Avoiding Soothsayers LIVE! (-4l971b5IQU)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=-4l971b5IQU

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 for asking What is truth? Yeah, the ones that you’re calling love Are gonna be the leaders in a little while When will the lonely voice of youth cry What is truth? This old world’s wakened to a newborn babe And our solemn lists where 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? I’m gonna do that again, keep this one short-ish, hopefully, if we can manage such a thing, which, you know, can always hope. It’s good to see everybody. And yeah, today we’re gonna be talking about soothsaying and soothsayers. And yeah, hopefully we’re getting better enough with these monologues that we can pull this off. And a lot of this stuff is I want to talk about much more complicated things, but you’ve got to get better at conveying things. So I worked a lot on this, you know, right up until an hour ago. So hopefully this works out. So what do I mean when I’m talking about a soothsayer? And there were lots of terms we kind of bandied about, right, like enchantment, but enchantment is neutral. I don’t want to use it because enchantment can be good or bad. And, you know, it’s not. But soothsayers are generally not thought of in the most positive light, or at least it was the most negative that I could find. So I decided on soothsayer, which is, you know, a false prophet, right? The soothsayers are a prophet, but this is a false prophet making predictions, divination, right? They’ll give you a way to make sense of something, right? It’s someone who hijacks a person to specific selfish ends using a form of enchantment or maybe many forms of enchantment as well discussed, right? In short, they manipulate your agency, right? And not just your agency will say doing things in the physical world, but your agency of thought, of free thought. They take away your free thought, right? Your consciousness. They hijack it. But how? And I’ll go into the how. One of the things that people sort of miss is that soothsaying is a medicine that only lasts so long. It soothes you in the moment, like entertainment. We like it for exactly the same reason. But it’s also temporary, right? It promises to be long lasting or significant, probably both. It sounds profound, but it’s not as transformative as promised. And it’s a solve, like entertainment. Sometimes, like when I’m eating, I like to watch mindless TV because otherwise there’s just too much going on all the time. And, you know, your brain is the organ that uses the most energy in your body. And when you’re using it all the time, you get tired. It’s not just physical things that make you tired. It’s also mental things. But the soothsayer is telling you something to ease your mind, giving you that solve, that calmness, that explanation for something that maybe you didn’t understand. And we need that, right? We need that. We need that distributed cognition. We need to outsource things. We can’t hold it all in our heads. It’s just not an option. We’re muppets. But what if what they’re telling you is not helpful, not true, not real, not important? What if it’s designed to make you do things that you otherwise would not do? What if it’s designed to steal your agency, to take you out of yourself, to take you out of the world, away from your family, away from your obligations? That’s the nature of what I want to talk about, is these people who aren’t doing you any favors, let me put it that way. And maybe they’re not malicious, right? Maybe they’re just wasting your time. Fair enough. And like, look, entertainment’s a thing. I just said, I like entertainment. You’ve got to have entertainment. It’s not an optional thing. But also, you don’t want to be hijacked. You don’t want to be moved away from the good, right? And you can move towards like maybe not moving to the good at the moment. That’s entertainment. That’s fine. It can go too far like anything else. But, you know, we were struggling with ways to figure out what this process of soothsaying or we’ll call it negative prophecy or bad enchantment, you know, really was. Like, what’s a good way to sort of describe it? Sally Jo, in her way, she’s very sensitive to these sorts of things and kind of notices pretty quickly when people are using negative enchantment, we’ll say. And she never really had a way to understand it. And she’s an artist. But, of course, today she comes up with the fact that effectively this soothsaying, this negative form of enchantment is a verbal impressionism, just like the impressionist artists, right? They’re using big words or big ideas, big concepts or, you know, complicated frameworks to build these verbal impressions of the world. And you fill in the details without even realizing it. Right? And now it seems you have agreement. Even if you aren’t talking about the same thing. So I can say, you know what, you need to be nice to people. Seems self-evident. We all need to be nice to people. I get it. But what does that mean? What if my version of being nice to people and your version of being nice to people aren’t the same thing? You’ve filled in your own details of what being nice to people is. I didn’t do that. You did that. I gave you the framing. And it can get more complicated than that. Usually it does. But that’s kind of in simplest form. Now, why didn’t I use the word enchantment? Because, again, as I mentioned, it has a neutral valence. It’s not good. It’s not bad. But you should be aware of when it’s in use. Preachers use positive enchantment all the time. Preachers generally aren’t offering you rational explanations without being explicit and contained. Right? Which is, you know, there’s always some rationality, hopefully. Sometimes not. Sometimes people are stuck without it. But you want it contained. You want to understand where that rationality is starting and stopping. I’m going to get into that more as I go through the list of methods here, because I’m going to go through a list of methods that are in use with soothsayers. And it really is about being explicit and contained. When I say be a nice person, I’m not being explicit. I’m being abstract and general and unspecific. I’m not defining my terms. I’m not putting boundaries around things. I’m not allowing you any discernment at all. You can say, ah, I can ask you. Yeah, you can. Did you? Did you think about that? I’m not saying you should have, given the context, but do you? Do you push back on people when they use abstract concepts out of context? That verbal impressionism that Sally Jo so brilliantly came up with. So I’ve got this bunch of methods. Again, probably not an exhaustive list. We don’t try to be complete here. We just try to do our best. And, you know, hopefully it’s good enough. And if it’s not, then, you know, it’s not. Not all these methods are in use at the same time, but they’re all important to know about. Usually there’s more than one method in use at once to do this soothsaying thing. Sometimes not. But usually it’s more than one thing. And so what are they going to overlap? Obviously. So just warning you. The first method that I want to sort of talk about is information overload. And one thing you can do when you’re talking to somebody is just push too much information into that person’s rational capacity, into their memory, into their mind and overwhelm them. And then what happens is you can’t process that quickly enough. Right. So the speaker has an advantage in that they know what they’re trying to say up front, relatively speaking. It’s not always true for all conversations, but it’s generally true. And if they’ve already got something practiced or they’ve already got a system in mind or in place in their head or whatever, they can spit that out faster than you can process it. Very easily. So if you’ve ever watched Ben Shapiro in it, you know, do one of his talks or listen to him, he talks very fast. He thinks very fast. Very fast. It’s unbelievably quick. There aren’t too many people that can think and talk that fast. If you watch him in his Q&A’s after maybe one of his talks, say pre-fake news, virus, scamdemic, he does amazingly well with people in terms of speed of response. Right. He’s ready. It’s not that he’s thought these things out. It’s that he thinks that fast with the problem. And he can use that to overwhelm people with information. He doesn’t, actually. He tends to allow people to catch up. But he doesn’t have to. So what happens when you get overloaded with information? Well, you default to emotion. That’s what you default to. So instead of trying to rationalize all the data coming in, because there’s way, way too much, it’s overwhelming. Now you’re tuned to the emotion. Well, what’s the emotion in the information? When I’m talking, I’m changing the tone of my voice. Maybe I slow down so that you can catch up. That gives you the sense that you’re safe or safer than you were. It’s not about feeling safe. You just have to feel safer when I’m talking slowly, which will do that. Be like, oh, OK, the pace has come down. I can relax. Your emotional systems are taking over. And you’re defaulted to any emotional signal that’s coming in. It’s going to get inserted into your psyche unconsciously. And we can tell this has happened kind of after the fact because we can’t remember what happened. So there was this AI talk that John Vervecki did that I’ve been pretty critical of. I think you’ve seen my maybe saw that live stream that Manuel and I did about it. And I’ve talked to a few other people about it. And I asked a couple of people that listened to it. What did you find that was so amazing about this talk? Because I’m just generally interested. Like, I’m an expert in AI and I was horrified by the whole thing. And not just the AI part, the technical inconsistencies and inaccuracies. And they couldn’t remember. They couldn’t really identify the why. Like what grabbed your attention and made you feel that way about these things? That’s a red flag that you’ve been emotionally hijacked by a soothsayer. Once you blow up the cognitive capacity of the listener, inserting a nice feeling is easy. The person then remembers the feeling of no idea. No idea how that feeling came about. Bang! They’re hijacked. Why did you like that talk? What about AI did you learn? What was said that was so profound? What did you take away? What did you integrate into your life? That’s a good hint that you’ve been hijacked. That some soothsayer got a hold of you and gave you a salve or a balm for your soul, for your mental capacity. I’m not saying that John Breveke didn’t make some really profound statements in the AI talk. He did. I starred a couple of them in my notes. They weren’t related to AI at all, by the way. Did you notice that? But they were profound statements. There’s no question about it. Not only were they not integrated in the talk, they’re not necessarily integrated in your life. So one of them was quite amazing. Some of this stuff is just mind blowing. He said, and I have to paraphrase, forgive me, but he said basically that religion was the way in which we learn to be in a hierarchy that we’re not at the top of. Wow. That’s a whopping thing. It’s nothing to do with AI. Zero overlap with AI. Zero. It’s a profound statement, though. And when you hear that in the moment and you don’t remember it, you’re not going to church. Which if you understood the statement, you should be. If you think that’s a profound statement and that’s correct, you damn well better be going to church. Or at least engaged in some kind of a religion. If you buy that, like I’m not saying you have to buy the argument, but if you’re affected by that argument and you’re not engaged in a religion as the result of that, and maybe you were before, so fair enough, it didn’t have an effect on you that’s of any real import or any effect that it has is like, who cares? You didn’t integrate it in your life. You didn’t take it away with you out of the talk. The talk just became entertainment at that point. So another method that soothsayers use is making you feel good. And there’s lots of ways to do that. So aside from the low, slow tone that people can use, you can also just tell people good news. You can say, well, really, you know, the political system is ultimately going to fail and free us all from all of its foibles and errors. And the new proletariat will rise up and manage itself and then we’ll never have to worry about a political system again. Obviously absurd in case you weren’t following. A lot of times these methods of making you feel good are predicated on not having an expectation. So you go into a talk and you’re not sure what it’s about. Fair enough. You’re in exploratory mode. Big fan of exploratory mode. It’s one of the modes of play, in my opinion. If you didn’t have an expectation for the talk, can you identify what the person was trying to say? And again, did you learn from it? What did you take away? How did it make you feel? What about it made you feel that way? Did they mix those two cent words with feeling words? Hijack. What do I mean by two cent words? Well, you know, look, I don’t know if you saw the movie Good Will Hunting, one of my favorite movies. Excellent film. Excellent film. Get on, by the way. Harvard. Nailed Harvard. They nailed the whole thing. Nailed New England. Completely. A lot of big words. Multi syllabic words. Fancy words that you don’t hear in everyday use. So I can say that your psychological attitude towards a complex topic can make you feel anxious. But I’m using a feeling word. Anxious. In with all these other big words. I didn’t say anything, by the way. Did you notice? I didn’t say anything. No information conveyed. Your brain filled it in, that verbal impressionism that Sally Jo so brilliantly pointed out. What is the setting in which you’re being told these things? Is it a church? Are you being preached to? Fair enough. Maybe that’s proper enchantment. Maybe not. Like, preachers get it wrong. People get it wrong. People do nefarious things. Sure. Sometimes, most of the time, people make mistakes. Most people are flat out incompetent. But if you haven’t noticed that, you’re not looking hard enough. Or you’re cynical and believe every mistake is not a mistake. Or that every person that’s doing something is competent at what they’re doing or something, which, meh, not my experience. Were you looking for something undefined to have an experience? Was what they said justified or just stated? Was it an exploration? Because it could have been. Are they using dualisms? Are they coming up with false dichotomies? False binaries? Is it information that you asked for? Is it what you came to engage with? Was it the type of engagement you were expecting? Who set the frame? Who decided upon the perspective? Was the perspective challenged? Maybe they’re just making you feel good. There’s nothing wrong with that. I like entertainment. Another method. They use axiomatic assumptions. Is it real, though? Is it reality? If I say AI is a spiritual being, what? What if I back that off and say, well, it’s going to become spiritual? What? What? That’s not a rational way to think about it at all. There’s no backing for such a ridiculous statement. It’s absurd. Once I insert that into your brain and we proceed as if. Now you’re hijacked. You’re screwed. I can sell you anything, literally anything. Does the person you’re listening to insist on those things? Are they making absolutist statements? I was having a conversation earlier today. Oh, yeah. You know, Google just boosts the advertisers to pay them the most. No, they don’t. I can show you that they don’t do that. There’s data on this. They absolutely don’t do that. You know who Google boosts in the search engine? Whoever’s gaming their algorithm this week. How do I know that? You can go online and watch people tell you how to game the algorithm. Or you can do it yourself if you’re me, because you know how this stuff works. But it’s not that hard. Who doesn’t have control of that? They wish they did. They’re trying to. There’s been a war between the two sides forever. It’s an absolutist statement. Lots of multisyllabic words. It’s more confusion to get these axiomatic assumptions into your brain. Just think about the complex interactions required in order for Google to push to you only those people they want to push to you. See what I did there? Of course, I did it in reverse, but that was fun. A lot of these people with these axiomatic assumptions will connect random things to physics or appeal to mathematics. They might jump to another trick called rationality or rational appeals, which is our next method. So what do I mean by physics? So you can always say human behavior follows some insert physics law here. You can do that, and people won’t even notice. You can equate it to math. And then you can use the mathematical logical argument to bolster your psychological argument or your metaphysical argument or your religious argument or whatever it is. People do that all the time. They’re just axiomatic assumptions. They’re just stating things. Do they have the right to stand where they’re standing? Where are they starting with these axiomatic assumptions? These are valid pushbacks to people. I know Jonathan Pujo used to ask people all the time, where are you standing when you’re making these comments? Yeah, it’s a good question. Well, let’s jump into rational rationality and rational appeals. Are you making logical connections between what they’re saying? Or are they stating logical connections without evidence? I can connect anything to math. It’s not hard. Is it valid? Did you look at the connection they made? There’s that famous thing about the cost of tea in China and the correlations with all kinds of other things. You know, what’s really attached though? What’s really connected there? Is it a valid connection? Is it a second order of fact? Is it, oh, look, the cost of tea in China goes up when a world war happens. We’ve got the cost of everything goes up. Is that the fault of the tea in China that the war happened? But people do this all the time now, like all the time. It’s all over the Internet now. Constant confusion with correlation and causation. Constant. It’s just awful. I mean, it’s everywhere. And they just know you won’t check. They know you’re not going to question them and challenge their assertion. They’ve made their axiomatic statements, as I mentioned earlier. They’d rather keep you trapped with the opposite, to keep you trapped in a false dichotomy, a false binary, where they can just claim you have no more authority for your objection that they have for making their statement. But they’re the ones that made the statement and they made it first. It’s a clever trick. I get it. I get it. But it’s negative enchantment. It’s a trick. It’s a trick. All right, I’m going to take a sip of Sam Pal here. We get the big bottle. Just to wet my whistle. So who’s making the logical connections? It’s a good question. Another method. Let me ask you a question. How do you build trust with somebody? What are the methods of building trust? Repetition. Say something over and over again. You know, especially from different people. Flattery. You’re a smart person. You can figure this out. Then I make my axiomatic statements. Promise of understanding. Let me give you a new way to understand politics. Binary frame. Always bad. No good. Don’t do it. See what I did there? Another reversal. Promise of control. Once you understand politics, you can use it to your advantage. Maybe. Maybe not. Like maybe you, maybe knowing something doesn’t give you the ability to interact with it. And these need not be explicit. A lot of times they’re implicit. They don’t flat out say, let me give you a better way to understand politics. They might say, well, if you put that in a political frame, you can see clearly that it’s a reversal. Doesn’t have to be a reversal, but you know, you can back into these things. It’s very unconscious what soothsayers are doing. We can make indirect claims. So they can appeal to your trust in them without making a claim themselves. So they can say, well, I heard from a bunch of people, whatever. Really? Now they’re not making a claim. Being claims implicit. And then you can understand something. Maybe you already agreed with that. With their conclusion. Right. That’s usually how they do it. You can find a problem with anybody. You know, you can say so-and-so is a bully and then give evidence for bullying. That’s easy to do with anyone. But again, watch out for the framing. Where are they standing when they’re making these claims? Where are they starting? Is this a place that you can stand? And who cares if they can stand there, but you can’t. If you can’t participate in the way they tell you you can participate, why is this important? If you’re not going to stand there and you’re not even saying they’re wrong, that’s not the issue. If there’s a war and they say you can pick up a gun and shoot it and you can’t pick up a gun and shoot it, that’s not helpful. They’re going to get you killed. And I’m not saying it’s malicious. This soothsaying doesn’t have to be malicious intent. It can be. Most often it’s not, but it doesn’t matter. It’s not useful to you. This is where asking simple questions comes in handy. Of yourself and of them. If you feel like the questions you want to ask are dumb questions, that’s what they rely upon to fool you. It’s a great trick. But the dumb question, I’m not going to ask that. It’s a dumb question. Really? Really? So they’ve gotten you not to question them based on your own guilt without ever going outside your head and validating it. Fascinating. And we sort of touched on this before, this rational scientific enchantment frame. You can make good sounding connections, which may be false. And again, you can go back. You can use math or some pattern of reality out there and link it to something that isn’t math. You can make a rational argument. It’s one of the things that just bothers me. I talked about this a couple years ago now on Vanu Klay’s stream. My name next to Jordan Peterson’s name in the same video title. Awesome. Paul’s very generous. Wonderful. Wonderful person. Absolutely wonderful. I used to play the logic and rationality and reason game with people all the time. And I’d say I can justify anything that way. It’s not that hard. There’s a trick to it, for sure, but it’s not overly difficult. Not for me. It helps to have dyslexia. You can start from the back and go in reverse. Handy stuff. So the big question was always, I bet you can’t justify the Holocaust. And I would always sigh and say, you do realize that Hitler already rationalized the Holocaust. That’s how it happened. But if you’d like me to use a different rationalization, I will gladly do that. Then I would proceed to do it. Now, it’s not a moderated sort of a battle. There’s no official rules referee, right? There would typically be an audience, of course. None of the people that challenged me to that ever won. I was always able to logically, reasonably and rationally argue whatever it was. There were a bunch of them. And they always conceded, sometimes begrudgingly. And always in consternation because they could not figure out how that happened. That is scientific enchantment. I am very, very, very good at scientific enchantment. Justifying things scientifically is easy. Jordan Pearson points at this when he talks about crossing Ebola and anthrax. How would you justify that? And yet in science, you could justify anything. It’s not hard. It assumes objective material reality, which I still insist does not exist. I’m open to being proven wrong, but please bring the receipts. And I will address this question. What’s the motive of the soothsayer? Soothsayers have lots of motives. What’s the most common human motive? Let me tell you. The most common human motive for somebody to tell you something, literally anything, is for them to fool themselves. Because if they can make you believe it, they can use you as a mirror to say, aha, I’m not alone in my belief. And we all want bigger tribes. And I’ve talked about tribalism before on Navigating Patterns. It’s kind of important to realize that that’s a bad frame, but it’s also a valid way to think about certain things at the same time. I wouldn’t divide the world into tribal and non-tribal or political or any of these stupid frames that are tiny and useless. Tribal is too spread out, right? There’s too many tribes. It’s like, well, what are you tracking? At some point you’re not tracking anything and you can’t really draw the tribe lines clearly and it doesn’t scale correctly and it gets messy. How many tribes am I in? Quite a few, I would say. Why do these things work? What is it about soothsaying that functions? What are the mechanisms that are causing us to appreciate and enjoy these forms of enchantment? First of all, enchantment is not negative. It can be. So we need it. So we have to be attracted to it to some extent. But the real deal is we are not only rational creatures. We are more swayed by emotion. Most signals come to us unconsciously through the salience landscape, into our awareness and up through our attention. But those filters aren’t just throwing out information. They’re also absorbing some of that information. You don’t notice the sweet dulcet tones of the soothsayer most of the time. I did have this little trick that occasionally I’d just pull out on the group because I’m a bit of a troll. What I would do is I would drop into sweet voice mode where I would get a little quiet and slow down and lull you into a sense of peace and security. And it would always disturb certain people quite a bit. And the reason for this was, of course, the high contrast and the immediate understanding of danger. Because when I’m doing that, I’m not being my genuine, authentic self by any means. I am not here to sweet talk you into a position. I couldn’t freaking care less if you agree with my position. Sorry, I just couldn’t. I’m doing this for you. But ultimately, like, if you don’t believe me or you think I’m full of shit or whatever, good luck to you. It’s fine. I’m not mad. I generally just don’t care enough. It’s not all of you, obviously. Some of you I’m closer to than others. But yeah, in general, if everybody listening doesn’t get the point, I’m okay with that. You know, I have my reasons for doing this and they have nothing to do with your reasons for listening. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Right. And I try to be upfront, which is why I don’t. I try to convince you that sous-sages are dangerous with a little tonal enchantment and some soft speak. I don’t do that. It’s not my thing. Other people, that’s what they do. And I’m not saying there’s anything necessarily wrong with it. I mean, unless they’re getting you to eat the apple. It’s just easier to see with me because I’m genuinely loud and bombastic. You know, I don’t do the slow pitch over the mound. I’m not throwing screwballs. Right. It’s fast and hard over the plate. So those filters are also taking in information. The salient’s landscape is feeding you stuff and your awareness is picking it up. And that’s getting fed into your attention and it’s modifying your attention. You pay more attention to certain things than you do certain other things. Some of that’s tonal. Some of it’s based on the positive or negative valence of the words you’re hearing, as well as the tone. And some people use that. They use a tone opposite to the valence of the words. You want a really great example of this? There’s a lot of music like this where a pop song about a bad relationship. What’s up with that? If you want bad relationship music, you listen to Stabbing Westward. They’re this hard hitting industrial prog rock band. And on the one hand, I don’t know who the lead singer went out with, but I know who the lead singer went out with. That’s for sure. When you hear Taylor Swift in her heartbreak, all poppy and happy, it’s just, you know, I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. I love Taylor Swift, actually. Great music. You know, I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but there is this dichotomy, right? And that dichotomy is what’s going on in the world. And that dichotomy between, say, tone and words, that’s very powerful. Very powerful. And it doesn’t have to be that way. But those filters go through you. Another good example is the Sound of Silence. Five Finger Death Punch does a version of this. Listen, the original version of theirs. This way of understanding what’s coming up into you. A song about depression, sung in 70s music style? What the hell? How’s the summer of love, man? You know, the decade of summers of love. How do you fight against this stuff? What do you do about this information that’s being put into your brain that you have very little awareness of? Maybe none. Maybe it’s all unconscious. I don’t know. I don’t know why John Burbache, you know, he’s so good at this stuff. He’s so good at this stuff. He’s so good at this stuff. He’s so good at this stuff. He’s so good at this stuff. He’s so good at this stuff. I don’t know why John Burbache resonates with people when he talks about AI. He can’t be resonating with the techies. He can’t be resonating with the religious people. Basically saying terrifying things on that front. I’m a pragmatist. So how does that work? I mentioned it earlier. Can I participate? If I can’t participate, it’s not relevant to me. Even if it’s correct, even if it’s accurate, precise, et cetera, what does that look like? Let’s suppose if I had access to the President of the United States, I could convince him to do something with an executive order. How I would know any of that, we’ll just take it as an accident. We’ll just take it as an accident. This is the other thing. We’ll take them as axioms. If I had access, I could convince the President and that would result in an executive order. There’s a lot of assumptions built up in there. But I don’t have access. It’s not relevant. Can someone convince me that I’m smart enough that I could convince the President so well that he would then write an executive order? That’s a tempting thing to be told. That sounds like fun. Yes. Stroke my ego. I’m not dumb enough to fall for that. I kind of have a good idea of what my limits are and what the limits of reality are. Just because you can convince the President doesn’t mean he’s going to do it with an executive order. And even if he writes an executive order, it doesn’t mean it’s going to stick. Oops. Mask mandate, anybody? But I don’t even have access. I don’t need to go through all that like axiom false, axiom true. I don’t have access. It’s not relevant. Game A, game B. I got a video on that with Manuel. It’s the video I put the most research into by far. Probably 10 times more research in that video than any of my other videos. Manuel and I put in a garbage load of work on that video. Took all the restraint we could muster. You ask the game B people, okay, I’m not going to ask you what game B is. It’s fine because you already said you don’t know. How do I participate in either game B or bringing it about? They don’t have an answer. They don’t have a positive answer. They might say stop participating in game A. Thanks, genius. Did you define game A? Did you give me an alternative for participation? No. Of course not. You don’t even have a thing. It’s all made up. It’s all a fantasy. If the world were described this way, described, not prescriptive or predictive, described as game A, then we could describe game B, which in fact they can’t, which is just hysterically funny to me. And you could do that and all of these great utopia things would happen. You can’t participate in that. Maybe you’re right. Who cares? We don’t live in that world. I’m not going to. Maybe everybody else will live in that world and not me. Also fine. But it’s not here now. Problem solved. I don’t get sophisticated about it. It’s not valid right now. It’s not worth putting my time, energy and attention into. It’s not worth it. It’s not worth it. I have a video on narrative capture. And how do you avoid falling into narrative capture? What is narrative capture? Narrative capture is when they make you part of a story. Like you could be the game B hero breaking out of game A and bringing us all to the utopia of game B. That’s what the game A, game B video is all about. They literally drop you in a story for real. It’s like look at the cojones on these folks. It’s unbelievable. Where did the story start? What character are you in this story? Is there only one of those characters? Like is it like the head character? Are you the one guy who can convince the president to write the executive order that brings about game B and saves the world single-handedly? Because it can only be one of those characters. Are you sure that’s you? Is this a character you can be? Can you be so persuasive that if you were just in front of the president, you could convince him? Or if you could just talk to somebody, you’d get them on board with the climate thing? Is that you? Is it? Is it you? Really? Are you sure? Is it something you can do? Is it stated as a binary, a false dichotomy? Are they appealing to the contradiction? You’re trapped in a paradox. You have to break free. Can you? What about everybody else? Let’s suppose you’re trapped in the matrix and you break out. And there’s nobody else who ever broke out. Is that better? Oh man, you know what? We broke out and the other people aren’t here yet. But they’re going to break out? Really? How about noticing universal statements? How about some skepticism? Remember, they’re getting you not to ask questions by, Well, that’s a dumb question. It’s very banal. It’s an easy question. Are they being skeptical and cynical? Are they identifying against? You know what the real problem is? Game A, man. Game A is like capitalism and consumerism and all the bad isms. You know what Game B is? It’s none of those. It’s always correct to criticize something because nothing’s perfect. Especially not you. Especially not the person you’re listening to. That’s me. Right now. Skepticism and cynicism are always correct. Always. That’s not a genius thing, guy. Three-year-olds do that. I’m not impressed with you. But like, really? Is that something to be impressed with? I’m not impressed. And usually, skepticism and cynicism is incorrect because you’re using a simplified form of something. Of course that contains errors. You know what? Corporations are all about profit. Okay. Except that’s false. There are these things called non-profit corporations. Not for profit corporations. How do you know that? I’m president of one. I’ve set them up before. Credit unions. Is it in a bank? No, it doesn’t. Credit unions are not for profit banks. They have great rates, by the way. Great rates compared to the banks. So you’re pitching about banks. There’s a solution for banks. Your skeptical cynicism has blinded you to the solution that already exists Somebody probably told you all this nonsense. It’s all nonsense. Charitable giving is everywhere. Charities run like corporations, but they’re not corporations. Some of them are bad, by the way, but a lot of them do a lot of good. Just like a lot of non-profits do a lot of good. I’m part of an electric cooperative. What the hell is that? They’re not for profit corporations. They actually return money to their users every year in the form of a bill, or they’ll cut you a check. They’ll send you the cash. Most people just opt to have it applied to their next electric bill, but whatever. These electric bills are so low that ten bucks is a big deal. Go South Carolina. Lots of things are true but useless. You’re not getting around corporations. You’re not getting around corruption. You’re not getting around consumerism. We all consume things. It’s called eating. You’re going to stop eating? You can do that. You’re going to stop me from eating? Good luck. I like to eat. I’m going to eat when I want. I don’t care if you’re trying to save the planet. I’m not going to eat your bugs, so piss off. How about the connections people are making? Are they valid? Are they real? Are they helpful? Can you follow those connections? Because maybe if you can’t, you shouldn’t follow. I’m not saying that for sure. I’m saying it’s worth considering. And if somebody else can follow, and if you can’t, maybe stay away. It’s not a big deal. You don’t have to play every game that comes along. Look, if you’re going to follow other people, be honest. I’m going to follow that person. Because I don’t want to disengage. Fair enough. You’ve got the negative. I don’t want to disengage. You’ve got the positive. I’m going to follow that person. And then you’re taking some of the responsibility for them, maybe screwing up. Some games you’re all in, Jordan Peterson. Not hard, right? It’s conformal to be cast out. See what I did there? It’s important and true nonetheless. It’s a nice little binary. Conformal to be cast out. And you’re casting yourself out in that case. Do you hear tonal enchantment? Curtis Yarvin, he did an article, I think the name was Gray Mirror, about circling. And Guy Sangstock, I guess his ex-girlfriend or whatever, was into circling. And he looked into it. And I’m not a particular fan of Moldbug, Curtis Yarvin, not even remotely. I think his framing is awful. Calling everything a church is dumb. But he’s not stupid and he’s got some good stuff. He’s got some good stuff, like three-year-olds come up with good stuff all the time. Quite brilliant. He’s talking about circling and he said, here’s the circling video that Guy Sangstock says, here’s a good example of circling. And he says, don’t watch the video. Read the transcript. Weird. I get this nice video I can watch where I want to read the transcript. Reading’s hard, especially for me, I’m not reading. I’m super dyslexic. Reading’s like painful. It’ll enlighten you though, if you read that transcript. Because I did read part of it. And read the whole thing, it’s long. Why? Because the tonal enchantment is gone. The set and the setting are changed when you’re reading it on the page, rather than watching it on the screen and listening to it. I’ve been over this before, but there are video recordings of Hitler, I believe, at Nuremberg, if I remember correctly. Giving a speech to a crowd. I don’t speak a lick of German. I barely speak a lick of English, so. Shut the subtitles off. Just watch and listen. Wow. That’ll move ya. It moved me. It moves me every time. I’ve done it a few times, just to see if the effect wears off. Not really. A little bit. Not really though. Not enough to worry about. And I know how that ended. And I’m still pulled. That’s scary stuff. I mean, this is, you know, when Jordan Peterson does that in Maps of Meaning, I knew he was right. I knew exactly what he was talking about already. I had already done the experience on that. Is the Soosay appealing to experience their own or other people’s? And how are they doing it if it’s their own? It’s a good question. Is it an experience you’ve had or is it an experience they’re telling you you could have? Very alluring. Making connections to experience or appeals to emotion after mentioning science. Something to watch out for. Why are you using emotional words if you’re talking about a non-emotional thing like math or science or physics or You know, and you’ve got psychology, which kind of bridges the gap. That’s why I hate psychology. I really, really despise it. First of all, I find it simple and banal as hell. Oh, I did do a lot of psychology on public broadcasting. Philip Zimbardo. Uh-huh. I just kind of compressed it all down to what I was doing. I just kind of compressed it all down to what I thought was the meat. Why are you mentioning emotion inside a scientific argument? You saw this. Paul Van der Kley did a couple videos, I think, on Jordan Peterson’s talk with Lawrence Krauss. He’d point out when Lawrence was talking science and would use a non-scientific word like spirituality or something, right? Or a word along those lines, an emotional word. I’m not saying that’s invalid. I’m just saying watch out for it. Watch out for the appeals to experience. Are they connecting these things to people you know? Are they name dropping? Are those ideas their own? Are they real? Do they seem convinced of what they’re saying? And in what way? Are they stating things as authorities? Do they appeal to credentials? Are they their own credentials? Because, you know, Peterson doesn’t. Peterson’s one of the top 1% scientists in his field. And in Maps of Meaning, I don’t think he ever says that. He never says, you can listen to me because in any form. Maybe he should. Maybe he should. But he doesn’t. He appeals to experience, yours and his, not his credentials. I think he mentions his credentials. You know, he says like, well, we did the research. Fair enough, you did the research. But he’s not using that to make his arguments. They’re not part of his argumentation stream, but it’s not what he’s falling back on. You know? It’s part of the reason why he’s so popular and he’s not a soothsayer. Are they connecting their ideas from one specialty to another? Look, I’m a big fan of cross-disciplinary stuff. It’s valid. It’s important. It’s significant. For sure. For sure. But, is it valid? Are those real connections? Are they taking responsibility for telling you something? Are they telling you the downsides, the sacrifices for their system? Because if they’re not, maybe they’re full of it. I don’t know. Could be. Where is their participation and where is yours? You can fool people into believing that you agree with them very easily. You can mention something and they’ll assume their conception and yours are the same. Look, we have to do this to some extent. We’ve got to have starting areas. Everybody agrees that we need boundaries, but if you don’t define where they are, like most of the people on the left, even when pressed, that’s a problem. So if I just say, yeah, no, no, we definitely need boundaries, but somebody else says the boundary line needs to be drawn here. We’re not talking about the same thing. I’m just saying boundaries exist, but I’m not actually setting them. The other person’s setting them. We have to agree on where they’re set, not that they exist. That’s a Captain Obvious moment. Beware of terms like metaperspective. They cannot have meaning without way more context. Effective altruism. I’m sure I could use that phrase somewhere, but I’d have to talk to you and maybe a group of you over at least a few days before I had enough context that we could use that effective altruism term and understand the same thing. You can’t just invoke it. There’s lots of terms like that. If there’s an assumption of rationality and perfection, then it’s easy to sound smart. And right now we are stuck in a world where we are assuming people are rational, conscious, competent agents. That everything they do is conscious, they’re well aware of it, that they’re competent and able to carry out whatever their conscious desire is, that they are full agents in the world, right? And that what they’re doing is rational. In other words, it makes sense in a context. None of those things are true for most people most of the time. But we’re making that assumption and so when some crazy person comes along and starts saying something, we’re just like, oh, it must be rational in some frame. They must be really smart. I’m not understanding their frame. I should get to know their frame because they sound really convinced of what they’re saying. Because they sound really convinced of what they’re saying. Soosers are often fooling themselves, not just you. There’s lots of motivations to convince people of things. And sometimes you have to convince people of things because prophets are real. Prophecy is important. Did you notice the switch in frames? Because people switch frames all the time on you. I’m not even saying it’s a bad thing. You just have to track it. You know, you’re in a discussion about impressionist art and the next thing you know, Sally Jo is telling you about something in her house that she had to do. And it’s like, okay, Sally, that’s fantastic. Can we go back to the other frame where I had a thread? She doesn’t care. She’s an artist. She picks up threads like nothing. Me? I’m like, I’m drowning here. I need a little help. I don’t know what the hell just happened. We were talking about impressionist art and now all of a sudden we’re talking about cleaning your arms. Not really that much of a problem for me, but some people don’t like it. I have this, I answer to a wee question video where I go over this, right? Somebody asks you, what can we do? And they say what they did. Okay, but I asked you what multiple people can do, not what you personally did. Because not only is that not generic, it’s specific to you. People switch frames all the time. Beware of the collapsing of time and the creating of paradoxes. People collapse time all the time. So I was watching some, Paul Van der Kleet did a video based on, with some clips from John Verbeke and Christopher Amato-Pietro. And they were saying, yeah, there’s this thing that you’re sort of one with, but you’re not quite it. But you’re one with it, but you’re not it. And they kept going back and forth like that. And I was like, are you guys freaking for real now? Are you talking about the fact that you are moving through time? And maturing from less of, say, some ideal to more of some ideal? And then you’re pretending like that’s a paradox? It’s not a paradox if you add time in. It’s like, no, really? I’m trying to become a better me over time, as Jordan Peterson talks about. Don’t compare yourself to somebody else is today. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday. Genius. Genius. They collapse time. Well, yeah, if you collapse time, all kinds of things are paradoxes. They’re just not paradoxes in the world that we live in with time that proceeds. Is it a paradox that I’m not a baby and an old man right now? No, it’s not a paradox. Was I always a baby? Will I always be a baby? And an old man, simultaneously, but only in the future. Come on, stop collapsing time. That’s gross. You hear a paradox, it points to a limit in your framing. It’s not some fantastic revelation of something important. It means you screwed up. And I’m not saying it’s bad. I’m saying, look, there’s a limit to your frame. Look up Zeno’s paradox. What does Zeno’s paradox say? Zeno’s paradox basically says you cannot touch a wall. You can’t reach a wall. You can’t reach any destination through measurement, through quantity. You cannot do it. Zeno’s paradox is clear as a bell. You can’t actually get to a destination. You can move towards a destination forever. You can never reach it. That is what it says. It is not wrong. There’s nothing wrong about the paradox. What’s wrong is your stupid frame. If you think the only way to get somewhere is to measure the distance to it, zero is not a measure. It’s actually not. It is the statement of no measure. It is null measure. You can’t resolve that with measurement by definition. These are important definitions. It just means that you’re thinking about the world materialistically. And in quantity and ignoring quality causes problems. The appeal to history can help separate those who are soothsaying from those who aren’t. James Lindsay does these wonderful videos. I think this is in WTF is SEL, which is a wonderful video. He basically talks about, if you pay attention to these people, they’re always sort of appealing to Gnostic tradition that goes back to 1752, that goes back to the Eleusinian mysteries or some similarly old ancient Greek thing. And he says, the problem is we have no texts. They’re stating the historical connection exists, but there’s no historical evidence for it. As opposed to Peterson, who says, look at the history of this pattern. You see that pattern today? He didn’t say it that way, but it’s what he’s talking about. Peterson’s not a soothsayer. Is he a prophet? Probably. So the appeal to history, how are they using the history? Are they? And maybe they don’t need to, but you know, these are just little pointers you can use. The following statement is true. The previous statement is false. That just means your authority is incorrect. It’s not a profound statement. It’s just Muppet Tree. It’s Muppet Enchantment. It’s Soussane. You can know things. Can you? Can you know as much about computers as I do? I had a lovely talk today, four meetings today. Oh my goodness, I thought I was going to die. Lovely meetings, though, actually all very productive. I haven’t done a four meeting day in four and a half years, maybe more. Four meetings is a lot. He’s talking to this guy. He’s in South Carolina, too. He was going into, well, you know, when you’re doing encryption, the hardware limitations matter. Of course, he was talking about floating point and the difference between the floating and I was, oh yeah, I do AI work. Guess what matters? So it turns out that if you change the software version of something, it uses a different hardware implementation, right, to get to floating point numbers that actually matter a lot. And now the AI is broken. Same code. The compile side breaks. Did you know that? It’s so esoteric, almost nobody knows about that stuff. And that’s what we were talking about. There’s a handful of people that know this. Somebody asked him, what happens when you hit the power button on your computer and he went through the whole thing? There is a whole thing to go through. I’m not going to do it to you. I won’t subject you to that. He said it took two hours. And it’s like, well, okay, if you want to be really, if you want to compile, you can do it. I can see maybe it taking two hours. Totally. Because I probably a little rusty, but I do know all that. Most people don’t think about it. They don’t understand firmware and bios and how those two things interact because your firmware and your bios might kind of be the same thing, but the bios is actually to some of the settings, etc. A little bit more complicated. Anyway, this whole power on system. All kinds of neat stuff happens with timing on the board. Yeah, I could go into it. Can you know those things though? Do they say like, you know what I mean? Do you? Are they saying that to get agreement so they can move on with their false ads? Or are they saying that to get a better understanding of what’s going on? And I’m not going to go into that. I’m not going to go into that. I’m not going to go into that. Do you? Are they saying that to get agreement so they can move on with their false axiom? Is it the same meaning? I know a meaning. Is it the meaning you intended? I don’t know. Redirection. Misdirection. Not answering questions. Using a question that is not a clarifying question to answer a question. These are all tricks. So I hear you’re going to sign the Equality and Marriage Act. Well, let me tell you why I think the Equality and Marriage Act is in place. It’s not what I asked. That’s redirection. And you’re not answering the damn question. Do I think you’re a snake? Yeah. I’m not even saying that’s bad. I’m just saying like, what up? Or you can ask clarifying questions that go into so much resolution that the person asking the question loses track of their original intent. And then you get out of answering the question. You can watch for this stuff. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m saying you can watch for this stuff. Not answering easy questions. Easy questions should have easy answers. I’m not saying you have to be legalistic about it and say, oh, yes or no, blah, blah, blah. Sometimes you do, maybe. But you don’t have to. Easy questions should get easy answers. I deliberately ask easy yes or no questions and frame them that way just to see if you’ll answer the damn yes or the freaking no or if you’re going to go off in some spin cycle. Because then I know something about you and I know something about whether or not I can trust you. And you can call me sneaky for that or whatever if you want. I really don’t care. I’m going to do what I’m going to do. And if you don’t like it, that’s too freaking bad. I’m still here. So deal with it. Adding nuance where none is needed. It’s a red flag. Not all the time. People make mistakes. I get it. But, you know, these are things to look for. I’m not trying to give you answers. I’m just trying to call your attention to these other things you can look at to help you navigate in the world. It’s all about the compass. Making profound statements that are not related to a topic. I went over that earlier. Saying that religion is the way that you understand or relate to or learn to relate to hierarchies you’re not at the top of. A profound statement. Nothing to do with AI. Nothing. No possible overlap. Just a profound statement sitting in the middle of a talk about AI for no apparent reason. It’s enchantment. It’s soothsaying. It’s negative. It’s done to impress. And then you think the whole talk must be good because I heard this one profound thing or actually at least three of them in there. Probably more. I should listen again and get more notes. That AI talk. Man, it’s a gold mine for this stuff. No warnings about what people are proposing. What’s the downside? What’s the sacrifice? What am I giving up to get this wonderful thing you’re proposing? What are the boundaries? Where are the limits? Do you have any positive things to say about the thing that you’re against? Or is it just all negative? Are you giving people a choice? Or are you just telling them one way to do the new thing? Watch how people use words. Is it an appropriate word? Is it a buzzword that appeals to you? Is it a common word? Or is it something that you’re going to find titillating because you know what you’re going to find? You know what you’re going to find. You know what you’re going to find. You know what you’re going to find. You’re going to find titillating because you know what it means and you think other people don’t. There’s a lot of things that enchant us. One of my favorite things that I still marvel at today. The movie Superbad. I watched the movie Superbad with a bunch of my friends. I think shortly after it came out. Freaking hysterical. Cannot remember laughing so hard ever in my life. About three years later I watched it again. I was like, what the hell? This isn’t even remotely funny. I mean there were some good jokes that made me chuckle, but I was like, I don’t…what happened? I was convinced that Superbad was the funniest movie I had ever seen. And in that moment it probably was. Maybe it’s the funniest movie I’ll have ever seen when all is said and done. I have no idea. But you know what? It’s a one trick pony. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I like to be entertained. Entertainment is good. In this case, no harm, no foul. I was looking to be entertained. I got entertained. It’s all good. It’s all good. Memes, for example, only valid in the moment with the right framing. These are forms of…of soothsaying, of enchantment. They’re pointing at something. They’re pointing at something. The same thing with memes. Memes are the same as enchantment. They’re pointing at something. They’re pointing at something. The self-deception of the soothsayer helps them to seem more authentic so they can help you to deceive yourself too. They want you in their delusion with them. What other other motives they may have? Because people don’t do things for single motives. Ever. No one. Including you. It’s never happened. Never going to happen. It’s not a possible configuration of the universe. It’s too complex. Aristotle came up with four causes for a reason. Wasn’t random. How do we break enchantment? Re-assessment through humility. That’s how we fight the soothsayers. Beware the dead matter. The dead objects. Pointing back to propositions. Not talking about relatable experience. No appeal to phenomenology. Not dealing with cause but only dealing with expression. These are soothsayers trying to get you in on their game. I’m not saying don’t play. I’m saying be aware. Just be aware. That’s all. All right. That’s my monologue. I’m going to make an attempt to go through the comments here. Feel free to jump in. I’ve pinned the message on navigating patterns. The only channel I can do that with. We’ve got lots and lots of comments. I know I only saw a few of them while I was reading here. There’s lots of agency here. You can see the agency here. There’s lots of agency here. Even though we’re muppets. I know Grimm doesn’t like agency. That would make people responsible. What a horrible idea. Yes, I’m here to soothe you about soothsayers. False profits are a ten penny. Yes. Yes, indeed. False profits are ten a penny. Indeed. They got wheeled a lot from misdirection in recent crisis. Part of the ramp up fear psychological nudging by the powers that be. Yes, there’s a lot of that going on. There’s a lot of that going on. The information overload strategy seems like a good job to outsource to chat. GPT, yes. Well, I think that’s part of it. I don’t think you can outsource things to AI. AI doesn’t know anything. Steals everything from others. It’s the Frankensteinian funhouse mirror necromancy from hell. The stuff of nightmares. It’s the good stuff of nightmares, but also nightmares. So, you know, Anselm and I have a friend that does that. Speaking rapid fire and torturous long winded stories. Gets annoyed when I try to get her to clarify. Yeah, well, when people are doing that, sometimes they just they can’t slow down because if they thought about it, they’d get depressed. A lot of people use the explanation rifle strategy. Keep themselves out of depression. So. I can understand that they don’t want to challenge to their worldview. Nobody likes the worldview challenged. I get it. I get it. Mills, AI enhanced persuasion is a huge threat, I think. Yeah, we actually adjust to persuasion pretty quickly. We adapt not at the evolutionary level, but at the social level fairly quickly. So and we’ve already seen that. Like, we’ve already gone through this phase where, like, all meanings of important words changed in, like, five years. So, yeah, I mean, yeah, five years of damage. Granted, but five years. We’ll get over it. Garth, truly profound statements tend to inspire. J.B.P. was really good at this. Yeah, well, that’s because he’s connecting his profound statements with the framing that he’s giving in the moment. And again, if you want to go into it, right, because, you know, I’ll drag it up. Give me a sec. I’ll drag it up. So if you go through for Vicky’s AI talk and look, I mean, in some ways, I really admired the talk, but not for any good reason. If you want to say something like hierarchy avoids infinite regression. John said that in his AI talk. That’s true. That’s profound. Not connected to anything else he’s talking about. Literally not connected. So, yeah, it sounds profound, but it’s not transformative. You can’t take it with you because he was talking about AI. What does AI have to do with hierarchy? Nothing. Nothing. We could put it in a hierarchy, but. J.B.P. connected everything. That’s what he did. One of the real reasons I was drawn to him is I’m like, I could do that. I do that all the time. I go up on these little branches and wind them back together and zip them back down the tree and stuff. Oh, yeah, it’s beautiful. You can see it in your head, too. Like when Peterson talks, I see the little branches of the trees and then I watch him walk them back down and wind them back up. He talks about that in Maps of Meaning. He says it a couple of times. He catches himself like, oh, I got here. How do I get back? He actually says that. It’s hysterical. Anselman. Dr. Jobst Langdegreb. Get a real name. Tell this guy to get a real name, handsome. Seems to have an interesting perspective on AI. Just heard a little of him, but worth following up, I think. Eh, AI is a waste of time. If you want to be enchanted by it, you’re welcome to it, but I don’t recommend. Yeah, Nathaniel, I wanted a motive of soothsayer. Yeah, there’s lots of motives why people do things. There’s not one. It doesn’t matter what kind of person they are. People do things for all kinds of freaking reasons. Mills. What if the perspective being presented resonates with intuitions you’ve had your whole life? That’s the trick. Let me ask you a question. How many perspectives have you had that you could resonate with? That’s the trick. Right. Ideas you recently clarified and expected, and now they are saying the same exact thing. Have you heard of the zeitgeist, Mills? What do you think the zeitgeist is? And do you think these people don’t use that? I was once in a clubhouse room. I’ll never forget this. I was in a clubhouse room. And somebody was talking about the parabolic way of knowing. They got that from Marc Emanuel. And I wasn’t mad. I’m still not mad or anything. But they didn’t know what they were talking about, so he ended it with, And that’s why I’m a supporter of the parabolic way of knowing. And I was like, really, dude? It’s a little dramatic, but hey, I’m sure everybody there fell for it. Freaking hysterical. Anselman. This is a spicy take, Anselman. Vervecki seemed to want to use the speculation about AI to try to demoralize Christians. Your God won’t save you. It could write a better Bible, etc. I’m glad you noticed all that. A lot of people missed it. Yeah, he’s very much using his attack on religion. That’s why he’s mixing religious terms and technical terms, which is something I just told you to watch out for. Mills. He does seem to be wrestling. It is a bit disheartening to hear him putting so much faith in AI, perhaps overconciliance of the wisdom traditions. Yeah, well, look, his projects are failing. Because they’re dumb. And that’s what happens. You have dumb projects, they fail. And yeah, he’s wrestling because he needs it to be right. He’s got a lot invested because of his trauma in the church with fixing this alleged problem. Of course, it’s not a problem. So you’re not going to fix it. But, Anselman, I don’t think it’s faith in AI, but rather his intent on having a religion without a God, a natural evolution. Yeah, that’s well said. Maybe a massanistic pretension about his own project. Yup. Well, I don’t think it’s messianic. I think that it’s desperation. I mean, suppose you had the answer and you rejected it, and then you lived out your life and you’re getting to the end of it. And you’re like, that’s the answer I rejected. It’s upsetting. That’s upsetting. Mills, God or the God principle? Worth exploring. No, the issue is creation. Watch out for creation denial. That happens all the time. What else we got here for questions or interesting observations? I’m going to skip over all the vervekis talk. I might address that in another video if I can manage it. Although, damn, so busy this week. Anselman, pop songs can instill attitudes unhealthy. Yes, or healthy. Sing about divorce, adultery, fornication, and catchy music. Right. Well, it gives you that dissonance. Divorce isn’t all bad. We can have fun with divorce. Really? I think divorce is all that. I’ve had more than one person tell me I wouldn’t have gotten divorced if I had known ahead of time what it was going to do to my kids. You would have taken the sacrifice of staying in a crappy relationship. Good for you. I think we found it out in hindsight. Nils, people will bathe and wallow, saying it eases pain, total self-deception. Yeah, well, you can look away from things for a long time, you know? Anselman, wear flowers in your hair and go to San Francisco to become a fornicating druggie, exploited. Yeah, well, they really are. It’s very sad. Takuan Soho, AI is good at impersonating Oasis and Drake. I do not know those references. I won’t take your word for it, though. AI is a demon, a Frankensteinian demon, funhouse mirror of our nightmares. And that is the problem. Garth, what’s game A and game B? Oh, you don’t know about game A, game B? Jordan Hall and others, I think he’s off that project now, but this is their big solution to everything. I have a video on it. It’s on navigating patterns. You should check it out. They did this video. The Stowa people did the video on game A, game B. They’re not the only ones that game A, game B has been. Wide and far, there were game A, game B people all over clubhouse. They’re still there. Some of them. Yeah, it’s a crazy, crazy concept. The whole idea is just, see, we’re stuck in game A and we just need to get to game B because in game B, all the bad things in game A don’t exist. It’s literally their whole thesis. Like, yeah, they use more words than that, but that’s basically all they’re actually saying. It’s kind of funny. Yeah, Mills, this is right. The whole rabbit hole. Game A, status quo. Game B fell in the blank with good ideas, pretty much. Yeah, it’s pretty funny. And you’re right, Mills. It’s a framing that calls for contributive content. It’s another way. You can do this. You can help us bring about game B. You can’t even define game B. This is the trick. And I heard it, well, VanderKlai mentioned it again today, this Q&A today, which I didn’t listen to much because today it was a wreck. I was just busy all day. But he mentioned it again, this whole idea around the sort of the tricks that people play around framing, right? Where it’s like, can you do that? Really? Are they defining consciousness? See, AI is almost conscious. We don’t have a definition of consciousness. How can you measure AI in relation to consciousness if you can’t define consciousness? This is an obvious trick. And everybody misses it. Like, I’m not disparaging people. I’m just saying, y’all missed it. No one has a definition of consciousness. They’re just saying AI could get conscious or is becoming conscious or is conscious. They don’t even have a definition. Oh, I missed Garth. I’m sorry he left early. That sucks. No one should leave early ever. Nels, I’m curious what your thoughts on workers cooperatives are. People cooperate all the time in all kinds of ways. I don’t know why work would be the way you would cooperate. Jesse said he was 40 minutes away at 5 minutes to 8, which means he should be here any second. The Muppet apologizes. Oh, wow. Jesse, can appeal to authority be seussing? Of course it can. Of course it can. You can appeal to something, somebody said, and… Then, bang! Hanselman, pushing an ideology, alleging it’s science or pushing a product or invention, alleging it’s science? Yes. Benjamin, Zimbardo fell from Grey’s heart. Okay. Except he retired wealthy and well known and well respected. So, maybe. But there’s a whole series on PBS about psychology. And it wasn’t wrong. Just saying. A lot of that story is misunderstood. You kind of have to be from Boston to know that. But I am. So I do. Hanselman facts get disregarded in the name of science. So, logic is a two-sing. It’s type of prediction and prescription for things. Now, it’s empty frame. It’s objective material reality and therefore. But there’s no such thing as objective material reality, so it’s really anything you want it to be. That’s why the logic, reason, and rationality game works. Because I can use logic, reason, and rationality to justify anything, I just have to switch the frame correctly. Because once I have the right beginning frame for you, the end frame is predetermined. So that’s what logic, reason, and rationality does. It predetermines things. You want predestination, use logic, reason, and rationality. That’s why I keep saying like, yeah. We’re not only irrational creatures. We can rationalize. It’s not what we do most of the time, by the way. The science is in on that. We’re not rational most of the time. It’s impossible. Too much energy usage. Just an energy problem. There are other problems. Just the energy problem. Insurmountable. Science is already making these predictions. And if you want the prediction to come true, sometimes you have to get rid of the facts. This has to happen. Side effect. I remember when he was a cool guy and everybody thought the Stanford Prison Experiment was great. Eh, I don’t know when that happened. I think that was the 70s when people were over that. It wasn’t an experiment that’s part of the problem. It certainly wasn’t a scientific experiment. It was actually his girlfriend that was doing it, not him. He was just advising. So, Jamie, I kind of tried to touch on this. Differentrina, soothsayer, and a real prophet. I mean, I’m giving you these ways of discernment. I’m pointing your attention at these methods that soothsayers use. I’m not saying prophets don’t also use them. I’m saying that that’s where the discernment lies. And that’s the best I can do, really. Like, I can’t, you know, I mean, are you asking me to point at particular people? Maybe I would do that if you point to particular people. Sam Harris is a soothsayer. Sam Harris is not a prophet. Jordan Peterson is a prophet. No question about it. He’s not a soothsayer. John Vervecky has become a soothsayer. Or a sorcerer, depending upon how you want to cut that. I’m hanging out with too many sorcerers. Benjamin Franklin. Basically, nobody was able to replicate the Stanford Prison Experiment. Not entirely true. And it turns out the experimenters gave him way too much direction to subjects. There were lots of confounding factors, but since it wasn’t actually a scientific experiment, and it wasn’t done by the psychology department, it was actually an art project, while your critiques are true, they aren’t invalid. That is the problem. Philip Zimbardo made lots of money. Lived comfortably and fine and got lots of TV coverage. Believe me, I watched probably all of his psychological lessons. They’re quite interesting too. Mills. People want to have their views challenged. Some people do. Some people don’t. Even if it’s a suppressed desire. Eh. Some people do. Some people don’t. I do it intentionally. Some people do. Some people don’t. This channel is much better than Googling my idea plus debunked. Thank you. I’m glad to hear that. Hanselman. Let’s get back to Monet. We had a big discussion about Monet. We had a big discussion about Monet this morning on the Mark of Wisdom Discord server with Sally Jo. So you missed that. Mills. Interesting about Zimbardo. Was not tracking that. We’ll have to look at that. Lots of studies or experiments end up being apocryphal or irreproducible. Look. The… Oh, shoot. Now I can’t remember the term. My brain is failing me. Probably because I’m tired. The reproducibility crisis. Reproducibility crisis. Now I can’t remember the word. Is real. And where it is the most is in psychology. Right? The inability to reproduce experimental results is largest in the psychological field. The only place it’s larger than the humanities. I would argue that’s invalid because they were never a science and never can be. And you can say that’s harsh. But it’s also verifiably true. It cannot fall in scientific methods. It’s not possible. So, you know. Mills. Yes, paradox indicates a need for a higher understanding than you have. Yes, it does. It’s not profound. Nathaniel. I’ve never heard somebody dismiss dialectical monism by saying it’s just time. Okay. Dialectical doesn’t exist. Monism is garbage. It’s not just time. I’m saying that people create paradoxes with time. It’s not flattening the ontology. When you have a paradox you don’t live in a paradox. The world you inhabit is not paradoxical. It’s rational. Which is funny. All these people go, the world is rational and then they come up with a paradox. And I’m like, you just said the word was rational and you came up with a paradox. You understand that you’re an idiot. Because you’re an idiot. Like, no. It’s A or B. Paradoxes are irrational by definition. Right? So, no. That doesn’t flatten anything. When you add time you are adding something. That’s why I used the word add. That was the tell there. Mills. It can be absolutely humiliating to realize that the quote higher understanding is regarded as common sense often. Well, the problem that I have with common sense is that in almost all cases I can find common sense is an appeal to something that you know so well that you don’t know how to explain it to others. And so you default saying it’s common sense. When in fact it’s just an accent you can’t rationalize. Mills. Can we talk about thought stopping cliches? Uh, we could. I don’t know how best to do that. I mean, yeah. There’s cliches in general sort of stop your thought. Right? There are compressions. Some compressions are valid. Right. But if you’re compressing the object of what it is you’re trying to understand obviously that’s invalid. Is self deception an inescapable given? Look. What is self deception? Like when is self deception valid? And when is it not valid? You know, how are you determining self deception? Right? And this gets into direction. Well, I know I’m deceived. Oh, thanks genius. We’re all deceived about something at any given moment. Sorry. At every given moment. I screwed that up. At every given moment. And maybe we have to be. Like maybe it’s just tradeoffs and perspectives. And if you’ve ever looked into Goethe’s incompleteness theorem I once made the joke to Paul Van der Kley who laughed quite hardly. It’s not turtles all the way down. It’s girdles all the way down. As in incompleteness theorem. Yes it is. That’s your fractal pattern. Well, wrong. I’m glad that you left and came back. It’s good to have you back. Lin, soothsayer, would that be more new age? I think it is. It really is just profit. But yeah, it’s sort of more new agey to me. Is it actually new agey? I don’t know. I didn’t go through the etymology. Somebody else did for me because I’m lazy. So, you know, distributed recognition baby. I use it. That’s how this all gets done. None of this gets done with a bunch of people helping. It’s another thing that Peterson does that, boy, I should do at least one more video on Peterson and his little tricks. Peterson very often doesn’t appeal to just his own thought. He’ll talk about his students. Right. And talk about undergrads that he worked with or labs that he’s worked with or other people. Right. And then tie it into his work. He doesn’t appeal to him as a superhero learning these things or coming up with these things by himself. Right. He’s very much like, oh, I learned this and I learned Pareto way too late. And I was like, eh, should have read Taleb, man. Although I knew Pareto before Taleb. Yeah. You know, he really appeals to the distributed cognition nature of what he’s talking about. And I think that’s really important to do. So, yeah, I mean that’s what I do. Man, these notes, I probably added like a paragraph today. In the middle of these four stupid meetings and all this other stuff going on, I’m just like, wah! Ugh. Man, doing like eight hours of straight work is hard, man. No naps today either. No naps! But that’s why we get snacks. You gotta have snacks. Everybody needs snacks. Nils, what are you saying here? Do you have any thoughts about Alexander Bard? Never heard of him. I mean, I’ve heard references to him, but I don’t know who that is. Why would I need to have thoughts about this crazy person? Do they have something interesting to say? Phlebas, have the join mark on screen portion started? Yes! I posted the link. It’s pinned on navigating patterns, although it should be at the top of all the chats, because you guys are not much on anywhere but navigating patterns. Phlebas, Lynn, I enjoyed your conversation. Lynn’s conversation with Paul Van de Peel was excellent. I learned a lot from it, and I thought I knew Lynn. Her story about the bird made Sally feel bad, but that’s okay. It was a real learning experience for everybody, I think. It was a lovely combo. I’m so glad. Lynn is very courageous. I don’t know if you caught that in the conversation, but she’s very courageous. Speaking out and warning people about the things you’ve warned them about. That’s brave. I mean, there’s waters even I won’t swim in sometimes. And that’s some of them. Look, I’ve got a lot of friends in the gay and lesbian community. I’ve worked with more transgender people than most people have ever even heard of. And that was pre-2014. Like, yeah, I was just very much in the grungy underground Boston scene for a while. Not in it per se, but connected to it. I mean, I’ve talked about this before. There’s a science fiction convention called the Rija. One of my best friends who lived with me for a while was president of a Rija for quite a while. And I knew a bunch of the people that started that convention initially. There was a time when I actually tried to fly to England and I got kicked out for reasons which have never been made clear. And they were like, what are you doing back? I thought you were in England. I was like, I thought I was going to be in England for a week. I went to the convention. And of course I hadn’t paid because I was going to be in England. And I just basically wandered around the convention and nobody stopped me from doing anything because every time one of the security people went to do anything another security people would say, oh, I don’t know, that’s Avon. It’s cool. Because that was my secret name. I mean, literally everybody called me Avon. It was kind of hysterical. That was one of my online names. So yeah, I got to wander around this convention for free. Nobody stopped me. It was fantastic. Yeah, Lynn, you’re right. Tucker Carlson, senior producer, was openly gay. Yeah, you know, there’s a big difference between talking about it, caring about it, and doing things about it. And we tend to think if you don’t love them with all your heart, then you’re against gay people and you want them dead. And it’s like, really? Are those my only two options? Really? Phlebas, are we going to go there? You’ve got to imagine with me using that as a name that I have many defenses against this attack. Avon is the I would say, the main character in the greatest science fiction series of all time, which is called Blake 7. If you haven’t seen Blake 7, you should watch Blake 7. If you don’t recognize me in the character of Avon, you’re a blind fool who should probably just like, just be fertilizer or something. You’re not going to make it. You’re not going to make it anyway. You might as well contribute. Yeah, it’s my favorite sci-fi character of all time. In fact, I’m still every couple of years I watch Blake 7 all over again, all four seasons. For a very long time, well into the 90s, I believe, it was the most requested and written about BBC show of all time. Not Doctor Who. Blake 7. And almost nobody in the US has ever seen it. I watched it, PBS had it. And then somebody gifted it to me on VHS. And since I have obtained the DVDs. So, yeah. That and another show nobody knows about. Which, Until Breaking Bad was the greatest TV serial of all time. And I would argue it was not science fiction. But you could make a case. It’s called The Prisoner. If you haven’t seen The Prisoner, The Prisoner is a frickin’ amazing, amazing. Yeah, I watch The Prisoner all the time too. I get the 25th anniversary DVD box set of that. It comes with a map of the village. It’s cool. Yeah, you’re going to know this stuff. It’s good. Ah, okay. Let’s leave this. You’ve been deceived. I’ve read a lot of sci-fi and watched a lot. I’ve never even heard of this. I know, you’ve been deceived. You’ve been deceived. Blake’s 7. Blake’s. It’s his seven peeps. Roughly speaking. Although, yeah. It’s complicated. It’s British. It’s so British. It’s unbelievable. How old BBC Blake 7 is? You know, you watch like Doctor Who and of course you watch The Fourth Doctor because he’s the best Tom Baker. Everybody knows that. They don’t know that. They’re dumb or they’re wrong. They don’t know which. It’s one of the two for sure. Binary’s. And you see some of the problems and the goofy special effects. And then you go to Blake’s 7 and you’re like, oh. But I think it’s invalid. Blake’s 7 has a lot of philosophy in it. And embodied philosophy. These are the actions they take to resolve the philosophical conflicts. I think the classic Star Trek is the same way. It has a lot of, well, classical Star Trek is Gene Roddenberry was writing moral plays. That’s what he was doing. How does he resolve in the plays? He’s not resolving it through argumentation. It’s not, you know, Socrates arguing at the banquet bullshit. It’s action. I did this move. It had this effect. And now we have to deal with it. That’s how they’re resolving the philosophical, if you want to call it that tension or the moral tension. Blake’s 7 does much the same thing. There’s some stuff in Blake’s 7. Oh man. Season 3. Season 3 is Avon goes insane. It’s great. Season 4 is continuation of that. He just does some really dick moves. It’s fantastic. They’re not wrong. But they’re also like. But it’s totally me. Totally. Totally. Anselman. Only sci-fi I enjoyed was Spoof Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Did not read it. However, the BBC did an early series on that. I think in the 80s. Fantastic. If you haven’t seen the series, and it’s like a TV series of Hitchhiker’s Guide from the 80s from England, you’ve got to watch that too. I bet Jesse knows some of this stuff. Welcome my Muppet friend. Hello everyone. Hello Sleepus. Gosh. Sleepus. Anselman. Very clever writer Douglas Adams. Douglas Adams wrote for a bunch of stuff by the way. Including Doctor Who. BBC series? Did we just talk about that? The BBC? I just mentioned it. BBC Hitchhiker’s Guide series was great. Well then the Dirk Jentlunds are all good too. There’s a bunch of those. I didn’t mind the American adaptation of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It was a bit too stuffy. The movie? Yeah the movie. I called it the American remake. It wasn’t horrible. Which is amazing. That’s like, for America, for American remakes, that’s like wow. Cause like you watch the American remake of The Office and it’s just like really? Is that the best you could do? It became something else. That’s the Usain nature. You take something from its original context and you bring it to a new context. Well Friends Friends was the same thing and they made a great job out of Friends. What was Friends a recontextualization of? Ah shoot, why can’t I remember the name of the series now? Cause I watched the original British series. Damn I can’t remember it. Right out of my head. Sorry man. That’s right. I believe you I believe it’s not that original. All the sitcoms aren’t original. That’s the point of the sitcom. The point of the sitcom is not to be original. The point of the sitcom is just to do something for the moment of the people watching it. It’s entertainment. It’s entertainment through framing. Right? Through fixed framing. Fixed familiar framing. And it’s not quite comedy either. Which is something I wanted to bring in here. Where you have to ascertain is this a stand up? Is someone giving me their propositional stand up or situational stand up? Or they giving me something that appears to be comedy but it’s not really comedy. Circa Chevy Chase. If you watch any of those National Lampoon movies it’s not a commentary. It’s not a comedy. It’s a social commentary. Right. If you watch National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation it is not a Christmas movie and it’s got nothing to do with Christmas. It’s not funny but guess what it is? It’s a commentary in the late 80’s. Yes it is. The only joke is the fact that when they go to do the Christmas prayer the old grandma starts with starting the United States pledge. I pledge allegiance to the United States. She does that instead of dear Lord Jesus. She goes I pledge allegiance. And it’s the only joke in the entire film. You’re like wow. I’ve watched 20, 30 minutes of information for nothing and then one joke and then that’s the film. I’m not a film making Jesse. Who wants to know if I’ll be watching The Coronation? I probably should and Anselman definitely should even though he said no which makes him a bad person but we’ll put you on someday. Uh oh. Mills. This is going to sound polemical but I’m not trying to. You’re allowed to sound polemical here. Look man have you noticed? I’ll just shoot your ass down if I don’t like what you say. That’s no problem. You have to apologize up front. It’s not a big deal. I value the challenges you provide. Well thank you. I’m really very happy to hear that. What differentiates you from a suicide killer besides tough love? Well I’m not trying to sell you anything for one thing. I’m not making prognostications without specification and telling you things like trade-offs. I’m not giving you answers. I’m telling you that over and over again. I’m not here to give you answers. It’s not what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to show you that the world is far more complex than you think and show you what to look at. Not only to prove my point that it’s far more complex than what you think but also to give you the tools maybe and maybe you can’t have those tools. Fair enough. Like if you know you fall prey to, I know people like this. They know they fall prey to enchantment. I have a very good friend of mine. She will buy anything literally that she sees 1995 on TV commercials. Actually she says this, I fall prey to marketing really easily. Like okay I notice that. And she’s got tons of those damn stupid things. She knows and she can’t resist it. Maybe don’t engage. You know what I mean? You will never have the skill to resist so don’t engage. It’s like if I have candy in the house I will eat it so don’t buy candy. And then it’s not in the house. Do I never eat candy? No. I went up north for Easter. Oh my god. Every day I ate candy. Why? Because everywhere I went somebody had candy or junk food or both and I can’t not. I’m a glutton and I will eat things if they’re in front of me. Yeah. It’s hard. It also depends if, this is the middle up thinking right? Which is what you say is you if you haven’t brought that in. But what’s television designed for? It’s not designed for entertainment. That’s the trick. The entertainment is the trick to get you to watch the advertising. Right. Exactly. Because who’s funding the show? Unless it’s HBO which is a completely new thing and even then you could say that’s something else. But the original intention of the television was not the entertainment. It was to get you to, well the ads were an entertainment originally. The ads weren’t like a two minute short clip barrage of corporate statements. It was a ten minute presentation. It was this whole dream and that’s what was big about HBO is HBO was funded to bring art to the TV. And it succeeded. I mean HBO was unbelievable. It still is right? It still is to some extent. So it has a different telos. It’s not, like you can’t reduce it to TV. That doesn’t work. That’s why when they take a movie and they put it on TV and they cut it up, they lose the movie. Because the people who want it on TV are using it to sell advertising. The people who made the movie made it for art. Right? And they don’t, they have other motivations too because you can’t do things for single motivations right? I’ve went over that before. So yeah. Alright. Benjamin Franklin. I really like the American Renake of the Game. Never saw it. Granted it was a shot remake and the same director did it but better with American actors. Yeah sometimes that happens. It’s rare. I prefer the, I think it’s Dutch? I think he’s Dutch, Michael Fanike. I prefer the Dutch. Something about the language and the way, the tonal aspects of things but that’s new. Oh no. I’ve lost Ethan forever. Until I heard you like Taylor Swift. Yeah well look I love Taylor Swift. I think her music is great. Not all of it but man, Katy Perry. Some of Katy Perry’s early stuff. Fan. Frickin’-tastic. I, there’s a couple Katy Perry’s. I’ll lose me. I’ll lose me. I absolutely love. What’s wrong with you? Mike Christie wanted to go see Noah Cyrus so I had to buy tickets to Duffy the other day. So. Uh oh. Anselman. Our monarch should serve the people and uphold their rights and traditions in the church and not outside powers. Anselman, I’m way behind but Adam and I are going to do something on the English Revolution to round out our history talk there about the French Revolution, etc. etc. And we’re going to go over all that my friend. And it’s very interesting what I have learned. Ethan, how does somebody that loves the pet, petoral love, I love Taylor Swift. Yeah well, you know, it happens. You just don’t understand Taylor Swift, that’s all. Oh you’re going to talk about socialization? In your British history recap? I’m just learning something about there’s an Anglo-Saxon ethos and it pops up again and again and it’s like, oh wait a minute, there’s a thread there I didn’t know about. Yeah, Adam is infected. It’s all good. Flee this is upset. The best way to get people involved in chat to say something controversial, one benign musical opinion, Ethan is a little bit. Ethan is sensitive. Okay, so Ethan’s all into, you know, pastoral and you know, all this classical music, right? But Ethan’s journey to the little secret is that he also likes Iron Maiden. Now, I was never a huge Iron Maiden. I’m more of an Iron Maiden fan now than I was when I was younger. Because Iron Maiden music is fairly consistent, but it is rarely ever great. Unlike Metallica or Tool where it is great almost all the time. Of course, the greatest band of all time Led Zeppelin. Led Zeppelin has two songs that aren’t great. Two, that’s it. Both her other songs are great and some of them are transcendent. Battle of Evermore. If you don’t understand that Battle of Evermore is one of the greatest pieces of music that could ever exist in the history of the universe, then I don’t know what to tell you. You’re probably not a real person or something. Mark, you like Beethoven, not Taylor Swift and Katy Perry. I like them all, dude. Why so exclusive? Why is this so terrible? What is this? I like Mark even more if he’s a Ludwig van fan. I am. I am. John Milton on the tenor of kings and magistrates is a good read. Oh. Dude, books? Really? Do you know how many books I’m not reading right now that I have to read? In fact, I got the Republic Book Club tomorrow and it’s like, uh oh, I gotta finish book four. I haven’t finished. I don’t think I’ll finish tonight because I’m usually tired after this. I’m usually tired in the middle of this. I don’t know why I do this. I’m like, man, this is tiring. Not only did I wipe myself all week trying to take notes for this goofy thing, then I get here and it’s like, there goes your Friday, man. Good luck thinking for the next four or five days. The Marathon Table Rock Tea, Marathon Tea is not doing the job today. Look, we all know subversive answer, right? But the best band that most people in the western Anglo-Saxon world appreciate is No. True. No. But my respectable answer is Rolling Stones. No. No. How about this? How about D.L.O.? Come on. I’m just saying. What do we got, Cassandra? Mark warms up before he streams right blank. Shake it off. Shake it off. Shake it off. No, I would do 22. I really like 22. 22 is fantastic. When you’re driving, it’s late night, it’s summer in New England. That was the last time it came on. I was driving with my friend, Afram Enchon friend who is susceptible to marketing, and we’re driving down the road and that came on the radio. I’m just like up all the way, baby. And I’m just cranking it down the street and I was having a blast. I absolutely loved it. Absolutely loved it. I could do Shake It Off. No, my warm up song is the song that I love. No word of a lie. I hate to sound like a mean, but I was doing it first before League of Legends was Darude Sandstorm. I’d like put that on, dive into what I was diving into, and bang work would just get done, baby. I can also do loops. So I can listen to a song, the same song over and over again, three and a half minute song for an hour and a half without, doesn’t even bother me. I can loop Darude Sandstorm and take it out. I would take out projects completely listening to that stuff. Or I could do the same with Metallica or Tool or Led Zeppelin or any number of songs. Arcade Fire. Yes. Arcade Fire is quite good. Quite good stuff. I love Arcade Fire. Early Arcade Fire. Yeah. My father Eric was here and he introduced me to Early Yes. And I was like, oh, that’s quite good. And I didn’t think I had heard any of it. You don’t like Arcade Fire? Really, Jesse? Come on, dude. Some good stuff. Every song is… Why is this a bad thing? Ethan thinks I need coffee. I have Marathon, which is Kenyon Tea, even though it’s from the Table Rock Tea Company. It’s Kenyon Tea. It’s quite good. It’s got a little woman running since a marathon. It works. Keep the Car Running. Great driving song. Well, there’s Running Down a Dream, the greatest driving song that could ever exist by definition. I will grant that when Ryan Adams covered Taylor Swift’s songs, I appreciated them all. He did? How did this happen? He did. Ryan was covering the whole 1989 album. I was not a lover of Ryan. Ryan Adams. Sort of like post-Goth. Don’t know Ryan Adams? Country singer. Country rock guy. Yeah. It’s cause you’re old. That’s all. Well, I don’t do much radio. I need radio. Spotify and keep up with the cool people. Oh, God, no. Spotify is terrible now. It was good for a while, but nowadays yeah. Yeah. They had their time in the sun and then it was straight downhill for their… Man, their playlists a few years ago, like six, seven years ago, were fantastic. And then they just became stale. And I’m like, what? And they’ve been stale ever since. I use Spotify all the time and it’s like terrible cause it just runs through the same walls. Why would that be? Would it be something to do with the emergence of AI? Dun, dun, dun. Sleavitt. Did we provide examples of soothsayers? I did. Are you not listening to my stream, Sleavitt? Are you trolling me? What’s going on? Historical examples to avoid awkward… No, I don’t avoid awkward accusations. If somebody doesn’t like being called a soothsayer, the solution to that is to not be one. So my freaking fault you’re like that. Don’t give me this bullshit. I’ll take the reality and shove it right where the sun don’t shine. You can deal with that bullshit. We need to realize we’re being soothsayers. Like it’s okay. It’s okay to be in the presence of a comedian or comic. But realize where you are and what’s happening. Yeah. If I call you a soothsayer and I say that’s a negative thing and you have a problem with it, that’s too freaking bad. Just say Mark has a bad opinion and move on with your life. And if you can’t do that, then you know you’re transgressing. And it ain’t my fault you know you’re transgressing. Get over yourself. That’s your own damn fault. Guy Sengstock is a sorcerer and a soothsayer. And he uses his garbage circling and then infects John Vervecky with it. Listen to John Vervecky’s AI talk. That’s all soothsaying, the whole thing. Want to hear more soothsaying? Listen to Grim Grizz. Grim comes up with some brilliant stuff and I like Grim and I like some of his stuff. But also he has soothsayers on there sometimes. And he does some soothsaying himself. Yeah. Yeah. Fleavis is apologizing. He was in and out running some late errands. He had the little the little lappy cryy face there. So it’s fine. So was I. I had to do some errands. Did my question on appeal to authority get answered? Yeah. Some people use appeal to authority, right? And I kind of went over that. That’s the same to some extent as appeal to science and stuff. Yeah. That’s it. Enjoy your family time. Deepak Chopra. Deepak Chopra is a soothsayer. He’s a soothsayer. Good call, Lin. Good call. Yeah. Hey, Lin, come on. Fleavis Vervecky does seem rather specific. He wasn’t. He wasn’t. He had a good team of people around him. I think on Agapic Orientation, Manuel’s wonderful YouTube channel, where you can have one of the best talks, one of the best discussions Paul Van De Klaay’s ever been in, is now on Agapic Orientation. It will eventually make its way to Paul’s channel, but you know, Manuel’s a good friend of mine, so you should watch it on his Agapic Orientation channel. Manuel has a talk that’s like four hours long with Skyler and Nick. And Skyler is an interesting guy. We really like Skyler. He does the hard work. He makes the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for homeless people. That’s not a joke. It’s also a joke, but it’s not entirely a joke. He does the hard work. He was saying at one point in his talk on Agapic Orientation with Manuel, he was saying that the people who are now running John’s channel, because the Vervecky Foundation has turned over, the people in the AI talk, for example, weren’t there when I was working with them, do not care about the work the way the other people did. And I would say that there was a change that happened. I don’t know all the changes because I wasn’t involved. So that happened. Alin, Oprah Winfrey, soothsayer. Dalai Lama, soothsayer. Jerry Springer. Jerry Springer, not a soothsayer. At all. Very honest person. And he, I remember years ago we were doing, we used to do Trivial Pursuit up in Maine at the beach house. And we were doing Trivial Pursuit. And I forget which edition, but the question over to the Smarty Pants people, because we were divided into people who went to college and people who didn’t, of course I didn’t go to college. And the not go to college team usually won the trivia. Just saying. Should tell you something about the world. Good or bad, doesn’t matter. The question came up to the college Smarty Pants who says, I forget the exact phrase, but it’s, and remember to be good to each other at the end of every show. Of course the answer is Jerry Springer. And they didn’t believe that because Jerry Springer bad. Because Jerry Springer. I know Jerry Springer is actually a really good dude. Ethan, I suspect there isn’t going to be much historical documentation for soothsayers because they aren’t rooted in truth. So their impact will be marginal when time is taken into consideration. That is the problem, Ethan. A lot of them aren’t that way. Oh, Ethan with the softball question. Ethan’s trying to butter me up. Philosophers after Aristotle. All soothsayers. Yes, thank you, Ethan. I wouldn’t have called them out. But you know, the audience asks. All I’m doing is answering every single last scummy one of the little bastards. Yes. Not a fan. Not a fan. They’re all soothsayers. Modern Philo- almost all soothsayers. Is Tony Robbins Tony Robbins is not a soothsayer. Yeah. It can be. He does not make predictions. Okay, we are going with my profit. Sneaky profit framing. Well, and he forms personal connections with people. You know. And that’s not all he does. Granted, like you know, you got a book. You read Tony Robbins’ book. It may be useful. It may not. But he is trying to form a relationship with you even in the text. And he is talking about relationships. He’s pointing at the relationship all the time in the text. It’s one of the things too I like about Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad Poor Dad. He’s constantly trying to give you the framing and the relationships in the frames to do what he’s talking about. And that’s why, you know, I don’t mind the guy. I haven’t read all his books, but Rich Dad Poor Dad is a great book. If you haven’t read that book, it’s actually really important to understand. I think my dad does, yeah. Taleb does the same thing, right? So Taleb makes a bunch of predictions, but of course they’re all correct because Taleb’s not an idiot. This is the thing, like marketing is not a pure science you know, you can be marketed to. You can mark you know, you have to market if you have a product. You have to. Otherwise, it’s just a thing. No, I mean marketing is just a fancy word for communication with others. And then people don’t realize that, that they can’t differentiate it. And that’s the problem. They don’t see the tradeoff. They don’t see the tradeoff. Lynn, you have to be rich to see Tony Robbins, Enchantment Issues. No, you don’t have to be rich. Actually, you can see him for cheap. He did a talk up here recently where you can just go see him in person for a day. You can get invited. They have programs. Taleb, as we were listening tonight, my four year old ran for address and insisted on dancing. Well, participation is important. It was just a clip that Peugeot did where he was saying, nobody in the medieval times would go to listen to music if that wasn’t a thing that you did. Music was for celebrations or dancing or you know, some interaction was one part of a larger frame of engagement. And while I do rather enjoy concerts every once in a while, especially chamber music. I love chamber music actually. Or classical music or whatever. In fact, I saw John Williams a couple times. That was fantastic. It’s not the same as engaging with the music with dancing. It’s just not the same. I’m not going to say it’s bad or good or whatever. I said this last week, you know, dancing was at the heart of the Victorian society. It’s how people met each other. It’s how they did the courting sort of dance and the formality of everything. Getting introduced to someone was, you know, even if it was a run down dance hall, people still went. It wasn’t necessarily about the place, it was about this communal activity that bound everyone together. Well, and that’s a theme in dirty dancing and footloose and right. It’s not the place. It’s not just the framing. It’s the participation in the story. Yes, certainly those films are not depicting that. Although people like to believe that they are. Not anymore. When you’re pushing a message, your ability to tell story is limited. And so you’ve got to decide how much message versus how much story. And I think to some extent, and critical drinker is watching me, which, you know, I’m sure is not happening ever. That’s what I would say you should focus on is more that message, right, where it’s this interaction between those two things. Oh, it’s Bruce. Hey, Bruce, my friend. How are you doing? Hi, how are you all? Back in the fire pit. We are better better now that you are here, sir. How are you doing? The trial is better than a monologue. Yeah, I’m over at the fire pit and my family went to museum this afternoon while I was working. It’s too far away for me to go meet them, so I’m waiting for them to get home. Oh, awesome. Yeah, so they’re on their way back. They went to the Baltimore National Aquarium, which is pretty amazing, actually. I’ve never been there. Yeah, I think it’s one of the largest aquariums in the U.S. It’s gigantic. But it’s in Baltimore, so that’s the only part, the only caveat. My buddy was telling me this story. He was driving through Maryland. I think it’s the Maryland Parkway or whatever, right? And he says, oh yeah, we were running low on gas. Oh, I know where this story is going. You didn’t get off that parkway, did you? Because it’s got very beautiful exits and you can’t see any. It’s gorgeous. Beautiful. It’s a beautiful road. It’s absolutely gorgeous. The minute you get off these meticulous, gorgeous, beautiful exits, you are in the most slummy, dangerous, scary part of the United States. True. It’s not a half a mile down the road. It’s literally the bottom of the exit. So you take this exit and the whole thing’s manicured and perfect. You take this exit and you’re in the hood. And it’s like, holy crap! What the hell happened? But he didn’t know that. It’s a serious culture shock. Well, and they told him, they said, you better get right back on the highway. You don’t belong here. And that happened to me too. That happened to me the first time I drove through New York City. We were going to New Jersey, which isn’t really an upgrade. But anyway, we had to get off near the George Washington Bridge. I think it was it must have been just after the George Washington Bridge. So we get off and like, New York City’s a fricking mess. You think the roads in New England are a mess? New York City around the bridge especially is like, just all this stuff. So we get off. I drive like a quarter of a mile. No word of a lie. First time in New York City I drive a quarter of a mile. I see a car for no reason go up on a curb. And I was like, no one’s talking about Boston driving to me no more. You know, we’re done with that argument because this is my first time in the city and there goes a car up on a curb. And he drove up on the sidewalk. I was like, tires up and down too, which is even more weird, right? And I was just like, yeah, we’re done with this argument. Boston’s way better than that. I’ve never seen anything like that in Boston. And then I get to this place and I’m like, how does this work? Because their gas stations didn’t work the same and everything they did to pump the gas for you and then they took, you know, they wanted a tip or whatever. And then I was like, how do I get out of here? And they’re like, you want to go over there. The ramp is over there. And you could not tell where the ramp was to get back on the highway. There was no freaking way they hadn’t told me that I would have found that on a map and been able to do it. It is weird. It is weird. What are the things about New York is at least Manhattan and the city. Most people that live there do not drive. Okay. Everyone’s getting through the city. So they’re trying to get in and out of there as fast as they possibly can. They don’t care. And they’re just on a mission. You know, the people that are driving through New York are just, they have no time for anyone. They’re literal missionaries. It’s nuts. Yeah, I can agree. And South Philly’s like that too, if you’ve ever been there. And they just park wherever they want, which is the wild thing over there. They don’t care. They just park in the middle of the road. It’s sort of, it’s just like the Wild West almost. It is weird. Yeah, it is weird. But it was really weird. I like it though. I really do like it. I like the people there. They’re very honest. I mean, they’re like New Englanders. When did this Wild West… Well, different regions are very different. And so it’s funny. Over here by Columbia, you go to this place called Five Points, which is right by the school. You drive to Columbia from where I’m at, down Route 1. If you come in the back roads a little just to save some time or whatever, which is totally valid, this is not the nice section in town at all. Five Points is very ritzy. We’re not talking about a quarter of a mile. We’re talking about two blocks. And then you’re in the ritzy section. It’s like, whoa, they don’t park to Boston like that. But Philly? Oh my God. Because we went to the Art Museum and then we went to Philly Cheesesteaks. You go to Philly Cheesesteaks, man. And I’m like parking the convertible there like, hmm, okay. Yeah. You know? Like, okay. There’s a couple places where the best the best steaks are in Philly are not the nicest places in Philly. That’s kind of the deal. You’re not going to be in a nice part of the neighborhoods. Yeah. There’s no nice part of Philly. That’s the secret there. It’s the pro-Panthony. How do I get such and such? Irishmen. Oh, I wouldn’t start from here. Ken confirmed. The South Boston Irish were like that a lot. I haven’t spent a lot of time in Boston, so I can’t really say. I will say that I love the Harbor area. It was really nice. But I can’t say about the driving too much. Oh, dude. The driving is pretty brutal, but it’s way better than New York City. Well, isn’t it more of an issue of the way the city was laid out in Boston, right? It’s not a grid, right? No, it’s not a grid. No, there’s no grids anywhere in New England. New York, Manhattan has a bit of a grid until you get to the edges. Right. No, Manhattan is very grid-like. No, no, no. Manhattan compared to Boston is a perfect grid, all of it. Nothing in Boston is straight for more than three feet. It’s all of it. It’s wonderful, but whoa. Yeah. There’s a couple like Back Bay. Back Bay is different because Back Bay is gridded to some extent just because it’s all fill. So it’s not. There were no cow paths because cows can’t walk through marsh. Everything else is cow paths. So once you get on the other side of Back Bay there, you’re kind of like, oh, what are these roads? Why are none of them straight? What’s going on? So yeah, it’s kind of great, great. Yeah, I can see that. Well, you’re a carpet bagger now. You’re down south. I know. You’re not in your homeland. You’ve fleed. I’m completely screwed because I’m nominally Catholic too. So it’s like you can’t even win on that front. You’ve done the white flight thing to a whole other degree. Yeah. It’s not pretty. There’s no winning. There’s no winning for me. Well, that’s part of the thing, right? There isn’t winning for anyone. It’s all tradeoffs. Yeah. That’s what people don’t realize. Yeah. Yeah, there is no winning. It’s all tradeoffs. And nobody likes that answer, right? They all want their eupia. Yeah, yeah. Not in this side of eternity, that’s for sure. Bruce, did you listen to Vervecki’s AI talk? No, I’ve actually avoided all AI talk like the plague because to be honest, I’m quite tired of it. But I’m sure it’ll be interesting. But what do you think of this comment? And maybe I’m paraphrasing, although I don’t know how accurate this particular section of the notes is. The religion gives us a way to contextualize in a world where we are not at the top of a hierarchy. He said that in the…I think it has nothing to do with AI and doesn’t belong to the AI talk that was part of the monologue. But that’s an amazingly prescient and important statement. But at that point, you should be going to church, buddy. It definitely raises the question as to what are you doing then if you’re not…well actually, there are two issues there. If you believe that. If you believe that, then you would…but I would say, here’s the other side of that, he is participating in a religion. But it’s a religion of idolatry. And so I don’t think people can be a religious. Religion is not a religion. So it’s another form of religion that he’s created. It doesn’t pass the epistemic sniff test, if you’re going to have those discussions. Which I don’t know how much Vervecki gets into that. I would think he would, but maybe not. But yeah, I think that that’s a bit of a platitude, or maybe it’s a way of him…because when I say something like that, is I say, oh, can you breathe well? And they’ll say, what do you mean? And I’ll say, well, how is it on the clouds up there? Is there any oxygen where you are, as though you’ve transcended this natural phenomenon that you’re describing? So what is he doing? Is he going to church? Is he in a religion? Well, yeah, he’s created his own church. Which is apostate, a horrible, crazy thing. And it’ll bear the fruit of that. That’s what I would say. But imagine, and people hear that and they go, John said some really profound things in the AI talk. And I’m sitting there like, yeah, but everything he said technically was actually wrong. And he contradicted himself throughout the whole talk. And they’re like, no, he said profound things. And I’m like, all right, I didn’t say he didn’t say profound things. But the things he said that were profound had nothing to do with AI. So that’s kind of a problem for me. Like, if you’re talking about AI, why are you talking about religion and spirituality? He believes he can steal culture. Yeah. Oh yeah. What does that mean? That is the ultimate two-saying thing. Like, you can’t steal something that grows organically and changes organically. It’s a living thing. You can’t steal something that’s living. He’s borrowing from the borrowing from what I would call the Christian worldview, which is what I think everyone does. He’s not borrowing. Nope. He’s not borrowing because he’s going to destroy it. He has no intention of giving it back. He’s parasitic on it. And that’s the problem. Oh, I’m mostly speaking on how he arrives at moral odds and claims and things like that. But as far as what he’s doing, maybe you’re right. Parasitic. That statement really doesn’t mean a whole lot unless he defines what he’s saying as well. So like, what are you saying? Religion, what does that mean? He does define it. But he uses all these magical words around his definition. He never gives you the end-to-end statement of what he means by steal the culture. He uses a bunch of descriptive languages around his definition. He has one description of steal the culture. And it’s very good. He says it’s what Augustine did. And he says there were a bunch of people in their houses doing religion in their own houses. And then he leaps to that swept over with the help of the rhetoric of Augustine, which I don’t know how historically accurate that is. The early Christians were woke the comparison to woke to the Roman Empire, which is silly framing. Well, but how do you do that, Jesse? You get there very easily. You make that ridiculous statement and you ignore the beginning. This is part of the middle out thinking, right? It’s not that they were in their homes worshiping whatever god they felt like. That’s polytheism. They were in their homes all worshiping based on the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Well, that changes the story because now it’s not because what John describes as steal the culture is the hell we’re living in. I’m worshiping the climate religion in my house. I’m worshiping the safety religion in my house. I’m worshiping the race religion in my house and on and on and on and on and on. And they’re all fighting and then everybody goes, oh, look at all these religions fighting. It must be a culture war. I’m like, no, it’s not a culture war. They’re not cultures. They’re not even religions. They’re cults. It could be a war of the cults, but they can’t take over anyway. Why are you paying attention at that layer? This goes back to the Tzoussé. You can’t participate in the whole world by being worried about the climate. You can’t participate in the whole world if your primary concern is safety. You can’t participate in the whole world if you’re, you know, if you’re off in one of these wacky new age rabbit holes. You can’t participate in the whole world if you’re listening to Sam Harris. Their frameworks don’t encompass a significant enough portion of your life that you can live your life, much less account for your birth, your growth, and your death, and after death. It can’t do that. So it’s a cult. It’s parasitic. A cult usually also has a sort of a, there’s usually one path to special knowledge. Right. And that’s kind of what they’re doing with, you know, oh, we have this particular science with this special consensus. That’s the cult. And you only get there through this very, this is the specific agreed upon science. And it’s held by a small group of people. But it doesn’t have an ultimate authority outside of itself. Right. It’s a consensus of individuals that are presupposing all sorts of things. And then they flatten it all out and then they, you know, just take that as their god. But this whole idea of woke, like you said, middle out thinking, it’s this sort of thing where people take their sort of socioeconomic lens, apply it to the history, and then put that on the reading. As though that would even be in the purview. Yeah, they flatten it all first, I think, is part of the problem. And the aim is to have a sense of transcendent without it being related to personal creator. They want transcendence without hierarchy. Because hierarchy means judgment. If I were a useless loser, I wouldn’t want to be judged either. But I’m not. Okay, the solution is don’t be a useless loser. That’s still the solution, by the way. Yeah, I would agree entirely. The idea of being autonomous and shirking responsibility, if you deny creation that way, then who are you responsible to? Right. The mob. Well, that’s the whole thing. And that’s why, again, it is a hell of a statement. Religion gives us a way to contextualize in a world where we’re not at the top of the hierarchy. Absolutely, John! What religion are you doing, dude? Have we assumed, too, that when he says people in their house worshipping, that we all know what he’s talking about? Because that could just be people. No! But we are as well. We’re assuming, oh, that looks like a Catholic ritual. Or that looks like a saint. Well, everybody’s going to fill it in. That’s the super thing. Everyone’s going to fill it in with their understanding of worship. And it’s never going to occur to Van der Kley and Pigeot that what John is saying is Gnosticism. It’s evil Gnosticism. Like actual evil Gnosticism, Anselm. It’s pantheism. Where all God nature is, we can manipulate it. Right. We’re all God nature is, we can manipulate. And that’s the thing. It’s not that John is merely heretical. Like he’s actually saying wrong stuff. Like really wrong. Not merely heretical. I think we’ve seen the rise of Paganism again. And it’s back in a big way. And that’s sort of what you’re seeing. It never went away. Well, that’s fair. It’s what we call it. What we name the phenomenon. It re-emerged in the 60s. That’s really the problem. It really re-emerged in the 60s. Yeah, there was a time for about 400 years in the United States. Maybe 300 years in the New World where that was not the case. And in fact, it was when they loosened the reins and the grip on the culture that it got that way. There was a real hard line on who’s in and who’s out. And to some of the faults, believe me, I love the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but there were a lot of problems with that idea. And they didn’t work with the Quakers very well, although they should have. And they went into Philadelphia and disempowered the natives so that they could form a country without William Penn and his nutbags. They lost the force of the trees. There’s also another set of problems that occurred in the Puritan society, which I think was they let women have a lot more control over the household. And there was a massive amount of heresy that arose and created a huge divide with this woman named Anne Hutchinson that totally busted things up because men were too busy trying to conquer war and nations as opposed to running their home and churches. But they’re public Protestants, and that’s actually a big problem. Anselman, I think Verbecky himself has indicated he’s reacting against a particular kind of severe Christian upbringing. Yeah, he’s an axogrine. Verbecky well, he doesn’t have an axogrine. He’s got two unbelievable, like if you’ve ever heard these two traumas, then you know, it’s like what? Holy crap. Trauma, either way, he’s blaming some particular part of his upbringing or experiences he’s had, and he’s grinding against that. They’re nasty. Anselman, theosophists in powerful positions promoted Eastern esoteric religion with drugs and gurus and pop music. Yeah, that’s the 60s. The emergence of the problem of the 60s. Uh oh, Elizabeth, rise of paganism. And Dr. Peterson, yeah, but he’s an antidote to paganism. That’s the thing. He kind of shows you, he links the paganism right back to a better version of paganism called the Bible. And that’s the thing. He gives you a path out of paganism. That’s one of the reasons why he’s so successful. It took him a long road to get there. Well, I guess it really wasn’t that long of a road. It was actually pretty short of a road to get there, if you think about history. It feels like a long time, or maybe a decade, a decade and a half. But in the course of history, he’s there rapid, pretty quick. Well, yeah. And look, Peterson does draw those lines, and he flips you over from the pagan myths to a better version of the myths that happens to be in this book. And like, okay, fair enough. It’s a great trick. I’ve got a video on it. It’s got over a thousand views. It’s fantastic. Yeah, I think he’s like a voice in the wilderness for many. I mean, that’s been the case for a long time. I mean, the fact that he was even that Jordan Peterson was getting on people’s radar, where he had just very poor production in his classrooms, and people were hearing this. Yeah, production value is still nothing. Yeah. Peterson is too Jungian, which is anti-Jungian. Jungian is not anti-Christian, even a little bit, sir. I would agree with Anselman. I have a pretty hard line on orthodoxy. Jung is not anti-Christian. No. Jung was very clear that he thought Christianity was actually a really good thing, and probably the best religion, but he was waffling because he wasn’t all in. Fair enough. Well, the reason why it’s difficult, the difficulty is there’s the, which I think you have this third way idea, but there’s this, there’s inner out idea in most orthodox Christianity. And so, to state that someone’s anti-Christian is really just saying, there’s the narrow gate and the narrow road, and he’s not on it. And it’s not, I mean, they’re new. That’s the problem, is that identification against the false psychotomy is, that’s a hard no for me. Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if you saw the third wayism talk that I did with VanderKlay, but that actually was the problem. I did see quite a bit of it, yeah, I did. What did you think? I wish it were longer. I think you guys should have talked for a lot longer. Oh, tell him, comment, send him an email, say you need to do another one of those. There’s far too much ground to cover in that. I mean, I think the entirety of the first episode should have been you laying out the entirety of the position. And then maybe the second would be, you know, VanderKlay going into the specifics and distinctions. But that would be not, yeah. Well, he’s only recently come to see what I was talking about. Ethan, anyone catch Verveke talking about how everyone in the church is failing to be a true Christian this week in the PBK video? I did not see that, but yeah. Verveke said that? By what standard is he measuring that? Oh, Verveke’s been saying that for ages. Well, by what standard? Verveke doesn’t have any standards. He’s a scientist. He does use objective material reality, Bruce. Come on. Yeah, so in that case, I don’t care what you said. Verveke wouldn’t know true Christianity if Jesus slapped him in the face. You can confirm. That would be Yeah, that’s interesting. He would be a mess if that happened. Elizabeth, he sets himself up as if he doesn’t know who. Verveke? Yeah, certainly Verveke does. Mark, how could you say that? Scientists have standards, they have convictions, they have the laws of physics. Come on! What, what, how do they, they can’t account for unity amongst diversity. They have to presuppose it. This is true. They can’t account for anything. They just think, I like how Peterson nails them on the, it’s all embedded in narrative, and then the postmodern Verveke cries. It’s like, alright, whatever. Well, this was, the gloves were off on this whole thing many, many years ago when he talked to Sam Harris. And it was like, oh, they’re never going to reach an impasse here. They’re never going to reach an agreement, rather. They were an impasse immediately. Peterson doesn’t, he won’t go out, it’s like, I would eviscerate Sam Harris like four seconds. And he’s like, urgh, I’d love to do it too. And that’s one of the things that stopped me from even trying. It’s like, no, you’re going to enjoy that way too much, my friend. Way too much. That would be far too enjoyable. Yeah. But nobody wants to defeat him. And I’m like, no, there’s a truth. You people frickin’ talk about capital T truth. And then when it comes to a capital T truth crane that is easy to back up, you back up. Like, you just go with being is good. Okay. Take your capital T truth and shove it where the sun don’t shine. Go ahead. Try to dismantle that axiom. Go ahead. Okay. And if you succeed and don’t immediately kill yourself in the moment, you’re a performative, contradicting liar. How’s that? Sure. Would you classify Harris as a soothsayer? Absolutely. Oh yeah, I did earlier. Yeah, you did. Okay. I like Sam Harris as a soothsayer for sure. Yeah. For sure. One of the things that I think even he cannot do. He’s just lying about the whole thing. One of the things I think more people need to come to realize is when they’re in dialectic, dialogos, right, with people, just because a person has a better wielding of the dialectic sword, it does not give you a loss. It’s only a loss in that frame, maybe, but that’s, you’re playing a game that you’re not even supposed to be playing. That’s the logic reason and rationality doesn’t, that’s form of enchantment. And you gotta be careful about it. Not that it’s necessarily bad, but you have to be careful. You have to know because I can do it with any, I can prove anything is, literally anything is correct using logic and reason and rationality. It’s not hard. It’s a fun game. It takes a while, but like, it’s not hard. It’s just not that difficult. Yeah. Yeah, it’s a chess match. Yeah. Well, look, Kehler did it. He justified the Holocaust. It wasn’t hard. I can justify the Holocaust using completely different rationality, by the way. It’s not hard. It’s not right. It’s not morally good. It’s not ethical, but it’s easy to do with science. Well, and obviously it is easy to do with science because people find utility in that, and so they’ll just subscribe to it. If it weren’t easy to do, then they would deny it. Ethan, Mark, lol, lol, great on the being is good person suicide. That conversation always ends there. Exactly. You people need to take out them swords and start a cotton away at these ass weasels. Well, the question would be, and it would always go to a definition of terms. And so you’d have to say what is being and what is good. They have to agree on it. No, no, you don’t. I mean, that’s the only way to talk about it. No, no, no. You can just say being is good. And if you don’t believe so, you have to kill yourself right here and now. Otherwise, you’re going to perform the contradiction. And they have no way out of that. None. And I’m fine with that. Like, look, if you don’t think you’re good, get rid of yourself. And I think I’m good. Like that works on all fractal layers automatically. And people don’t see it right away. It’s like if you think you’re not good and you’re a being, then you should commit suicide and leave the good beings on the planet. It totally works either way. And you can’t actually get around it. I like that. Ethan, or worse, killing your child, which actually happened on the aptmc server. Yes, it did. Oh, that’s terrible. Oh, that is terrible. Oh, they’re terrible people. Was this an abortion thing or more than that? No, no, they did. They’re all Gnostic, that’s cool people. It’s Jamie. Good is indefinable. No, it’s not. Well, even if you were to take the colloquial terms of good and being, which is what I think you’re doing is fair, they wouldn’t have to admit yes. Any definition. Right, right, right. Again, the performative contradiction handles the…once you bring the participatory knowledge, as John would call it, even though I disagree with that, it’s very useful. You should use it. Participatory knowledge says you’re a being and if you don’t think that’s good, solve the problem for yourself. Okay, go ahead. I have…everyone’s happy. You get what you want. You can keep the badness out of the world by ending your life. And I get what I want, so I don’t have to listen to your ridiculous retarded arguments. Everyone wins. Everyone wins. It’s a win-win situation. The Lord will sort them, huh, Mark? No, no, they’ll sort themselves and then God will do what he will with their sorting. I don’t… No, that’s what I mean. The Lord will sort them after they’ve sorted themselves. Right, after they’ve sorted themselves. No, no, I’m happy to give them their individualism and shove it right up their ass on their way out of this earth. Take your individualism and go. That’s all you got. So take it and go. But they don’t. And that’s the point, right? They won’t. That’s the performative contradiction. That’s when you get to win because it’s like, well, dude, you’re still here. Now what? I guess being is good, huh? Or are you admitting that you’re evil? Well, they can’t. You’re really screwed now, aren’t you? Yeah, they would never do that. See, that’s what I mean. Like, why not nail Sam Harris to that cross and laugh the whole time through? Because I would be gleeful. I would just be like… Well, I mean, yeah, yeah. I’m actually curious. I’m kind of curious how he would do that. I would imagine he would do some sort of sophistry that would, again, go back to semantic definitions game. He’d have to try, but it wouldn’t work. Like, you can… All the sophistry in the world isn’t going to save you from being as good and you haven’t committed suicide yet, so you have to agree or admit that you’re evil. But if you’re the problem, then wow, that’s a different issue. It’s prime by me. Either way, I don’t… The answer you give does not change the solution one bit. Any answer you give is going to end in the same solution. I’m okay with those things. I think they’re great. Ethan at Bruce, you’d error in giving quantitative measure to qualitative things. Lynn, don’t Christians believe in original sin? We do. But that doesn’t mean being isn’t good. That means that goodness… that being isn’t perfect. Really? Exactly. That’s the difference. Big update, Bruce, Jesse. Being isn’t perfect. Thanks, Captain Obvious. It’s almost as though there’s a distinction. I’m not Captain Obvious. It’s almost as if there’s a distinction between being itself and human being. Right? God is being itself. God doesn’t even exist, actually. If you want to be… He’s beyond existence. Yes. We exist. Therefore… The other thing is with something like original sin, you have a frame for what evil is and how it’s corrected and what’s good. They don’t have a frame in the non-creation standard. I don’t know where that is. There isn’t really a frame for it. It’s not that there isn’t. It’s that you can’t conceive of one and appeal to it because they’re non-hierarchical. And then, yeah, all claims are now equal. Thanks, Postmodern Recharts. Anselman, God gives us being so it is good. Wow, that’s one way to look at it. Sure. Ethan, Bruce, defining being… Bruce, defining being in good. Yeah, exactly. Anselman, God allows us to suffer the flaws of original sin but makes us in his image despite that. Well, I’ll admit it’s in his image first. Lynn, most of those people believe being is good. No, they don’t. They say it but they don’t believe it. Most of them believe emergence is good or the new thing, they believe rationality or order is good. And that’s it. Like the science people are, order is good people or rationality is good. Yeah. But even… The difficulty there is even getting them to admit that there is a good. So they wouldn’t even be able to say that this is necessarily good. They would say it’s not ultimately good. It’s only relatively good based on cultural consensus or whatever other sort of Marxist ideas they want to use for that. Well, they have to because otherwise they’d be judged and they’re falling short. And the answer is be better. Don’t whine about falling short. Just be a better person. Yeah. I agree. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s how you know the soothsayers, right? They’re usually giving you perfect answers. They’re not setting boundaries around the stuff they’re talking about. They’re not talking about sacrifices and tradeoffs, right? They’re just kind of pitching something to you. And that’s it. And you know, it’s not hard to see once you start paying attention to it. You’re like, oh, there’s a soothsayer. There’s a soothsayer. There’s another soothsayer. They’re everywhere. And it’s not necessarily bad. Like it’s just you need to be careful for yourself. Hey, Chad. How you doing, sir? Good. I’ve come to soothsay. Chad, what’s up, man? What up, bulls? How’s it going there, eh? Yeah, I’m just, oh yeah, you know, just having a quick smoke and watching. We’re watching dude, you know the British television’s got some good shows, man. Yeah, we talked about some of them earlier. I’m going to wake up early tomorrow to watch the coronation. 5am Eastern Time. I’m not going to make it. I’ll catch you on the YouTube. Too early for me. We haven’t seen a coronation in our lifetime. At least I have. I mean the last one was in the 50s. On YouTube, I gotta wake up at like I gotta wake up at like 5 in the morning and talk. Gavin’s got a guy who wants to talk with me and then I gotta have a men’s breakfast at the church that I’ll be cooking for at 7 o’clock, which would be good. That would be good. Oh, great. Good for you. Oh, cool. So you’re going to cook? Yeah, yeah. So once a month there’s a men’s meeting, a men’s breakfast at the church. And, um. Cool. And I was like, well, I want to do something. So I’m coming. You’re going to be slinging some bacon and eggs? That’s it, man. Chad, have you seen Taskmaster? I don’t know what that is. Benjamin Franklin wants to know. Taskmaster? No, I haven’t. Okay. I don’t know what that is. Have you guys, uh, I’ve been really being self-promotional lately. Not like that guy who promotes his navigating patterns. But I’ve been, uh, I just started a sub stack. I was wondering if you guys had a chance to read my terrible, uh, very poorly technical. I have not, Chad. Sorry. I, uh, I haven’t. You started a sub stack. Alright. Good for you. This is like a blog spot of the early 2000s. Taskmaster is a great British TV show and he’s, Benjamin Franklin’s been watching it lately. Also, Jamie, if good is definable and it is, then define it. I did, actually. Any definition can only point towards good things. Yeah, that’s true. Already done. Also, a topology, but not a problem. Jamie is one of our resident writers at the, uh, Peter Pan’s, uh, storyboard. I believe that’s the same Jamie. Could be. I don’t know. Cool. Nick? Hello. It’s good to see you, my friend. It’s positive news. Hey, you know that? I enjoyed the bonanza nostalgia on PVK today. I missed the bonanza nostalgia. Bonanza nostalgia. I’ve been listening to The Godfather and there’s a bazini in there. Yes, there is. Pretty good book, man. You know, like there’s something strange about, uh, a book that’s about family and tradition and, uh, discipline. And yet they’re kind of, well, they’re evil, but still. At least they have discipline. I mean, the mob? Yeah. That’s part of the whole thing. That’s kind of what, uh, what kept a lot of Long Island together for so long. Right. And it’s an absolute mess now. I’m not biased anyway, of course. No, no. I mean, look, yeah, long history. And the thing is, family first, family second, and family third, right? And everything else is subservient to that. And then it gets really worse. You expand family and then things get corrupted over time. Yeah, the only problem with it. Family. I wonder which movie series I’ve heard that in that’s got to do with the mob. Something to do with being fast and being furious and family. I’ve actually never watched any of those movies. They’re all about the CIA. If you do not get that from the start, you’ve missed something. They’re all about the CIA. You get the F9, which we watched two weeks ago. CIA. They literally say CIA group. It’s crazy. Yeah, it’s funny. You just spoiled it for me. Yeah, thanks. The first movie is truly special. I really enjoyed the first movie a lot. I’ve seen it a few times and every time it’s just as good. That’s great. I’ll have to watch it. I will say speaking of TV, I just watched the new Reacher series on Amazon. Good. I was blown away. I thought it was good. It wasn’t terrible. I was surprised. It was good as it relates to Reacher, man. Because I like the Reacher books. See, I haven’t read them, but I kind of want to now. No, they’re good. They’re good candy. It’s definitely got that machismo thing that I love. Winter’s Bone is an interesting movie, says Neutri now. I never heard of it. I just went to see John Wick 4 with my wife. She was like, hey, you want to go see a movie? I’m like, sure. She’s like, let’s go see John Wick. I was like, oh, okay. We go and I’m sitting through this movie and I’m like a quarter of the way in and I’m thinking to myself, why the hell am I watching this movie? This is absolutely absurd. It’s just literally like murder porn and it’s like Where’s the downside? It’s the negatives. Waiting for the negatives. You have to sell it to me. Actually, I think Peugeot was talking about something in a recent conversation about modern art being I can’t remember how he put it, but I was like, oh, that’s exactly the John Wick movies. It’s like, it’s just It’s not pointed up anymore, right? But there was some sort of symbolism in there. It’s like, it’s not just I can’t remember how he said it, but it was a perfect description of it. It was like, yeah, I mean, the cinematography is beautiful and the art in the film is like high art and it’s really nice looking, but it’s like there’s literally no story in the movie. In the fourth? Yeah, it’s just, I mean, John Wick’s story ended in the first movie. All the story there, everything else is just like almost Everybody misses the story in the first movie. Yeah, because it’s not It’s designed to create a mythos. It’s not designed to be a story. It’s designed to create the archetype of the professional killer and the organization. It’s not as wholesome as He-Man Masters the Universe, clearly. Yeah, I mean, he, yeah. Yeah. It’s just… Chad, what did you think was the story of John Wick 4? And I will tell you that you missed something. The story of John Wick 4? Yeah, which I thought was the best out of all the ones other than the first one. The first one’s classic, but if you have to compare the last three, the fourth one actually has a lot more going on underneath the surface than you realize. I haven’t seen the fourth one. I want to see it. I wouldn’t say that there was a lot more going on underneath. I would say that you have people that are torn between friendship and basically their duty to do what it is that they’ve always done, what they feel their destiny is. And then justifying it by saying that they need to protect their families. So you did not pick on anything to do with legacy? No. Because the whole, that’s the whole thread of John Wick, is that he has this legacy which he’s not living up to. And then it’s the inciting incident. It’s not the death of the dog, it’s what the dog represents. It’s, I mean, Mark Sorktow, that’s a fast map, but it’s the death of the dog. The dog being this representation, this legacy, this memory of his old life, but also the purification of his old life. And the dog is a purification symbol, and now that purification symbol has died, he therefore becomes, he resurrects his you know. There’s no legacy. The fourth film is, yes, that’s, dude, do you have, the Chinese guy is corrupt, essentially. They’re all corrupt characters trying to purify themselves and their legacy and what they’ll be remembered for. What they think is a legacy, there is no legacy. That’s the point. Lin wants to know if a dog dies in the new one, so that she can avoid watching it. No. No dog die, no. Well, I mean, that’s the, yeah, the fact that they’re corrupt now doesn’t mean there’s no legacy. And I think that’s very much the theme. Catherine Brodsky wrote an article recently, or did a video actually, recently on her YouTube channel, Random Minds, about should we save institutions, right, which is about legacy. And she basically said, yeah, and that’s because you and I can’t build institutions. Like, that’s almost impossible. And so we better fix the ones we have. How do you fix them? Well, the corruption is in the people. And in some cases, people are trying to purify themselves and restore, because they know, unconsciously, in some cases, but they know they’re corrupt and they’re not going to leave a good impression for future generations. And that’s very much, like, people are struggling with this right now in society. Like, what do we do about this problem? We can’t just burn it all down. That’s anarchy. You don’t burn it down. It’s not, yeah. We’re not looking for revolution. We’re looking for reform. Right. So much different thing. That’s what happens in the fourth film. Well, that’s what I’m saying. What I’m saying about the fourth film is that this is what the thing is. There’s a guy that comes in there, there’s a new young kid, and he wants to do things how he does it, and the agency gives him power to do that. And then the old timers use the- No, no. He takes power for himself. He takes his own finger off to give him power. He literally- He literally corrupts himself. He literally cuts off his finger, which is this whole yakuza metaphor going on, where you corrupt a little bit of yourself for the sake of power. So he- They don’t give him power. The entire film, he’s pursuing power. He’s doing whatever he can to get that power. Who are you talking about? The- The- I’m the guy with the dog. Not him. I’m not talking about him. Oh, okay. I’m talking about the guy that- All the- Yeah. So this guy comes in. They give him power to run the show, and he doesn’t know how to handle that. And then the old timers use the law to put things back in order, and this guy doesn’t know how to actually play inside that game. And he’s full of hubris. And everybody important in that movie dies, and there is literally no legacy. It’s just- It’s useless. It was a completely useless story. Well, but that story of now, right? Everyone’s complaining. The Boomers won’t step aside and give us power, which is a lie. It’s ridiculous. And what’s happening is they’re not competent to do anything, and they know it. And so instead of admitting it and trying to become competent, they’re going, It’s literally not the Boomers’ fault. It’s like, it’s literally not the Boomers’ fault. You can step up and take power anytime you want. You can show that you’re responsible, but no one wants to be responsible. They don’t want to lead because leadership requires sacrifice, and you have to take responsibility, and nobody wants it. Yep. That’s been happening since before the Boomers, to be fair. Oh, no, no. I’m not saying it’s a Boomer-specific thing. I’m just saying- Oh, actually. It is a recurring theme. Right now, however, it really is glaring. Everyone’s like- You’re still missing it. John Wick 4, he closes the loop, the loop in the cycle of violence that started for the first film. He closes the loop. He doesn’t close the loop. Yes, he does. He does. They literally end with him in the graveyard. How could that not be a symbol of the closing of a loop? And they’re talking about, is he really dead or is he not? No, no. He just ruined it for me. He just kicks everyone. That’s not gonna ruin it, John Wick 4. No, I’m just kidding. I’m kidding. Literally, the Continental is going to be reformed. Literally, the Continental is going to be reformed. It’s useless. The whole thing is stupid. Alright, I gotta go. The guy with hubris. Get schooled. How could that not be a useless story? It’s a useful story. I’ll concede to you. It was a beautiful story, and it was really good, and it was full of fantasy. And I really loved when all the brains were flying all over the place. Let me tell you, that was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. It’s on you. You engaged. Sorry, I respect you, Chad, but I’m doing this for the sake of argument. You willingly, you knew what John 4 was going to be. You knew the context, the frame. Have you never seen any of the other films? No, I’ve seen them, but I just was like I didn’t remember that it was so extreme, dude. It was literally somebody’s head getting blown off every five seconds. What? But you knew, violence is violence. More realistic, more stylized. I like a great violent movie like anybody else. But I want a great violent movie with a great story. And this did not have it. That’s fair. If you didn’t see the story, you wouldn’t see the story. What do you think is a great violent story? The Patriot? There’s this man, the man. That’s the best violent story. Point to something that you think is the best example of that. Okay, I gotta go. Bye. I think that was the issue. Reformation is about the lines and holding. No matter what, I would say Reformation is about cleaning house and getting rid of the evil people. I totally agree. Lynn agrees with Chad. I think that in order to reform, you have to figure out what’s wrong and fix it. And the thing that’s always wrong are people, not the institutions, but the people. And on that note, we need to reform this live stream because we’ve gone three hours, which is a little bit longer than I wanted. So I’m gonna take a 10 minute break and I’m gonna open an after party. And I hope everybody will join for the after party. I hope we’ll get even more voices. But I will be back. I’ve just gotta take a 10 minute break. Because that’s the new rule. And it’s Jesse’s fault. So if you don’t like it, blame him.