say that I have heard reports from the Sacramento Estuary about how it actually works that are different from the reports and say how John Van Doe, yeah, John Van Doe says estuary is supposed to be. Okay. There we go. Okay. Now, I know how groups work, particularly online groups, but also in-person groups. Okay. The descriptions of how estuary is supposed to work cannot work. It’s not possible. Right. It’s the round table problem. You know, people go, oh, round table. King Arthur is a king who then instantiates around table and encourages people to be around it. The hierarchy is there. He does not destroy the hierarchy by creating a round table. That didn’t happen. I understand that you misunderstood the story, but you’re a Muppet and that happens to Muppets. It’s okay. It’s okay to make a mistake and be a Muppet. But that’s not what happened. Paul will usually quote Paul and then Josiah, he runs another one in the local area, but they’ll refer to themselves as the estuary leader. I think that’s even the language that Van Gogh uses on their little estuary leader training website. Right. There isn’t necessarily going to be a hierarchy. Right. This is the thing. Billet is non-hierarchical. Everybody can bring whatever they want and put it on the table. Really? That’s the whole thing because that’s how they describe it. They don’t say, oh, by the way, every estuary has a leader and he’s responsible for X, Y, and Z. Right. I’ve seen a lot of skepticism around the leadership movement recently. That is good skepticism and criticism to have because when you’re talking about leadership and you’re not talking about responsibility, there’s a problem. Leaders need to be responsible for something. When you have a group, the odds that you have one leader in a group of any size are almost zero. Right. Different aspects of leadership are held up by different people in a group. That happens all the time. And so Jesse alluded to it earlier. Jesse’s talking about, I’m roughly speaking, and Jesse will correct me if I’m wrong, I’m a sidekick and that’s important and I feel an important role. Yes, Jesse feels very important roles, a bunch of them. And at those things, not only is he responsible or feel responsible and take responsibility for, but he’s also leading those things. You’re responsible for the things you’re leading, you’re leading the things you’re responsible for. To pretend that that responsibility doesn’t exist or not to make it explicit is already a problem because now you’re being sneaky. And the mediation of groups often happens in ways that are not made explicit, but are clear when you’re in the group. Right. There’s always a mediating factor. I’ve talked about this before. This may seem a little off topic, but it’s not. I’ve been in software teams. We had somebody who couldn’t really code very well. And I’ve been in software teams. And I’ve been in software teams. But because they were there, the two big headed idiot coders who were very good coders who would fight all the time would fight less with that person there. And so the three people together were more efficient with the person who wasn’t contributing code. It’s amazing. It’s kind of a miracle. It’s kind of like what the hell’s going on. Well, they’re filling a role. They’re taking responsibility for the things that they’re doing. They’re taking responsibility for being able to absorb the conflict between the two egos. That’s what’s happening. And because that buffer is there, that scapegoat is there, everybody’s more efficient. I’ve seen that happen. That actually happens. That’s a part of leadership. He-Man indeed. And everybody in that cartoon has an important role. And all the leadership is not located in one place. There’s an authority giving advice, super important. There are advisors. Being an advisor is part of leadership. And we tend to over-reduce leadership to a person. And that isn’t how the world works. Elon Musk hires the best people. He doesn’t just say, you do this and you do that. I’m going to… No. When there’s a conflict, somebody has to resolve it. Elon Musk is likely that person. Even with his Twitter account, he has people helping him. His Twitter account, his interactions and his memes that he puts out there and stuff, different things. He’s always delegating. Probably one of his chief skills is actually delegating. He seems to be quite good at working or managing people. And that’s what’s made him money. And I think maybe this is controversial. I think he knows when to quit. Yes. He got out of PayPal. He’s like, this is the wrong time. Out. Done. Yeah. Well, and maybe him staying in PayPal would have made PayPal last longer, but it still would have gone on. I don’t know. Right. Still would have gone downhill. I don’t know. It’s hard to tell. But that’s the thing. What’s more valuable? The individual worker or the person who can make a bunch of individual workers more effective and efficient in their work? It’s a no-brainer. And that’s why people get upset at wealth. But it’s like, what if without Steve Jobs, all the workers in the world that can build all the individual parts of the iPhone can’t build an iPhone? Because that’s almost certainly true. And now where are you? Yeah. This is this 90s corporate model of like the individual CEO being the… It’s a succession, Mark. It’s that succession. Everything’s projection. It’s all projections of the leader and the attitude. It’s all that sort of stuff going on. Succession is so amazing because everything is disconnected from action. Everything. Like all actions are actually arbitrary in that show. As little of it as I saw and I don’t recommend watching because it’s crazy. I think it is the closest thing to people writing in pure narrative that you can get. Like no. Pure narrative is not a thing. What do you mean? Narrative is necessarily an abstraction. What do you mean they’re writing in pure narrative? It’s completely abstracted and is divorced from the real world? Yes. Every part of the episode that I saw was completely divorced from anything in reality. So the way they seem to have written the show, and I’m just guessing, obviously, right? But from what I could discern, right, my judgment is that they are taking their imagination of what’s going on in somebody’s head. So it’s necessarily a projection, a psychological projection, and then casting that person, that character, as though they are perfectly speaking the thoughts in their head. And so it’s two layers of abstraction removed. And on top of that, the whole thing is removed from reality. So one of the scenes in the show was just to give you a little bit of context, the guy who runs the company has died. And now there’s two groups of people vying for the company. It’s not how any of this ever worked, by the way. One group is the children who have been set on one another by the father before he died, right? And the other group is the board. And so what happens is this guy comes into a room, there’s a guy already there, and he has a piece of paper. And the guy starts talking about the piece of paper, didn’t say what’s on the piece of paper initially. Didn’t mention nothing about what’s on the piece of paper initially. In fact, I don’t think he ever talks about what’s on the piece of paper. I think other people start to, but here’s what happens. He says, oh, you’re here, you know, I have a bit of a problem. What if there were a piece of paper and I looked at it and I decided it would be better if this was never seen by anybody. And he’s holding the piece of paper in his hand. So you know he’s referencing a real object in the show. And he’s looking down at it and like all the signals are there. This is what he’s actually referring to. And the other guy says, you know, something like, oh, well, you know, that could happen. And he says, well, you know, I’m just a bit concerned. And he asked him, like, what does it say? Like, is there some kind of impact, right? And he says, well, you know, I mean, I’m just saying, like, what would happen if this just never saw the light of day? Like, if just it just got lost under a desk or it got thrown in the toilet. And he said, well, you know, that would be a shame. And I’m joking, of course. You know, like the old trick when people say in Minecraft, they actually did that scene that way. And the funny part is, as the scene goes on, more and more of the board members enter the room and start talking about this in the abstract. And then eventually they mentioned, oh, well, so and so is supposed to succeed in the supposed to take the succession of his father in the company. And it’s like nobody does that in the real world. Like, if you had a question about a piece of paper and nobody else were there, you just get rid of it or you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t have a discussion about this with other people as they’re entering the room. That would never happen. And also, corporate succession is determined by corporate paperwork. No, really. Or by the board, but that’s explicit in the paperwork. Like, it’s not determined by the will. The writers don’t understand how corporations work and they don’t understand how wills work at the same time. And so they’re writing this story as though the will could overturn the corporate paperwork. The corporate paperwork doesn’t exist or, you know, all of it. And then there’s a random piece of paper that would hold zero weight in contract law in any court ever that couldn’t possibly do what they imply that it does. And they’re talking about it in the abstract as though it may or may not exist. It’s like Schrodinger’s piece of paper. And that’s how they’re talking in the show. And at the same time, all these references are coming up throughout the show that are sexual. And I’m just like, nobody… This isn’t how people operate in the world. I don’t understand how you’re getting there. Well, that’s what happens when writers and actors don’t have a life before they get into the business. What is it? Older Hollywood… All these great actors and writers, they would go live a life and go be a cowboy or go actually serve in the war, right? So they have a sense of how the world works. They have a grounding. And you talk a lot about historical grounding, which is the term that I use for it. When you have a historical grounding or grounding in the real world, in nature, that was a big thing to tell you. Joe and I were discussing over the past couple of days. Then your metaphors change. The way you think about the world changes. You relate things to things outside of yourself that are unconditional, like plants and animals. That’s the problem. When you don’t do that, you end up stuck in abstractions and references and you’re disconnected from all the important things. And then suddenly you think we can just switch to eating bugs overnight because protein. And it’s like, if you understood the logistics of trying to farm enough insects, and then you would realize immediately that all the things you hate about ranching are actually exacerbated by switching away from ranching and towards farming insects. All of them are worse. Every single aspect of them. But you’re so far from reality that you’re just grabbing protein and saying, we can just substitute protein A for protein B. No, you can’t. The vegans tried. Veganism doesn’t work. Right. It’s like, okay, we’re going to make more plants. We’re going to get all these plants, all these soil farms, and then we’re going to get all these crickets, all these bugs. A disaster happens. It will happen. Something goes wrong. You have all these bugs. The bugs. What do bugs do? Bugs eat plants. Ah. Like, it’s just even on like, just abstract, never mind the practicality of actually like farm grazing is far better for the land than all these soil farms, and you have to destroy more land, make all these soil farms, all that. Yeah, it’s just, just think through the trade-offs. So just, no, people, I keep saying it every stream. I understand the trade-offs. People do not understand the trade-offs. There are no trade-offs in your head, Jesse. None. The world is perfect in your head. As long as you stay in your imagination, there’s no problems. And that is the issue. That’s right. And that’s why action matters, because it links you back to the world, right? Because actions through your judgment, whether you believe you made a judgment or not, link you back to consequences in the world, and you are responsible. And when people divorce you from the responsibility or consequences of your actions, now you get stuck in distractions and you run outside in the middle of the city and scream at the sky because you’re upset about the board knows what. It doesn’t even matter. Do you even know? And how’s the screaming going to help? Oh, I feel better. Oh, thanks. You’ve been inconvenienced to everybody around you by screaming and doing something weird. And now you’re a meme on the internet, by the way, in order to comfort yourself. Is that valid? Do you have the authority to do that? Is that okay? Yes, the model of interdependence is so weird, too. Everything’s interdependent. It’s like, guys, if the electricity goes out and we have all these animals, we’ll be okay. Because at the end of the day, someone, even if they do it clumsily, can still divide up an animal. Might not do it well. They might have a lot of excess waste. But the potential for results, positive result is there. Have the bugs that are relying on electricity and you have an EMP or whatever, sun blast. They have all these, the electricity goes in. All that interdependence is just, yeah. Network effects. So, yeah, even this, you know, like if the internet goes out, how do I contact Mark? I don’t even know Mark’s address. Maybe Mark, you should send me an address in case China decides that they don’t like this anymore. The interdependence and how interdependent people are because we live in this religion of safety. I’m trying to bring up every string. I’ve been actually brought up today in a couple different ways, but I just didn’t stay through it. But the safety religion, it’s, you know, the pseudo safety religion that people have as an operating system in their head is like, yeah, you got to dismantle that somehow. Things aren’t as safe as they appear. Like the internet is full of you. The internet is the ultimate Psyop, sorry, conspiracy theorists. It’s like the internet itself. It’s military project. It always was. Right. Like it’s not going to be, you know, what, and what the internet was 10 years ago is different from what it was in Mark’s time. Yeah. The eternal winter, then you’ve got the whole, yeah, how many people are bots and all that sort of thing. But it’s, yeah, this sort of interdependence leads people to make wrong actions in the world because they don’t, they don’t, for every action you make, you know, this is where Maxtwo actually gets things right, which is, you know, there are causes and your actions lead to causality. And whether you want to admit it or not, you are making actions. Like you cannot make no actions. Like the, right. If your discernment is corrupt, you’re not going to see the causality. If you’re discernment and judgment are corrupt, and if you’re constantly living in your imagination, then you can’t see causality properly. Right. You’re going to mislocate it. You’re going to say, right, the problem with society is Twitter. We made Twitter. Twitter does not make us. It’s just you don’t understand causality. You don’t understand which comes first and which comes second. You don’t understand that we are masters of the things we create, not the other way around. Why are you doing that? Because you don’t want to be judged and you don’t have to judge others. And when you don’t judge others, you feel like, oh, well, they can’t judge me either. And no. Well, there’s a, it’s an old anxiety, those ideas. I, we’re going to lose control of our technologies. I can’t remember if it’s Aztec or Mayan. Fresco, or I guess you could call it of their baskets and knives, basically sprouting legs and chasing the people. And when you put it in that way, it’s like, oh, that’s obviously ridiculous. It’s like, we do that all the time. Do that every day. Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s a good point. Yeah, that’s exactly it. You know, oh, AI is going to break out and go rogue. It’s like, you know what AI is? Like, you know, and I know they don’t. Like, I mean, I actually, it’s like, you don’t understand what any of this stuff is. You don’t understand how simple it is. You don’t understand how it works. Like you just, you’re not, you’re not getting. Wait, what are you showing us? Hold on. Hold on. Where’s mine? That’s the news layout. Is that the layout I want? Yes. Do you have the picture ready for us? There we go. I might have it. South American mythology. I might have it. I love books like this. Adam and I were talking the other day that, you know, these picture books are actually meant to be for adults, not for kids. Because without pictures, a dead book, a book, weird pictures, is a book that has life and resonance. Yes. All this information, but as soon as you have the text in a picture or representation, you’re getting at least some sense of knowledge or some sense of behavior pattern, belief, phenomena. It’s something to reference too, because it’s just text. You can just be looking at it and you’re like, all right, it’s just white and black, really. But it’s more information and more context. Context. And more signal and different type of signal from mere text. And all of that is important. I think illustrated books are really important. And they’re actually cheaper than textbooks. Oddly, yes, even though they contain more information ultimately. Especially if you find a nice library. Yes. I gotta go to bed. I’m dying. But it was a great conversation. I particularly liked, Mark, your response to Raj when you wrapped everything up. I think you backed it up to the discernment. You touched on ideal prediction results and how that is the formula for orientation. I think that was a key link. Thinking of discernment in that way. And then, again, just to see the difference. In my mind, the difference between Robin’s model is the judgment to action. I think that is key. Because discernment and belief, in Robin’s model, belief is doing a lot. And I think in yours, discernment is doing a whole lot. But that judgment link is key. Anyway, that’s one of some things that just stood out to me. Right? For whatever it’s worth. But anyway, thanks for the talk, guys. Sleep well, sir. I’ll see you tomorrow morning. Bye, Danny. If you want to see a live example of me helping someone with discernment, in the middle of the Eggo girl stream, a guy from Melbourne actually came on. And Mark and I did, I think, a helpful recalibration of his stuckness. And so it’s up to him what actions he makes from that. But we suggested things, and that’s all we can do. And try to guide back to good purposes or the high purpose. Right. But if you want to see a live example of that, I’ll do the Mark thing and go, we put a stream for that. We do. We do indeed. Yeah. And I also want to highlight we’re going to be doing Book Club tomorrow, The Republic on the Texas Wizarding Community channel. And then that will get posted sometime tomorrow after we do the Book Club. The previous episodes are there too. I posted a link. Please check it out. Yes, indeed. This Eggo stream, Jesse, what is this? Oh, on YouTube channel or what? Yeah, Mark, it’s like maybe four or five weeks ago. Oh, it’s navigating patterns. Okay. Navigating patterns. Yeah, yeah. It’s on navigating patterns. It’s in the middle of that. Yeah. Livestream? Yep, it’s under live. I’m going to share a link to it. Got it. Okay. Got it? Okay. I’m going to share a link anyway. All right. Well, thanks, guys. All right. See you guys. Have a good night. Bye, Dan. What’s the image I’m meant to be looking for again? Like a basket with knives, right? It’s like a whole bunch of different little items that have sprouted legs and are chasing the people. Oh, yeah. I have seen that. I’ve seen something like that. That’s somewhere in there. All right. Benjamin Franklin. Recursive. For example, maybe we invent the technology of avocados, but that technology recursively affects each norbol… Yes, every technology affects everything. So what? Like you’re not stating anything. If the technology had no effect, it wouldn’t be a technology. Furthermore, when agriculture was invented, widely adopted, 100 and gathering largely became dead. Isn’t it a good death? Not true. Who cares? Like, I don’t… These are such… This is such weird framing. We never stop hunting and gathering. Yeah. The ultimate wild west is the ultimate jungle. Right. It’s weird. It’s weird because none of that happened. People say that. It’s like, what world are you observing? Because people hunt and gather all the time. Anarchists make that mark. It’s a common anarchist. Being civilized or passive… What was the model that they try to sneak in? Pacification of man through not being hunting and gathering, by being rural, being domesticated. That’s it. Yeah. Just all these bad frames. Oh, I missed one. Me personally, I think the obsession with control, I’ll have to prove that, is connected with obsession or immortality. No. Not real immortality. Still no. But symbolic immortality, people don’t even understand symbols. Through legacy. No. I think the causality can become… Look, I don’t know where you get these frames from. They’re crazy. All that is just no. It’s a bad way to think about the world. You really need a frame that you can live in. And that’s frame that small and tight. You just can’t take action in. And if you did, you wouldn’t see the results and you wouldn’t be able to judge. And you’d just get kind of narrowed in, reciprocally narrowed, become an addiction, an obsession to understand the world. There’s so much more personal motivation. There’s so much more to personal action. Because you can be motivated to go to the gym and still not go to the gym. Like that happens. You just can’t reduce things down that much. There’s so much more going on. Like just in the communication chain, I haven’t done it in a while, so I’ll try to do it again. I have a thought. I want to communicate it to Raj. That thought needs to be formed into words. That’s already imperfect and prone to error. I have to form that thought in conjunction with my prediction of how he thinks in order to communicate it to him. I then try to do that. There’s a bunch of room for error there. Maybe smaller. You’re talking about smart people. Smart people do that second part. Some of us puppets just say things just to see. Hold on. See if it stinks. Let me give the full chain and then we’ll end it. Then we’ll go into the fact that some people can’t even do that. Then I say things poorly because I may mix up my words or screw up a syllable or be unintelligible. And then Raj hears whatever he hears. And it may not resemble what I said because psychological projection is real. Many, many people. Many people. This happens to me all the time. It happens to other people too. Manuel in particular. I’ll ask them a question and they’ll be like, why did you say I was a bad person? I’ll be like, I literally just asked you a question. I don’t. How did you hear that you made all that up in your head? None of that happened. And people usually kind of figure it out. Oh, you’re right. It’s like, yeah, I’m right. So I can’t control how Raj hears my words. Or even whether or not he’s listening. That’s why when people go, what we all need is active listening. That’s not a thing. And even if it were, you can’t grab it and give it to Raj. But who cares? If that’s true, it’s not actionable. It’s not useful. I can’t force Raj to actively listen, whatever that may mean. Maybe I’d like to be able to. Maybe I’d like to bash him across the head a few times when he gets wrong what I said. These aren’t reasonable options. Even if they’re actionable. They’re not actionable. He’s in California and South Carolina. I can’t smack him. Not that I would. I can’t. It’s not even an option. That’s the time. It would certainly grab my attention. Let’s assume he listens and hears all the words that I used imperfectly, correctly. Let’s even assume that all my words were perfect. His interpretation doesn’t match my prediction. Okay, that happens. And then maybe he understood everything perfectly and then he communicates back to me poorly. Is that my failure? This is way too complex. And yet we’re able to communicate. It’s kind of a miracle. And we don’t have gratitude for that. We don’t appreciate any of that. And we keep trying to reduce to, well, if I just spoke clearer, or well, if you just listened better, or well, if we were just using the same dictionary, none of that is sufficient to solve the problems I just outlined. And there are more problems than what I outlined. How do you use the same dictionary? It’s like, oh, the mirror is spelled differently than the Oxford. No, the word is what? Right. Even if you could do the actual solution, even if that solution were ideal, it still wouldn’t work. Why are you caught up in this? And guess what? We’re not doing that now and we haven’t in the past, and yet we’re able to communicate well enough. And why can’t we just be like, wow, that’s amazing. How great. And yeah, there’s problems and imperfections in bad framing, but we could work through that if we admitted that that was a problem and pointed at it and tried to fix it. But you can’t do that if all you’re going to do is spew the same garbage you were spewing before over and over again. And people do that all the time. They do this, they play this game where they’re like, well, look, if you’re embedded in the world and culture is doing a thing, then you have no choice. It’s like, no, you still have a choice. There may be consequences to bucking culture, and you may not like them, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have a choice. That means you’re a wimp. It’s a different problem. You always have a choice. You always have a choice. You always have at least two choices, and this is where people get upset. It’s like, no, you always got at least three options. Courage is risk mitigation. Many forms of courage and action. Right. And people don’t account for that and they get caught up. A lot of people get caught up in this thing where they believe that because someone’s doing something in the world, they also are subject to doing that thing in the world. And so I met somebody in Clubhouse and she was like, it wasn’t until I got on Clubhouse and started talking to people that I realized I didn’t have to play that game. But that was an option available. The option of not doing what other people are doing? Yes. Is what you’re talking about. It’s something like that. Nice. Oh, yeah. If this book’s like these series, I’m trying to collect them all if I can. The Library of the World’s Myths and Legends, beautifully printed. I can show you another one. I love it. Yeah, Raj, this person, it never occurred to her that she didn’t have to wear a mask, that she didn’t have to get a fake news flu shot, that she, you know, and a bunch of other things. Like, oh, I don’t have to go along with this pronoun thing. Oh, I don’t have to call it social distancing. No, you can tell them all to f off twice and die. Like I do. Right? You can do that. But there’s plenty of, like, I keep showing you a bunch of images. Nice. Filtering what’s appropriate for streaming the internet. Here’s another one. Here’s the last one. Oh, cool. Yeah. I’ve got like six of these books. I’m looking for more. Oh, that’s neat. Yeah. Yeah. Picture books. Also, Mark, I try and change why I’ve got the big screen. Action. There you go. I love it. That’s a great one. Jessie, Jessie being nerdy. Yeah. Okay. Maybe this is a good way to slowly get to a wrap up. What’s a good narrative ization of a story where it takes action? How do we point to stories or a way of telling the truth or pointing to the truth? And we were talking about action today. So what’s some good models, signals of characters or stories and props for action? Do you mind minting words? Do I need more coffee? No. I mean, I’ve got to push back on truth and put it back to true, which I think is a better way to think about it. Yeah. That’s right. Muff it here. Uh-oh. Now Ethan wants to cause trouble. Oh, hi. What’s this wrap up nonsense I hear? There’ll be no wrap up while Ethan’s here. He wants this stream to go on forever. Yes. We’re just going to continue on till the book club tomorrow. No, we’re definitely not doing that. That ain’t happening. Sleep is required before book. Man, that book club is like mentally destroying. I usually ruin my Saturdays because of that. Oh. I’m not complaining. I’m just saying, man, that’s hard work. Mentally draining. It is. It’s like on one hand, it feels like we’re going too fast, but on the other hand, you have to do it. We’re not going to spend… We don’t have the time and resources to spend a week per page. Right. It’s funny because Danny keeps going, oh yeah, we’re going to cover book two in one day. I’m like, yeah, that’s not going to happen. You know, and I think he’s given up now and he realizes it’s at least two weeks for one book of The Republic. So yeah, but I do want to address what Jesse was saying, whether we wrap up. Sorry. Sorry to interrupt. No, no, that’s not… No, no, no, no, don’t worry about that. We’re all friends here. This is the community, man. We’re tolerant of crazy long-haired freaks. No. No, I would not want you to be tolerant of anything. That was me poking Ethan on purpose, by the way. We’re just going to tell Manuel tomorrow that we’re all going to be loyal to him. Oh, dude, no, stop. Stop. Do not poke that bear, please. That bear is poking himself enough. He doesn’t need any help from you. Anyway, yeah, look, you want stories that have been… Help you to discern and judge and take action in the world whose results are positive. So you need stories that can either exemplify the negative, like don’t do this. This is a bad idea, right? So like, and I would point to this. So I never, when Trainspotting came out, I didn’t watch it on purpose. I’m like, oh no, I’m not a big fan of that topic. You know, and like you make all kinds of story claims about it. I would call it narrative claims. You make all kinds of story claims about there is goodness in the story and whatever. I don’t care, right? The reason why I didn’t watch it is because there’s no relationship to it. It’s about drugs. I have a history of drug addiction in my family, right? And so not a big fan. Heroin and I, you know, I get along already. I wouldn’t like, oh, bad, bad, bad. Too many deaths, too many deaths. So after I went to Edinburgh, Scotland, which is a wonderful, beautiful, awesome place, I watched the movie and the negative signal in that movie is good. It gives you a way to relate to the world, to say why being a junkie is not good. And maybe there’s a slippery slope. And it’s easy to fall into that problem of drug addiction, especially in Edinburgh, which at the time that I was there was the drug capital of Europe. So bigger than London in terms of drugs might be a significant factor. Also, they’re all insane as evidenced by what’s going on with the Scottish National Party and stuff since then, all of which I saw coming, by the way, and said so at the time. It was obvious if you were on the ground. Sorry if you didn’t see it, but also maybe you should open your eyes. So when you engage with that story, even though I would say there’s not a lot of goodness in there in terms of good versus evil, there’s a lot of good in it in terms of signal. And that signaling is you don’t want to get involved with this stuff because it’s a messy world and things just get messier and messier. Things just get messier over time and even if you can pull out, you’re still scarred and trapped, which is roughly all of that is in the story. So what that does is it contrasts the world of a drug addict and somebody who recovered from drug addiction, roughly speaking, with your world. And maybe you’re a drug addict now or maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re a drug addict now and it never got that bad for you, but now you see that it could and maybe that turns you around. Although, yeah, once you’re a drug addict, it’s really hard not to be. It happens, but it’s not the common case. Or maybe you’re not a drug addict and somebody kind of offers you something and you’re like, oh, wait, there’s a slippery slope here and, man, it’s a long way down. And now you have that discernment that you wouldn’t have had had you not engaged with that story. So stories can give you a lot or maybe you engage in a larger story, like the Republic, and you start to see, oh, there’s good modes of engagement in terms of justice because that’s all the Republic talks about, not politics. It’s not in there. And so it’s like, oh, okay, maybe I want to explore justice more or maybe I want to engage with justice better. And so that’s part of engaging in the Western canon. Like, maybe I want to read. I haven’t read any Shakespeare. Well, I read Julius Caesar, but I was in high school. I don’t remember much of it. You block these stones, you worsen senseless things. It’s ladies tomorrow. That’s what I remember. Maybe I remember it wrong even. I don’t know. But that’s it. The rest of it was iambic pentameter in one ear and out the other and couldn’t have gone out fast enough for my liking. So maybe you read that stuff and maybe it teaches you. Maybe you read Moby Dick. Maybe it teaches you something. Maybe you read I ran. Maybe you learn something from it. Right. You don’t only have to get positive signals, but these signals allow you to learn this contrast between your life where you’re at and where the characters in the story are at and what context they’re embedded in helps you to see context better. Why would they see the world as though drugs were their only option? Because they’re poor and living in Scotland and in the movie Scotland is shit. Fair enough. That’s how they viewed their world. Whether that’s quote true from some objective standard isn’t relevant, not to the character who said it and not all the characters who agreed. Doesn’t matter. But now you can see that because it’s in the story and you’re not. Yeah. At the end of the day, it’s just it’s it’s all how attention is directive. Even if it’s this is a cool thing about that. I’ve noticed with page. I was like not notice whatever something that he points out is, you know, people ask him about these anti Christian or anti narrative. They’ll ask him about horror movies. Right. And you say it’s actually can be good because by being the opposite of Christianity or whatever, being antithetical to Christianity actually reinforces the pattern. In a weird way, because it’s putting that into your attention. Well, the pattern doesn’t exist except in relation to something else. And if that thing isn’t in the pattern, then it yeah, now it contrasts the pattern and lets you see the pattern better. And until somebody points at it, you can’t see it. Yeah. Right. Like until somebody says, oh, listen to the fury in this music. And that fury was going through the zeitgeist at the time. Right. Somebody may have said that to me on a trip up to Thunder Bay once. And it’s like, oh, now I hear it. But that attention was pointed there. And now all of a sudden I learned something about music that I didn’t know before. And suddenly different things make sense to me in the context of, say, engaging with Byrne Powers, the anadromist, excellent series on how we got here. Because now there’s a flavor, a layering to classical music, in this case, that I didn’t have before. There’s something new I can listen for. And somebody will point out a good rock drummer. It’s like, oh. And then suddenly, you know. The number of people that I’ve met, and I’m like, did you ever hear how hard Bonham hits the drums? And they’re like, what? And then all of a sudden they hear it. And it’s like, wait a minute. Nobody else does that. That’s right. Nobody else does that. You didn’t hear it before. And now you know something about drummers. Know in the sense of interact with informationally that wasn’t available to you before, even though it was there the whole time. Because the world is attention. And there’s so much, and your attention is so limited, you don’t have a choice. That’s why it matters how you frame things, especially your questions. Because how you frame it determines how it’s going to get answered to some extent. And that’s why you have to have some respect for people who say, I’m not going to answer that question, or that question’s asked in a funny way or a way I can’t relate to. Because they’re giving you an important signal about how you’re thinking about the world. Not to say that you’re wrong, just to say that they can’t relate to it. And it’s important to know when you’re doing something people can’t relate to, that’s also showing your sanity. Yeah, attention is precious. Yes. Taking, you know, when you’re a materialist, it doesn’t mean anything. That’s why Prager can make these absurd statements about pornography, you know. Yes. And think that him saying these things has no consequence, you know. It’s like, I’m going to… The audience, you know… The statement of objective material reality is a statement of disconnection, is a statement of lack of intimacy. It says there’s a space in the world that is totally disconnected from which we can judge. No, that’s not possible. You are embedded in the world. You were created inside a creation, like it or not. It’s already done. There’s a bunch of unconditional, there’s a bunch of boundaries, there’s a bunch of natural laws, there’s a bunch of limits. There’s a bunch of things that you cannot affect directly, but you can affect your relationship to. But that means you have a relationship. And so the fact that you can remove yourself from the heat of the fire, the fire isn’t getting less hot, your relationship with the fire is changing. Like, that’s what’s happening. Fire is unconditional in terms of heatness, right? And so there’s a relationship there. That means there’s intimacy. Intimacy is the quality of the relationship that you have to the thing. It’s like, okay, well, if objective material reality exists in some fundamental fashion, then you’re disconnected from the universe when you’re standing there. Completely removes all intimacy. Right. The universe exists independent of attention. And consequences. And when you remove attention to, the real problem is that you are removing your relationship to that thing. And there isn’t a world where you don’t have a relationship to everything in it. And then categorical imperative is asking what Prager said about porn. You want to take that, Ethan? You want me to take it? I can take it. You saw the clip that I posted this morning? Okay. Yeah, that was, I forget his last name, the Catholic dude, Matt. I was on this channel this morning. Right. So he actually got Prager on his channel and they kind of, you know, talked about it. I got about halfway through and just turned it off because they were just, it was kind of garbage. I mean, they just started going into all of these hypothetical legalistic situations. It’s like, well, what if this and what if this is like, this helps nothing? Like there’s no, like this isn’t helpful at all in any way. Legalism is removing intimacy too, right? It’s trying to resolve things by using… Objectively. Right. It’s using a justice, objective justice frame to try to resolve a bunch of relationships. And you can’t do that because you’re not there. That’s not a situation. Exactly. You need to link it to story, right? You need to say, is the lesser of two evils an okay method for resolving the question of pornography in light of religion? And I would say no. Right. Because what Prager is saying is if, well, there’s a conditional that’s already a problem for me. If engaging in porn is preventing you from cheating on your wife, committing adultery, then the porn is good. But that’s a post hoc observation. Exactly. And it can only be said after it happened. Exactly. And it’s a presumption. It’s all hindsight bias. It’s garbage. It’s a garbage way to think about the world. It helps you zero looking forward. Exactly. It actually hurts you. Yes. Because it opens the door for rationalization. Exactly. And this is why I said you have to begin, right, from final cause. You have to start at final cause when you’re in intent. And then you have to start at intent when you’re moving towards action. Right? Father Eric said it better earlier in the stream. But yeah, there’s no way around that. And that’s why. Because you have to set a standard that you’re going to hit in a result in order to help your discernment and judgment later. And so if the standard is better than adultery, that’s a terrible standard. The correct standard, especially if you’re a believer in the Bible, is that you’re going to worship goodness in whatever form. Exactly. There’s an infinite amount of things that are better than adultery. But all of them will fall short of loving your wife. Yep. Right. If Manuel was here, he would say pornography is identifying against adultery. And that gets you nowhere. You have to identify in a higher principle. You can’t identify against. You can’t make a photocopy of a photocopy. You have to go to the source. But that’s what, you know, we’re going to see this in the Republic. This is what Plato is, you know, we’re going to talk about it tomorrow. You know, it’s like people just keep, you know, you fall into this pit of legalism where it’s like, oh, these bad things are happening here. So we’re going to react against it and make more laws here, more laws here, more laws here, more laws here. Here’s the exemplification. So porn should be banned. Nobody mentioned banning porn ever. I don’t know where that came out of your head, but that was an imagination that happened to you. The thing is, and I’m very sorry, we said all we said was engaging in porn being better than engaging in adultery is an invalid frame. It’s a bad way to think about things. We weren’t getting legalistic because I’m not legalistic. I don’t believe you can legislate morality. He’s a word. He used to make the throw in this is cloning, which is what you’re talking about, Ethan, is possible. The problem is that you’ll lose authenticity. Once you copy something once, you’ve got to copy. Then once you copy the second time, the third time, the fourth time, you’re getting into cloning and with every clone you’re getting into essentially a degradation. And so that’s what, you know, you see a naked woman once, right, fine. And that’s proper context. But the more you see it, the more the ability to authentically see something deteriorates. You no longer see the thing for what it actually should be or in the proper context or in contrast. It all becomes gray scale. If you want to use photography and like that sort of thing. And actually, if you continually photocopy something, which I have done, by the way, which is joint knowledge, right, it either becomes all white or all black. It actually does. I’ve actually done this with real photocopiers. And that’s the problem. Yeah, we’re going to we’re going to go over this tomorrow in the Republic. I mean, when you fall when society falls into crazy legalism, he says you just have to stop. Like it’s no good because the problem is actually an inappropriate spirit that’s being embodied. It’s a vice that’s being embodied. And more laws aren’t going to fix anything because you’re just going to go on forever. You have to identify in a good you need virtue, essentially is what he’s saying. Right. You don’t you can’t be identifying advice. And look, you know, shouldn’t porn be banned? That no, nobody made a case that porn should be banned. Like we’re still implicitly not trying to make a case for or against porn. All right. We’re saying that what Prager said is wrong because. Right. And so if I ban porn, I’m identifying against porn. No, identification against is not the correct thing. And this is the argument. Prager is not identifying for attention towards the highest, which is still the correct answer. Now, some of that highest may just be loving your wife or some of that highest may be keeping the sanctity of the relationship, the marriage in this case, that you’ve agreed to or the highest may be pointed towards God. All right. Like any of those things is correct and anything else is lesser. Yep. Then you don’t have to ban anything, identify against anything. If you identify with and for the good, all these problems disappear. I don’t have to take an action against if I’m busy taking a right action towards goodness. Yep, exactly. I mean, the thing is, is you’re identifying in and then when you say, imagine that you’re looking at something, you’re identifying in this. And when something comes in your way, you push it out of your way, but you’re not, you’re not focusing on that thing and making an inversion or a polar opposite of what that is. Because it’s just going to get, and it’s just going to point you in some other direction. It’s not up. Look, what you want is flexibility. Vices by definition are constraints. You could be flexible in harmony with nature, with yourself, with others as much as possible, which requires this level of flexibility and fluidity. Vices by the definition of the word, it’s a constriction. It’s constricting you to a certain behavior and pattern that you can’t get yourself out of. You don’t have that flexibility given to you. Right? If you have a vice of alcohol, you always have to drink, but when you have the right flexibility or the right harmony or right relationships to a behavior or to a social event, then you’re able to be better and to operate better in the world. But with a vice, it constricts you to any time I’m with others, I always have to drink, I always have to smoke. And that constriction is going to limit you and it’s going to limit your relationship with others. And in fact, it probably will limit others, which you have a feedback cycle there too, where it’s like, oh, every time we get together, we always get drunk. It’s like, well, who’s determining that? If we’re all in vices, no one has that flexibility and trade to actually point out to someone like, stop or that’s enough or what to do next. Alcohol is the easiest one to manage in terms of a metaphor. But the vices are, I didn’t quite agree with what you said, because we all have vices. It’s a relationship to yourself. He cuts out sometimes, that’s true, but it’s the wall of the internet over there. They don’t always flip the packets over correctly. So I heard him fine. Did it cut out? You cut out a little, you’ve been cutting out a little bit for a while. It’s your internet, but it’s not, it’s not bad enough that I can’t hear you. You’re still in total. I think I’m going to have to go to the bathroom. I’m going to have to go to the bathroom. You’re still in total. I love Graham. Thank you. Dyslexia too. Sorry. What I was trying to point towards is that you have to integrate your vices. You have to be aware of them. And also you have to, when you’re, the authenticity of your soul and your relationship with others matters. And that’s what you have to, that’s what helps you make actions in the world. And so the behavior is a manifestation of those. So that’s why you can’t say, oh, we’re just going to ban it. It’s like, you can’t ban behavior. Like if behavior is going to exist whether you like it or not. What you can do is try and have some constraints, some sort of boundaries that help proper orientation. Right. What I was going to say is that by answering this question, you kind of, you’re losing if you, by answering this question. I just answered it though. I just answered it in like in seven different ways. Well, if you’re answering it with yes or no, you’re… I didn’t though. I never actually answered it with yes or no. Well, that’s what he’s saying. That’s exactly what he’s saying. I can say. The framing for the question is already wrong and it’s irrelevant because whatever. I can’t ban anything. You can’t ban anything. We can’t ban anything. It’s not relevant. If you want your legislators to do something, go talk to them. But that is no relevance to me. I have no control over that. I don’t want any control over that. Leave me alone. Somebody asked Pajow about abortion one time regarding like medieval people and he’s like it just was never a question because like they never got to the point where it was a question. Abortion. But maybe they did. But like his point was like the rights of the mother over the child. Like it just that that never even occurred to them. Right. Of course. I don’t know if it was medieval Christendom. I’m not sure. So yeah, I mean, some cultures did child sacrifice, but that’s not the issue. The issue is in medieval times, which already implies we’ll say certain parts of Western Christendom. Right. It’s not all of Western. Yeah, exactly. Right. Like, no, that wasn’t the framing is wrong. And it’s anachronistic to try and talk about it that way. In the same way it’s anachronistic to talk about, you know, Platonism or it’s anachronistic to talk about what was the religion of Socrates. Like what? Yeah. Another. Another one. Another typical one is homosexuality. That’s an anachronism. Like people didn’t identify and they didn’t identify themselves and desires or how they sexually express themselves. Sexuality was what he did, not who you are. Yep, exactly. Yeah. And it’s weird that we want to link our action to our identity. Yeah. Exactly. That’s the point. It’s like, no, that’s not it. First of all, identity is a negotiation. Like, and why would you do that? And you don’t have a single identity because you can’t take a single action and only that action in the world. Like, even under your own steam, it doesn’t work. Muppet. If you’re in this individualist mode, you need to be recognized as an individual. Therefore, any actions or behaviors that you do, you need to be recognized. Like very enforced, right? If you’re a child, a childish, childs are always seeking. But in essence, Jesse, it’s worse, right? No, it’s a simple phenomenon to understand. Well, but if you’re trying to be an individual, which is not an option, and you can’t because you can’t, then you’re trying to make a connection back to other people. Because that’s the only case you need identity is in concert with other persons. You don’t need identity if you’re alone in the woods living in a cave. It’s not, there’s no such thing as identity. It’s like trying to do philosophy alone on a desert island. It’s still no, it’s not an option. It’s not a valid frame. The idea of identity has come in the city. It’s a city phenomenon. It’s a way of trying to be recognized. No, no, no, no, no, it’s not. It’s not. But identity, the reason why you would simultaneously try to be an individual and have an identity and a single identity is because the identity is the intimacy that you’re trying to control. And that’s why people are going, you know, you have to use my pronouns, which is such an absurd ask, then it’s like, how did we even get here? Do you not understand how language works? You can’t control my speech when you’re not around anyway. You can’t control my speech when you are around because I’ll backhand your ass. So good luck. But no, it’s a whole thing’s absurd. The imposition of trying to impose your identity on other people is a way of objectifying the other people and thus ending your relationship with. What’s limiting the actions that you can take, it’s removing your authenticity. It’s like you have to call me by this name. I can’t be my, you know, you want for you to be your authentic self. You’re limiting my authentic self, which is like this equity thing. Right. And that’s what I was talking about. This this phenomenon of I thought we were equating the individualism with this, the battle for recognition and identity. I thought we were equating the individualism with this, the battle for recognition and identity. And that’s what I was trying to say. This is a city. When we conglomerate into these giant cities, right? The increasing of this type of behavior has levels of identification have kind of risen with it. It will be increased. Because if you’re if you if you are seeking that option to be an individual, you will seek the behaviors to be recognized as this visual. Yeah, with the individual materialism, individualism, they just go hand in hand because in a materialistic universe, the only thing that you know, the only thing that you the only real thing to you is your cognito cognito sum. Right. So that’s where the individualism comes from. The only thing that’s real to you. You keep like nothing higher. There’s no higher principalities that exist. There’s no ethic. There’s no transcendent ethic that you can identify in. So you have no choice but to identify in yourself and reference yourself. Thus, individually, and that necessarily leads into identifying with the passions. Yeah, because that’s what’s inside of you. I get really disturbed when I hear that people work for organizations or corporations and they have no boundaries between their friendship group and then the organization that they work for. I’m like, this is wow. This is this is this thing is like I have to maintain my constant identity. Right. You know, I have these different modes of being in the world. I have to stay in this one container of authenticity. Like you mediate. But what is all this? This is all just reduction. It’s all just flattening the world. It’s all just taking the margins and trying to put them in the center. It’s all making everything equal. Right. It’s saying I can be reduced to one identity and then I can embody that identity. That’s something I can understand and rationalize and therefore control. That’s what rationalization is all about. Control. Right. And then I can do that with the world. I can say, look, the world is really just economics and it’s all run by money and or maybe money and power or maybe power is money. Right. And therefore now I can understand you can’t understand the world. You can’t understand the tiny percentage of the world. The world’s way bigger than you. No one has enough cognitive. And then we seek out people with cognitive capacity. Well, everyone has a cognitive capacity. And then we seek out people with cognitive capacity. And then we seek out people with cognitive capacity. Well, Eric Weinstein has super cognitive capacity. Maybe he can understand the world for me. And now you’re not an individual anymore. You’re actually listening to him. And he’s not smart enough to figure out the world. You can’t even figure out the housing crisis. So, you know, this overly complicated what happened in the housing crisis model that is so ridiculous. And now just fraud. Sorry. Just people said they don’t think they didn’t know. And the courts let them get away with it. That’s all. Very simple. And you can look in the court records and see that this is the case. It’s not hard. It’s like, you know, and I went through the lawsuit. I could go through the whole thing and just show you all the places in which they didn’t have documentation because they didn’t own the house and they were allowed to take it anyway. It’s just fraud, though. They never owned the house. They never, never happened. Right. But, you know, you can pretend it’s due to tranches and third order derivatives and all kinds. No, it wasn’t. Just fraud. Massive scale fraud. But fraud. And that’s it. And it’s not just evil. Like it’s like it’s it’s simple. It’s evil. And you don’t believe in evil people. Lizard people always ends up with lizard people. It always ends in lizard people. That is correct. And that’s the thing. We’re seeking. We’ve been told rationality is the key to controlling the world and understanding the world, even if you don’t control it. And then we’re looking for rationality. And well, if the world is rational and I’m a rationalist, I’m a rationalist. If I’m rational and I’m a rational creature, then I can understand it. And now I’m trying to fit the world into something I can understand. But I’m a Muppet. I can’t understand the world. That’s not an option. And so instead, I build these ever simpler and simpler and simpler models, try and squeeze the world in. Then all I do is make bad predictions. And now I’m angry and resentful all the time because every understanding I have of the world actually turns out not to work out. And then I’m making more and more exceptions. I kind of talked about this, right? I’m making more and more exceptions. Well, you know, if not for the election being stolen or well, you know, if we only own the whole Congress and not most of it, well, you know, and it’s on and on and on and on and on. It’s like you can make a thousand excuses for your predictions are wrong or you can realize your worldview is stupid and needs adjusting. I think Meister Eckhart quote popped in my head. It kind of identifies the difference between the modern mindset and the previous one. He says, if I had a God who I could understand, I would have him as my God no longer. Yes. Yeah. Well, that’s what Nazism does. That’s why people do believe in evil, but they actually put themselves on. They’re just as equal. They flatten the world down. So things that they can. They do believe in evil. That’s why they watch the horror movies, but they don’t say anything higher than that. It’s all this kind of flat world equality. That’s why Meister Eckhart quote proves true. Because something above, right? Something higher with a higher purpose, higher theology than you are. But if you’re a Gnostic, everything’s kind of swimming in the same. As a Gnostic, it’s almost like you put yourself above it or it’s below you. You are equivocating. You’re the same. It’s all flat land. No, no, no, no. The Gnostics. No, the Gnostics like John Brevecky. Emergence. What are they talking about emergence? If something is emergent to you, you have to be above it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t see it as emergence. Well, Salafism is trying to put yourself above. Also, about Nazism. And that’s the issue, right? That’s the issue. All right. I don’t. We already answered this, so we’re not going to answer it again. The answer is still no. We don’t believe banning works. We don’t believe in legislating morality. Legalism is stupid. Stop being legalistic. Still no. It’s not going to change. I’m going to find this spot. Hold on. OK, you go find it. So yeah, I mean, when you’re talking about emergence, you necessarily have to be above it. You’re necessarily indicating you’re above something. And so the game they play is they say, oh, no, we’re all equal, but emergence. And then that’s why they don’t understand egregores and spirits, because they can’t. There’s no framework in their head where they can understand something coming down from above, because there’s no above, because everything’s emergence. This is how you get the emergence is good thing. And then people stop being reasonable about talking like John Brevecky talking to Jonathan about a city talking back to you, a city community. How do they do? At least they have a preference for their version of evil, which they push out. So they do believe in evil to some level. Because evil’s beneath them. Evil’s beneath them and they’re already the highest, because everything’s emerging from below. That’s how they talk. And this is what I mean. It’s like solpsism. You’ve got to listen to what they’re saying. Because everybody goes, no, no, no, John Brevecky understands emanation. And I’m like, he never talks about it. He says the word emanation, and then he goes into, let me give you 20 minutes on emergence every single time. And that’s why when Jonathan Bichot says, well, if you do something wrong, the city can send you a letter. Isn’t the city conscious? And he goes, no, no, no, no, no. There’s something about speed wrapped up in consciousness. It’s like, what? Why wouldn’t larger animals with bigger brains think slower? There’s a question for materialists that they can’t answer. Of course it would. Well, if the city’s conscious and has a big distributed cognition spread out over lots of people, it’s going to take longer to communicate. Duh. That’s in the materialism. That’s not, I’m not even getting into egregorism spirit. I’m just saying from a materialist perspective, this has to be true. So why would consciousness be wrapped up in speed if size is a factor? And size is a factor for materialists. It’s a factor anyway. Err. Right? And that’s why it kept for making you off guard. Like, wait, what? It has nothing to do with it. Because he’s obviously just wrong. Like, nope. The city communicates with you. It happens all the time. And that’s the danger. Alright. Categorical imperative. I get the impression Mark doesn’t want to answer moral questions, but why? No, I answered the moral questions. You’re just wrong. Is he forbidden to others from answering the question? No, we answered the question. You just don’t like the answer. But that’s a different problem. That’s a you problem, not an us problem. Like, I answer a question, you don’t like the answer, you don’t get to keep asking until I give a different answer that you like. That’s not. You’re allowed to not understand, not like, not appreciate, or not integrate the answer. Or not engage with it. You’re welcome to all of those things. But you’re not welcome to say it wasn’t answered. It was. That is incorrect. If that’s not what you experienced, then you’ve got problems, I suggest, getting help. Let me ask. Let’s see if this answers this question. I’d have thought then that the true lawgiver ought to bother with… Oughtn’t. It’s a kind of, okay, ought-tint. Okay. I have thought then that the true lawgiver oughtn’t to bother with that form of law or constitution, either in a badly governed city or in a well governed one, and the former, because it’s useless and accomplishes nothing, and the latter, because anyone could discover some of these things while the others follow automatically from the ways of life we established. So, in a poorly governed city, you can be making all of these laws against, about morality, like, we’re going to ban porn, we’re going to ban abortion, you know, et cetera. And it’s futile because the question is even being asked. It’s not going to change anything. You can’t ban porn because there’s a demand for porn. Right. And in a well governed city, things like porn or abortion aren’t even… They’re not going to be questions. They’re not going to exist. Porn’s not going to exist. Abortion’s not going to exist. So, it’s like, what he’s saying here is that a lawgiver oughtn’t to bother with that form of law or constitution. It’s completely futile, whether it’s a badly governed city or a well governed city. So, that’s what we’re trying to say is that there’s no point in answering the question. Exactly. No use. If you’re moving towards the ideal, all of these questions are going to arise. Exactly. Exactly. Well, and also, you know, it’s weird. I saw a great meme where they were like, you know, you said the war on drugs was ineffective. And now there’s another one. There. Sorry, what was the last part? And now you want to start a war on guns. It’s like, you know, the same thing. Guns. Yeah. You know, it’s all the same. The impulse to ban is always the same because it’s like… Yeah. I mean, we’ve already covered it. It’s the same. It’s been over and over in different ways. It’s the… I mean, we’ve adopted the language of spirit. Go look at suffrage, right? Suffrage? You can go look at… Not suffrage, what’s the other one? They named alcohol in America. Prohibition. Yeah, prohibition. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I was going to reference Pompeii too. You know, like porn and things of that nature are manifestations of other types of hubris, other types of pride. And so, you know, Pompeii, they thought everything was fine. You could set up this giant civilization. It would have been an active volcano at the time. And one thing’s… You have one… You either have all the virtues or you have none, right? We’ll take our spell at faith. And so they had no virtues in Pompeii, which caused them to behave, manifest, act in a certain way. They caused hubris and the volcano, when the manifestation of nature finally takes its theological shape. Yeah, they weren’t able to mitigate that risk. Right. In some ways, you know, the truth of winter is always coming is a nice way of… Well, there’s many Armageddon, I think I’ve heard Peugeot say. It’s not just Armageddon. It’s just… Not to be accelerationist, but, you know, if things aren’t kept and they’re in check, we’re going to have boundaries into sentiment and judgments, then yeah, Pompeii is an office chair. And the Chernobyl I referenced earlier is an obvious manifestation of that. If you don’t know, Pompeii had… Sorry, I probably just jumped… Yeah, all I know about Pompeii is that there was a volcano. Pompeii had all these sexual imagery. They had slave houses. They had… You can go look through all their art. I had phallic symbols everywhere. So there we go. Sorry, I didn’t jump straight to it. Yeah. Yeah, brothels. Is it kind of like a Sodom and Gomorrah type of story? Essentially, yeah. Yeah, explicitly. It’s explicitly destroyed by fire from above. Click, and hot ash, and yeah, it’s nasty. And it was that place where people went to be immoral. See, I didn’t know that. I just thought that Pompeii… I just know all I heard was that Pompeii was a city that was wiped out almost immediately by a volcanic eruption. So are you suggesting that there’s a link between the hubris to plant a city so near the volcano and then the pride in their sexual impropriety? Look, I inferred it. I’m not sure if I want to discuss it. But I definitely inferred it. Okay. But these things, you know, same thing with Rome and Byzantine, right? Why did Byzantine fall? Why are other civilizations fall? You can point out to manifestations of the patterns of behavior. And a lot of it is hubris. At a certain point, they believe that, you know, why is the Titanic sink? Was it, you know, it doesn’t really matter if it was meant to sink or not meant to sink. It still was an improperly built boat because they thought they had the best systems. Yeah, it’s funny. We’re all back to the lizard thing. It’s like how many documentaries have been made about why the Titanic sunk? You know, if it was going to be written down in a biblical type of text, you know, and people are reading it a thousand years from now, they’d be like, well, who built it? Was it the British? Whoever built it? The Brits. Yeah, the Brits, they got, you know, they got a little hubristic. They got caught up in a competition and they were prideful. And that’s then the ship sink. You know, like that’s what it’s going to be written down as. Well, you know, that gets into this categorical, imperative feminism behind the meaning crisis. No, it’s not symptom of it. And then is the pirate king no pirate king here? The philosopher king, the philosopher king is an imaginary thing that can’t exist even according to the person who created it, which is Plato. Does he forbid the other from answering the question and they accept his authority? No, they answered the question. You just weren’t listening. Different problem. Oh, here we go. Is Raj allowed to answer the question about whether porn should be banned? I argue good. I know literally literally everyone has already answered the question. It’s a stream though. You go back and watch if you missed it. It’s fine. Not a big deal. It’s not urgent. But you can see the way the framing is trying to draw out a certain set of results, right? Because it doesn’t work because I’m well familiar with this trick and I may have invented methods for it. And so you’re playing the wrong game with the wrong guy. You feel free. I like to win. But also I’m going to win. Just let you know. And I’ve done it before. You can check out my stream. How far back it is with Claire. Zero points scored by her. And yeah, whatever. It’s a bloodbath. It’s a beautiful, glorious bloodbath. And I enjoyed every minute of it. But also cannot win. Also, Ethan already answered like four times. I suppose he could answer five times. But I don’t think I wanted to. We invoke Plato to answer that question. Right. I did want to add real quickly. One of the best. I’m not going to say it the best. I’m going to say one of my favorite things that I’ve heard from Peterson lately is this proposition. You can’t legislate against bad ideas. Yes. When he said that, I was like, yes. And he’s actually talking about Ronda Santis, I think. Something he was doing in Florida. It’s like that is freaking awesome. I’m really happy that he just said that. But that’s the core of the problem. Like all these legalists have not read any history ever. Like pick up one history. Book once. Like just one. And you don’t really have to read the whole thing. Like we’ve tried all the legalisms that you can possibly imagine. And we know they don’t work because they have been. We know why they don’t work. It’s well studied. This legalism is nonsense. And trying to pin people down in the yes or no is not going to work. All questions cannot be boiled down to a false binary because it’s a false dichotomy. It’s a false binary. Binaries aren’t real. And that’s the problem. And yeah. And you’re not going to hear a yes or no answer to banning porn because that it’s an invalid question. And you don’t like that, but still is true. Both answers to your question are the wrong answer. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And the question is always wrong because we know it doesn’t work. I’ve heard Prager. I think it’s Prager. I don’t think it’s originally his quote, but I’ve heard him say it somewhere. It’s something like if you don’t follow the Ten Commandments, then you will be, if you don’t follow the Ten Commandments, you will be subject to the 10,000 commandments. Yeah. Yeah. Christ comes along and reduces the Ten Commandments into two, not commandments, but into loving the Lord God with all your hearts, will, might and loving your neighbor or yourself. That just points directly to the ideals and then that solves your problems. Pursue the ideal. Right. Right. If you’re Protestant, it’s like, oh, well, simple. That’s easy. All I’m going to do is love God. And it’s like, OK. But if you’re not a Protestant, it’s like, how do we love God? You know, we sort of mediation there. Like, where are we looking to? How do we love God? So you go to the liturgy and it’s like, oh, there’s this tradition, you know, like this tradition is offering us a means to to love God and love our neighbor, you know, fulfill these two commands. I think Bruce would be the best person to argue against. I think completely slander the Protestants that way. I think Bruce would push back you on that. I think you would. I don’t even think he reduced it. I think he just said start from here. This is how you can write. The thing is, the thing is, I know Bruce isn’t here, but he’s going to come. He’s going to have a really good answer. But like that works for him. That doesn’t work for all Protestants, though, like not all Protestants are like him. Right. That’s that. That’s the problem. He’s part of a really unique sect. And he and I have had this conversation dozens of times at this point, and his personal beliefs don’t allow him to fall into most of the mistakes that are, I would argue, inevitable for 99.9% of the population. Right. Right. Exactly. So, you know, when I walk to the Orthodox Church, walk into the Orthodox Church, it’s like it doesn’t matter where you’re at anywhere. Like they all are doing the same thing. It doesn’t matter what your level of understanding is, you know, how what your level of theosis is, whatever, you know, they’re all doing the same thing. And it all benefits benefits each person. It’s not like, oh, hey, this benefits this person more like they’re all coming and communing together, doing the same thing. Right. Right. Anyways, I don’t want to turn this into a that type of conversation. But you are talking about actions. Pretty irrelevant. So, points, points to you. Yes, points, points for action. Did you did you hear the monologue, Ethan? What did you think? Jesse thinks I did myself again, which would be nice if that was true. I did hear the monologue. Lots of, OK, I’m trying to remember lots of stuff on action and action and pre action and or behavior. Was it action or behavior? Action. Everything about was about action today. That’s like, where do you draw the line for action? I see I see pragmatically. It’s like, well, it doesn’t really count until like you you go out into the world and, you know, but there’s when you’re giving your attention to a certain thing that entails us at some level in action, I think. This got me thinking. Because what did you say you said? Your actions inform you, inform the world. Yeah, an action, an action exists outside of you. If it’s not outside of you, it’s not an action. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist. I’m saying that things that aren’t outside of you are actions because they can’t be independently judged. And then all the material world. I do. I do remember. It kind of triggering me not triggering some provoking thought inside of me like it’s like what is causing your action? Like, where does that come from? It’s inevitably coming from something that’s way beyond your rationality. Like the way so the way that you see this is how I think I’ve been thinking about it lately is the way that you see the world, the way that phenomena phenomena like the phenomena is actually determined by your by your state of being. Or I guess we could say your ontology, your ontology is determined by what you give your attention to. So like if you’re essentially what’s God you’re worshipping and I don’t I don’t. You’re aligned to. Yeah. Yeah. That’s what you’re aligned to. But it’s not like you don’t you don’t go out when you when you’re going out in the world, you’re doing your day to day things. You don’t you don’t choose what is salient to you. What is salient to you happens before way before your rationality like it’s already. You you you have some choice in what is salient to you, but you don’t have ultimate control over it. You can train yourself to see things and not be things just as big. But that’s constrained to and right. And the number of things you can find salient to do the way the way the full model looks because we have lots of models. Right. Awareness is the thing that drags things in towards attention. And then attention is how you pick. Right. And then once that’s done, it’s done. Right. You can’t really split your attention into. You can do things that look like that. Like I used to I can’t do it anymore. I used to be able to listen to and participate in two conversations at once live and listen to a third conversation. And I proved that to people and they were just like frickin blown away. Right. But my brain before I was sick, I was really fast. And so what I was doing is dropping information on one page and the other page and the third. But even with that, there’s only so much thinking you can do. And so the thinking side and the re communicating side, I get only two streams at once, but I could do it. I was listening to the third thing and it was not easy. I would be exhausted after I did it, but I could do it on command pretty much pretty reliably, not a percent reliable. It was on the percent. But, you know, but that’s a trick. Right. It’s it’s not, you know, it’s not and it’s not reasonable to expect that anybody should be able to do that. Of course, I can’t do it anymore. That’s incredible. I guess you make up for your dyslexia in that way. Yeah, well, that’s how I get around my dyslexia. I check everything three times. Like live, like when I’m writing and it doesn’t fix it entirely. But, you know, the error rate is so low that most people are like, you’re dyslexic. I’m like, not only my dyslexic, I’m highly dyslexic. Like my dyslexia is really freaking bad. Yeah. Where do you have the auto check three times thing in my brain? There’d be no way where it sends you into involuntary naps. What were you saying? And loss of consciousness. Yeah. So it’s weird. Like, OK, so obviously we have agency and like you have agency and like choosing what you give your attention to. And then once you give your attention to it, once you give your attention, it’s like the reason. Like, OK, so I think I’ve been participating in marginally in in in services recently, Orthodox services. Oh, good. There’s something that I, you know, like people willfully they use their own agency. They go and they participate in these liturgies. But the thing that they’re offering their attention to after they’ve they’ve done that. That thing then informs the world for them. They’re not informing the world themselves. They’re not they’re not picking their salient landscape. They’re offering their attention up to what is qualifying their salient landscape. So this was this reminds me of the question I had earlier, which is like. My prayer discipline that I follow in the morning has an effect on my discernment and actions throughout the day. And it’s like this giving. Giving your agency up to something so then that so then that spirit can occupy you. Yeah, I this is a this I use this example all the time with my wife, probably because it really sticks with her. I said, OK, so the husband that has breakfast with his family in the morning. So say there’s a husband and he has breakfast with his family in the morning. Is he more or less likely to make a flirtatious comment to his secretary at work that day? Right. The options of if you imagine it like a like some kind of video game, role playing game or something like that, like if if you have breakfast with your family in the morning, when you go to work and you encounter the secretary, the options are different. Like the selectable options of what you can say to that secretary are different based on the ritual that you that you practice that you engaged in in the morning. And that’s just that’s a very, very kind of basic example. But prayer morning prayers that the same thing on a different scale, obviously. But when you’re when you’re praying when you’re praying in the morning, you’re like you were saying you’re offering up your agency to something that in turn is giving some is informing the world for you. And that’s actually that love that that that love of offering up and then offering down like you’re offering up to to a higher principality. And it offers it. It’s reciprocal reciprocal than in that it it informs the world for you. Well, that’s why we can see with reality itself. Yeah, exactly. And that’s why these these Christians are so drawn to this. These these these rituals. That’s why people show up at 11, 11 at night on a Saturday and are there till two thirty in the morning like old people like like there’s probably 100 people there. And like I was the only one yawning the whole time. You know, it was crazy. It was crazy. Like I couldn’t believe it. I could not believe it. It was incredible. And they’re just they’re doing it, you know, and they’re I don’t know. It’s a it’s remarkable to see. And it’s something like this what we’re talking about that’s going on like they’re just completely committed to this. It’s worship, right? That’s what it is. Yeah, and that’s that’s all wrapped up in in action and interaction with what you’re doing. And it’s the action, right action, hopefully that enables you to adjust your judgment and discernment. Yeah. Yes, exactly. It’s like how to, you know, we talk about discernment and judgment so, so much here and how important it is. It’s like, OK, well, how do we have good judgment and discernment? It’s like, well, we can’t answer that. You’re not going to get that here. You have to get that somewhere else. It’s it’s from action, right? It’s the action and the results of those actions that allow you. There are some of the tools that you can then use to judge. Right. And the other tools are the ideal and the prediction. Your prediction shouldn’t match the ideal. Right. That would make you a utopian or an idealist or both. That would be bad. So that’s the problem. Then what actions you have to take as a matter of experimentation in your life. Is this a is this a a a. Words that mean not a zealot, a. And an agent of Claire. Oh, yes. Now we have we have troll agents going on in that. They’re trying that they’re trying to trick. It’s not working. They’re still trying to trick. It’s still not working. They haven’t figured out it’s never going to work. They don’t know why the mathematical certainty that they can’t make any progress, but whatever. It you know, it’s just I’m going to I’m going to miss frame exactly what happens. It’s like, OK, and I’m going to reframe exactly what happened correctly. And you’re going to make no progress. But I like to win. You’re welcome to play all day. I love to win far too much. So I will play this game until you drop. And this is why people hate you, Mark. And it’s like, yeah, Joey, Joey was saying and he said this many times. People hate success. Yes, they do, because it’s a judge. It’s like, oh, there’s an ideal out there judging. Yes, that’s it. People hate being judged. They hate it. And therefore they hate success. Which is why it’s easier not to take action because your actions necessarily give you a result, which judges you. Exactly. Yeah, right. Well, and that’s why that’s why people. Want to curate the action that they take, so I’d rather play a video game or stay in the basement with Cheetos and Mountain Dew. Nothing against Mountain Dew. I love Mountain Dew. Rather than enter the real world, like leave the father’s tent or something. Right. And that’s also why they’d rather live in a video game or like live in Metta. Right. Or spend all their time online. Right. Yeah, the the the judge not lest you be judged. Most people interpret that as judgment as a bad thing, but it’s actually encouraging judgment. Judge not lest you be judged. It’s actually encouraging judgment so that you can learn. And it’s encouraging that it’s a judgment as such, because when you go out and judge, you’re going to be judged by the same thing and you’re going to learn, you know, and it’s going to shape you as as a person seeking virtue. Right. Well, and that’s really it. Right. Like I didn’t. That’s a good a good addition. Right. Action, because you do it externally to yourself, shapes you as much as you shape the world. Right. And so that’s the steel sharpened steel sort of metaphor. Right. That’s like, oh, I’m interacting with the world and I’m getting feedback from the world in the results and the consequences and that shaping me. And then I can use that shaping to judge right against the ideal against my prediction right against what’s happening. I can ask people other people can see it because it’s an action and happens. I might happen to happen outside of you. The actions are are are vital and it ties back into the Batman and Superman thing is there’s a there’s a separation there. Like there’s. There’s. I really liked what you did. Like they have there’s a separation between the the incarnated life or the everyday life and their superhero life. Like they’re completely separated and you have action and idea like the two have to be unified together. That’s what creation is. That’s what that’s what that’s we look at our creation. I’m not sure what the creation myths are with with you, Raj. The. It’s not really emphasized much, actually. So I can’t readily point to it. There’s an idea of kind of a void and then. God speaking into it like that concept is there. There’s there’s almost an agnosticism about the creation itself. Yeah. Yeah, it is. Well, that’s that’s the denial of creation. But it’s not just about creation. It’s also about reality. That’s what it’s not a denial of creation. That’s what it’s not a denial of creation. Yeah, there’s there’s not a denial of creation. It’s it’s more of a. It’s more related to this idea of not being able to know the creation. But that there is definitely a creation and there’s a reality to it. And I mean, the opening stanza of the job, emphasizes action over thinking and judging or and contemplation and doing nothing. This was. There is an idea of such a switch in a whole, which means even if you think 100,000 thoughts, you will not be able to think your way through it. And then which is even if you remain silent and deep meditation, you’re not going to get it. And what you have to do is so gives a key out of a good group. They follow. So question is, how can we become truthful? It is by walking in the will of the divine, which is taking actions. Walking is an action. And body participation. Right. Yeah, that’s great. I like that. Yeah. Yeah, with the creation like that, we just had the orthodox just celebrated their Easter. They call it Pashka Pashka Pashka. Yeah, Oscar. And it’s all that it’s all just celebrating creation over and over and over and over again. So, you know, you have Christ and there’s there’s lots of it’s very erotic in nature. Like so they refer to Christ as a bridegroom, a bridegroom. And they were referred to the tomb as the bridal chamber. And so he dies. He goes into the the the tomb bridal chamber and then goes into the not only the tomb, right, is in the earth and he goes down into the depths of the earth into death. And then he brings everything back up. He’s resurrected and then he ascends back into heaven. So it’s just this this thing, this this condescension. They actually use that word condescension. And then there’s death that goes all the way down. Then there’s resurrection and then back up into into heaven. They’re just back and forth. And so it’s like the very first principle coming down into the depths of the earth and then coming back up and that like that’s creation. It’s the two things meeting together. And then the result is the they say the church, you know, and the church is is is the body of Christ actually, you know, like going out and it’s growing like it’s the Christianity growing like that’s that’s creation right there. The two things unifying together, like the principle with the expression together. And they just they just they give their attention to this over and over and over and over and over again. And these things like the Batman and Superman were like the driving a wedge in between these two things. You know, it’s it’s undoing that thing. It’s unifying these two things. The disincarnation. Yes, exactly. That’s what that’s what the loss of intimacy. Idealism, absent of action. That’s what it’s doing is driving a wedge in between those two things. It’s uncreating the world. And this is like you look at contemporary things happening in politics and whatever. You know, it’s very simple. It’s like, oh, you recognize these patterns of trying to separate these two things, trying to uncreate the world. It’s like it’s not lizards. It’s just it’s just the evil spirit in trying to incarnate itself. The people are possessed by it. It’s just evil. You know, like, like, you don’t have like you don’t need you don’t need a lizard conspiracy theory to explain that. You know, you know, we’re we’re taking children away from their parents and give it putting them in the offices of psychiatrists and giving them drugs to see that that’s evil. You’re separating. You’re separating things like that. That’s what it is. It’s just evil. You know, it’s not evil because I don’t like it. It’s it’s it’s a rebellion against creation and creation is this this this nourishment. Like that’s what I mean. Like what is the creation of a family like you’re taking potential and when a mother you know, you have the mother and the father like it’s very simple things, you know, and it’s like you have the father and you know, it beds the like and beds the seed into the mother. And it’s expressed and then it grows and the identity the identity is expressed. And when you’re trying to undo that, it’s just it’s you can see the pattern of a rebellion against creation. It’s just evil. It’s not lizard people. It’s just evil trying to incarnate itself. But that reminds me of like what this flattening of the world and people only having like their own their primary relationships or their relationships with work and their coworkers. And you see this reflected in the popular sitcoms of like the last four years. It was maybe 50 years. It used to mostly be family sitcoms, right? And then in the late 80s, certain the 90s, it transitions into friends. You got Cheers, you got Seinfeld, you have friends itself. And this is a flattening and a removing from that creative principle of family. And then in the most recent iteration, it’s like no all shows about work. Yeah, there’s no there’s not even friends. There’s not even friends. It’s the office, Parks and Rec, Brooklyn Nine-Nine. It’s always workplace comedies. And then you see people like Michael Scott is the person who’s trying to have his identity constantly affirmed by people by doing ridiculous things so that they have to acknowledge. Yeah, he’s trying to force identity through action. Yeah. And it doesn’t work, which is ironic. Because they all follow that pattern, thinking that even though the thing that showed them it doesn’t work, thinking they thought it would work. And they kept trying it and trying it and trying it, much like our troll friend who keeps trying the same trick over and over again. It’s just not working. It’s like, well, maybe that’s because your trick doesn’t work. I don’t know. And people have made a litany of watching The Office over and over again. I know. That’s me. I mean, it’s me for a long time, too. Okay. Okay. In The Office’s defense, how is Michael Scott’s character retired? He runs off with his love, right? Exactly. That’s the only solution out of there. Yeah. And he actually talks about having kids with Holly, which is kind of absurd, you know, given their age. Still, you know, he’s like, hey, I’m going to run off and it’s happily ever after with this person that I love. And he’s thinking about these things. So there at least is that, you know. That’s true. But like, look at Star Wars. Star Wars is just terrible. There’s no like that’s not there, you know. Not at all. Yeah, it’s. Yeah, there’s just, you know. There’s no riding off into the sunset. Well, it’s not right. It’s not a properly structured story. It’s written by somebody who’s an amateur writer at best. All the best lines were ad-libbed by the actors. You know, it’s just that it’s a mess. I mean, I love Star Wars, but it’s a mess. If you look at if you look at the original, you know, you have this relationship between father and son, you know, like you can see that there. But the latest ones, the main character is a female and child ring has absolutely nothing to do with her character. You know, like that’s not even part of it at all. Even close. In which case, is it really a female character? Exactly. It’s not. It’s not a female character. Like there it’s not a coincidence that we’re seeing this type of, you know, we’re seeing these characters in blockbuster movies. And then what’s what’s the thing we just saw at the Gender Museum that used to be a woman museum? It’s a bearded man breastfeeding a baby. You know, it’s like those two things go together. Like it’s like it’s actually the complete like I think I commented, I said destruction of woman success. We’ve completely destroyed the woman. Yes. Erased it right from the well, because to some extent we know it should be the hidden matriarchy. And when it’s not, we got to get rid of it because it’s a problem. Because if you’re denying creation, you’re denying womanhood. Exactly. Yeah. The thing is, with all of this, everything, it’s so sad. Like with every step, every nudge we progress towards this ideology, the first point of suffering is always women. Ironically, like it’s always women that suffer first. Everybody suffers, but it’s always women that suffer first because it’s always it’s always the feminine that brings feminine is weirdly like the first point of contact of the realization of anything. It’s like the woman was the one that took the fruit. Right. The woman was the one that brought God into the world. You know, it’s it’s just a weird. Well, we don’t. It’s weird to me because I, you know, we don’t understand the feminine at all. At all, you know, modernly. And we’re not supposed to. Yeah, that’s the thing. We’re not. We’re probably not supposed to. Yeah. No, we’re not. And women aren’t supposed to understand men. Like that’s not. We’re specialists in our own domains. And that’s good. Because that enables something larger. Men men are a lot easier to men. Masculine masculinity is it’s. It’s. If we’re going to look at it as a triangle, masculinity is that the represents the the pinnacle of the triangle is something that you can actually look at it, whereas the feminine, the feminine is what surrounds is what’s at the bottom of the triangle. Or if it’s a circle, the masculine is the identifiable point in the middle and the feminine is what surrounds it. It’s the it’s the peripheral and periphery. It’s not something that you can focus on. The feminine is not something that you can because if you change if the feminine is their peripheral vision, we’ll say it’s your peripheral vision. If you look to the right to where your peripheral vision was, it’s just you just refocus. The periphery is always on the periphery. You can’t you can’t. You can’t make it not that way. It doesn’t work. So my point is that you can we can understand or at least see like literally see the masculine easier than we can than we can. You’re supposed to be able to see the masculine. It’s supposed to be the target. Yeah, exactly. It’s supposed to be can’t be any other way. And that’s and that’s a directed type of attention. It’s different from the type of attention that that women engage in. And yeah, men are simple. Og build, og smash. Pretty much it. But it’s not. That’s still mysterious. Like that’s still mysterious from the woman’s perspective. Right. It doesn’t make sense that there’s a there’s a question. Like you should get married young because the sexes are fundamentally incompatible. Well, yeah, but it’s more it’s more important than that. Right. Because it’s the interaction of the masculine and the feminine. Men will build and smash random things unless something is pointed at. And women point whether they like it or not. Like they just do. Beauty points. It does. And so it’s unavoidable. But then if they don’t know what they’re pointing at, we’re just going to do random stuff or we’re going to do based on what we think they’re pointing at that they may be pointing at. And they’re not going to understand it because they don’t know they’re pointing. Yep. That’s going to happen. It’s really cool. Just because I’ve got it right here. This book that we’re going through. Nice. Yeah, it’s actually a book that I’m going to be reading. Yeah, it’s actually secret. It’s weird. There’s I don’t know how else to describe it other than veil. It’s veiled like the thing pulling Dante through the comedy through hell and purgatory in paradise is actually in a secretive way the feminine. It all starts with Beatrice. That’s actually what’s pulling him through everything. And it’s not explicit. He’s never made explicit. It’s just kind of it’s implicit or or secret or veiled in a way. That’s so in sick. He like we conceptualize ourselves as brides, right? We’re married to the good. We’re married to God. Yeah, we were. And it’s like God is it’s weird because God loves us. Because God loves us. So then he’s actually doing these things for what we’re pointing at, even though we’re broken and stuff. Right. Like there’s still a yeah, we’re trying to serve him and submit to the one. But there is also this reciprocal thing where he’s doing the things that are the best for us. And we have these desires which are good. Right. There’s disorder of passions, but there’s good desires. And there’s like the fulfillment of these desires through through the proper ordering. Does that make any sense? No, no, I think that that’s correct. That’s how Christians are supposed to understand things as well. Almost like exactly. They’re supposed to understand a feminine relationship with God. I mean, what I was talking about earlier, the bridegroom, right? There’s Christ and his bride is the laity, the people, the people that worship him. Yeah, like these are we have five case. And when you get initiated, they become sort of obligatory. But like the idea behind them, I was listening to a podcast that these in the your hair is one of them. You got a comb and you have a coupon, which is a dagger. Yeah. And one of them is actually a certain kind of undergarment. And it’s like these are your wedding gifts. Like this is what God is given to you as the wedding gifts. That’s cool. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I it’s funny. Everyone’s like, you join East and West. I find it. There is no difference between East and West. If you’re seeing a difference, you’re a little you’re going to you’ve got a discernment problem. Hey, the way they’re expressed is different. Of course. Right. But there’s no difference. And once you understand, there’s a wonderful book called The Geography of Thought. Once you understand the geography of thought, there are other books like that. And it points to the book about the difference in thinking between Asia and the West. And everything’s more circular. They did this great experiment. You go to you go to China or Japan or something, you ask them the strong wind’s been going up in three days. What do you think it’s going to do tomorrow? And almost all of them, like 80 percent of them say it’s going to go down. If you do the same thing in the West, they say it’s going to go up. That’s so interesting. And how you think about the world. Because it’s circular. Right. There’s that whole thing about the white horse. Right. The white horse shows up and they’re like, oh, that’s that’s very fortunate. And the farmer goes, maybe. Right. And then it’s like, oh, well, well, well, then the son starts to ride the horse and gets thrown off and breaks his leg. And they’re like, oh, that’s very unfortunate. Farmer goes, maybe. And then the military shows up and they’re going to conscript his son, but he’s got a broken leg. So, you know, it’s like, maybe. Right. It’s all about tradeoffs and about how you can’t tell in the immediate moment from the event whether it’s good or bad. And the farmer seems to know this and starts going, I don’t know. This could be good. This could be. I don’t know the world. Maybe a broken leg is a good thing. And in this case, it is. Right. And the story goes on and on and on. But, you know, there’s all of there’s all of that flavor in there. But, you know, read read the Tao Te Ching and Ecclesiastes side by side. We did this by accident on The Awakening from Meaning Press, sir. Same book says almost the same thing. Like, actually, like the language in Ecclesiastes and the language in the Tao Te Ching overlap heavily like the actual language. It’s really bizarre. They’re saying the same thing. There’s again, they’re pointing at it differently in some cases, but there’s a lot of overlap. You don’t need to merge East and West. They’re already merged. The difference is if you’re an Easterner and you have Eastern thought, you’re going to engage better with Eastern practices. If you’re in the West, you probably don’t have Eastern thought. And the funny conclusion or one of the conclusions in the book, The Geography of Thought, was that Easterners can think like Westerners very easily. Westerners cannot think like Easterners on average. Not possible. They just can’t do it. Which I find amusing because that has so many implications, right? But it’s funny, too, because back when I first engaged with the book and read it, I started asking my friends from Asia, for example, like, you know about this? And they’re like, oh, yeah, we know. I’m like, you bastards. You never told me. You sons of bitches. Like, really? And they’re like, oh, yeah, we know we think differently and we know and we can switch and we know we’re switching. And I’m like, I can’t believe you betrayed me like this. I never knew this. I never would have suspected until I read that book. That’s interesting. Last night at the estuary, actually, one of the guys, he was talking about hierarchy and he was framing it in terms of a triangle. And I instinctually was like, well, I think about it much more in terms of the circle and circle and belief. And it was just like, that’s wild that you said that. Well, yeah, that’s and it’s in the literature. Like, if you read it carefully enough and you’re actually paying attention, you’ll see the same patterns exemplified through different metaphorical examples. And in the East, it’s circular. And in the West, it’s directional. And it’s an oversimplification. But yeah, yeah, bang. It’s right there. And then it’s like, oh, like the West is goal oriented. Whereas the East is continuous. Right. And this gets into there’s the there’s the knowledge engine model. I have a video on navigating patterns. Right. When we talk about this, one side of the brain is discrete and linear, point A to point B, and the other side of the brain is continuous. It doesn’t end. The processing is ongoing, indefinite. And and Midocus talks about this, too. Right. And, you know, some of the work was certainly borrowed from him. But it was always in the data. I mean, he uses the data to prove it, too. But I engage with a lot of that data, slightly different interpretation. Some of it, he’s making some obvious mistakes, but they’re not germane. He’s mostly right. So it doesn’t really matter. But yeah. And so it’s almost like, you know, the East is heavily on one side and the West is heavily on the other. And I think that kind of. You said McGill, Chris. I know. It’s not even a three. You say his name three times. You say it once and she shows up. I know. I know. But waiting. She’s like, I know. She can. She knows you’re going to say McGill, Chris, before you say it. She’s already there ready. It’s true. Or Dante. Like, as you mentioned, if you had trade in your Dante interpretation, bang, she would have got it. Just like that. In the background, just waiting. That’s the proper feminine. Should it? Well, I don’t know. I mean, you were at Thunder Bay, Ethan. Did you notice Scott’s wife? Remember who Scott is again? Scott’s the. Oh, oh, yeah, definitely noticed her. What would it would have noticed? What about her? Well, I mean, she filled in all these little gaps that didn’t exist until she filled them. It was really strange. I was like, oh, OK. So at one point, I think it was Saturday. For lunch, you know, we had that lunch break in the middle. So I’m sitting at the table and I’m not going anywhere, so I don’t know where to go. I’m like, whatever. I’m not going to go. I’m going to leave. I’m not going to get lunch today. I’m fine. And then all of a sudden appears all this food. I’m like, oh, this is where all this comes from. Oh, yeah. I mean, I’m a glutton. So there was food in front of me. I’ll eat it. So I was like, oh, my. Yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about. She was weirdly mysteriously filling filling spaces, filling gaps. Yes. Yeah, yes. And they weren’t gaps that were apparent, at least not to me. I mean, you know, I would have been fine had she not brought her food. Like, and there were a bunch of us who just we didn’t go anywhere. We didn’t go off to lunch. It was raining and you know, and like I just wasn’t super hungry. I was like, oh, I’m going to go. I’m going to go. And like I just wasn’t super hungry, but having a couple of pastries was perfect. So I was like, oh, you know, again, you can’t put food in front of me. I won’t eat it. That’s not I can’t do that. Unfortunately, I wish I could. Yeah, I really appreciated her. I don’t even know her name. I don’t even I don’t know her name either. I keep asking after like, what is her name? She just kind of appeared when needed and vanished again. And I’m like, what is going on here? This is very strange. She’s like the periphery. Right. Right. You couldn’t focus on her. Right. All the focus was on him where it belonged. Exactly. Yeah. The targets, the man let him he’s the he’s the tank. Let him take the damage. Yes. True. Well, you know, I like gaming terminology. Yeah, I do fancy me some D&D occasionally and some world. I used to play World of Warcraft and similar sorts of online MMOs. I never put huge amounts of time far too much time, no doubt. But, you know, I mean, some of these people would play eight hours a day, you know, six days a week. I never did anything crazy like that. It’s not that I didn’t have the occasional eight hour day, but this guy is still stuck on porn. It’s been like two hours. I know. I’m not getting the answer I want in the way that I want it. So I’m going to keep on. I’m like, OK, you can keep trying. You can continue to fail for as long as you’d like. We’ll be here. I wonder if Elizabeth saw the latest with Prager. I mean, poor Prager. I mean, there’s been there was something he said in the he said. I can’t remember which episode it was, but it was really nice. You know, he’s like, oh, like, I’ve learned so much. I never thought until this point, unless he was just bullshitting. No, no, I was I I thought this way my whole life until this very moment. And you guys changed my change. Yes, not about this. I thought that was that was really nice. He said that several times in the first eight Exodus episodes. We said it again. Yeah, but like 11 or 12. Forget about that. The point is in the moment when it happened, he exemplified. Oh, you have helped me with it. Like at one point, I think he did this twice, but I know he did it once. He said to Pigeot, I’ve heard that argument before from from Jewish people, from non-Jewish people, but until you. Framed it the way you framed it. I didn’t I didn’t take it. I wasn’t able to take it seriously or something to that effect. And so any appreciated it in the moment. And we don’t see enough of that in the world. We don’t like it was like, why are we having bad conversations? Well, part of it is we’re not giving people credit when they make good points. You know, like, oh, you should do that when somebody says something clever. And this is one of my deep criticisms of the Verbeke Peterson Pigeot conversation when they were talking about Foucault. Peterson made a couple of whopper like, hold the phone, stop everything, acknowledge this statement that I was like, you guys just blew past that. I mean, even I was like, John, the show, you’re his buddy. Like, no, hold the phone. Like, that’s huge. Or at least let him finish and then say, hold on. I want to acknowledge that was a me. Yeah. Right. And he didn’t do that. And that disappointed me. And I did want to yell at him at Thunder Bay about it, but I didn’t. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The admirable of Prager. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you should listen to anything he says. Yeah. Well, well, no. I mean, you should listen to the positive things that he says. He has a lot of good things to say. He’s just he’s wrong about porn and he’s wrong, you know, in a certain way for a certain reason. And I think that reason is clear, given some other things in his background. That’s all. And actions speak volumes. Right. And his action of defending the what I would call an indefensible position by his own framework, he’s contradicting himself. I think that’s important. I really appreciated Matt saying. I really appreciated Matt responding with, oh, that’s that’s absolutely appalling to me. You know, his response to Prager. That was nice because a lot of people like, oh, OK. You know, he was just like, I don’t know. Like and this is the problem. Like this is why it’s important that Christians are forlorn. Because if you’re afraid of speaking because of the consequences and that destroys your your your signaling, you’re not signaling the good into the world. And I argue and I be wrong about this, but none of the even the crazy heretical Christians have pushed back. I argue that if you’re following Jesus, you’re definitely putting out that signal no matter what the consequences. I don’t know how the hell you get around that. I mean, I haven’t read the book or anything, but fairly sure I know how that part goes. And kind of looks like he just does the right thing no matter what the consequences are. And that was the thing I didn’t mention in the in the monologue I meant to mention. If you want to see good action and right, true action exemplified in the world, the movie to watch is Man on Fire. What’s Man on Fire about? Man on Fire is a movie about doing the right thing. That’s what the movie is about. You know what else? It’s about nothing else. It’s only about doing the right thing. There’s a redemption arc in there. There is, but it’s really a movie about doing the right thing. Mm hmm. Let’s check it out. That’s a great movie. If you haven’t seen Man on Fire. Well, first of all, it’s a great guy. It’s pretty brutal at times. So maybe women don’t want to watch it. Fair enough. Maybe they shouldn’t. But it is about like doing the right thing. And yeah, you know, sometimes the right thing is pretty freaking ugly without war. Like one of the lines in the movie is, I’m going to find him. I’m going to hunt down anybody who had anything to do with anybody who profited from it. It’s like, what? It’s like, yeah, and he does. And it’s like glorious. Absolutely glorious. It’s like, this is how to do the right thing in the world. And you know, I mean, everyone’s going to be like, what? That movie is horrible. He kills a bunch of people. Yeah, but they were bad. Sorry. And then this gets into the good bad man. There’s no such thing as a good bad man. Doing bad things does not mean you’re a bad man. Doing things that you perceive to be bad means that you don’t understand the world. Because no action in and of itself outside of context is bad. And that’s the problem. Say that again. No. No action outside of context is bad. Or no action outside of context is bad. Or good. You can’t say like killing a person is bad. Because that’s the same thing as legalism. Exactly. That’s the legalism. Legalism is dramatism. Right. And that’s why, like, in Sikhi the scripture, there’s no rules. It’s all about relationship. It’s all about intimacy with reality. Like, there’s not, like, in the Quran or… We avoid these conversations on your channel, Bill Gates, so I’m not going to go through that. Yeah. Alright. It’s late. So parting thoughts. We’ll go to Ethan first. Pass. I need more than a second’s notice. What do you mean, pass? Alright, Raj. What do you got for parting thoughts on anything, really? You don’t have to stick to it. I’m glad I hopped in here. It was a very nice chat with both of you. Oh. I’m very happy to hear that. That’s quite nice of you to say. I really appreciate that feedback. Did you watch the whole stream or did you just jump in? I watched the beginning of your monologue. Then I had to do something, and then I caught up to where you guys were debating about whether or not meditation was action. You were saying it was not action. I saw you guys were talking about meditation. I saw maybe about two thirds of the monologue start from there. Oh, great. Did you like the monologue? Was it good? Yeah, I did. I really enjoyed your discernment and judgment when I watched those. I’m drawing some drives last week. Oh, great. I’m happy to hear that. That’s wonderful for you to say. Any other parting things before I force Ethan to actually speak? I think I’m ready to hear what he has to say. Excellent. Come on, Ethan. Yeah, I think it’s really cool. I really like the things you’ve been saying, Raj, about the what you just said about the legalism. I think it’s really cool. It’s nice to hear that. I think we need to hear that more here. That way of thinking about things I think is very important, and people need to hear that. It’s really neat to hear that from someone, especially someone coming from an alien tradition. So that’s great. Let’s see. The Christians are for lions. That’s the weird thing about Christians. It reminds me of Star Wars when Obi-Wan tells Darth Vader, If you strike me down, I’ll become more powerful than you ever could imagine. That’s straight from Christianity. That’s Christianity. It’s like, oh, you want to go to war? We’ll just give you an unlimited amount of bodies. And with each body that we give you that’s eaten, it’ll become stronger. It will become stronger. Christians just willingly do it. They would just show up and they’re like, We’re going to make a spectacle out of you. We’re going to feed you to lions. And they would just do it. It’s insane. It’s crazy. There’s a reason they built the center of the western church on top of the martyrs that were eaten by lions. There’s a reason. Elizabeth can help us. Somewhere in Vatican, I can’t remember where it was. They just built everything on top of where they buried all the martyrs. Thinking about that’s incredibly humbling to me. But yeah, it’s crazy. Wow. Anyways, I love it whenever you talk about that. And I also hate it at the same time because it’s incredibly frightening. It’s frightening and also gives you a sense of wholeness at the same time hearing it. I’m glad to hear that. Did you hear Michael on Jacob’s stream say, I can’t help but hear Mark in my head talking about Christianity. I was thinking about that today. I need to go back and listen to it. That’s funny. Yeah, between that and the clip that you pointed out, thank you from Paul Vander Saint. Excellent. Yeah, I was like, well, that just means it’s all working. It’s taking a while, of course, but it’s all working. Victory. And look, I want to, in some sense, redeem communication because I touched on this earlier. Giving people credit for the good work that they do is an important signal. So even though the action value is say equal to being defamed on a stream without being discussed privately first, the action value may be the same, but the signal value is actually different. And more positive signals in the world will move the world more positively automatically. I’ve often tried to explain this to people. Twitter’s not the problem and Twitter’s algorithm is not the problem. Because if everybody posts nothing but smiley faces, that’s all you’ll see in Twitter. And you can argue, well, you know, the advertisers. OK, so you see advertisers in smiley faces. It’s still better. Like, you know, what you do matters. And if you put out, today I posted a rose on my Twitter feed, right, because that’s what I want to do. It’s not the only thing I post, but the big part of what I do is post ineffable beauty on purpose, right? Share it with everybody so that they can engage in the ineffable beauty that hopefully I notice when I notice it. Sometimes I don’t, obviously. And that’s important. Those are important signals that so taking the time to judge the action of speaking positive positivity and speaking positively about others, even if you disagree with them in the world, is important. Because exemplifying differences is easy, but exemplifying how we’re the same is really hard. And that’s really important. It’s an important set of actions, actions to take. Yeah. And I. I wanted to share some lyrics from a song called Henchmen by a band called Bad Religion. And it’s a don’t be a henchman, stand on your morals, do what no one else does, praise the good of other men for good men’s sake. And when everyone else in the world follows your lead, although cold day and hell it will surely be, that’s when the entire world shall live in harmony. Nice. Good lyrics from Bad Religion. That’s hysterical. That’s so symbolic. Yeah, no, that’s wonderful. So the next action I’m going to take is to end the stream. But I want to thank everybody for watching and everybody who participated in the new people moved in and out. And Sally Jo was here, which was awesome. That was pretty epic earlier. Yeah, I want to I want to do streams for the European crowd, too. And it’s just I’d have to get way more organized and I just haven’t managed to do it yet. But it’s still it’s still in the plan. And yeah, you know, look, I hope that these engagements are opening people up to new ways of thinking, right? Re-enchanting their worlds for them, allowing them to engage in a larger conversation, a better conversation and not, you know, get reciprocally narrowed in the frame that they’ve always been stuck in or a frame that isn’t helping them take right action in the world. Right. Or a frame where their action keeps frustrating them and making them angry and resentful. Right. That’s part of what this project is all about. And particularly on navigating patterns, we’re trying to fix cultural title grammar. But also with the last change, it was slightly different. Obviously, I got a costume on. Right. There’s more going on. Different things. We’ve got that nice animation front. You haven’t seen that. Watch that. And yeah, thanks, everybody. And have a great night. And I will see you all next time we do a stream. Next Friday.