Attention and signals LIVE! (HWowMY_Pes0)

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Young girl dancing to the latest beat, has found new ways to move her feet. And the lonely voice of youth cries, what is truth? Young man speaking in the city square, trying to tell somebody that he cares. Can you blame the voice of youth, asking what is truth? Yeah, the ones that you’re calling wow, are gonna be the leaders in a little while. When will the lonely voice of youth cry, what is truth? This all world’s waken to a newborn babe, and our solemn lists swear it’ll be their way. You better help that voice of youth find what is truth. And the lonely voice of youth cries, what is truth? Hey, hey, all right. Well, welcome. Today we’re going to be talking about attention and signals. And I’m happy to see everybody here. Ahoy, my fellow Pirates and Pirate fans. I had a little rush today. I’ve been working, which is just a terrible thing. I don’t know why the world has done this to me. So, rushed notes, rushed everything, of course the computer is never working anymore ever again. But I wanted to talk about attention and signals. It’s come up all over the place, like right up until, you know, Attention and signals was right in Vanderklae’s live stream today. I was like, what is going on? Absolutely everywhere. So we got a bit of a new format because what I’m going to do is I’m going to go two to two and a half hours and then I’m going to stop. I’m going to take a 10 minute break and then I’m going to open it up for after party. So after pirate party. So, yeah, we’re going to do the same old monologue first. Yep. We’ve got the big bottle of Sam Pell, which is our thing. Right. We’ve got the tea. We’ve got some, we’ve got some La Croix. Highly recommend it. My cousin introduced me to this stuff. It’s fantastic. We’ve got Marathon Tea from the Table Rock Tea Company in South Carolina. And I’ve got my junk list bar here, my cinnamon, cinnamon junk list bar. So we’re ready to go. So with that. What do I mean when I talk about attention and signals? Because of course they’re related, right? You’re paying attention to signals. And this is wrapped up in influence and pointing and noticing, right? Signals are the things that you notice. And then there’s patterns that emerge from all this attention and, you know, that emerge from the signals that you can give your attention to. Right. And how does this work? It works with awareness and awareness is limited. So your attention is sort of inside your awareness, right? Your awareness is limited. Right. And the larger thing is the salience landscape. So you have a salience landscape, you have a certain awareness within that. And within that, you can move your attention. And these are the limits to perspective. And, you know, we’ll go into perspective someday as well. I, you know, I’m not going to do it today. And then because it is wrapped up in this. So we’ll mention it on and off. Perhaps you can see where it sort of blends into perspective as such. And part of the problem is we notice things, right? There are things that we attend to unconsciously. Right. And so there are signals that are sort of being attended to unconsciously. Maybe that’s not the best way to think about it, but your attention is moved by unconscious things as well. Right. So we have to curate our attention. We have to understand what we’re attending to. Right. So attention is to attend, right? It’s how we attend. It’s how we notice things, how we interact with them, how we look at the world, how we determine what to think, what to imagine, what to do. Right. It’s how we have discernment. Right. We own our attention. And that helps us to have better discernment. And it’s these signals that have different aspects. Some signals can be loud. Right. Some signals can be frequent or resonant or sneak in quietly. Right. Again, unconsciously. Right. So there’s all these signals. They’re not like a signal is not equivalent to one other signal because of these other factors like loudness and frequency. And we have to curate that. Right. We have to discern the good signals from the bad signals so that our attention is not hijacked away from that, which is most important. You’ll notice I said most. So what am I invoking here? I am invoking priority. I am invoking hierarchy. That’s a priority. It probably makes no sense without hierarchy. Right. So your attention should be towards the thing in the moment that needs to be the most important. You cannot pay attention to everything. You can’t even pay attention to a lot of things, as it turns out. Well, how do we pay attention to what’s most important? My method is pragmatism. Right. There are others, but I’m going to take talk about what I believe I know the best, which is pragmatism and pragmatism is wrapped up in results. Right. So pragmatism doesn’t try to mind read people. Right. It says, oh, this happened. I don’t know why. It could be several reasons. Maybe if it only happened once, I go, well, whatever mistakes happen, things happen, randomness, whatever. Right. But if it happens twice, maybe I go, oh, I don’t know why. This happened once. You kind of remain aware of it. It happened again. Now, you know, explanation, something. Right. And if you don’t have that, you know, maybe we have to take an action and you can say, oh, well, you know, you don’t know what action to take. And I can say, yeah, maybe not. But maybe. So you’ve got a bad politician. Do you care if it’s corruption, incompetence or incapacity? Because the solution in all three cases is to get rid of the politician. Now, how that’s done, you know, do you vote him out? Do you have a special vote? It doesn’t really matter. Right. So you don’t need to attend to the reason why the mistake happens over and over again. Right. You can just say it doesn’t matter what the reason is. The solution is the same. Now, what you do after that’s a different story. Don’t much care because I’m more focused on the discernment, judgment, action, cycle. Right. And attention obviously is part of that. Right. Because attention, again, helps you with discernment. So because hierarchy matters and hierarchy is somewhat a statement of this scale matters. Right. Hierarchy and scale are related because the scale of things that happen at the king is not the same as the scale of things that happen at the peasant. It just isn’t. The scale of things that happen at the city is not the same scale that happens at the people. And that’s the problem is that when you’re at the top, you lose detail. And you can pay attention to details, but you can’t pay attention to all of them. That’s why scale matters. Right. You have to pay attention to some of them because you have to recalibrate your 30,000 foot view if you’re at the top. Same at the bottom. Like, look, sometimes whatever’s at the top, whether it’s a king or a government or, you know, a state or a community, right. An HOA, housing authority, whatever. Doesn’t matter. Sometimes you’re going to be on the losing end of that stick. Right. Because sacrifices have to be made. Things have to be jiggled around and organized. Right. Hierarchy matters. You’re going to have a certain place in the hierarchy period. Maybe you don’t like that. Maybe you don’t want to call attention to that. Right now, there’s no election. There’s not much I can do about elected officials. I can I. It’s not to say don’t pay attention to them, but not going to be voting on the top. I can pay attention to the scale. Right now. Right now, there’s no election. There’s not much I can do about elected officials. I can I don’t say don’t pay attention to them, but not going to be voting them out. I can take notes and say, well, I really didn’t like that. I really didn’t like that. Right. But limited attention. I don’t want to put all my attention on it and start screaming about, you know, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or any number of people in Congress, many of whom are traders. I don’t want to do that. Right. Because it’s not going to happen. Now, everybody takes up arms tomorrow and storms the Capitol. That’s a different story. I hope that doesn’t happen. I’m not recommending it, but, you know, that would change things. That hasn’t happened. And so I don’t want to put my attention there on anything that would involve that because that hasn’t happened yet. You can always defer your attention to, you know, when you need to. And this gets into do you have proper discernment? Right. Can you take an action? Do you have proper discernment? Can you judge? These are problems of attention. You need to pay attention to whether or not you have the information to discern. You know, you know, you get two siblings, they get in a fight, you walk in the room, they’re in the middle of a fight. You’re in the middle of an incident. Can you really determine who started it? I don’t know. You know, at some point it’s arbitrary. And so you have to keep that in mind with your judgment. Well, I can’t judge fairly, but I can judge. And someone’s going to get upset either way, even if it’s just by accident. So, you know, you just need that discernment so you don’t make that error. You’d be able to tell the siblings, nope, this is an arbitrary judgment. So too bad. That’s life. They’re going to run into that one way or the other. Those are problems of attention. So you can pay attention to what you’re paying attention to, to some limited extent. But again, you’re not going to know all the unconscious things, right, because that’s a thing. And the signals are everywhere. And sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s going on. Is this a loud signal or is this a signal that I just resonate with or is this a signal that I hear all the time? Because everybody kind of knows that, right? And if somebody says something over and over and over again, we tend to believe it. And that’s the issue. Signals matter. Attention matters. It’s important. We have to curate this stuff. So you can frame things any old way. Like you could say that, you know, porn created the Internet. Okay, not really. People’s attention moved as the result of sexual signaling on the Internet. And that’s the issue. So you can frame things any old way. People’s attention moved as the result of sexual signaling on the Internet. We would call that porn for sure. Memes are an attempt to capture attention, right? But it narrows attention and makes it individualistic, right? There’s lots of things that are vying for your attention, right? And if you don’t know that you’re being moved in a certain direction by a certain signal, right? If you don’t understand that your attention’s been drawn to some place or to something, then you’re hijacked. And your attention can be hijacked. That happens for sure. And look, attention is a good way to know whether or not something that you’re being told is correct or not. Did porn create the Internet? Do you think that some other industry creating the Internet would have meant that porn didn’t get onto the Internet? You know, that’s kind of crazy talk. Like, almost certainly not. The only way you could have something like porn not on the Internet is by regulating it. But the people that started the Internet didn’t want to regulate it. And in fact, it was designed so that it couldn’t be regulated. Something that the DOD, I know for a fact, is really regretting right about now. Has been for 10, 15 years. And Congress is certainly pissed about that too. And so are governments around the world, right? They tried to shut the Internet in Egypt a few times and Iran a few times and China a few times. It just doesn’t work. This thing is too well designed to do exactly what it’s designed to do, which was to be so redundant that it couldn’t really be shut down. And, you know, there are some exceptions to that rule, but there are exceptions. Maybe you can’t do it. And, you know, there are some exceptions to that rule, but there are exceptions. It can’t really be shut down. And once that’s attended to, the fact that communication can happen over that sort of realm, you have a problem. And that problem is that even if you destroy the technology, people are still going to try to do what the Internet did. It’ll be recreated. That’s the power of attention. And our attention is limited, and the world is not as limited. So not everything that we could do in the world is going to be manifestable in the world. And that’s a function of our attention. We put our attention on war, we’ll get war. Right? If we put our attention on the Internet, we’ll get the Internet. If we put our attention on Mars, we’ll get to Mars. Right? It’s not guaranteed because we have to put enough attention by enough people. Blah, right? There’s other factors. But attention is the thing that gets us focused on things so that we can overcome them. Now, a lot of what the connectivity of the Internet offers, for example, is the ability to find a small community to get rid of our domicile, where we don’t have to change. We can just find people enough like us. So if we find enough people who are enough like us, we don’t have to do the hard work of getting along with people. We don’t have to do the hard work of finding common ground. We don’t have to do the hard work of figuring out where the boundaries are between people. Because we need to find people that are like us. Now, of course, those people don’t exist. And so what ends up happening is either you get involved in a cult where these things get worked out in a way that’s probably not going to be favorable to you, or you end up in a situation where you’re alone. You get that domicile. The domicile comes back. Right? Because you get kicked out of one group, and you get kicked out of another group, and you get kicked out. I know a lot of people like this. They go into Internet groups, and they get kicked out as soon as they get out of the group. And they get kicked out as servers shut down or whatever. Communities are constantly trying to emerge, and then emergence is not good by itself. So the emergence goes for a while, then blows up. That’s what happened with the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis server. It went for a while, and then it blew up. Mark got tired of trying to keep it together anyway, so good enough. When we don’t attend to the fact that there’s hard work and struggle you’re not doing, we don’t do the hard work, and then we end up in domicile over and over and over again. If you feel like a gypsy, if you feel like you have no home, that’s because you’re not willing to submit to what you need to do to be with other people. And you should be with people local to you. And maybe you could move. Sure, maybe. Is that really going to solve your problems? Because you take your problems with you. I mean, you’re still you. Most of your problems are you. They’re not external to you. And we know this, especially in the US, because people at the bottom of the rung rise to the top all the time in the US, more than any other country in the world by far, by far. Economic mobility in the US is ridiculous. CNN years ago used to have a show on, I forget the name of it now, but basically it was one of these individual hero shows, and it was all rags to riches stories. And one of them that really struck me is, a guy came here from, I think it was Hong Kong, and he lands in one of the ports around, I think it was San Francisco or something. And he had some contacts through the family, and he slept in the warehouse and ran the warehouse for this guy. And didn’t speak any English. In a year, he became a millionaire. In a year from coming here not speaking any English. That’s insane. So, you know, you can whine about your situation. I mean, I’ve been born here and grown up in a middle class, a middle class house, whatever, or even in a poor family. Yeah, sorry. It’s all you. If you’re not where you want to be or need to be, that’s you. It just is. There’s lots of people that come here and just from other places with nothing and just make fortunes. They’re hard workers and they make some ridiculous. I mean, some of the guy was sleeping in the warehouse and willing to be woken up at any time in the warehouse to do whatever, you know, whatever loading unloading needed to be done. I wouldn’t do that for sure. I’ll forego the million dollars. Thank you very much. And I have like, you know, this isn’t theoretical for me. There’s been lots of jobs. I’ve said, no, I’m not doing that. I don’t care how much money it is. And I’m well aware of that because I attend to it. I know where my attention is. My attention is on doing good. It makes life a lot easier when you just attend to the good and not worry about the rest. It doesn’t conflicts don’t go away. Conflicts change, right? Values and the virtues become more clear. But a lot of the confusion that people have about what to do and when to do it can go away if they just pay attention to the good. And when we’re in a good local community, it’s easier to know what to attend to because you can just attend to that which is around you and aim it towards the good. And that can help fix the domicile of the meaning crisis, you know, that helps to address the meaning crisis. And I know last week we talked about reciprocal narrowing. What is it? What? That’s what attention mediates, right? It mediates your reciprocal narrowing because sometimes you need to reciprocally narrow your focus. You concentrate on something. You need to get something done and take an action that’s reciprocally narrowing. And then you need to reciprocally widen or broaden or open. Right. So it’s both. It’s not one or the other. You need to mediate between those two. And your attention helps you to do that. That’s why things like the Pomodoro method, if you’ve never looked up the Pomodoro method, you should look it up. I don’t agree with their timeframes. Their timeframes don’t work for me. But the idea of working for a while and then taking a 10 minute break or five minute break and then working for another chunk and then taking a break. Very good advice. Why? Because you’re reciprocally narrowing, reciprocally narrowing, reciprocally narrowing. Well, we’re going to reciprocally open. We’re going to get what I used to do when I worked at corporations was it was time to go get tea. And so, you know, sometimes I actually program an alarm. Sometimes the computer tell me like, all right, computer do a little countdown thing. You know, in the old days, there were various ways to do it in scripting, which I would do because why use something that already exists when you can write your own script? All right. It also keeps your scripting skills good. That practice is the practice of training your attention. All right. Oh, this alarm is going to interrupt me. Thanks, food. And then I’m going to change my attention to do I need to pee? Do I need to eat? Should I get something to drink? Whatever. Now, when you’re doing that, your brain switches modes and all of a sudden the problem you’re working on and focused in on becomes more clear. And then when you go back to focus in, boom, it’s done. Same works for study. Pomodoro Technique is wonderful. And it is a function of training attention. Effectively. It’s not only that, but a good way to get things done. And. You can see. This cycle of attention matters, right? And starting point matters. So John Breveke did a video on AI that’s just atrocious and you probably shouldn’t watch it because it’s full of enchantment. And clearly he’s self enchanted. And in that video he talks about AlphaGo and he says, you know, AlphaGo is the greatest Go player ever. And it turns out that if you change the starting conditions of AlphaGo, it doesn’t work. It will not win the game. So you can give it a head start on number of stones placed. You can give it the first move and it will reliably lose. If it doesn’t start from either first or second stone placement, it doesn’t win. That’s because AI is highly dependent upon attention. And when its attention does not start at the right point, it can’t function anymore correctly. No, really. That’s state of the art stuff. It doesn’t work the way we work. This is why when people say AGI, I’m like, you don’t even have four types of memory. CogSci says we have four types of memory. AIs don’t have four types of memory. They don’t even have one. Technically, we could argue the LTSM issue. Not a technical discussion. But I will argue with you, by the way, because actually I do AI and I do know this. So pay attention to the fact that I’ve got a lot more experience than most people in AI. Most of the people in AI don’t have as much AI experience as I have. They’ve been doing it an awful long time on my own. Thank you very much. Attention works in a limited fashion, even in an AI. And it determines everything about the effectiveness of the AI. And it determines everything about the effectiveness of you. Too much attention, which might be worship, to the wrong thing takes you away from the important things. It destroys your life. We are looking for something unrealistic to maintain and bow out when it is gone. We have these notions that a relationship should be like a good vacation. We want the thrill of love without the long-term attention to the person with all their flaws, problems and insecurities. We want the thrill of love without the long-term attention to the person with all their flaws, problems and insecurities. We don’t want that. We just want the vacation part. What we have is an addiction, a reciprocal narrowing of attention on vacation, good fun. This is a modern problem. It’s a problem that I had. These are problems we all might run into and most of us do run into. And it’s a problem because we are attending to the wrong definition of relationship. We are attending to the wrong thing. A relationship is not about having fun, feeling good, getting the dopamine hit, whatever. The mere physicality or the mere thrill of being around someone is not a problem. A relationship is a third thing. You need to attend to the third thing in order for the two people to get along. They have to be aiming at the same third point in order to orient in relationship to one another and the world. You are changing. The other person is changing. The world is changing. You need orientation, mirror direction towards the other person. You need to be able to see the other person. You need to be able to see the other person. The world is changing. You need orientation, mirror direction towards the other person won’t work. And if their mirror direction and your mirror direction are not the same, then it’s not going to work. It has to be towards the relationship, however you define that. It has to be towards the relationship, that third higher thing. It has to be higher than the two of you. Otherwise, it will go to reciprocal narrowing and become an addiction. And that’s probably not going to end well. Didn’t for me last time. And today, attention has been fractured. Why? Because the world is flattened. It’s spread out all over. It’s flat. You look out over the landscape and you just see an endless sea to the horizon. It’s not aimed in three dimensions anymore for us. It’s not aimed up. We’re not looking up at virtues and values and goodness and truth and beauty or the true. Deluded attention causes us to chase bad dreams because we have too many options. And we can’t track them all. We can’t attend to all the options. We have to narrow the field a little bit. Maybe a lot. It’s a paraphrase. Bilbo Baggins. It’s like too little butter spread out over too much bread. So let me ask you. What is a building? They raise up. A building is attention to a principle. In order to go up, you have to attend to the higher ideal of building the building. Whether you’re the stonemason or the electrician or the guy doing the steel girders or the crane operator or the guy doing the drywall. It doesn’t matter. You all have to attend to the building, the final product before it’s built in order to build it. So you take martial arts, they tell you. You don’t punch the person. You punch past them. And if you look carefully, if you pay attention, you’ll notice that principle of looking past your goal is everywhere. It’s universal. It’s one of the few universals. Very mysterious. Why is it that you can’t get to the wall and stop? Zeno’s paradox, that’s why. Measurement doesn’t work. It doesn’t get things done. You can always cut it in half. You’ll never get there. That attention to the principle, to the final product, to the talos, to the final cause that’s important. When you don’t do that, your attention gets spread and chaos reigns. The flood is here. And that’s what we’re living in. We’re living in the flood. And you’ll see people try to get us all together. Let’s all get together. How? Around what? Ah, we can get together around things. We can’t just all get together. They’ll invoke empathy. But empathy makes you responsible for everyone else all the time. Even in a small group. I can’t do that. I can’t do it. I don’t want to do it. It’s no good. It’s no good. It’s not possible. That’s why I have my doubts about empathy and tolerance. I mean, people make mistakes, but I have to accept those mistakes. If they affect me or not, because I think they always do. The what and the how for attention. How do you interact with a signal? How much and what kind of attention do you pay to that signal? Mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy. Should you pay attention to that? I mean, the normal answer is no, none of you are my mother. I can be sure of this because she’s not around anymore. So she can’t be listening to this, at least not in any way that is relevant to her streaming. Or if I suddenly buzz off the air, then I’m wrong about that. Hopefully she wouldn’t do that to me, but who knows? How do you interact with that signal? What are you going to do about it? Can you do something about it? Maybe you can. Maybe you can’t. And you have to remember, if you deny something your attention, it goes away. Or at least it lessens. That means some of the things we’re attending to don’t have to be. Because we can stop paying attention to them and they will go away. End of War games. A strange game. The only way to win is not to play. If you don’t play the game, you can’t lose the game. You also can’t win the game, but maybe it’s a stupid game. Tim Pool. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Yes, you can attend to stupid games. You can play dumb games all day. You can do that. No one’s going to stop you. But you’ll win stupid prizes. Or you cannot attend to that. You say, oh, some people are attending. Okay, let them. I have a video about that. On games and gaming. And the fact you don’t have to play them. Right? You don’t have to play them. So, one kind of attendance. So, one kind of attention is none. Because you can’t attend to everything. You can’t even attend to most things. So you’ve got to pick the things you attend to and attend to them well. That’s the key. But you do have to be careful. Because no attention can make things worse. And withdrawal of attention can be dangerous when attention is needed. Sorry. Hope you weren’t looking for an easy answer. Because that’s not what we do here. There’s nothing easy about the pirate life. You’re right on the edge of the law. In the middle of the water, stealing. Stealing with a pre-pardon from the king. Which he may revoke, by the way. Look up the history of pirates. It’s fascinating. And likewise, what you focus on gets bigger. At least to you. It’s possible to take in more detail than you can handle. To over attend to something. This is the coddling of the American mind. To quote Jonathan Haidt, I believe. It’s the name of his book. You can coddle people and destroy them. Because you’re paying attention to details and then they aren’t. And now they don’t know how to do that because they lose that skill. And oh, by the way, that’s going to drive you crazy. Because you have a limited attention. And there’s an unlimited number of things you can do. So you’ve got to be careful with that. You need discernment. You need judgment. Be pragmatic. If the level of detail you’re paying attention to something isn’t helpful. Don’t go to that level of detail. Look at results. Figure out if what you’re doing is okay. Do I need to read all 1200 or whatever pages of the Affordable Care Act? No, my buddy did. I did not. I did not need to read it. So I did not read it. I could have. But hey, my buddy did. So I didn’t have to. And I trusted him. Before it was passed, by the way, he was a great writer. Before it was passed, by the way, he read the whole thing. Very funny. This attention issue and focus, it comes up everywhere. So for example, the original spell checker software, it’s very short. The code is very short. I forget who did it. But anyway, the way it works is it focuses on keyboard layout and uses a little bit of stochastic math to figure out your typing errors. All the new spell checks use AI. So they use large language models, right? Large language models focus on the language instead of the most common form of spelling errors, which is typing mistakes. And so newer spell checks get it wrong. Why? Because they attend to the wrong thing. Their discernment is off. They’re discerning that you’re trying to make some complicated statement about the world when in fact you hit the A key instead of the I key. That happens to me all the time, literally. I don’t know why. Don’t ask me why, especially on my phone. Not on a real keyboard. A real keyboard is no problem, especially not this one. Excellent keyboard. SteelSeries gaming keyboard. Good stuff. Nice and clicky. So the focus, the attention to the language destroys the spell check’s ability to be a good spell checker. The original software, which is a handful of lines of code, I think it’s like 200 lines or something, is way better because it focuses only on the mathematical probability that you hit a wrong key plus a dictionary. And what’s the implication here of attention? So let’s suppose, for example, that you, I don’t know, go to school. Seems like a safe bet. Most of us go to school. Some kind of school. And what you learn in school, what you are attending to in school because the teachers attend you to this, right, they move your attention to this constant thing, is problem solve. And so you get a bunch of problem solving skills. And you learn to see problems in the world. Now what you have is sample bias. Sample bias, which is a real scientific bias, is the statement of bad attention. It’s a function of a sample bias is a function of attention. So now the world is a set of problems to be solved because that’s what you’ve been attending to. Now the world is bigger than that, but that’s what you’ve been attending to in school. And now you expect everything to be that way. Like, I don’t know, we’ll take one of the perennial patterns, because it’s not a problem, of grief. Is grief a problem? There’s a bunch of problems created by the fact that we have to grieve. That’s for sure. There’s a bunch of legal work I have to do for a case, and I heard my mother’s voice on a voicemail, and that kind of derailed me. And so hopefully we’ll get some of that done tomorrow. We’re not getting it done today, that’s for sure. Attention overload, problem to be solved. Grief can’t solve that, it’s not a problem. You have to go through it, you have to suffer through it, you have to struggle through it. Hopefully on the other end you’re better and not worse. Could go either way. That depends on your attention. Are you attending to the fact that grief can wipe you out, and therefore you need to be careful with it? Are you? Did you grieve properly? Are you over that? I’m not. Changed forever. Is this a problem? Am I better, am I worse? Is that a problem? I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a problem. It is what it is, and I’m a pragmatist, so is what it is. We pull that out all the time. You can invoke Calvinism instead if you wish. Don’t care. The direction of your attention towards the future is important, because there are perennial patterns. There are things like falling in love and broken hearts that you’re going to have to go through. And perhaps these psychological models, and I, in case you don’t realize it, I hate psychology. The blinding passion that knows no bounds or ends. For lots of reasons, at every detail level, because I’ve looked. Perhaps these models, we have the ego and the id and the self and the superego and the supercalifragilistic, ex-fialidocious thingy, whatever. Perhaps self plus a mirror explains all that. The only difference would be attention. Maybe I have two things I can attend to, the room around me or the mirror that shows the room around me and myself. And maybe that mirror is a funhouse mirror, because it is. You don’t need an ego and an id and all that nonsense anymore. You need one agent. That’s all you need, one agent, to explain all the other things in psychology. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe. So one of the tricks I use as a pragmatist is I ignore words and I attend to actions. We went over actions last week, obviously, and I admitted communication is an action, but all communication actions have roughly the same value. Right? We can attend to that a little bit closer and maybe get into some details and say the value of words is equal. So all spoken word values are equal. The value of all tones is equal. Right? And then the value of whatever body language goes along with those tones and words is equal. Three values, though, and maybe there are more. Don’t want to get exhaustive about it. No need. Right? I use the tones and I use the expressions on the faces to make determinations about whether or not the words are matching. So I’m attending to the action, not the words. It doesn’t mean I’m ignoring the words, but I’m privileging the actions. Whether that’s action of tone. Did you laugh at something someone said? So if I say, oh, well, I believe that dogs are the greatest pets ever, which, by the way, is probably true. And somebody says, well, I think dogs are stupid. And I go, ha ha ha ha. Where’s the genuineness with my previous statement? Where’s the genuineness with my agreement in the statement that I clearly don’t agree with according to my words? I’m attending to action, not to words. Doesn’t mean I’m ignoring the words, but my attention is focused on the actions. How do I know when someone’s a good leader? I pay attention to their actions. It makes sense. How do I know when someone’s a good leader? I pay attention to their actions. It makes life easier. Are they out in front? Are they taking the damage? Are they taking responsibility? Then they’re a good leader. If they’re not, then they’re not a good leader. Are they in charge? Are they supposed to be a good leader? Or are they just a good leader? Do they lead from the front or do they lead from behind? Because it might be valid. I don’t know. Different situations. Are you paying attention to you versus me problems? Is this a me problem or is it a you problem? Or am I making it both of our problems for no reason? Because that’s the thing, people. Are you confused about something? That’s a problem of attention. It’s solved by having proper attention. Sometimes arbitrary. You could have seven things to pay attention to and there’s no way to adjudicate which one. There’s no way to judge. That can happen. You can make an arbitrary decision, but you should use your intuition. And before you learn to use your intuition with your attention and your judgment and your discernment and your action, you may have to make what seem like arbitrary choices. Yeah. And then you can look at the results and adjust accordingly. Yes. You can do that with your attention. Confusion is one of the dangers of too much signal, too much information, too much knowledge. Overload it to the system. When I overload your system, I can insert sanity into you. It’s not hard. It’s not hard. So be careful. Be on guard. The minute someone confuses you, they can just tell you a clever story to put you back on track. And you’ll follow right along with it. And that’s the problem. You’ll follow right along with it. Attention is so powerful that the person who’s well researched at something will beat the smartest person who is not. So you can be Eric Weinstein, and you can sit there and you can talk about the housing crisis back in 2010, I think his talk was. And you can be me watching it going, oh, you didn’t do your research, buddy. Your framing’s all wrong, and you’re wrong about this. It’s a way easier problem than what you’re making out to be. And all of the solutions were, oh, talk to smart math people. We’ve got it figured out. No, they didn’t. They didn’t even understand the problem. Literally bad problem formulation. How do I know? Hundreds of hours, hundreds of hours of legal research for my own legal case. Hundreds. I know way more about that than most attorneys do. And they’ll tell you that. Because I’ve had chats with housing attorneys who go, you know way more about it. Yeah, I do. I research the ever living hell out of it. You don’t have to be smart to research. Maybe you need a minimum intelligence. Fair enough. The well-researched, well-attended person beats the high IQ person every time in a specialty, every single time. That’s how powerful attention is. It’s really powerful. And as I said before, I can confuse you, insert a narrative right into your brain, and you’ll go right along with it. Very, very powerful. Attention matters. And I’ve said this in a previous video, right? While you’re busy paying attention to the billionaires ripping you off, the people actually doing so are the millionaires and tens of billionaires. They’re ripping you off. The guy who built the iPhone is not ripping you off. The guy making the electric car for short money is not ripping you off. Okay? Those are all voluntary transactions on your part. The guys ripping you off are the guys who have a million dollars of living comfortably, or a few million, or tens of millions. To make real money, you can’t be concerned about ripping off individuals. It won’t last long. That’s the power of attention. Wrong attention means you’ll be confused about categories like natural and supernatural, which, for the ancient Greeks were the same thing. They didn’t have a category for supernatural. I was part of the natural world. This has wide-ranging implications. You can have your attention put on something that isn’t a thing. And because we see patterns in the world, we’re designed to see patterns in the world. We try to see patterns in the world, and we try to make that thing fit. Everybody tells me I should be paying attention to this video. Okay. Is it a good video? Because maybe if it’s not a good video, you shouldn’t be paying attention to it. Now, maybe, because I pay attention to bad videos all the time. You should, because then you can fight it. Are you going to fight it? Because if you’re not going to fight it, maybe you shouldn’t pay attention to it. I can make up a category like non-binary. Completely useless idea. Like, everything about it is completely useless. And then I can tell everybody they need to pay attention to it. And if they do, they’ll try to find a way to make it work. And the next thing you get 6,000 genders. No, I’m not exaggerating. And it’ll go to infinity, too, buddy. Why? Because it’s a bad category. It’s not that hard. You can’t pay attention to that. You can’t. When you try to pay attention to a bad category, it explodes. Combinatorial explosion? Worse. It explodes immediately. You’re incapable of using principles to interact with it. If you can’t stick to principles, what are you doing? That’s a better task for attention. Does this fit within principles? Can I make principles out of this? If I can, maybe it’s a good category. Not a guarantee, though. Attention is the thing we follow. So if someone’s looking up at the sky and there’s nothing there at all, other people will stop and look up at the sky. Well-known experiment. There’s dozens of versions of this. People do this experiment pretty much every year. It’s a well-studied phenomenon. We pay attention to what other people are paying attention to. Why does this matter, Mark? Why does this matter? This matters because platforming somebody is okay. But only if they do something absurd, you point it out. Because if you just agree to their poor framing, if you just laugh it off when they say something that is seriously a problem, you will point other people at that and give them a reason to pay more attention to it than it is due. Sometimes, I know Jacob Federacci is famous for saying this, some people are stupid and should be ignored, and you should tell them that. Yes, and you should tell everybody else that. I agree. You should point out people’s flaws. I have no problem platforming people. And I’ve done it before on my live streams. And sometimes I take them apart because they deserve it. And there are people I absolutely would not platform. I haven’t met them yet, but I know that they’re out there because I’ve paid attention. And I’ve already drawn those boundaries because I draw boundaries way before I hit them in most cases. You can’t do that for everything. Sometimes I get blindsided, too. But you can draw your boundaries. You can know what they are ahead of time. And you can make a decision when you’re up against them and you’ve pre-made the boundaries, whether it’s a good idea or not, you can make a decision when you’re up against them and you’ve pre-made the boundaries, whether or not you want to change them. You can do all that. It just requires attention. When the fool is on being a fool, and you don’t laugh at the fool, that’s a problem. Because maybe people think the fool is a sage or a prophet, and they follow the fool. You should not follow the fool. Who’s the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? Well, that kind of depends on what people paid attention to. Because if they paid attention to that fool, as though he was worth listening to, and other people said, oh, he looks like he’s worth listening to, that can be a problem. If you laugh off some casual, heretical comment on a live stream, maybe I may not be referring to a real thing that just happened today, that can be a problem. And you need to pay attention to Anselman’s excellent point, although I’m not looking at StreamYard yet, to what’s guiding people. If what’s guiding you is only your own personal likes and dislikes, that’s a problem. And you need to attend to what’s drawing your attention away. That is my monologue. I’m going to try to catch up with this ridiculous chat. Oh, I see we had Griswold Grimm in here. Chat GPT, yeah, wonderful. Phlebas has servants? Phlebas, is this true? Do you have servants? I want servants. I call them minions, though. It’s better to pay attention to what knowledge compartment you’re in. Well, as if you could do that. I mean, if you’re in a compartment, you can’t really pay attention to which one you’re in. But I like the theory. I just wish it were possible, but no. I need a butler. Send me the butler, please, Anselman. If you have a butler, send him down. Send him down. Or her. I’ll take a happy valet. That would be lovely. I was up in New England and was at my cousin’s house for a while. Lovely experience. Literally waited on. I was like, this is great. I should hang out here more often. Oh, my poor cousin. He does love me, though. That’s good. It’s good to have good, lovable cousins. Thank you, Grimm. I shall have a good stream. My kids are unconvinced Mark is a real pirate. They are very curious if he’s got an eye under that. Oh, aye, aye, aye, aye, captain. Yes. Yes. Lots of eyes. Lots of eyes. And yeah, Anselman, right? Advertisements everywhere compete for our attention. Got to switch off to ignore. Advertising largely doesn’t work on me, which is very funny. Because I was like, what? Where do people learn about that? They’re like, look, there’s a big billboard. And I’m like, oh, I don’t know. And when I do pay attention to advertising, I’m like, oh, look at these cool patterns. Yeah. And that’s part of what symbolism is, right? Is your ability to pay attention and your ability to move your attention around a large field. Mills. Outstanding monologue. Well, I hope so, sir. I hope so. I hope so. I hope so. I hope so. I hope so. I hope so. I hope so. I hope so. I hope so. I hope so. I hope so. I hope so. I hope so. I hope so. Anselman. Interesting. You spoke of attention to war and attention to Mars. You can make your own decision as to how well planned those little patterns are, my friend, on the channel navigating patterns. Yeah. Interesting. You might go back and listen to other monologues and find more patterns. Many more. Who knows? Or maybe you got them all the first time. I don’t know. Mills is leaving us. Can I attend to my family tonight? Excellent idea. I am happy about that. You know, he’ll listen to me later. Although maybe he’ll come back and jump in if he feels inclined. Anselman. Local action and cooperation needed to resist totalitarian moves from the powers that be. Indeed. Indeed. I’m behind but really intrigued when you stated that attention is not dependent upon consciousness. Working out the difference between conscious and unconscious is going to be a tricky thing. And I will not actually commit to that, but I will say that I will address this further as I can. I do have a video on conscious and unconscious. There are certainly unconscious attention after a fashion. I don’t know if I actually want to call it attention. I’m still on the fence on that, to be honest. So, yeah. Anselman. My friend Archie Midez was not paying attention when he ran running his bath. Made a happy discovery as he flooded the bathroom floor. That happens. Ethan. The ethos that created the Internet was zero constraint. Damn it, Ethan. This is the problem. You’re so dead on on some of these things. So naturally, people will take advantage of that. That is exactly what happened. That is exactly what happened. I know that John was talking a lot about don’t let the military and porn take over the new AI thing. The military is way ahead of you guys. It’s too late for that. You’re just being dumb at some point. And that was definitely past that point of dumbness. Can’t tell you too much because they’d have to shoot me. But yeah, definitely. Yeah, when you create a zero constraint system, evil is going to be all over that. Sorry. Just don’t do that. Intrusive thoughts can be repelled. Yes, Anselman. They can. They can. Pirate or privateer? Yes, Jack. Privateer or pirate. Indeed. Indeed. Indeed. What else do we have here? Let’s see. Anselman, I think anxious thoughts are prompted by what’s going on around us. Yes. For me, the solution is turned to God. You mean look up, attend to the higher so that all the lower noise goes away and drops away from your system. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I’m going to anyway, because this is my stream and I can. Pirate. Win. Jonathan Pigeot. I did forget to mention that. And it was in my notes, I thought. Jonathan Pigeot, the world is attention. Yes, Ethan, the world consists of attention and not objective things absence of attention, which is the delusion of OMR. Objective, material, reality. Dead on, Ethan. Ethan’s my best student. Sandra. When I was younger, I used to think intelligence is being able to point out everything wrong or bad. That is the postmodern lie. That’s what the postmoderns believe. The postmodern measure for intelligence is can you find a problem with it? Because then you’re smarter than the person that created it, which is so absurd and ridiculous and insane and damaging to the universe that it makes me want to build a time machine and just slaughter some key figures. Because the world would better off if they stopped listening to them. Anselman. The more you learn about what’s going on in the world to be overwhelming, unless you can refer to the higher power. Yeah, look, you can pay attention to all kinds of things. And look, some people do pay attention to politics. Not me, because I’m not going to do anything about it, even if I can. It’s not the realm of politics. It’s not the realm of the world. Because I’m not going to do anything about it, even if I can. It’s not the realm I want to deal with. So, Ethan, this OMR, objective material reality, delusion, is to the great advantage of the adversary because it allows him to easily seduce people’s attention and give it to him casually. I’m not a Christian, but that sounds about right. If you want to put it in a crazy Christian framing. Is there a crazy Christian? Ethan, attention is the life water of creation. That sounds right. I can, I can, I can, I can deal with that. J. Harris. Mourning should only be done in sackcloth and ashes. Yes. Anselman. Good leaders are a rare commodity. Yeah, they’re non-existent nowadays. That is true. Derek Ma. How can I have disagreement and have fun with it and not get too caught up in the nitty gritty? Well, look, caught up in the nitty gritty is a function of your attention. And the secret to disagreement is intimacy. And so you want to get to know somebody on a personal level before you disagree with them. Then you can disagree with them and still have lunch. If you can’t have an argument with somebody and still have lunch, you failed as a human. And you should probably jump off a bridge. No, don’t do that. But yeah, I mean, you get to fix it. You get to fix your attention. What’s more important, winning an argument or being able to have lunch with somebody? I’d rather be able to have lunch with somebody. I’ll have the argument. I’ll lose. I’ll agree to disagree. Whatever it is. I don’t care. Just so long as at the end we can eat. Because I really like food, even though I can’t eat as much as I used to back in the day. Anselman, someone’s arranged to give us a lot of bad leaders. Yeah, you know what? The lack of attention to what true leadership is has caused us to believe that we can hand leadership off like a rock. You can just give somebody a leadership. And oh, actually, so I have this is a Jade piece. I have a little piece of paper. I have a little piece of paper. I have a little piece of paper. I have a little piece of paper. I have this is a Jade piece from New Zealand that was given to me by a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful woman years and years ago. Blue eyes. Oh, blue-eyed blonde. Anyway, it is a leadership club that the head of the Maori tribe would have to denote his leadership. It’s a symbolic representation of the wooden club that they would carry. That is my understanding. I might not be remembering correctly, but I think I am. Derek, it seems most people give too much attention to the negatives. Well, you’re supposed to give too much attention to the negatives. How can we go beyond that, especially when it seems like it is true? There’s always negatives in the world, so they’re always true. There’s always downsides and problems and issues. It’s always true. But you have to focus your attention on the highest thing. And when it’s focused on the highest, it probably won’t be quite so negative. Cassandra, I just realized you look a little more crazy scientist than pirate tonight. Okay, I don’t know how to parse that, but I will keep that in mind for later. Ethan, the well-attended person beats the intelligent person every time. Yes. He does. I have often been that person with the lower IQ and the superior detail level on the issue I was talking about. That might be a trick that I use all the time, by the way. Yeah, it’s amazing how smart you can seem when you only speak up about things you know. Just shut the hell up. And humility isn’t sexy and people don’t notice it. I’m okay with that. Yes, Anselman. Federacci is not a good judge. He takes personal dislikes as his guide. Yeah, a little too much for sure. And yeah, to your point, you should not try to dismiss somebody because you don’t like the facts they present. Right. Or you don’t like them for presenting facts. Benjamin Franklin, excellent model. Well, thank you, sir. I do appreciate this. Joey, activism is a form of advertising. Activism is pure advertising propaganda. Activism is pure advertising propaganda in most cases. Yeah. If we can classify propaganda. That’s actually really interesting, Joey. Yeah, I think that we can always classify activism as pure propaganda, negative propaganda. I think that actually would be fair. That’s quite interesting. I didn’t think about that, but that is interesting because I’ve been struggling with propaganda. Maybe I’ll do a stream on it someday just to get some distributed cognition because I can’t figure it out. Looks to me like propaganda doesn’t exist except in hindsight, but that might be an exception, Joey. So well done. Anselman, ever the troll. Was that meant to be morning and not morning? Do you put your sackcloth and ashes on every morning? Yes, maybe. Maybe he does. Why is that a bad thing? Why? Why is that a bad thing? So look, I think I’m through the comments here. We’ll invite everybody to watch, and if you’re watching on Navigating Patterns, I can actually pin that link so that you won’t miss it. If you’re watching on another channel like Rand is United or Jacob’s channel, I cannot pin the link, but you’re welcome to click on it because it’ll be there. So feel free to join me. I’m definitely going to take some tea here because it’ll be nicely warm. Yes, the Marathon tea from Table Rock Tea is what we’re drinking today. It’s quite delicious as always. It’s a really strong Kenyan tea, actually. It’s not the South Carolina grown stuff, but it’s delicious. So yeah, anybody who wants to join, please come in and we can talk about attention and signals. And then probably going to do that for another hour, hour and a half. Then I’m going to shut the stream off for 10 minutes, start an after party, and then we’ll talk about the rest of the day. And then I’m going to shut the stream off for 10 minutes, start an after party, and we can continue the conversation from there. That’s going to keep these live streams, these initial live streams, the monologue a little shorter so that more people will watch them, hopefully, if we’re lucky. And we’ll see. We’ll see who wants to join in the Distributed Cognition and learning about and discussing and sort of exploring these ideas because I think they’re important. So as I said, a lot of these ideas came up within the course of the week, as always. Very mysterious. I love my cinnamon bars. They’re absolutely delicious. And it’s good to have something to eat after blubbering about for an hour plus on your own. Where’s my buddy Jesse? What’s going on? He’s the one that sort of forced me into this time slot. Unlike, unlike Jacob thinks where he thinks I planned this out around his religious practices, which I wasn’t attending to at all and never even thought of. But attention is powerful. I’m just paying attention to Jesse. He’s just paying attention to me. Ethan, Mark has managed to materialize time, energy, and attention to a hot beverage. I’m working on that for real. The tea company is coming. It just requires more resources and especially time than I have right at the moment. But it has been a burner of a week. I missed a meeting. But other than that, I’ve been attending meetings all week. I get some stuff off the ground and then my legal work came up and that’s just been devastating. That just destroyed the end of my week here. So very sad. But these are the things you have to go through to maintain virtues and values and hold the principles. So it is what it is, you know. And it’s quite upsetting when your attention gets pulled in too many directions. I used to have a lot better attentive capacity and a lot better focus so I could get things done quick. So I would just do lots of things, but I would do them one at a time quickly. And then it just looks like you’re doing 10 things at once. That’s a trick. And being able to do that or being able to switch things in the middle, because you can play the pomodoro. You can get some of the advantages of the pomodoro technique not by resting, but by switching tasks. And if you understand how tasks work for you and your brain, because it’s a little bit different for everybody, you can get most of the advantage of the pomodoro technique and none of the rest and relaxation time that would get in the way of actually getting things done. So if you want to be hyper efficient, you can do that. Not that I’m necessarily recommending it. I’m just saying some people can do that. Some people can do that. Hanselman, I like the moment of his nostalgic revelry. Blonde hair, blue eyes. Ah, oh yeah. Well, she was something. Another broken heart. Jesse claims he will be here in 10 to 15 minutes. Okay, Jesse, we’ll see. Jesse always makes claims about how long it’s going to take him to get here. And he doesn’t have a great hit rate. I’ve been attending to his little how long it’s going to take him to get here. Hanselman, I remember my blonde hair, blue eyed special person. I’ve had a couple, but then I have like a, yeah, I am powerless around blue eyed blondes. So I have to play very standoffish around them and aloof because otherwise, once they could just tell me things and I would just do them. I know none, zero self control. It’s like, what the hell is that? Doesn’t even exist. Yeah, I remember there was a girl named Rachel Scott in a school I attended back in, was it even high school? No, it was probably sixth grade or something. Yeah. And I remember at one point the teacher sent her up. Something happened. I must have been late for class. That doesn’t sound like me at all, though. That’s weird. I must have been late for class or something. And I ended up in a classroom that was empty. And I was like, where the hell’s my class? What’s going on? And it turned out we had a dance thing. Back when I went to school, they still taught music and art and recess and lunch. And we had all kinds of things going on. So one of the things they were doing is teaching us dancing. So we were learning. Was it the minuet? I think it was the minuet. Yeah, that was a long time. This is before time stuff. So maybe I don’t remember correctly. But I think it was the minuet. And the teacher sent Rachel Scott up to get me. And then I got paired up with her for the dance. It was lovely. Absolutely lovely. Jesse admits that he is a Muppet. Well, your Muppet King commands you to Muppet your way in here, sir. Jesse asks, is reframing attention hijacking? Well, Jesse, it’s funny you bring that up. That is exactly what it is. Reframing is hijacking your attention. Why? Because your attention is dependent upon the container into which it is being delivered and therefore, or in which it is embedded. And therefore, when you change the container, you move the attention. And that is not good for people. This is why the postmodern is so dangerous, right? Because you can change up someone’s attention and point it at something silly like non-binary. And suddenly you created a bunch of problems that didn’t exist before. So you’re living in a world, you didn’t have any problems. There were answers already. And then you blew apart the answers you had effectively by changing the frame. And now you have a bunch of problems that it turns out can’t be resolved, which is ironic that you’ve created problems and yet they can’t actually be resolved. Or the resolution of those problems creates ever more problems, which might be a good marker for parasitic behavior. When your problem creates more, when the solution to your problem creates more problems, maybe you’re in a bad frame, maybe, almost certainly. Back to Anselman. My first crush in high school fitted that description. Cute accent was the thing that really wowed. Dude, yeah, the other thing that gets me is accent. Girl with accent. Yeah, it almost doesn’t even matter how she looks. So, Jesse notes that dancing is at the center of Victorian society. Well, look, I mean, we did this dancing. It was, I want to say that according to my memory, which may or may not be accurate, this is before time stuff, so it’s way worse than my normal bad memory, that we were doing this minuet dance, and that was something that allegedly George Washington was doing, if I’m remembering correctly, which maybe not. Anselman, proper dancing. Exactly. Well, and it was. It was designed that way. I mean, this was very, this was very, this was very, this was a magnet school in Lowell, and the magnet schools were the special public schools, where they were doing the experimental stuff. There was still a great deal of experimenting going on in the schools in various cities in Massachusetts when I was younger. And when I was really young, actually, I went to Montessori school, like as a preschool. So I remember that because I learned to count to a thousand. And the minute I learned how that worked, which is basically the learning recursion as a child, like you learn recursion. Oh, wait, you can always add one to something. Bang, it just explodes the universe. So yeah, I was sharpening a pencil. By the time I was done, I didn’t have a pencil anymore, but I counted to a thousand, so I didn’t care. Mission accomplished. So yeah, it’s, we did dancing, we did art, we did music, we did lots of recess. We did special classes. So we had regular classes, and then we did the dance classes, regular classes, and then, you know, oh, we’re not doing history. Now we’re going down to learn minuet. Okay, I’ll learn some dancing. Oh, we did computers. Yeah, that was the reason why I was in the magnet school for the computers. And that was a complete total and utter waste of time because I knew more about the Commodore 64 than the teacher did, who was dragging it around, so it didn’t work well. But it was better to be in the school with computers than not. Yeah, I took computer in high school, too. I took computers in grammar school in like sixth grade and in high school. That was really useful. The thing that was useful about taking computers in high school was I did all the assignments like the first week for the whole semester. And then I ran around the room and helped everybody else with their solutions. And I actually mostly managed not to tell them how to do it, but just to tell them how to fix their code, which taught me, oh, there’s like other ways to approach the same problem and come up with the same answer. And occasionally someone would have had a better answer than I did. And I’d be like, oh, wow, things you learn by doing things. And the teacher loved it because the teacher didn’t have to help everybody because I was helping them and I was perfectly good at it, so it didn’t matter. Everybody else was struggling, of course, but it wasn’t my fault you’re dumb or slow or whatever. Happy to help. Don’t care if you’re slow. I’ll help you anyway. Just get off my nose. I get to learn from your stupidity. Aha. The wind goes to me. Yeah, see, and that’s the thing. You can always look at these things negatively or positively back to the earlier point of people paying attention to negative things. Yeah, you need to pay attention to negative things. The reason why you need to pay attention to negative things is because the negative things are the things that kill you. And you don’t want to die. So negative data is important. You know, you’ve got to be careful of negative data. So you want to have a positive attitude about it, though, like, oh, negative people are starving in Africa. Oh, positive. I’m not in Africa. Also positive. I could go to Africa and help them if I cared that much about it. There are ways to do that. I’m too sick to go to Africa and help people, so I won’t be doing that. If you buy tea from the Table Rock Tea Company, they’ll help people in Africa for you, by the way. So go to the Table Rock Tea Company. Quite lovely people. Those are the people that I met. I went and visited their tea company because they gave a tea tour. And it was the best thing ever. I super, super enjoyed it. They are lovely people. If you’re ever in South Carolina, please visit Table Rock Tea Company. Buy tea from them online. They really, yeah, the husband there is amazing. Like, he’s, I had a long chat with him. He’s amazing. I’m going to go back up there. I’m going to try to make some tea with these guys. They’re quite good. Their story is amazing. They made a drill, a well drill that can be carried on checked-in luggage and assembled on site and is repairable with local parts. And the way he did it, because of course you would do this too, is he knew this was a problem. He knew that the drilling that they did when they went to help countries was modern drills. And of course, modern drills require modern repairs and modern parts. And so they’re not very useful once they break down. So he went to his Edinburgh, I think it’s 1862, encyclopedia, as one does when one is looking for water drilling solutions from the past, pre-electric days, and he cobbled together something and invented a drill. And they help people in Africa with that drill. They fund part of their stuff through Table Rock Tea Company, where they locally grow tea in South Carolina, which is absolutely crazy. But also works. And they need help. So help them out. Jesse, some people require more attention because the initial signal was not received as well. Yeah, you know, it’s a good point. There’s a lot of depth there, Jesse, right? We can talk about different types of signaling, different amounts of signaling, and the fact that different signals work with different people. If you want to know more about that, there’s a great book called The Five Love Languages. There’s a book on signaling and attention. Right? And that’s what the book’s about, actually. You can say it’s about love language. No, it’s actually about perspective signaling and attention and how your perspective is sort of wrapped up in a bunch of things you don’t necessarily understand well for yourself. And yeah, some people require different types of attention. Some people you can’t just talk to, right? They need your company, right? Or children often need your undivided attention because they know when your attention is not fully on them, and they act out if it’s not. That happens. For both parents, actually, right? Boys that don’t get enough male attention and girls that don’t get enough male attention can have a problem, right? And it’s always a struggle because the man is supposed to be out of the house. Plowing the way and bringing back the goods. And yeah, so there’s always that struggle. You know, and you hear that theme in music all the time. Right? So what’s that Jim Croce song? When You’re Coming Home, Dad, right? Yeah, there’s all kinds of… There’s all kinds of indication signals of that pattern in the world playing out over generations and generations. That’s definitely a thing. So, yeah. Amount of attention, type of attention, how the attention is being conveyed. Very important. Hanselman, good poetic description of dancing in T.S. Eliot’s East Coker. I’m not familiar with that. I haven’t read any T.S. Eliot at all on purpose. I know somebody accused me of not being well read. Of course they don’t know what I’ve read and what I haven’t. So the accusation is absurd. If you were paying attention, you would have known right from the get-go. That’s a ridiculous accusation. Not because it’s not necessarily true. Because there’s no freaking way that person could have that information. None whatsoever. There’s something to pay attention to. Can you validate the claim you made or are you just making a claim to make a claim? Oh, Ethan tells me my memory is correct. The minuet dance was popular around George Washington’s time. Man, that’s amazing. I remember that. I was young when that happened. I think it was sixth grade, something like that. The magnet school. Yeah, and Lowell. Yeah. No, what a beautiful girl. I’ve got a picture of her somewhere. Yeah, blondes. Anyway, my attention was temporarily… You may have noticed I’m exemplifying loss of attention several times. Anselman. Recommend. He speaks a pattern in that poem. I probably have. Ah, my book’s not here. My big book of poetry is not here. Why? Oh, it’s on the screen. My big book of poetry is not here. Why? Oh, it’s on the shelf. That’s why. I think it’s on the shelf. Yeah, yeah, there it is. My big book of poetry is down there. I think I have T.S. Eliot in the Norton Anthology of Poetry. I should hope so. Maybe I have that one. I shall look it up. And if not, I shall hunt it down until the ends of the earth or time itself ceases. For that is all that can stop me sometimes. Unless I’m sick, when my attention and focus go away entirely, my memory fails and I fall asleep. Which unfortunately happens, but… It’s… Often when you can’t sleep, it’s due to your attention getting scattered during the day. And you can overload your attention such that it affects you in the night when you’re trying to sleep. So you’d be careful what you attend to and how much attention you give to things. And you have to kind of be able to let go of certain things. Right? You have to say, you know what? This probably needs my attention, but it ain’t gonna get it because limits. Ethan, minuet dance was a participation as opposed to a performance. That is correct, sir, that I do remember. Again, I often wonder, how do I know all this stuff? It’s like, oh yes, that’s right. Oh yeah, because I experienced this when I was young. Anselman, I think you’d appreciate his concise use of language. You had me at concise, sir. I love concise use of language. Yes. Yes, that is another attractant. So I like Catherine Brodsky. I follow her on Twitter. I met her on Clubhouse, quite a lovely, lovely, lovely journalist. And also beautiful. But her writing is so gorgeous. Oh yeah, she’s got a substack. Catherine Brodsky, lovely substack. Yeah, yeah. I’m a sucker for a bunch of things, actually. I’m amazed I’m not completely destroyed by any of these addictions that I have. Joey, alcoholism is an antidote to attention. That is literally true. Alcoholism is your ability to stop attending to things. That’s why people get drunk. There he is. The Muppet himself. Your echoing Muppet. I can hear myself on your mic. How do you do this? Why can’t freaking audio engineer artist my ass? Let me put it that way. Unbelievable. Because I just hit load. I don’t just like just join. I’m here. I prep for these things, damn it. I put things on the board. I make sure the glasses are on. I wash my face. I got lighting. I got the uniform on. Like there’s a lot of prep that goes. I make sure the sound and light’s okay, you know, early in the day. Like, you know, it’s a test. It’s like, you know, it’s attention, Jesse. You’re going to pay attention to these things. You are right. My time estimation as always. That’s a part of my culture. Oh, man, dude, don’t get me started on Australians in time. My goodness, we’ll be here all night just talking about that. The event starts at 7. So you want me to show up at 7? No, the event starts at 7. I’m going to show up before the event starts. So they always, and then people take liberties with that. They’re like, oh, you’re actually starting at 7.30. So I’ll show up at 7.30. So those people, they’re late on the trail of people. So they don’t get into eight. And so it’s just creating a giant. Well, and they don’t care, like literally. It’s a very European sort of thing. They just don’t care that they missed the beginning. And I’m like, really? Oh, well, yeah, those people can’t help. Oh, Ethan. Ironically, it was just after that time composers started speeding up the minuet to the point you couldn’t dance to it. An act of disembodiance, circa late 18th century. I learned so much from Ethan about music and stuff. He’s great. The 18th century comes up again. I hate to invoke it. Yeah, well, you don’t have to. Ethan did. Anselman, I find a nice beer can focus attention. Well, see, this is the problem with alcohol, right? There’s that buzz. When you’re buzzed, you’re better at everything. The problem is it’s a narrow band and it doesn’t last long. And so it’s real. I mean, I know people who can stay buzzed for hours on alcohol, and it’s amazing to watch because they just like can play pool and can pick up women and all the things you can do in the zone, that zone of proximal development. They can stay in the zone of proximal development using alcohol all night long. It’s very rare, though. It’s very, very rare. So Anselman, savor the taste of the beer. Savoring is a function of attention, right? As you reflect on things or debrief during the day. Look, I don’t drink, and I don’t think other people should drink just because I’m a Puritan, so even though I’m nominally a Catholic. But yeah, Joey, drink what? And cancels the attention to the periphery. Right, drunkenness destroys your ability to attend properly. But again, there’s that buzz, that zone of proximal development that actually forms in the interim, where you get really well attentive to the right things. And you can really zone in to what you need and just do it. And this is why people get drunk. Men get drunk because then they’re not scared of women, and women get drunk because then they’re more open to men, and that can be a bad thing for them, especially the combination of the two. You know, on the other hand, maybe you’ll get married. I don’t know. But yeah, that’s well known. On the other hand, people are reporting that the coffee date now is the most safe date, not the bar date. Figure that one out. The attention mapping has changed the culture. Yeah, well, the bar date was never safe. That’s the whole point. Well, safe within keeping an approximate sense of safety, right? Everyone here is drinking. Everyone here is active within accordance to the group. Acceptable might be a better way to think about it. Yeah, well, yeah. What are you attending to? I’m at safety religion. I’m attending to the way in which my friends are finding their mates. Ah, what way is that? At the bar. Ah, right. And that’s why I get a little nift at the livestream, the Vanderklai livestream, because they’re all laughing at these, A, incorrect and B, heretical statements that are not good. Not good. Which ones? Those who have to sleep, what was said? Oh, it’s Vanderklai was getting addressed down by Kale Zeldin, Sam Adams, Hank Cruz. Wow, okay. Who else was there? Somebody else was there, I can’t remember now. It was a good video, actually, kind of. But, ooh, Anselman was a total abstainer for years, but now doing moderation. Congratulations. My problem is, I suspect that my grandfather has a lot of Native North American in him. A lot of people suspect this. There is some in the family. You put French Canadians in the woods alone in the winter. What do you expect out? Anyway, and the French were not above such things. If you haven’t read Colin Woodard’s American Nations, highly recommended. When I, like I can sense alcohol from across the room in small quantities. When I get anywhere near alcohol and the burning, I’m out. It just burns, literally burns me. I’m like, what are you, people drinking this, it’s fire water. Literal fire water. I’m like, oh, I know where the Indians get this from. Because it’s fire water and it burns you. It’s not hard. I understand not everybody has that experience, but I do. Benjamin Franklin, speaking of attention, have you guys ever heard of the invisible girl attention experiment? It’s really crazy. I think everybody in this little corner knows that far better than anybody else. Because Peterson goes into it, Verbeke goes into it, everybody goes into it. It’s not crazy. It’s just your attention is limited. You think you can see a lot of the world, and Verbeke does a good job of explaining this to you. No, you can’t. You filter out 99.97% of everything. There’s so much going on that you can’t see, it’s not even worth talking about. Because you can’t imagine the numbers of things you’re not attending. You essentially filter more than you pay attention. Yeah, you’re off. It’s all filtering. Well, the filtering allows your attention. The filtering allows you to have a limited awareness, which allows you to have an attention within this alien landscape. And this alien landscape is an alien landscape. So yeah, people get really confused about that. Anselman, I bet you were always the driver at home from parties. Yes, the designated driver. Yes, I always got free soda. And I always got treated pretty well. And every party I went to, the drinkers want you to drink. Why? Because you’re the outlier. You’re not in the crew because you’re not drinking. So I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to lie. I’m not going to lie. Benjamin Franklin. Subjects are asked to pay attention to how many times a ball is passed between a group of people. In the middle of it, a guy in an ape outfit goes through the scene, but a lot of subjects can’t remember it happening. Yeah, pretty much no one. That’s again, because you filter out everything and the stuff you’re paying attention to is a small fraction of the things you don’t filter out, which is a small fraction of the things you filter out. It’s like, yeah, it is impossible for your imagination to contain the number of things you filter out. The problem I have with that experiment is the actual frame. They tell you that this is an experiment and you should watch out for something, and they give you a false thing to pay attention to. So if you didn’t know that it was an experiment and someone just walked in on a gorilla suit, I wonder how many people could actually, the filtering mechanism would go down even further because you don’t have this meta frame for lack of a bit of a term that you’re already imposing on. We’re going to show you this video about this experiment. Watch out for that. It’s like, okay, you’ve already actually implied something, so I’m going to start paying attention. Hey, are they going to pull any tricks on me? Are you going to do some magic on me? So that’s kind of… Yeah, the surprise element actually might be deleted because I actually found the gorilla. Sorry, guys. One of the tricks that I have that I’ve only figured out later in life will say, I can pay attention like no other person. They have never met anybody that can do the detail level that I can do in the moment. No one. Now, there’s a bunch of things I don’t pay attention to in order to do that, and most of those are really important in social interactions. It’s a different problem. You guys don’t know about that because you haven’t met me in person. So you haven’t seen me in a crowd, for example. It becomes really clear. Oh, good. Anselman is validating that yes, the have a drink, go on is a phenomenon. Yes, yes it is. They really want you part of the group, and alcoholics really get upset when you don’t drink with them, so they try to get you to. I was at one party where the guy was like, why don’t you like rum and coke? So we’re going to make you a rum and coke, and he three quarters rum, one quarter cokes the cop. I’m like, dude, I’m not drinking that. Come on. No, no, man. I only put a quarter. All the other drunk people are telling him, no, dude, no one’s drinking that. It’s almost all rum. It was freaking hysterical. So I did not drink. What are you saying, Joey? You’re wrong. What is wrong? Nothing is wrong here. This is the perfect pirate utopia. And the gorilla is less visible because there is a separate task. Maybe. I think Jesse has a point that if you tell somebody that something’s going to disrupt the scene, that actually draws their attentive capacity away, and so they don’t have the capacity to see something unusual, to see the surprise. But who knows? It’s the difference between I’m going to tell you a story and then starting the story. Right. If I’m going to tell you, I’m going to tell you a story. I’m kidding. There are important things that I’m trying to communicate to you. If I just start telling a story, it’s up to your attention matrix to what you filter out the story’s relevant information. Yeah, exactly. Well, and there’s something about capacity. And if you use up your attentive capacity by telling somebody to look for a surprise, it’s, Joey, you all need to know that too. People assign missions to you so you don’t notice other things. Yeah. I sort of went into that in the monologue. Right. And you need to have good information so they can insert a narrative into your brain. It’s very effective. You are almost powerless against it in most cases. Here we go. Anselman. I had a bottle of cider thrust in my face on a visit to someone in an official capacity. I tactfully declined. Scary moment. He was aggressive. I always liked the Peterson story where he lived downstairs from his landlord who was a drunk or something or a drug addict or whatever. He showed up all drunk one night and like, I need to borrow your microwave or something silly. And finally, Tammy was like, no, you need to do something about this. And Jordan very skillfully tries not to die. Of course, doesn’t die because he’s here. And that’s one of my favorite stories. That’s probably my favorite Peterson story of all time right there just because it’s fantastic. Joe, yeah, the experiment has the mission of counting the number of passes. Right. Right. But I think they also do direct your the rest of your attention. See, counting and noticing things is something that I can do in a limited capacity for a lot of things. So those things don’t work as well on me as reliably as they do on others. But I do have a ridiculous attention, attentive capacity. So I can often have two conversations at once. And you’ll see me do this. So people are like, I can’t read the comments and do my monologue. In past streams, I have done that. That is not the reason why I’m not doing it now is actually screen real estate. That’s actually the only reason. And even in this one, I noticed one of Anselman’s comments up here on this screen. And I integrated it in the monologue because I can get away with that. But most people can’t do anything like that. That is just a pretty great monologue. Was it? Oh, good. Yeah, I’m glad. I was worried because I was unprepared. But it turns out that my notes are coming out in sequence somehow. And I only had to move one line in my notes to make sure I got that point in the right place. So I did pretty well. I’m like, oh, good, because I was hoping to have like an hour to just go through the notes and curate and add to them. And I totally didn’t have that today. And today was a complete disaster in terms of timing. And last night, I went to sleep early. So I woke up at 2 AM, which is very bad. And that wasn’t the problem. The problem was I had had a power outage at like 930. And the internet went out. And they said, well, the internet will be fixed at midnight. And I’m like, well, hell, if I’m waiting for that. And I didn’t, for whatever reason, manage to convince myself to do this thing called reading a book. So the power came right back on, but the internet didn’t. So I was like, all right, well, there was all this stuff I was going to do. And I’m like, well, I can’t really do that. I can’t really do that. I could do some of it. But it was a pain in the ass to use a cell phone and do this. So I ended up waking up at 230. And the power is going on and off and on and about in about a minute, minute and a half intervals. And when it’s going off, there’s this big flash and a boom. And I’m half awake going like, I hope that’s not in the house. And then I’m like, well, the house isn’t on fire. So presumably, that’s outside. Now, where outside it is, I can’t really tell. It’s springtime. The trees are kind of lush. And I live in the woods. And it’s hard to tell as it’s behind me, in front of me. I did notice at one point a truck pulling away. And then it was fixed. So I stayed up for about an hour and actually watched a great, great video from Jonathan Bigeaud, John Vervecky, and last name Howland. Can’t remember his first name. Great video. On the symposium, I have to finish it. I didn’t finish it. Really good. Really well worth your time. And yeah, I’m really enjoying that video. I hope I get to finish it. Doesn’t look like I’ll finish anything this weekend. This weekend is a complete catastrophe. Then I went, then I fell asleep, which was unfortunate. So I had stuff to do. I did look up a few things that I needed to look up. But it’s great when you can just disable the wireless on the cell phone, set it up for tethering, Wi-Fi tethering, and use your Chromebooks. And then you have internet on your Chromebook. And you don’t really care that the internet’s out. So yeah, I got all kinds of toys. I like having toys. They’re not useful all the time, but. Joey, can confirm. I have seen Mark do several things poorly at once. Yeah, this is true. I am very good at doing several things poorly at once. That is my superpower. Uh-oh, Jesse’s in the office. Oh, he left us though. What a bastard. One minute he’s there, the next minute he’s, oh, he has to go set up the room. All right, he’s back. Can I read your Irish blessing? I’ve never done this on a stream. Please, please. Yes, that would be lovely. This is my, I picked up this book a couple of weeks ago. It’s called the Irish Blessings. Fantastic. I would highly encourage people to get little books of blessings or prayers. Good for grounding, especially when it’s like half a page. You’re like, great, I’ve done a little thing today. I’ve re-orientated. I’ve directed my attention towards the good. Good for attention directing, agree. What’s one that’s more neutral? May you have these blessings, good health to make life enjoyable, good fortune to make it bright, and lots of happiness always with everything just right. That’s quite good. I love it. Thank you. It’s full of these little things. I can keep going. Thank you for sharing that. I actually annoy my partner every day. I just walk up to her with a book and just stare at her and put on a voice, put on the Irish voice. Sure, this isn’t just Barney, but what I say is true. The luck of the Irish was with me the day I met you. That’s great. Tension hijacking. It’s funny too, right? Because a lot of the internet, let’s take an example that will be near and dear to both of our hearts. A lot of the internet is on things like critiques of movies or pop culture or music or whatever. As it turns out, if you pay very close attention to what’s going on, all they’re really doing is inserting different descriptive frames for exactly the same information. It’s what they’re pointing your attention at. That’s what matters in that context. The games you can play with attention, because attention can be manipulated roughly infinitely, there you go. I like what Anselman said. He said, Bigora, where’s my chilele? Yes, in fact. St. Patrick’s breastplate. It says, good to be sure. I like it. I like it. Where’s me Guinness? Indeed, indeed. Adam could not join us. He did apologize, which was totally unnecessary, but Adam is an overly polite Irishman. Oh, Adam, come on, man. Dude, it’s like midnight or something. And I don’t get done until 1 a.m. his time. He’s got to sleep. He’s a young boy. I mean, I didn’t sleep. I was up till midnight talking to you, helping you get the attention thing. That was true. You were quite helpful. That is true. Sometimes you sneak onto the Discord server and we have quite a good. That’s why I was like when I was up in the morning, I’m like, if I if I was sure I wasn’t going to fall asleep around six or seven, I would just get on the Discord server and wait for Jesse because I know he’ll show up, which isn’t true. But I was telling myself that in my head and it would have been true in this case. But you never know when Jesse is going to see me online. You never know. This is too much. Your attention is therefore taken for granted. We haven’t gotten there yet. Right. Right. Taking someone’s attention for granted. Yes. What? Benjamin Franklin. Whatever happened to Broom Shroom? I haven’t seen him in a while. Look, I tried to attract his attention on Discord and I failed. He got a little miffed at certain events and yeah, it’s. He’ll come back. He’ll come back. It might take a month. He’ll come back. We do miss him. He has not heard the music that he wanted that we now have. So when he does, I think he will come back and participate. There’s always a lag to reset attention. Right. Yes. It’s always a lag. And some people can redirect their attention very quickly. And they are talented people. Hanselman says, I shall be shortly singing the parting glass and slinking off to bed. Excellent. That is a good way to go off to bed. And look, pointing your attention before you go to bed is super powerful. I’ve often told people this. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it on these streams before, but one thing you can do is think about a problem that you have just before bed and then go to bed. And you tell yourself like, oh, here’s the problem I’m going to solve and then go to bed and just take it as a foregone conclusion. And often that works. You don’t want to make the problem anxious to you. So there’s a trick. I’m not giving you a. There’s no easy solutions, guys. I hate to break it to you. But that’s actually super effective. And that’s when and where you pay attention matters. So there’s certain things that I have to do in the morning, assuming I get up well, which hasn’t happened recently, but occasionally happens. I do them in the morning because I’m super efficient at them in the morning and I’m not super efficient at them any other point in time. So when you pay attention matters. And everyone’s different on this stuff. So it’s hard to give you guidelines. But that’s part of the trick and self-help is just give you give people random guidelines. It’s going to work for some number of people and they’re going to be your diehard fans and you know, you make fun of guys like Tony Robbins. Tony Robbins works for a bunch of people. Does he work for everybody? No. But should he not do it because he can’t accommodate 80 percent of the audience? Isn’t 10 percent good enough? And maybe it’s higher. I don’t know. And these things are hard. It’s easy to say, well, he didn’t help everybody. So he’s a charlatan. It’s like, really? I don’t know about that. You’re better off helping some people than no people. These are tough judgments to make. It’s difficult discernment. Oh, here we go. Anselman. Yep. You also get great poetic inspiration in the morning and good spiritual alertness. I agree with that. So one thing I used to do and I haven’t done it in this house, which I probably should I used to have a copy of the Desiderata by Max Ehrman, I think is credited with that particular poem. It’s called Placidly Amidst the Noise and Haste. Yeah, that’s how it starts. Beautiful poem. I used to be able to recite it. I’m terrible at reciting poetry. I can barely recite the tiger. And that’s my favorite poem that I’ve read far more than any other. I’ve written it out. I still can’t remember all the words. Yeah, the Desiderata is wonderful because it is, you know, this just calm down, quiet down and savor the world sort of a an engagement. Anselman. Oh, yeah. Keep a notepad by your bed. Really good advice. Excellent advice. Yeah. Yeah. Not just for journaling, just for good ideas. One of the things I do, I was at a business meeting. I was doing an interview. I was interviewing somebody for a job. And they said something that triggered a thought. And I had to take out the Chromebook, which I didn’t have out already because sometimes I don’t think of these things ahead of time. And I took a note for today’s monologue. So these things happen. You got to be prepared to take notes. And I didn’t want to write it out because my handwriting is terrible. Always has been. But yeah, that happens. Taking notes. If you want one superpower, taking notes is a superpower. Start taking notes. Your whole life is going to change for the better. Guaranteed, you’re going to get better discernment and judgment and everything else. Anselman, did you check out Will Franken’s surreal video on Blake yet? No, sir. I have not. This week has been a complete and utter catastrophe. I am so far behind on so many things and my attention has been all over the place. Will, it’s on the list. Where is it? Will, Bonnie? Will Franken, he did a video on Blake. Yeah, big fans of Blake here. William Blake is the best. He’s also a crazy person or was a crazy person, but also the best. Then these are little trade-offs, right? It’s like you want an artist? You’re going to get an unconstrained crazy person who can’t set his microphone game correctly for whatever freaking stupid reason. I haven’t played it yet. And is never on time for anything ever. No, that’s not true. Of course not. It’s hyperbolic, but you’re on the virus dream. I had to think about it. I was like, is it generally true? No, it’s not generally true. I like that you had to think about it for so long. I’m like, aha, I win. Victory again. Yeah, I do have to check that video out. I’m going to be completely slammed for the next four days because I got to get this legal work done and it’s a pain in the ass. The amount of emotional drain involved in something like this is tremendous. Especially when you’re like, no, this is an emotionally charged thing somehow. A, I’m not a fan of people stealing from dead people. B, I’m not a fan of people stealing from me. And C, I’m not a fan of stupidity. So when I see people being stupid about things, I’m like, no, this really takes 10 seconds and it really is just this easy and they want to make it complicated. And I’m like, no, I would rather make it easy. Yeah. And also being told that the expert witness is going to cost $20,000,alljustoneexpertwitnesswasreallynotwhatIneededtohearsinceIdo{n}^{\prime }tactuallyhaveanythinglikethatamountofmoneytoputtowardsthisprojectbecauseIneedthatmoneytoeat.Soyeah,w{e}^{\prime }rekindofdowntothewireonallkindsofthings.Ialsowanttosaythatmoderndictatingsoftwarehasactuallygottenquitegood.Soifyo{u}^{\prime }renotgoodatwritingnotes,evenyourphonecandictateyourgeneralwritingandthenusingthatdictatetore-editbecausei{t}^{\prime }sfareasiertoeditthoughtsthanitistoactuallygetthemdown.Well,Iwouldsayifyo{u}^{\prime }renotareallygoodattyping,butactuallywiththeSteelSerieskeyboardthatIdugoutandgottoworkonthecomputer.Howishe?Youhavetoshowandtell,Mark.IfIdo{n}^{\prime }tseeit,itdoesnotexist.Doesthislighterexist?Yeah.Itisbeautiful.Anditmakesthemostgorgeoustypingsounds.Soi{t}^{\prime }sjustwhenyo{u}^{\prime }retypingawayonit,i{t}^{\prime }sabeautifulthing.Itisabeautiful,beautifulthing.Iassureyou.Itisquitepretty.Oh,Ido{n}^{\prime }tlikechocolatekeyboardsatall.Iwillallowpeopletohelpwithmy,withmydire,direlegalconditionhere.Yeah.Yeah.Legalworksucksandi{t}^{\prime }semotional,likeIsaid.Soi{t}^{\prime }s,i{t}^{\prime }sextrahardandthatdistractsmyattentionandtheni{t}^{\prime }sdrainingbecauseyourattentiondrainsyoulikeallyourotherthoughts.Yougettokeepinmindtoo,yourattentionisafunctionofyourbrainandyourbrainistheorganthatusesthemostenergyinyourbody.Ibetnoonetoldyouthatbefore.Sothereasonwhyyoudo{n}^{\prime }tuseyourbrainisbecauseyo{u}^{\prime }renotgoodatwriting.Ibetnoonetoldyouthatbefore.Sothereasonwhyyougettiredbeingaroundpeopleisbecauseemotionstakeupenergy.Thoughtstakeupenergyrationalizingyourbehaviorortheirstakesupenergy.Attentiontakesupenergyandi{t}^{\prime }susuallymoreenergythanyouwouldusedoinganyotheractivity.Tha{t}^{\prime }swhyrunningandwalkingissotherapeuticbecauseyourenergyusesswitchesintoyourbodyfromyourbrain.Andsothatreallyhelpsyourbraintolike,Oh,right.Yourbraingetsintothesepatterns,right.Andyourmusclememorytakesoverandthenyourbraingetslowerenergyandthenallyourenergyisbeingputintoyourmusclesandyourbrai{n}^{\prime }slike,ah,energyflowthereinsteadofenergyflowuphere.SoalmostlikeKantwaswrong.Itisnotmindoverbody.Anybodywhoeversaidthatissodumb.Ica{n}^{\prime }tconsideranythingtheysaytobeworthy.Gartham,isthatahoseclamponyourpirateeye?Yes,itis.Thisiscertainlyhandmade.Itwas$10 on Amazon and I am super grateful that somebody is willing to sell this for $10onAmazon.WhenIsawit,Iwaslike,Ooh,andi{t}^{\prime }sblue.Iwilltakeone.Now,ofcourse,thisisstupidbecauselikewhenItakethisoff,Ica{n}^{\prime }tseeverywellforminutesandminutesandminutesafterwardsbecauseoneeyehasbeenseeingblue.Andtheothereyehasbeenseeingnotblue.Andyeah,i{t}^{\prime }sitcausesallkindsofproblemslike{I}^{\prime }mstrugglingandsufferingforyoupeople.Thispiratethingisnojoke,man.Yeah.Oh,Anselmint.SofillmetothepartingglassofSanPellegrino.Yes,sir.Goodnight.Enjoy.Betoyouall.Goodnight.Goodpeople.Thankyou,sir.Goodnighttoyou.Raisingaglass.I^{\prime }llgiveitpointsforbeinghandmade.Allgoodsteampunksortofparaphernaliaishandmade.Ihaveasteampunkcostumesomewhereintheshed.Ishould{n}^{\prime }tsaysomewhere.IknowexactlywhereitiswithahatthatImadewithsomehelp,ofcourse.Yeah,IgetabunchofpicturesfromthesteampunkthingthatwewenttoaconventionyearsagoinBoston,madeourowncostumesanditwasallsteampunky.Youmakeitwhateveryouwanttogeneralsciencefictionconventions,notlikealikeasuperherooranyofthatcanbewhateveryouwant.TherewasawomantherewhodidLeilafromDoctorWhofromTheFourthDoctor,TomBaker,whichis,ofcourse,thebestdoctor.Ifyoudo{n}^{\prime }tknowthat,yo{u}^{\prime }rejustwrongabouttheworldandyouneedlike,Ido{n}^{\prime }tknow,somekindofdrugsorsomethingtofixyou.Andshehadacaninethatwasunbelievable.AndIthinkshewasquitedisappointedthatreallyallIcareaboutwashercanine.Ialsohaveacanine.Andhesaysaffirmativemaster,whichisaboutthecoolestthingintheworld.AndIabsolutelylovehim.SowhenIfirstcamedowntoSouthCarolina,Iwasjustdownheretemporarily.SomyhouseinBostonwasstillahouse.AndIhadmybuddygoinandgetsomethingorchange,fixsomething.Sohestoppedinandfixsomething.AndIhadtheplaceriggedwithremoteIPcameras,youknow,becauseIwasaway.Soheandtheneighborgowatchthehouse.But,youknow,whatever,IknewIwasgoingtobedownhereforlikefourorfive,sixmonths,gethowlongmymothe{r}^{\prime }sfirstcancertreatmentwas.ButhewasdowninthehousetalkingtomethroughtheIPcamera,whichisjusthysterical.Thisisyearsandyearsago.Thisislikesix,sevenyearsago.AndIsaid,hey,domeafavor,goonmydeskandgrabmycanineandhitthebutton.Andhedid.Itwasgreat.AndIboughtthatatabookstore.Andinfact,Ionlygotthebatteriesranoutawhileago.SoIonlygotbatteriesforitrecentlybecauseIkeptmisreadingsomehow,whichbatteriesprobablybeingsick.Sometimesyoudostuffandjustdoeverythingwrongforawhile.So,yeah,tha{t}^{\prime }sthatwasbutIlovethatthing.Ido{n}^{\prime }tevenknowwhyIloveitsomuch,butIabsolutelylovemylittlestupidcaninethatsaysaffirmativemaster.I{t}^{\prime }sjustbrilliant.AndIlovecanineingeneral.Butyeah,yeah.Attention,baby.Youcangetmyattentionwiththecanine.Noproblem.Therewego.Ilikethat.Isthatlikeagorilla?SowhatwaxwasoriginallyaMexicandayofthedeadcandlelight.Ithadacandlehereandrewaxeditintobeingoppositeintoaskull.Sopeoplealwayshavetoreactiontothis.Oh,i{t}^{\prime }sliketheylikethepeoplelike,whydoyouhaveaskullthatlooksterrifyinginsomeaspects?I{t}^{\prime }sallmadeofwaxandi{t}^{\prime }sallstickyandstuff.Icantellalotaboutyouveryquicklyfromyouronereactiontothis.Oh,i{t}^{\prime }sgreat.Oh,yeah.Sowehavedoyouknowaboutourtellquestions,Jesse?Youknowaboutthetellquestionsw{e}^{\prime }vebeenworkingon?Oh,yo{u}^{\prime }vedoneoneonme,but{I}^{\prime }malwayshappytodomore.Butyes,Idoknowaboutthesequestions.Yeah,w{e}^{\prime }vegotabunchoftellobjects.Becausetheobjectiswelltoo.Yeah,i{t}^{\prime }sanotherabstraction.Youcanpayattentiontopeopl{e}^{\prime }sresponsestothings.SoalotoftimesIwillaskpeoplecertainspecificdirectwellformedquestions.I^{\prime }vebeengoingoutforever.ButSallyJo{e}^{\prime }stheonethatcameupwiththesethisclevernickelquestion.Thatisjustfrickinabsolutelynextlevelbrilliant.Andw{e}^{\prime }vesortofbeenworkingonmorequestionslikethattotellyousomethingaboutapersonbasedontheirresponsetothequestion.Thequestionisneverrightanswer.I{t}^{\prime }sjusttogaugewhereyouare.Andw{e}^{\prime }rehopingsomedaytomakeitdostuckness.Sow{e}^{\prime }llbeabletoasksomebodytwoorthreequestionsandsortoffigureout,oh,yo{u}^{\prime }restuckrighthere.AndIdidastreamwithonTuesdayhere,IdidastreamwithVanderKlayandManueljumpedinattheend,ofcourse,whichisnice.Butweweretalkingaboutthirdwayism,right?WhatPetersondoesdifferentlyfrom,say,anevangelist,right?WhatPetersondoesdifferentlyfromsomebodytryingtogetsomebodyintothechurch.I{t}^{\prime }sagoodvideo.Youshouldcheckitout.PaulandIgetalongquitewellandPaulwasverygracious.AndIgotabunchofnewsubsonthechannel,notquiteat500.W{e}^{\prime }reat499though.Soyougotmeabunch.Yougotmelikesevensubsorsomething.Maybe,maybeeight.Iforget.Itwentupsoquick.Idid{n}^{\prime }tpayattention.Yournewsubcomeonthechat.W{e}^{\prime }renice.W{e}^{\prime }renice.Weactuallyarenice.Tha{t}^{\prime }strue.W{e}^{\prime }reusuallynice.Weareactuallyprettynice.Wehave{n}^{\prime }tbeatenupanybodyinages.Yeah,becausenoon{e}^{\prime }sstupid.Comeon.Sorry,I^{\prime }mjustgoingtosayitthatflatly.Right.Well,look,youactstupid.Youkindofcomeonlookingforafightinsomeaspectsor.Yeah,yeah,tha{t}^{\prime }sgoingtoendit.Well,ifyourattentionisinthewrongplace,thenwemightgotherewithyouandyoumightbedisappointedattheresults.Yeah.Yeah.Tha{t}^{\prime }s,andthatiswhatitis.Likeissomebodytrollingyou?Wher{e}^{\prime }stheirattention?Isthereattentiononthethingathand?Aretheystayingontopicoraretheytryingtodrawyourattentionintolegalismortheirreligiousbeliefortheirideology,theirsystemofthought?Right.Becauseeithercouldbe,couldbethecase.I^{\prime }mnot,tha{t}^{\prime }sagoodwaytoknow.Like,aretheydrawingyourattentionawayfromyour,whereitwasbefore?Theremaynotbeabadthing,butitmaybeabadthing.Buti{t}^{\prime }ssomethingtowatchandyoucanwatchwithresults.Like,oh,wasI,didIforgettopayattentiontothething?DidIgettheanswerIwaslookingfor?Right.Andthenofcourse,IthinkitwasWednesday,ManuelandIdidastreamonAI,whichwascool.AndIwanttodomorestreams.HopefullytheEuropeancontingentwilltellmeifwecandomorestreams,ifpeoplewillhopin,Manuelwasveryupset.Wedid{n}^{\prime }tgetmoreviewsontheAIstream,but,youknow,wedid{n}^{\prime }tplanitfarenoughinadvance.Andyeah,thisweekwas,IhadtobumpthatstreambecauseVanderKlaywantedtotruck.IreachedouttoVanderKlayonTuesdaymorningandh{e}^{\prime }slike,yeah,le{t}^{\prime }stalklatertoday.AndIwaslike,Iwas{n}^{\prime }texpectingthat.ThenIhadtorushandtakenotesforthirdwayismbecauseIrealized,oh,I^{\prime }mnotsureIcanarticulatemypointcorrectly,althoughIthinkImanageditintheendaccordingtopeople.Sothatwasgood.So,youknow,itwasjustlike,oh,IhadasqueezeofattentiononTuesdayandIwastellingpeoplelike,oh,no,no,no,everythin{g}^{\prime }soff.Like,I^{\prime }mnotgoingtowatchvideos.Igottolikedonotes.AndIwasinthemiddleofdoingattentionnotes,whichisjustironic.Ofcourseyo{u}^{\prime }redoingattentionnotes.Nowyoucanswitchyourattention.Notdoingattentionnotes.Dough.Right.Andthen,yeah,soi{t}^{\prime }sbeenahecticweek.I^{\prime }mnotcomplaining.I^{\prime }mjustsayinglike,i{t}^{\prime }sbeenabusyweekand{I}^{\prime }mwaybehindonthethingsIwouldliketodo.Andlook,someofit,alotoftodayandbecauseofyesterday,Iwasjustlike,Ineedtogoovermynotes.Andthen{I}^{\prime }msittingthereplayingsolitaireandchattingonDiscord.I{t}^{\prime }slike,ah,somethin{g}^{\prime }sgoingwronghere.Mindsweepers.Ifwewantanattentiongame,Mindsweepers.No,no,Mindsweepersisterrible.No,no,Iactually,I...No,no,no,yo{u}^{\prime }rewrong.Yo{u}^{\prime }rewrong.Yo{u}^{\prime }rewrong.Yo{u}^{\prime }reabsolutelywrong.I^{\prime }mthepiratecaptain.Sono.Iuse...Veryfewthingswillarguewithyou,Mark,butMindsweeperisgreaterthanSolitaire.IusesolitairespecificallybecauseIdevelopedamethodinsolitairetha{t}^{\prime }sfairlyreliablebecausei{t}^{\prime }sarepeatablepatterntomeasurehowsickIam.SoIactuallyusethatlike,oh,Ica{n}^{\prime }t,likemysolitaireskillsarelikereallydown.SoIwo{n}^{\prime }twritemecodebecauseifIwritecodeand{I}^{\prime }msick,I^{\prime }lljustmakeamessofeverything.AndIknowthat.SoIhaveameasureandIactuallyusethatallthetime.Iwas{n}^{\prime }tdoingthattoday.Itwasjustavoidance.AndIthinkIwasburnedoutfrom,whichhasbeenabangerofaweek.I^{\prime }mdoingalotofmeetingsatworkandwritingstuffandcomingupwith...Igotpinnedinameetingandaskedlike,well,ifwewere,howmuchmoneyforhowmuchtimeandwhatwouldbetheoutputattheend?AndofcourseIcandothat.SoIdidthatrightinthemoment.Andno,no,no,IknowthatIcanjusttellittoyou.Andi{t}^{\prime }slike,well,weneedthatintheslide.Oh,fairenough.But{I}^{\prime }mnotdoingthedamnslide.Theothergu{y}^{\prime }sdoingtheslide.SoIcangetawaywiththat,butther{e}^{\prime }sacostandittakesalotofenergy.SothenIgottotakeanap.Tha{t}^{\prime }salittleIgottorest.NowIca{n}^{\prime }twatchavideo.Right.Soyeah,i{t}^{\prime }s,itgetsdone.I{t}^{\prime }sagood,theimportanceofsleepisrightthere.Right.Thesleepisthedecoratedattention.Isthatyouneedthatbufferzone.Yeah.Youneedtosleepiscomplicated.Um,becauseyouneedtogoinandoutofatleastthreesleepcycles.ThewayIcompresssleepisIcompressthecycletime,whichisperfectlyvalidbytheway,itworksgreat.Andwhenyoucompressthecycletime,youactuallyimproveyourabilitytolearnduringtheday.I{t}^{\prime }sfantastic.Uh,Iactuallyhavethatsleepprogramuponmywebsite.Um,uh,butI,andIwill,um,Iwill,whenIgetanew,betterwebsiteformarketwisdom,Iwillputitupthereinstead.And,uh,yeah,wegetalotofmaterial.I^{\prime }dliketogetup.Ineed,IneedaWordPresspersontohelpwritethewebsite.I^{\prime }vegoteverythingdone.I{t}^{\prime }salready,I^{\prime }mjustnotgoingtositthereandlearnWordPress.Igotwaytoomuchstuff.NowIcould{n}^{\prime }teventhinkaboutit.Um,webuiltthe,the,the,themeaningcommunitywebsiteand,uh,inJoomlaandstuff,andIgotmostofthattogether.Ihadsomehelp,ofcourse.Ica{n}^{\prime }tdoanyofthisstuffalone,but.Butyeah,i{t}^{\prime }sa,i{t}^{\prime }sabigproblem.Andoneofthebiggestthingsyoucando,andPetersontalksaboutthisquiteabit,oneofthebiggestthingsyoucandoisfixyoursleepandthebestwaytofixyoursleep,especiallyiflike,Calibus,um,sleepisanissueforus.Nighthawksthebestwaytofixyoursleep.Ifyouliketostayuplateistocompressyoursleepcycles,uh,causeyoucangetitdowntofourhoursanight.Uh,andwhenyoudo,youjuststayuplateandwakeupatfiveinthemorning.Soyo{u}^{\prime }reupuntiloneandthenyouwakeupat5a.m.Andyo{u}^{\prime }resuperproductiveandlifeisbetter.Um,andIgotanumberofpeoplethroughthatprocessanditworksverywellforthem.Uh,gettingtheretakessometime.Ittakesaboutamonthortwo,dependingupontheperson,uh,whatyoudo.Gettingupbeforethelightis{n}^{\prime }tveryimportantforthat.Peoplethat{I}^{\prime }vehelpedisgettingthatearlymorningexposuretolightinthemorning,highlyvital.Highlyvitalfori{t}^{\prime }slike,itdepends.Yeah.Imean,afullspectrumlightbulbsareusuallyrequiredifyouwanttodothat.Butthekeytofixingyoursleepformostpeopleistosetawakeuptimeandletthegotobedtimehandleitself.Andwhenyousetawakeuptime,likefiveAMorsix,whateveritis,itdoes{n}^{\prime }tevenmatterandyoudo{n}^{\prime }tchangeitforaweek,youwouldbesurprised.Um,andthenonceyo{u}^{\prime }re,onceyoursleeptimestabilizesaroundyourwakeuptime,uh,theneverythingchanges.Ifyouwanttocompressit,yo{u}^{\prime }vegottocompressithalfanhouroranhour.Youknow,foraweekandthenagain,althoughitmightbetwoweeks,itdepends.Andwhenyoudothat,sofirstyoustabilizeyoursleep,thenyoucanstartmovingtheclock.Whenyoudothat,youhavetofollowallkindsofrulesbecausewhathappenswhenyoucompressyoursleepcycles,whenyouchangethemisyourimmunesystemgetsoutofwhack,soyouhavetoboostitwithorangejuiceandstuff.Likeyouhaveto,um,howyouwakeupiskey.I^{\prime }vegotawholedocumentonit.I^{\prime }llshareitagainsomedaywhenIgetthenewwebsiteup.Um,buttha{t}^{\prime }ssofaroffmyradarrightnow.Soi{t}^{\prime }slikeavideo.Icoulddoavideoonsleep.Yeah,maybei{t}^{\prime }s,i{t}^{\prime }shard.Theultimatepatternistheultimatepatterntonavigate.I{t}^{\prime }sinsomesense.Icould,Icoulddo,Icoulddoanavigatingpatterns,youknow,compressingsleeporsomething.Yeah.I^{\prime }ve,I^{\prime }vedoneitforayear.I^{\prime }vehelpedpeoplewithitforyears.Yeah.Itdoes{n}^{\prime }tworkwhenyo{u}^{\prime }reilllikeIam,althougheveryonceinawhileIsleepfourhoursandIgetupandhaveagreatday.Superproductive.I{t}^{\prime }sfantastic.Wha{t}^{\prime }strade-offs,right?Ikeep,Ikeeplaughingeverytimetrade-offsandrulesarementioned.Justlike,thereitisagain.I{t}^{\prime }slike,ifyouwantagreateroutcome,yo{u}^{\prime }llhavetomakeatrade-offandsufferforalittlebitorstruggleasweweretalkingaboutlastnight.Orismypreferreddefinitionoremphasisisyouhavetochangetherelationshipyouhavetosomething.Yes.Yes.Fleebits.Thatistrue.Sleepingisahugeproblem.Yes.Imissedsomesleepanalogyslaredimmediately.Yes.Yeah.Sleepandyourimmunesystemareverywellconnected.Ido{n}^{\prime }tthinkanybodyreallyunderstandsthat.Um,atleastnotthemedicalcommunity.Uh,maybethe{y}^{\prime }rebeginningtonow,butalotoftha{t}^{\prime }swrappedupincircadianrhythms,whichiswrappedupinfullspectrumlightinmyotherhouse.Ihada,Ihadanoffice.SoIhadthehalfofthehousedownstairswasofficeandlivingroomwithahalfwallbetween,andthenIhadadesk.Itwasreallycool.ImissedmyhouseupNorth.Um,myhalfmilliondollargotstolenfrommehouseupNorth.Uh,thatthathousehadto,uh,recesslightsinthat,inthecomputerroomsection,andIput,uh,fullspectrumbulbs,superexpensivebackintheday.Inthere.Andman,Iwas,Iwasabeast.Iwasamonster.Itwasgreatthattheupstairsofmyhousehadeightcomputers.Yeah.Yeah.Andtheywereconnectedtothebasementcomputer.NowIhadtwointernetpipes.SoIhadoneinternetpipecomingintothat,whichwasactuallytheslowpipe,Ohyeah.AndthenIhadtheupstairstodownstairsconnectionthroughtherouterthataggregatedthepipes.Soyoucoulduseeither,eitherpipe.Theotheronewascableoutofpipe,obviously,whichbecamefibereventually.Um,andthendownstairsandmostofthemwere{n}^{\prime }ton,Ihad50computers.50inthebasement.Thebasementwasawholecomputerlab,benchtables,thewholething.Peoplebringtheircomputerslikemycomputerisbroken.I^{\prime }mlike,allright,uh,le{t}^{\prime }stakeitdown.W{e}^{\prime }llbenchit.Boom.Ibenchit.Bang.AndIfixedit.Notimeatall.Thepartslaidoutandeverything.I{t}^{\prime }sfantastic.Icouldfixcomputersinlikeminutesandeverythinglaidout.Everythingwasready.Ido{n}^{\prime }tjustdothisnow.Whyare{n}^{\prime }tyoudoingthisnowasasidehustle?Well,a,Ido{n}^{\prime }t.Soher{e}^{\prime }stheweirdthing.I,whenIwenttoScotland,Inoticedthis,um,inScotlandiscomputerrepairshopseverywhere.ComputerrepairisnotaviableindustryintheUnitedStates.Youknow,justbuynew$300 machines. So it’s not worth it. Time wise. There are a few shops. Like there were, I saw 12 shops in Edinburgh, 12. There aren’t 12 shops in the state of South Carolina, much less a city. There are no cities in the U S F 12 computer repair shops anywhere. So I don’t know what’s going on over there, but, uh, yeah, gambling, gambling houses, the old modernity things. If you can fix it, fix it. Rather than just sort of the waste, the waste lesson. And computers are massively expensive in Europe. Yeah. Like here, there are commodity and literally $300.Likeno,areallydecentmachinecanbeat300buckshere.Andtha{t}^{\prime }sbeentrueforyearsandyearsandyears.Sotha{t}^{\prime }sproblem.Numberoneproblem.NumbertwoisIdo{n}^{\prime }thaveanyspacehere.Icould{n}^{\prime }tdothat.Sothebackroomrightnowhasexplodedcomputerseverywhere.Longstory.FinallygotthedamnsystemupwiththeGPUandfinallyi{t}^{\prime }sworking.Theharddrivesetonfire.Thatwastheonlyproblem.SoImightbeabletogetanother,well,yeah,Imean,youknow,soImightbeabletogettwomachinesworking.Thatwouldbegreat.CauseIhave,thatmeans{I}^{\prime }llhavethreetotalcausether{e}^{\prime }sanothermachineontherackintheback,neverintendedtogetarackinthebackroomofficer,butIhaveitahugesixfoottablebackthere.Sorightnow,ifsomebodywantstocomeandvisit,Ihavetocleanthebackroomandputabunchofstuffintheshedandputthetableawayinordertopulldownthe,theMurphybed,butyes,that,thatisthebestthatI,soIcanbenchstuffkindof,butyeah,repairingcomputersaroundhereisrepairingphonesisabetterjob.Tha{t}^{\prime }swhyaroomcrewtherewasdoingitbecausepeoplelovetheirphonesandneedtokeeptheirdata.I{t}^{\prime }saloteasiertokeepcomputerdatawithoutthat.Andthereisacomputerrepairshopdownthestreetfromme.Anditcaterstothepartoftheproblemtoo,isIliveinthewoodsandthepeoplewiththemoneywo{n}^{\prime }tcometothewoods,whichisfair.Liketheyshouldbescaredandstayintheir,intheirNewJerseyminihouses.Causethe{y}^{\prime }reallfromNewYorkandNewJerseywhomoveddowntoSouthCarolina.I{t}^{\prime }skindoffunny.Andtheyliveinthese,youknow,the{y}^{\prime }reallstuffedinthesedevelopmentsthatthether{e}^{\prime }stwodevelopmentsoverhere.On{e}^{\prime }scalledLakeCarolinaandtheotheron{e}^{\prime }scalledsummit.Theyhaveoverathousandhousesinthesedevelopments.Ther{e}^{\prime }sprobably2,500houses.Tha{t}^{\prime }sfivemiles,fivemilesfrommyhouse,fiveandahalfmiles.Well,alittlebitless,butdependinguponwhichpartyo{u}^{\prime }regoingto.Inaplace,Jesse,inaplacewhereIgot12acresoflandforunderahundredgrand,thesepeoplearepaying$250,000 to live on a quarter acre or less in a homeowners association, smack up against other houses of the same basic design. And I’m like, y’all are insane. Cause down here, you don’t even own any land until you own three acres. And three acres is not bad. And I got 12. Some people have six and five, five’s not unusual. It’s five, six acre lots are everywhere down here and they’re cheap as hell. And I’m like, why are you buying these? And even so like those houses are 250. What’s the, what’s the, what’s the thing that they’re struggling with? Cause it is related to a child. Cause it is related to attention in my intuition here. Like they not wanting to make maintenance. They want no one. No, no, it’s looks up North. The there are neighborhoods and the neighborhood is tied to status and identity and the neighborhoods are very regular up North. And so there are neighborhoods within towns and then there are whole towns. Like if you live in Wellesley mass, you’re wealthy. Uh, Wellesley mass has, is in the top three for income per capita in Massachusetts. It’s all the entrance. There’s no poor people at all. Uh, and any poor people are in the Wellesley motel by the highway, you know? And so it’s prestige. These houses are all of the same type. They’re huge. They’re all the same open design, right? My mother had one that also got stolen from me. It’s what the lawsuits about partially, uh, you know, so they’re all open design. I think it, I think that house was. I was at 2,500 square feet or something. It was, it was a big house. It was a pretty big freaking house. Cause my house is 900 square feet. You know, it’s nothing. Um, this is maybe it was 3,500 square feet. I forget. It’s a, it’s a big house. Um, and it’s got two car garage and I don’t have any garage. I get nothing. Uh, well, I have a, I have a tent for my car. So, uh, convertible needs tent. Uh, pasta sundown here is killer. So they’re paying attention to what the neighborhood and the house look like with relation to status in the world. And that’s how they do their status decisions. That’s how they identify themselves within society is by the neighborhood that you live in and the neighborhood that you live in and the house that you live in. So in Lake Carolina, there’s a big Lake. And then if you live on the Lake, you got more money. Right. A bigger house probably. And there’s a couple of gated communities in there. So there are many gated communities inside the community. Oh yeah, it’s crazy. And in, and in summit, they’ve got a whole section. Well, the Carolina has this too. They’ve got a whole section of Charleston houses, which is a very unique architectural style where basically it’s a skinny long house and then the driveways are in the back. So it’s just a weird design, even though that that’s, you know, not necessarily a sign of great wealth. Uh, and it was done for cooling purposes. So it’s not necessarily appropriate. And like one of the things I knew to look for down here, cause I was smart and, you know, knew when I was a kid, actually, cause I had studied such things. Down here, you want to look at where the house is on the lot. And if it’s a skew on the lot, it’s probably because they built it correctly. Because you want the houses down here aligned north south for a reason. And they have to be perfectly north south aligned because the sun is very hot. You don’t want the summer sun coming in the windows. So in my neighborhood, when you go down the street, you get a little house like mine off in the woods in the unkempt woods, cause I don’t know how to take care of my property. I don’t have the tools. Um, and then you get like a pretty big house, 4,500, 5,500 square feet behind me. Down a very long driveway that you can barely see his house. Uh, and then you’ve got a double wide, right? And then you’ve got a double wide with a garage. That’s twice the size of the house. Um, yeah. And then you’ve got a single wide with an RV. So the RV costs more than I paid for my house and property. Um, and then, right. Although his house is nothing. And he’s on three acres, but he’s got an RV and a house good for him. Right. And then you’ve got another one with a, with a nice, you know, colonial farm style house. Right. And it’s all over the place down here and nobody cares. Cause, and that’s what I want. I want to live in a mixed kind of neighborhood. I don’t want to live. And so the funny part is, so you can buy a fancy house for 250, or you can go, is that eight miles, go eight miles into, into where I live, uh, and buy an almost identical house on a little bit more land for 150. Yeah. Right. Right. Cause you can’t. The attention meter needing to be attend to the city and being close to the city and having that clean from you is more important than having attending to the land and the natural elements. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Please. This is enough detail to find you. Yeah. The problem is that, uh, if I shoot you on my property, ain’t no one going to care. Um, so people can find me all they want. Uh, I’m typing. Shouldn’t be long. No. No, no, that was my buddy’s gun, but it was great fun to fire. Yes. I did in fact shoot a 44 Magnum, a dirty hairy gun. It was fantastic. Dells great movie, but it’s unbelievable. Great series of music. I think they were all great. That’s, you know, and that’s one of the things like we haven’t attended to leadership and that’s one of those attention things. It’s like, ah, we weren’t attending to leadership and now we don’t have leaders. Yeah. Think we weren’t attending to the importance of wisdom and now we don’t have wisdom. Yeah. Think we weren’t attending to, right? I mean, I could go on and on and on. What were you attending to? Were you attending to education? And then somebody corrupted it because you were paying too much attention to the details of education without looking at the results because you can get somebody lost in details while you hijack the results. That’s exactly what they do with education in the U S that’s exactly what they did. The U S. And not just the U S because a lot of people follow the U S. See the video that I did with Adam on modern times there on the present. It was quite a good video. Death wish also has a lot of things to say here on attention to problems of living in New York versus living. You’ve seen death wish with Charles. Oh yeah. I saw a death wish. I’m just trying to think of different tier of ideas is the name of the video I did with Adam most recently. We’re going to do another Adam video soon. Yeah. I got to get caught up on videos. I’ve been fascinated by the monarchy series documentary series at the BBC that you introduced to me too. I got to get caught up on that. So, and then we’re going to do a matrix video. Yeah. We got to do that too. Jesse, not, not next week. The week after I might actually have some bandwidth again, unless you know what I enjoy in my off time when I have a couple of 10, 15 minutes, I’ve been going through every movie that was released in the night from, because for me, the 90s start from 89 from the fall of the Berlin wall. I kind of like that’s where the 90s really started. And just before then, it’s the same thing with like the 90s really kind of ends 2001 sadly because of the thing. So yeah. So, but you can see if you start tracking it, like the height of, or the, I want to use the word progression, but the increases in subversion every year in the 90s, you’re like, Oh wow, honey, I shrunk the kids. So like, yeah, like comedy is a bit difficult to say, I didn’t just point like that’s subversive, but it’s not necessarily the main topic that’s subversive there. It’s the, it’s what it’s doing underneath or what it’s calling it. Look who’s talking to would be, there’s another one. There’s a whole bunch of different ones. They’re the easiest ones to point out. But yeah, I’ve been going through and like just going, Oh wow. Yeah. Men in black. Yeah, that’s, yeah. Oh yeah. The whole idea of zapping someone’s memory temporarily. Exactly. It’s not, it’s gotten people, it’s gotten, it’s gotten, it’s gotten, it’s gotten people to think, Oh, I’m going to be like, Oh, I’m going to be like, Oh, I’m going to People don’t understand that. Look, don’t, don’t look at the main plot. Look what the other things that are happening around that they show you. That’s the subversive thing going on. Um, there’s a great movie called, um, I really like it’s called Tango and Cash. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And has a couple of similar things going on there. Um, Yeah. So that’s high backing attention through detail again. Yes. Yes. Oh, pay attention to these cool aliens. And not to this theme about these dark suited men, destroying the world by zapping memories and making you believe things that, you know, making you believe unreality and by the way, the reality is far stranger than you could possibly know because we keep zapping your memory. Yeah. It’s, you know, don’t pay any attention to that. Here’s a cool story. Right. And that’s the subversion. It’s when you’re telling one story, you’re signaling something else inside that story, right? It’s, it’s kind of like this embedded symbol or this virus. So when Dawkins talks about memes in his book, and no, I haven’t read it. It doesn’t matter. Believe it or not. Doesn’t actually matter. Um, right. But he gets the framing wrong and he doesn’t actually understand what’s going on. And to be fair in the seventies, when you wrote that particular meme thing, um, it, it wasn’t going on in the way that it was going on, say in the nineties, from the period of 1989 to 2001. I mentioned that right in my, um, in one of my videos, right about, yeah, you shouldn’t use, uh, oh my, my, what is modern anyhow video, right? Modern and modernity, right? Like you shouldn’t use time periods like that. You should use time periods that correlate to events. Like 89 to 2001. That, that is correct. There is a distinct thing going on there. I like how Fleabag says, uh, I’m Canadian. So I wouldn’t even see it coming to thought. Some of them might have a gun in the record. My mind, everyone down here has guns, buddy. In fact, if you only have one gun, what the hell kind of person are you? We’re kind of suspicious of your ass. No, really. Like, especially down south. Well, so the problem is I had an, I had somebody on my property. You belong there. And it turns out she was the granddaughter of the woman who owned this house. So I bought this house from the estate, obviously. Um, and I don’t know what she took from the property. She took something. Uh, but I had called the cops and granted it was Memorial Day weekend. Um, but it was Memorial Day. In fact, I had been away visiting my friends in Georgia. Um, they didn’t get here for like an hour. Like, you know, it takes an hour for the sheriff to get here sometimes. Sometimes not. One time I was away and the cameras went off and I saw a car. It was right after that. Actually, it was months after that. I saw a car on the outdoor camera and I was in New England and I called the car. I called the dispatch and said, it looks like there’s a car outside my house. And one of my indoor cameras said that there was an alarm. Can you go to the house? Can you go and check? And they’re like, yeah, no problem. And they came down with like three cars, sirens blaring. And my laugh’s a little overkill guys. But, but they came down and they were like, no, no, we just, we had a lot of wind. And I was like, yeah, but what’s that car? No, no, no, no. There’s a, there’s a, it was a gigantic like truck to cut the trees down or something, but I couldn’t tell from the camera angle, there’s a lot of trees on my property, a lot of plants. So I couldn’t tell. I just knew there was a vehicle there that didn’t belong there. I didn’t know what it was. And they were like, oh, no, no. And I was like, oh, I’m sorry, officers. Oh, no, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it. We’d rather be safe. And I’m, I’m like, you know, I’m far enough outside that I’m, I live in the woods. I live in the woods. I live in the woods on purpose. I got a pond. It’s 12 feet from my house. It’s lovely. Winning, winning. Winning. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The cost is I have to, you know, you have to protect yourself. You can’t rely on the police. On the, on the, on the, if you know, in the cities these days, you’re at the frontier, right? Right. Always in that way. Well, it’s a big difference. I mean, they have requirements in the cities for how long to respond. And, you know, they keep staffing to do that. It’s great. We don’t, we only recently got a police force in my town and like, they’re not here on Memorial Day if you can. You’ve got to call the county sheriff’s office. So, I’ll be back. I’m going to go get water. Water? Are you supposed to have your Sam Pell with you? Thank you very much. Or your LaCroix. Either one. You know, if you’re coming to the stream, you got to come prepared. You got to have that effort in there. Um, I don’t, I don’t even know why he’s going to get water. Cause I actually, I’m going to shut this down in about a minute. Then I’m going to open up a new stream for after party, where you can all party. We can talk about attention more. Um, or you can come in and talk about whatever you want and, uh, leave this, how large is my town? I actually don’t know. Cause I really don’t care. Uh, I like to refer to it as a two horse town. Uh, cause I think two horses is right. Um, if you drive through the center of town, uh, and you don’t notice, I wouldn’t be surprised. So I don’t know how many people are in it or any of that. Uh, and towns down here in the South are really funny compared to up North. We kind of have bright shiny lines around towns. Eh, the size of things is kind of, they have dead towns and like, there’s a place called Pontiac around here that’s no longer a town. So, you know, like, I don’t know how big is the town, man, you know, it’s about so many people kind of sort of maybe, and some people are in Columbia. Some people are, you know, in the Pontiac area, right. It’s, it’s crazy. It’s crazy. So yeah, I don’t know how large my town is. I haven’t looked it up recently. I look it up when I need to, when I care about comparisons, cause I grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts and I lived in Marlboro, Massachusetts. So, you know, those are big cities. Basically those are good sized cities. So I’m not really used to being in a two horse town, but I love it. I mean, it’s always what I wanted. I don’t, the buzz, the amount of energy it takes to live in a city is kind of a big deal. So I’m not a fan of cities and living in them at all. Um, I’ve done that. Right. Uh, I’ve been to New York city. New York city is crazy. Great place to visit, but it’s, it’s tough. The last time I went to New York city, we went by train. I flew up and went to a concert with my uncle, ELO concert. It’s great. Jefflin’s ELO. Wonderful. He’s a big ELO fan. Um, and, um, we took the train from Boston basically into New York city. Unbelievably beautiful train ride. Just freaking gorgeous. And, uh, stayed at the hotel across the street from the train station and the train station is below Madison square garden where the concert was. And we get there. We check into the hotel, a cheap hotel too. Unbelievably cheap. Couldn’t believe anything in New York city, especially in the center of the city was that huge, huge old hotel, hotel, Pennsylvania. Um, great place to stay. I mean, it’s not a top notch, but it’s cheap and it’s really nice. Um, and then we walked up to a central park, uh, cause I hadn’t been, I’d been to New York a few times and never been to central park for whatever reason. Stupid me. Um, and we had a lovely little walk. We didn’t walk the whole park. The park is huge. And then we walked back, went to the concert, um, had a lovely time, got out of the concert, went kitty corner across the street to the hotel, dropped like stones, boink, uh, slept, uh, got up the next day, took the train ride back. It was wonderful. They went an absolutely wonderful visit. It was, it was truly, truly a special visit. It was quite nice. So yeah, you know, if you, if you do that, that sort of train thing, um, that’s the advantage of the city. Like the city is a great place to visit, but living in a city can be really tough and they’re not safe cities in general. And now they’re like New York city. Woo. Man, I’ve heard some stories. I got, I got relatives up there too. I’m like, yeah, you should have gotten out when you had the chance. Now it’s kind of too late, but good luck to you. Cried through the roof. Things are bad. They got rid of all the cops. It is not, I mean, some of them left and retired, but some of them were, you know, that, that campaign to stop policing. Cause that’s what the poor people really want, even though that’s a total lie. Um, like if you leave this, my kids are wild for trains. Trains are the best thing ever. I went to a, well, I’m actually, I’m going back to Dollywood, which is in Tennessee. It’s not too far away, but it’s a, it’s a little bit away. So we’re going back to Dollywood at some point, probably this year. I think that’s, that’s my friend’s plan there. She’s planning this trip and, um, Dollywood has a steam train and, uh, yeah, we get to Dollywood and she goes, what do you want to do? And I’m like, really? Cause I know she doesn’t want to do the things I want to do at all, except the roller coasters, we both like roller coasters. So I’m like, steam train. So we get on the steam train. First thing, like the first steam train ride, it doesn’t go anywhere. It just goes in a loop around the park, around the tiny part of the park. It’s Dollywood. If you’re in the U S and you want to go have fun, go to Dollywood. Dollywood is great. A little expensive, but actually wonderful time. Pigeon Forge, Tennessee is awesome. There’s a billion, actually a billion. I counted all of them, things to do. Unbelievable. The whole town of Pigeon Forge is just like one giant set of amusement parks, arcades, uh, mini golf places. It’s fantastic. We played mini golf. We went to arcades. We go to an arcade. I don’t think we went to an arcade. I’ll have to rectify that next time. Um, but we went and did a bunch of stuff and we went to Dollywood and we had, uh, they had cinnamon brads, unbelievably out of this world, delicious. They make it fresh. Um, we went on some roll and cook. Different from donuts. The cinnamon bread and donuts, just the same thing. No, no, beignets because donuts are based on beignets, French beignets. Very different, very different. But yeah, it was wonderful. So look, Jesse, I want to shut the stream down per your. Uh, suggestion and, uh, take like a five minute break and then start it back up again. What do you think? Okay. Sure. All right. Sounds great. I will be back. Jesse will hopefully join me and anybody else who wants to join, um, you know, please join, um, hold on before we go, let me know if you see Mennonites. I wouldn’t recognize a Mennonite if I saw them. We’ve got conservative Mennonites up here to visit Dollywood. It’s confusing to me. Dollywood is awesome. It really is a lot of fun. And it’s really based on old town, you know, Dolly Parton’s life. Uh, and she built it, you know, to revitalize the area. And she’s done a wonderful and Gatlingberg, which is down the street. Oh, gorgeous. And to get there, I have to drive over the Appalachians. Uh, so over the, uh, smoky mountains and the blue, I think it’s the Blue Ridge and smoky mountains that you drive over to get there from here. Gorgeous drive. Anyway, I’m going to stop the stream. I’m going to take a tiny break. I’m going to restart the stream and we’ll repirate broadcast. And, uh, hopefully this will help get the views up for the, for the shorter live stream. So I will see you in approximately five to 10 minutes.