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

All right. It says we’re live. I don’t know if we’re actually live, but that’s what it says. So the opening for this is all about, we’ll say, a set of comments that Adam made to me all about not just the Barbie movie, although that’s how it started, but also about the other movie, a previous film, and I’m going to make a case for both those films. And I have just returned from seeing Barbie. And I will tell that story right after Adam tells us about the framing for how this live stream actually came to be. Go ahead, Adam, take it away. Well, so about three weeks ago, that’s about two, three Sundays ago, I was at Mass at church and usually what we do is we go with some young men around my age, some are a little bit older, most of them are probably a little bit older than me, there are a few who are a little bit younger, and we’ll go to have some breakfast after Mass. And up until this point I basically not even heard about the Barbie movie. I think I might have seen somebody talk like one mention of it and I was like, who cares about that, you know? But then something really strange happened. These are kind of associates, these aren’t, let’s say, really good friends. But I knew them for a while, the past six months, you know, kind of on and off seeing them. And they just kind of started mentioning Barbie all of a sudden during my breakfast, during our breakfast. But in my head I’m like, okay, well, I don’t know anything about Barbie. These guys are all kind of immersed in the world of Barbie, and they start talking about the film. It’s strange because some of the younger guys were, so one was 17, one was 18, they didn’t really have much to say about it, but it was the older guys, around guys my age, maybe 23, a little bit older, some of them were 28 or 27, started talking about it. And they used a very particular phrase, which I was very perturbed by. They said, in relation to Ken, they started using all of these words. I heard Kennergy, you know, Kennergy, what is this? So they utter a very specific phrase, you know, he’s in relation to Ken, which is one of the characters in the Barbie movie, apparently. He’s literally me. And I just, there was, I mean, the whole conversation was revolving around Barbie as well. I mean, I was very much used to it actually just trying to kind of get into, you know, how it was power people’s weeks, all this sort of thing, the sort of things you might talk about with somebody when you’re eating breakfast with them, you know. But no, it became dominated by Barbie, and you had all, and it was very strange because you also had political framing in it as well. So some of them might have said, you know, oh, it’s very, what was it, they might have said, oh, it’s very right wing. And it’s like, hmm, there’s very, like the kind of, let’s say the quality of conversation, but even the world in which we were kind of discussing things became very flat all of a sudden. And so I was very perturbed by this and I thought, well, I gotta see whether anyone else has heard of Barbie. So, I mean, I mentioned it to Mark and Manuel, I think pretty soon after. And yeah, that was very weird. I was very, very disturbed. And luckily, Mark and Manuel helped me think that through. Yeah, that was weird. Yeah, that was very weird. In fact, very disturbing. Another interesting part about that conversation was it wasn’t just Ken that these young men, very good, I would say very good young men, identified with it. So with Ken, they said literally me, but then they made the reference to Joker, the Joker film, which came out in 2019. And so I just found it very strange because the conversation kind of, the quality kind of dropped and we were all in this kind of flat world of, oh, Ken is literally me. And I found actually, I noticed the younger guys, 18, 17, didn’t actually, the previous week and the previous week before that, they were actually kind of interested in the conversation because they just wanted to enjoy a meal, really, I think, and have a bit of small talk and really just enjoy each other’s company. But then they kind of quietened down. It was the older guys who got into it. And so that’s my context for even finding out about Barbie to begin with. So that’s my in on this. Ever since then, my mind has been occupied occasionally with thoughts on Barbie. Yeah. Yeah. I remember you telling me about this, telling me about not only are they identifying with Ken, but also this identification with Joker. And what happened was I heard this and I was like, Adam, you’re a nice guy. I know you well. You must be lying. This can’t. No. Just a no. Unvoked. Yep. Fair enough. So the way I saw the Joker was I was watching Sargon of Akkad, it was 2019, right? Watching Sargon of Akkad, he goes to see the movie, comes back, does a movie review on his channel, right? And the first thing he says is you should watch this movie first. Now, he hadn’t ever done that before. So I stopped, went to the movie theater 10 minutes down the street, saw that it was showing in like 15 minutes, walked in and watched the movie, decided that that Joker movie was in fact the best movie in the past 10 years. Okay. Now comes this comment and I’m like, wow, how could anybody identify with Joker? It’s overtly a bad character. It’s designed to be a negative anti-hero, you know, type nah kind of character. And well, anti-hero in the fantasy world, right? Actually not even close to a hero, an actual villain, right? Thinks he’s an anti-hero in his head, right? It’s really strange. It’s a really strange film, but it’s also brilliant and beautiful and awesome. Yeah. So I hear about this film and then I’m down at the Washington DC conference, right? Which was on, roughly speaking on community and reviving culture. And I’m there with Pastor Paul Van Ducais, my wonderful friend. And he tells me on three different occasions over the two days, you must see this movie. And I’m like completely puzzled. And I had watched his review. And in his review of Barbie, what he basically says is, watch Ben Shapiro’s review, I watched Critical Drinkers review, I watched the movie. There’s more here. This is a very important movie. They’re not wrong. And I’m like, oh, and then his review interferes with their reviews. And I’m completely puzzled. I’m baffled by this, completely baffled by this. And then what happens is, I start looking at what’s going on with the Barbie movie, right? I watched the Ben Shapiro review. I’d already seen the Critical Drinker review. Then I saw another Ben Shapiro review with Brett Cooper, who’s a 21-year-old female. And Ben and Brett are talking about the same movie, but they’re not talking about seeing the same thing at all. And I’m like, well, that’s more than a little strange. And then you start to hear these patterns. That’s what I do, patterns. And I’m like, oh, this is a weird, these are not normal sorts of patterns. So we were going to do this last weekend, but things. So I decided to go see the movie. So I just got back from seeing Barbie. And the point is not actually to talk about Barbie per se, although I have a lot to say about that, if I can manage it. And maybe I should say nothing, because words are insufficient. I am really having a hard time wording in general. I feel like my ability to word has been broken in some fundamental fashion. Yeah, well, look, I mean, Barbenheimer for real, like I, I’m not going to say Barbenheimer for real. Like I, whatever zeitgeist that is, is dead on. Like this Barbie is the nuclear weapon of storytelling. I mean that in every possible interpretation, good and bad. Like it is a fascinating, fascinating film on so many levels. But the real point is, why are we living in a world where people are identifying with characters that don’t have any known positive affect with lost characters? The Joker is very much a lost character. Why are people identifying with Ken in Barbie? Because Ken is basically an NPC in Barbie land. And then he goes into the real world and becomes an un-NPC or sees what the world would be like if he weren’t an NPC and says like, wow, I’m respected. That’s amazing. Totally reasonable by any standard. Right. And then he goes into Barbie land. This is just one of many potential interpretations of the Barbie movie, which is valid because it’s there. Right. Goes into Barbie land and takes over. It takes like five seconds. As Ben Shapiro says, yeah, it takes no time. And so what’s going on there? And then there’s so many flips in Barbie. There’s so many flips. But effectively, the end story for Ken is the Barbies try to take over through using all the standard trope female subterfuge tactics for real. And I think they got all of them even. Like I bat your eyelashes, pretend to be stupid, like all these things. And that’s how they sort of take the power back, if you want to quote funky music. Right. So the interesting thing about it is they make the Kens fight with one another, which again is like, this is not a good look. Why are you doing this to women? Right. Yeah. And the guys. And the guys. Well, yeah. And there is no point in the movie where the masculine ethos is allowed to persist, and it is made fun of at the same time. And so there’s, yeah, it’s so difficult to talk about. It’s the final battle where they get this Kennergy stuff from, is this scene where they’re dancing. And so it’s like a West Side story in a lot of ways. Oh, wow. Why are they dancing? They’re getting their energy from, are they dancing alone or together? No, no, they’re dancing together, but they’re supposed to be in a fight, but they’re actually not. And so they’re coming together, two main Kens, because there’s main Kens. Nothing in this movie. If you make any sense out of any part of the Barbie movie, that’s you. It’s not in the film. There is no messaging in the film whatsoever. For real. I wouldn’t have said this was possible. I saw it for myself, having a really hard time with it. Like right now I’m of the mind that if you come out of the movie, you’re going to be in the movie. I’m of the mind that if you come out of this movie and you are not stark, raving, mad after watching it, then you saw whatever you wanted to see in the film. You did not, you did not know two people are going to see the same movie when they go to see this film. You could neurolink those people and they will not see the same movie. It is not possible. There are too many things. I’ve been likening it to a jigsaw puzzle with round pieces, only round pieces, and that nothing is connected in the film. And everything that is overtly explicitly stated in the film is overtly explicitly subverted in the film. So it’s not even subversion. It’s just flat out denial. Because like, well, we know we said we’re a for-profit company, but we’re really not. But then what are you doing? You know, and it’s not underneath. It’s all explicit. A lot of the movie is just shot-for-shot remakes of other movies, like West Side Story and The Matrix for real. There’s so many Matrix references in this film. It’s almost like they should sue. This is insane. You almost didn’t make your own movie. Yeah, all the seminal…and they’re all subverted. Every single Matrix scene is also subverted. At one point, it just turns into a Pac-Man game, which I love Pac-Man, so I’m all in. But really? So I now have to say that either The Joker is the best movie in the past 10 years or Barbie is the best movie in the past 10 years. And whichever one you pick, the other one is garbage. Because The Joker was a coherent, consistent, beautifully made film. And Barbie is an incoherent, inconsistent, beautifully made film. And I did a tweet earlier today, just a few minutes ago, actually before the stream, kind of summarizing my thoughts on this particular film. And Barbenheimer is real. That ethos is real. This is a destruction. And the real question is not, how did they make the movie? Why did they make the movie? Why are people identifying with The Joker? Why are people identifying with Ken in this crazy movie, which is a movie? You’re going to put it in context. It’s the Barbie movie. It’s made for women. It was advertised to women. It’s primarily a woman story. And yeah, there is a story Ken in there. And it’s appealing to men. And it’s appealing in a way that they resonate with. I mean, that’s how you get a billion dollar movie. You’re not going to get a billion dollar movie cutting the movie audience in half. That’s not going to work. You get a billion dollar movie because you can get both sexes to go. It’s going to offer something for both of them. And it actually does do that, but not in the advertising. So the real question is, how did we arrive at a point in time, at a way of being in the world, at a culture that would be able to make this movie Barbie? And I would to some extent make the same argument for The Joker because The Joker is a pretty tough film at the end of the day. It’s a difficult film in many, many ways, just not in the ways Barbie is. How is it that people would be attracted to this film in this way? How is it that they would find a message in a film like this? Because I’m just not sure. I mean, you are going to see a reflection or you’re going to go crazy, one of the two. You cannot analyze the Barbie movie. It’s not actually possible because there isn’t a coherent message in it to analyze or critique. So you can’t actually do that. You’re already at the quote meta, even though I hate that word, level. You’re at the level of what the hell just happened, not how do I understand what I saw? You’re not going to understand what you saw. You’re going to see if you’re Ben Shapiro. I’ll answer for you right here, Mills. Is it a mirror? If you’re Ben Shapiro, you’re going to give the stereotypical Ben Shapiro political movie review based on the propositions that you normally talk about. If you’re a critical drinker, you’re going to give the quintessential critical drinker review that you normally give on a movie made in Hollywood in the past 15 or 10 years, whatever time frame he’s using. That’s what you’re going to do because that’s what you’re going to see because that is also there along with every other possible combination of every other possible thing that you could possible in your possible brain. It is remarkable to me. But the question really is about this framing. How is it that people are framing their lives such that they are identifying with Ken, who’s an NPC in the movie, or the Joker, who is an anti-hero in his head but an actual villain in the movie, has a psychotic break that is not hidden or subverted in the Joker? How are people saying he’s literally me to either, much less both, of the characters? That’s really the question at hand. I mean, this is the thing that intrigued me enough to say, we need to do a stream on this. This is really important and prompted me to go see the Barbie movie first after a long string of hours of doing nothing but I recall difficult intellectual work, live-screen, play it at a book club, straight into the movie, and now we’re here. So it’s been a busy Saturday for me. So what do you think, Adam? Where do you want to go? Well, I’ll give additional context in terms of how you can get very multiple interpretations of the movie because I remember on that same day, I think it was, we went out for some pints in the afternoon, evening, and they were talking about the Joker movie again. And one of the guys mentioned, oh, you see Ken, he goes, Ken towards the end, he goes, MGTOW, he goes, MGTOW, men going their own way. Yeah. And I was like, okay, right. And then, because I hadn’t seen it, I was like, okay, but then what happens to Barbie? And then he says, oh, she, you know, there’s a scene of her walking, what’s it, into a gynecologist or something, she’s got kids and stuff. Now you mentioned that those scenes were fuzzy. Now I didn’t get that detail at the time. So what I was filtering on was like, okay, so maybe it is a MGTOW message, but then he’s like, oh, it’s so, so, it’s a good message. It’s really what we’re looking for, not as people, but to have out there so people can see. Right. And I had to say, like, because this is a Catholic, right, this, actually, this man is about to get, this man is going to be married in a couple of months. And I said to him, yeah, but I mean, I don’t know, I don’t know, is that really all that good considering Barb, like who’s, who’s, because Ken is ostensibly, let’s say, let’s say, I’m not, you know, is ostensibly like the husband of Barbie, right? This is a little bit, you know, this is a little bit stretching it, right? But then I said, I said, okay, who married Barbie? Like who, because it’s not Ken, if he’s gone his own way. And like, you know, I was kind of pointing out, like, well, maybe there’s, you know, you might say, MGTOW is all great. I was like, yeah, but what about, like, maybe there’s some divorce going on here as well. And maybe that’s not so good. In terms of messaging that’s being put out to people, in terms of sundering, sundering of bonds, which I’m sure there’s plenty of other examples of that in the film. Yeah, I wonder, I wonder about, at least from the context I was coming from, what young men see in that, in Ken, or in Joker. I will say that there was a time where I sort of would have looked at Joker, and there would have been something of that, that would have called out to me. And, you know, identifying with that fantasy, identifying with all of that. But, you know, Joker is a vile character. And, you know, he doesn’t have a happy ending. And that’s fine in some sense, because it’s like, well, maybe we’re not all cut out for happy endings. But his ending is not just a non-happy ending, rather an unfortunate ending. It’s an ending where there’s no hope, an ending where there is no, let’s say, the theological virtues, there’s no charity, there’s no faith. And, I mean, that’s worrying that you would have men who are going to church every Sunday, kind of identifying with that. And I feel like there’s probably something of that identification that’s actually pushing the brakes on their progression in that sort of life that they’re looking to lead, which is funny, because, you know, there’s kind of two opposite poles. One is trying to bring them out of themselves into the world, and the other is trying to get them to rail against it and animise themselves as well. Yeah, and I did want to read my tweet, because my tweet is, I don’t even know how I did this tweet. The Barbie movie is both peak postmodern and destroyer of worlds. The meaning crisis is explicitly stated by Barbie, by the way. Subversion and nothing else. No two people can see the same movie. Beauty manifests as destruction itself. No true and no good. That’s why Barbenheimer is real. And the thing about this film, and like there’s so many pieces I could pick, because there’s just an infinite number of pieces in the movie, that everything that works in the film is propositional except, and again, it’s so, like it’s beyond fascinating. The mother-daughter broken relationship that is part of the underpinning of one of the threads of the film is mended by singing together in a car. That’s what it’s like. Which just harkens back to DC, and my observation that, yeah, we opened with song, and that worked pretty well, and there was no conversation. Everything else, however, is magic words. The way they disenchant the Barbies from the Ken enchantment, so when Ken comes back early into Barbie land and takes the place over in like five seconds, the Barbies are happy to be stereotypical housewife women. And it’s weird, because it’s not even seen as a bad thing. It’s not even seen as a bad thing. Like they’re opening beers for their men, and it’s very, very bizarre. And it wasn’t like that before. The jarring. It was jarring. Yeah. Right. But then what ends up happening is the one woman from the real world talks to them. So they grab them one at a time. She gives them a speech that snaps them out of the spell. It’s actually what happened. Unabashedly what happened. And then, and then, so this MGTOW thing, this is puzzling to me, because it’s like, did you just take the second half of the scene? How did you get there? Because what happens is the Barbies take over, and Ken’s like, I don’t know who I am. And she goes, you’re Ken. And he’s like, no, it’s Barbie and Ken. And she goes, yes, but you’re just Ken. And he’s like, there is no just Ken. It’s Barbie and Ken. I only exist, basically, from your attention, which they stated earlier in the movie. Ken lives for Barbie’s attention, which is totally backwards, like totally completely backwards. Right. And so that is, to me, like there’s no MGTOW message there. He’s being let go and cut off. Yes. And the way she snaps him out of it is maybe it’s Barbie and it’s Ken. So she literally inserts a contraction into the previous phrase that he had spoken, and that makes him his own person. Oh, no. Right. I was just like, no. You know, like, I can’t, you can’t be watching this. This can’t happen. And then if you did, who would identify that as MGTOW? The statement of the movie is Ken is nothing without Barbie and she just cut your ass off, dude. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s not even the statement of Barbie. That’s the statement of Ken and the narrator. And there’s all this fourth wall breaking throughout the film. Yeah. Like the fourth wall is just like, there ain’t no real fourth wall. It’s more like the fourth thing. The fourth fence. It’s not even a fence. It’s almost like an open window. It’s the fourth open window. It’s really what it is because it’s constantly being leaked in through various methods. Some of them are covert and some of them are overt. But I don’t think Mills is correct. Joker is about someone who has reached the limit of society’s ability to carry him. We’re all there, dude. Joker is about so many things that narrowing it down to one thing would be kind of silly. Joker is about the struggle of the common man, which is interesting, contrasted to the lens of somebody who’s insane in a way that he fancies himself to be sane, which is an interesting, that’s why Joker’s probably the best movie in the past 10 years, because even contemplating doing that at all, much less correctly, is silly. And yet it was done. All right. It’s that good a film. And the issue with Barbie is that that same struggle is there, not being able to understand what being like a normal woman is and why it’s important. And it’s very telling that in the beginning of the film, everybody probably knows this, it starts out taking from 2001 and the monkeys, and they’re smashing the dolls. So the problem is that they’re destroying being itself. And then at the end of the movie, Barbie says, I don’t want to be the one in Barbie land. I want to be the one making meaning. So she wants to literally, she says that explicitly, I want to be the author of meaning. But the problem is the beginning of the film, you’re destroying babies. So and the only relationships that are talked about are wife and my, I forget the phrasing because it’s way too long and silly, but it’s basically my sleep with you when convenient person. And those are really the only two options. There are no other options at all for the male female relationship. And so there’s no relationships of different qualities expressed in the movie. And ultimately no relationships at all expressed in the movie. All the relationships except the mother daughter is broken. And into your point, Barbie’s given a choice, not given a choice. Barbie always had the option to be human. And the Oracle character or equivalent, which is the original creator of Barbie, who was the original CEO of the company until the nineties, by the way, little things they leave out that are important. She basically says, I would be irresponsible if I didn’t show you, you know, what, what you were in for, if you human or something, because it’s not a choice. It’s stated is not a choice. Like, like somehow you manifest it without choice is, is the implication in the film. And so what happens is she grabs her hand and you get these very fuzzy flickery pictures of women with their daughters, not clear. And it’s not stable. And they’re all happy. And so it’s not a warning, but it was couched as a warning. And this is what I mean, like, it’s not really subversion because it’s over. Like none of it is underneath. It’s all just like, yeah, we lied and we lied. And we’re going to say the contradictory thing here. And it’s very disconcerting in the same way Joker’s disconcerting, because they do that with the mental illness, right? They mentally ill, but he has this thing with the woman, but then it turns out he didn’t because of course not. Right. And it’s the same sort of thing in some ways. The delusion is kind of front and center. There’s no, there’s no hiding it in Joker, right? There’s just your, you’re seeing it from his perspective. And then you realize actually this man is something of a psychopath and he’s committing evil acts because he can. Whereas in the Barbie one, you’re never out of that. It’s like a fever or something, a fever dream. It’s not exactly clear where you are and how people act in it is. Well, then it’s both. It’s the two worlds bleeding into each other in both movies. Yeah. Right. And then they’re both perspectival shifts, right? So Joker, you have the perspective of an unreliable narrator, narrator, right? It’s like, okay, we have an unreliable narrator who knows he’s unreliable, but doesn’t know how unreliable obviously. And then in the Barbie movie, we have all this fourth wall breaking from unknown unseen forces. And towards the end of the film, again, this, this, this Oracle type creature, she says, well, I’m asking you to make me human because you’re the creator. And she says, I don’t have that power over you. And I’m just like, what? Oh, no. So, yeah, first of all, was it funny? Because I think it’s supposed to be a comedy. There were three points in the movie where I actually did laugh. Yeah. So my, my connection to the movie is from mostly a Dutch commentary. There’s a bunch of guys that just end up talking at the end of the week. And one week, they just all went, three of them went to, to Barbie. And they, they related to it as, as, as some sort of social commentary, right? And so the, the, the thing, the thing that I’m, well, the way that I see it, it’s like an adolescent girl, right? Like that’s the perspective, because that’s who plays with Barbie, right? Like, well, you play with Barbie when you want to find out what it’s like to be grown up, right? And then the, the, the matrix element, right, is, is when she goes to the gynecologist, right? There’s this, this shift. And I think that’s, that’s symbolizing maturation. So when, when I look at these shady images in the end, right, like I see them as, as the perspective of a little girl as a hope for the future, right? And then all, all of the things that you’re saying are, are in some sense, really flat, right? Like they’re in some sense, a really incompetent relationship to the complexity of life. And, and I think, I think that is maybe true to the experiential perspective of a little girl, right? When- No, but there’s, but, but Manuel, that’s made explicit and it’s made explicit by the woman in the movie. She says being an adult is really hard multiple times. And then she starts to go into why, and the whys are all binaries, every single one of them. You know, they tell you to be pretty, but not so pretty because then you’re a slut and you know, it’s that sort of thing. Oh, yeah. Whoa. Like five minutes. Like there’s a five minute series of this. She’s just going on. It’s America, Ferrara, who, she doesn’t look good. I don’t know what to say about that. Like, she’s not- Well, I just want to say as well, I think it’s a little bit weird as well that the ending, the ending has Barbie, has a Barbie going to a gynecologist. Like this is a, who is the film for in that case? This is very, I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but like this is a very, you know, there’s not really much hidden there, you know? Well, right, but it, but it, but also it’s, it’s who’s the film for and how did they find them? Because the film, one of the threads of the film, because there’s a bunch of them, one of the threads of the film, he’s trying to throw out a bunch of messages, is this woman with a daughter is the one playing with the Barbie. I mean, that’s, and she’s playing God at the same time by drawing sad Barbie and cellulite Barbie and existential crisis Barbie. And I mean, she calls her existential crisis Barbie. Yeah. And the movie’s constantly making fun of itself, you know, like Margot Robbie is sitting there saying, well, I’m not able to do inference, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but if I were, I would say blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it’s like, what just happened? Like, why, why is this a valid thing to do? And I don’t, I can’t explain how damaging and detrimental and have you ever seen a hydrogen nuclear weapon, the hydrogen nuclear weapon test? That’s pretty much this movie. I mean, there’s, there’s harm there. But it’s beautiful. It’s just like the hydrogen nuclear bomb test explosion. It’s gorgeous. It’s destructive, but quite gorgeous. And like, at one point, you know, they’re talking about Barbie and falling apart or whatever, right? Because that’s another thread in the movie, right? It’s motivating that character. And the big narrator, the fourth wall break comes in and says, in some ways, the director couldn’t have chose a less appropriate character than Margot Robbie to play Barbie. Because they’re talking about imperfection in women. And I’m just like, there’s so much wrong with doing something like that, that I can’t explain to you how wrong it is, because words can’t express the wrongness of it. Okay, so I’m just going to make a bold claim that if you look at 80s Dutch television, it’s gonna be worse. Well, that’s possible. That’s possible. What I think I think the intimacy crisis, which leads to the meaning crisis manifests in different cultures at different times in different ways. Right. And I was talking about this on the stream last night, too, about ghost in the shell. And how that’s just Japan is at the end of the meaning crisis. That’s what that is. Right. You want to see where the meaning crisis ends? Go look at go look at ghost in the shell. That is the last stage before where they’re at now, because that was back in the 90s, right? So you can see the manifestation of what bringing up those very questions brings to you. And at the same time, like there’s so much going on in Barbie, like the what is a woman question is there, and it is answered with a duh. And they don’t answer it. Right, multiple times. It’s not once. And and so you get this. It’s basically there is no message. There are no signals, no messages, and no symbols that are coherent in the film. Why are people able to look into it as a mirror? That’s the real sort of question. Well, like when I’m listening, I’m thinking about this word that I’ve been thinking about a lot, affirmation, right? So you well, not affirmation validation, right? So, so like, when someone says duh, right? It’s like, if you just insert your perspective, right, and it and it fits, yeah, then you you get validated, like, oh, yeah, the movie agrees with me. And it’s like, well, if you can insert like 15 perspective, and it doesn’t conflict in any significant way, then everybody gets validated. And it right. It connects to this, this idea of tolerance that I’ve been been talking over thinking about is like, okay, so we’re actually able to house all perspectives, we’re able to tolerate everything, everything can be together in one thing. But it’s also nothing at the same time, right? Because there’s there’s no sharedness apart from that it’s all reflected in the same mirror. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. There’s nothing shared. There’s nothing holding any of it together. And people are and this is what Ben Shapiro is complaining about with the film. They’re kind of forgetting the statements that contradict the previous statements. Sometimes those statements are in the same actual sentence said by the same actual character, by the way. So what is going on with our culture with our society with our communities, that you would watch something like that that have that quality? Or alternatively, the Joker with the quality is the opposite. It’s totally coherent, totally makes sense. But also the good and bad is clear as day. And yet you’re you have people identifying on both sides of the register there. So what is wrong with our society that people are able to do that co-identification or get that validation out of both of those different types of films? Because Joker is a very different type of film. And like I said, either the Joker is the best film in 10 years or Barbie is the best film in 10 years. And it’s one or the other. And the other one is garbage, whichever one you pick, because they they they just have this weird quality in terms of consistency that has that property to it. Yeah, I think at least in my case, in my context that I was giving there, there is there isn’t the intimacy between the people who I was having breakfast with isn’t doesn’t seem to me to be that great in the sense that they might actually be looking for in the sense of affirmation and tolerance. You know, we’re all Catholics, so we’ll say we’ll say we’ll all agree on everything. But really, that’s probably maybe not the case. And that’s fine, actually. There are you know, for I mean, there’s some things, let’s say that we should we should all agree on, but that’s kind of by the by the point being is that in during that entire conversation, we had previous conversations previous week, and there seemed to be a building of intimacy going on there. When the discussions around Barbie came in, that actually seemed to kind of stall out any movement towards closer kind of intimacy, even though on the surface of it seemed like, oh, everyone was agreeing with this, everyone was playing along. Because everyone can see a different thing. There’s nothing to gather around there. You know, and this is and this is happening. This is kind of juxtaposed with us having just come from from church, right, where we’re all gathered, pointing in the same direction around the same thing, you know, singing together in some cases, right. And so I don’t know, I think from my perspective, I think that’s a lot of it’s just coming from a kind of leftover habitual affection for the world that they’re kind of coming out of, and as opposed to the life they’re trying to lead. So the thing that that brought up to me is participation trophy. Everybody gets to participate. But there’s no shared thing in the participation. And so it, and I think this is intentional. I think that’s the postmodern spirit, right? Like everybody gets to be included. But there’s no communion because everybody has to have, like, sometimes you’re forced to your individual interpretation. Like, there’s a, when Mark was talking about the right and wrong and the problems with that, it’s like, well, there’s this conflict in these people, right? Like there’s, well, like Adam was saying, right? Like there’s the past life, and then there’s the ideal, and the ideal is calling, right? And in his case, that is manifest in the church, right? But like everybody has some ideal calling, right? And they know that the ideal asks something of them. And the movie even affirms that that is the case, right? Like, yeah, you’re gonna have to sacrifice, like things are gonna suck. But it’s, yeah, the promise and a way to a resolution is void. And I guess that’s the nihilism that’s sneaking in. But what does a participation trophy do, right? It takes the ideal trophy, the single ideal, and it splits it into a bunch of equal trophies and flattens it out and spreads it across horizontally. And that’s equality doctrine. And I think the interesting thing about, you know, I would say Joker and Barbie in this case, and the story of Oppenheimer, right? Because these patterns happen, right? The interesting thing about all of these stories is that in order for people to find them interesting, certain, some subset of a certain superset of things has to resonate in some particular way, right? And it won’t be the same for all the things. It’s a very complex thing why we find things interesting. But ultimately, what that indicates to me is that there are these unavoidable patterns of interaction. And you kind of see that in the Barbie movie where they’re very clearly trying to make a feminist message, but then very clearly, the story can’t hold together. And so they have to default to talking about traditional roles for women and how pleasant that is. And like at one point, one of the women characters has been taken over in, you know, Ken land all of a sudden. She says, Oh, I don’t have to think anymore. And that’s so much nicer. Yes. So like, is freeing her better? Like, I’m really not sure that like, it doesn’t make an anti feminist point. At the end of the day, this is Ben Shapiro’s critique. It doesn’t the anti feminist message doesn’t work in the film. And like, there’s all of these things. But I think with any good story, whether it be a movie or a book or whatever, you end up in these patterns, they’re unavoidable. And I think the Joker shows this like you end up in the pattern of how do we know what’s real from what’s not real? How do we know we’ll say the topic of my life last night live, you know, unconsciousness live, right? Or the week before sanity, right? The live stream before it was sanity. So you know, you get into these things where it’s like, Oh, what? What? What? What? These are deep questions that everybody has. They’re not. They’re not problems. They’re perennial patterns. Like, Oh, we all get into the pattern of wondering about our own perspective. We all get into the pattern of work wondering about, is it better for us to be in charge? Or is it better for somebody else to be in charge? Right? We all get into the pattern of should I have the burden of knowing this and then having to manage it? Or should somebody else have that burden? And then I can focus on something else that I might be better at or like better, or is more calming to me because of my disposition. Right? These are deep, important questions. They’re all brought up in Barbie. And I would say many of them are brought up in Joker too, in different ways. And that’s the interesting thing. And then we are seeing these manifestations, these patterns and thinking that they provide us with say answers when in fact, they’re patterns. They don’t have answers. They don’t have resolute. I mean, the fact that like Barbie actually explicitly states, well, I like things not to change. And then it’s stated, oh, no, no, only ideas don’t change. Right. So Plato’s forms confirmed by Barbie. Yeah. The neoplatonism in Barbie, that modern neoplatonism, whatever they’re calling neoplatonism, all of that framing is sitting in that movie. Explicitly. It’s not hidden. It’s not under, it’s not Gnostic. It’s not underneath. It’s right out in front of you. They’re actually saying the same things using slightly different language, in some cases not. Yeah. And I think that’s what growing up is. Right? Like you have to face those choices and there’s the wanting to retreat. Right. And then in the case of Ken, there’s a rejection. Right. It’s like, what do you do with that? Right. Like you have a dependency. Right. And it’s funny in that sense that Ken was only there because Barbie needed a partner in real life. Right. Ken was just created so that Barbie wasn’t alone. And yeah, if you identify with that, right? Like there’s no place for me but just to fill this role. And my uniqueness is not contributing to what I’m providing because I think that’s basically it. Right. And then there’s like, well, why is your uniqueness not providing? Right. And if it’s not providing, it’s probably going to be a detriment instead. Well, in Barbie, she is prototype Barbie. So she’s the blonde, original Barbie doll. So she doesn’t have a uniqueness. That’s stated explicitly. Everything is stated, including that. And it’s just bizarre because there is no ending to that line. There’s no resolution to it whatsoever. It’s just stated as is and moved on from. Very much so. And I mean, in many ways, like anybody looking for meaning, right? Or trying to work out the intimacy crisis, it’s not there. It’s like I said, like if you watch this movie and you don’t get a clear mirror of yourself, you are going to go crazy. Because you try to make sense of Barbie, you’re done. Your brain is never going to work again, ever, no matter what. It’s over for you. There is just nothing there. And it is remarkable to me that anybody’s able to make any sense of it other than, like I said, the mirror is clear as day. You’ll see whatever you normally see in a pure form too. And that’s the other thing. It is a pure form, that mirror. And that’s sort of the interesting thing because ultimately, they are children. Both of those movies, Joker, right? A lot of the more recent movies, they are all children. And it is about growing up because they never matured. And the men in the Barbie movie are all like freaking eight years old. It’s just terrible. And interestingly, so I go there on purpose late because I don’t want to see the first 15 minutes of trailers. And there are 25 minutes of trailers. Amazingly enough, I was shocked, utterly shocked. So I get there and I’m like, all right, well, I might as well sit down and watch trailers. And the trailer was for the Marvels. And the Marvels, of course, is Brie Larson and now there’s two other women and they have to cooperate to save the world. So you can see the superhero genre going from a single agent as the savior of the world, the protector of whatever, right? Into this more intimate, if you will, right? Relationship with other characters that are required to save the world. And it’s stated in the trailer, you can’t do it alone. It’s like, oh, so all of a sudden we’re back on the side of community and culture. And I have a video on navigating patterns about this, right? The culture war is not a war between cultures. It’s a fight to have culture or none. And you may not like the option that you have to have culture, but it’s just too thick and bad. Because culture only works within a certain set of constraints and therefore it has a certain set of flaws. And so you’re kind of screwed. And not wanting to grow up is one way to stay out of culture and remake it. Because you can always stay in Barbie Fantasyland or in Joker Delusionland or in, you know, whatever other kind of fantasy that you want and remain in that space as a child with someone else who’s taking care of you. You can still always play make-believe, whatever you want. So it’s interesting to me that there’s an adultness to the child, and the superhero makes that even more extreme. If your superhero is embodying a child, then the agency, the potential that the child can wield is enormous. And that’s problematic. As a child, the reason that it works is because you have a dependency. If you grow out of the dependency without the regulation of your agency, then you get into a conflict. And it seems like the whole of society is on a group level trying to figure out what it is like to grow up. And the answers that are coming out are not mature. There’s still imaginations of immature society. And yeah, I think that’s because there’s a wrestling with the spirits, the spirit of tolerance, the spirit of inclusion. Because the real growing up is realizing that you cannot make these things happen, and you’ve got to find a different path. You’ve got to surrender to reality so that within what you can do, you can reestablish, well, something generative. And I think that’s where everybody’s failing. You can look at the divorce rate and all of that stuff. The capacity to grasp onto the generative and bind yourself is lost. And if we go back to this idea of a child with a lot of agency, that means that if you give up, if you submit to being in a marriage, for example, you have to give up a bunch of stuff. And if you are younger, when you enter the same relationship, you have less buildup that you need to give up. And so even if you have the world view, the framework that can support your choice, it’s still going to be way harder for you, even if you’re having the right intention. Yeah, and I think I do actually want to address this neutrino. I don’t think all fringe is checking adolescence. I didn’t think we were talking about the fringe. And this is the problem. We’re talking about the norm of the population, the middle of the curve. This is a billion dollar movie, Barbie. It’s a billion dollar movie. You don’t get to a billion dollars if you appeal only to one sex. That’s not happening. All right. I mean, women will go to men movies mainly because they want to be with the man. And usually there’s a romantic component in there on purpose to make sure women are happy. Right. And like the pure sort of blood and guts movies, women won’t go see. And pure rom-coms, a lot of men won’t go see a rom-com on purpose. Although I’ve played a few rom-coms, I’m like, oh, this is pretty good. They’re also very good movies in general. But there’s something going on here and it’s something in the middle of society. This fringe don’t go to movies. So they’re not, we’re not the ones we’re talking about. And the inability to deal with where you’re at in life and matching that up to society is really what we’re talking about. So neutrino, how is the joker struck an adolescence? Let me count the ways. First of all, he has fantasies about a woman that aren’t real. Yeah. And the joker believes that he is an average person and he starts out having an average person job and being an average worker on the street. He is not a fringe component. He is pushed to the fringe. And so, and this goes back to the original point that we started with, was why would anybody say the joker he’s literally me, which was what Adam told me. And I was just, I mean, I mean, I’ll say it again. I’m not being funny. I’m like, I like Adam and I believe Adam, but I don’t believe that statement from anybody. I don’t care if Adam says it or whoever comes down or whatever authority. That is an unbelievable statement because how the hell could you possibly identify with the joker except that you feel like an average guy and you feel like you’re pushed to the outside, even though you may not be, which is the worst part about the joker is that a lot of the things he believes about what happened to him and why he is wrong about it is a perspectival problem on his part. It is not a problem with society. And I can understand why if you saw the movie, that’s what you saw. I get that. But also, you know, you saw one possible interpretation, but you didn’t see what I would call the more likely interpretation that he should have, could have been normal if not for the fact that he had this break. And the break was largely precipitated by learning about his history and believing that history of mental illness that sort of predates the start of the movie. It’s a very middle out thinking movie. See my video on navigating patterns for middle out thinking. Right. And so that to me is what’s so fascinating about the movie. And that is, look, that is neutrino. That is the point of the joker. The question in the joker is a very adolescent question. How do you know that your notions are delusional? That’s what the joker deals with. And in many ways, that’s what Barbie deals with too. Right. That’s the whole point. And Mills, Mills, my buddy Mills, that’s an excellent point. Half of the reciprocal narrowing, it starts with the joker. Right. And so why is it that you think that you’ve been destined to play out the part of the joker in the joker movie? Well, what would lead you, what would put us in a position where we have created a society, where we created men of an age, because they’re of a certain age, that now have an attitude that would resonate in that way with that movie? Because that to me is like, at one point, fascinating. At the other point, completely horrifying. Terrifying. Yeah. Well, the adolescent part of joker as well. I mean, it’s the typical thing you hear about quote unquote adolescents. Now, for my part, I think that’s a made up term in the sense that it’s a kind of middle period. You’re supposed to rebel against your parents, unlike somebody like my grandfather, for instance, who went to work at 14. I mean, you know, it’s just, and he was providing income for his mom and dad shoveling coal. Yeah, joker is exactly the image of that in an adult man and how those notions come about. Right. So, oh, am I all, is it all just a delusion? It’s like, well, you could ask that question, or you could say, well, much of a muchness. So I’m here, I’m going to do stuff, I’m going to try and do good and kind of adjust accordingly as time goes on. No, that’s an excellent point. Previous generations did not think of adolescence as a time of rebellion. Nobody ever said that before the 50s, so far as I’m aware. And that is reflected in the movies. That is a cultural affectation of film. That’s a big, not that it also wasn’t other places, but film was the big medium at the time. And I do want to address this from neutrino. So existentialism is childish, is a fair summation. No. When you are a child, you go through something that will say some useless academic who probably should not exist or at least not be heard by anybody ever would call existentialism. Okay. That’s retarded. It’s a retarded term. Okay. It’s a retarded concept. Everybody struggles with that as they’re growing up. Now, either these people didn’t grow up and they’re stuck in the state that from we’ll say the knowledgeable position or the academic position, we would call existentialism, which is as near as I can tell garbage philosophy, just garbage philosophy. Right. Or you are sliding back from a more mature state to a less mature state because everybody takes it for granted. As you grow older, you get more mature and then you’re less of a boy or something. That isn’t how the world works. If you do not practice the muscles of whatever, including the mental muscles, you will lose them. And so that is the problem. I mean, fundamentally, and this has been done, this has been done for years. Comedians do this all the time. My child is retarded. My child is schizophrenic. My child is a psychopath. Comedians use this language all the time. Because yes, yes, if you use an adult frame to frame a child, which is an invalid thing to do, but it’s also very, very funny, it’ll cause it. You’ve ever heard Bill Cosby’s early routines on stage from like the sixties and seventies? Oh my goodness. He’s funny, but almost all of what he’s doing is reframing either his children or his family in ridiculous frames. And it’s very funny. It’s also absurd and that’s why it’s funny, but it’s also, listen closely, absurd. It’s absurd on purpose. And that’s actually really important to realize. This is something that no normal person would do except as a joke. Okay, fair enough. We need jokes. I’m a big fan of jokes. I love that sort of thing. But also you don’t do that seriously and then label it existentialism because that makes you stupid. And it causes problems that don’t have to exist if you don’t make the stupid move. Most of life is problems that aren’t actually problems that didn’t need to be problems that you created all by yourself on your own because you chose to frame the world in such a way that a problem appeared. And like, I’m sorry, but yeah, like, yes, children are schizophrenic psychopaths and they’re retarded also. And they’re little monkeys. You just call them that and they’re calm. And we can go on and on and on. And this is not uncommon language. People say things like this literally all the time. Little devil. Little devils are all the time. Why? Because in the frame of an adult, right, or in the frame of maturity, that is what they look like. And that is what they are supposed to look like. And that is the norm. And that is how it has always been since the dawn of time. You can be upset about that. But also you were born at a particular time, in a particular place, and too bad. Too bad. You weren’t born in some alternate metaverse version of whatever it is you think could have possibly happened to you. But by the way, thinking that makes you a lunatic. So please don’t be a lunatic. So I want to go into the validation, right? So there’s a progression in the modernist era where there, well, I was going to come to the fact that it is an era. But there’s this liberal mindset, right, where we have to liberate ourselves. So how does that work? Well, it’s identifying a problem, a oppression, and then you revolt against it in whatever form that takes. And then you establish a new normal, right? And then the new normal, like, it goes into an equilibrium, right? And now there’s something else that’s suppressing you. And you do the next revolution. And you keep revolving. And at a certain point, we ended up at the feminist side of that equation. But this idea of this revolution, right, and the ground that is gained, right, and therefore what is accepted, right, what is perceived as the norm, it’s not an actual norm, but because society is not adhering to the norm, the norm becomes what is present all around you, right? And if you don’t have a way that you try to be normal, right, like if you don’t have a practice that sustains you in that, right, you’re going to see yourself into the cultural version of that. Now, when we get media like movies and stuff like that, now we get a carrier of a norm or a proposition of a norm, and that gets spread over all of humanity at the same time. Like, it’s no longer just a local bubble, right? So there’s an acceleration in that, right? And then when the norm, right, and we go back to the fuzzy future thing, right, when the norm is fuzzy, right, when you can’t have a relationship to the norm, how are you going to navigate these spaces, right? Like, how are you going to navigate these stages of life, right? And then we get solutions like psychology or life coaches or boot camps or whatever, right? Like, we start making structures where we’re like, oh, no, no, like, we need to oppress ourselves again, right? But we need to voluntarily choose our oppression so that we can be liberated within our oppression. And you get like a religion around these ways, because that’s literally that which saves you from falling into the pit of nihilism. Yeah, exactly. And so to go back to the movies, right, and the identity is like, oh, like, when when there’s these mirrors or these frames, these paradigms that open up for you, you get a sense of security or insight or whatever, like, and that’s what’s appealing, and that’s what’s resonating. And I think this is where people maybe lack self-judgment, right? Like, just the fact that something resounds in you, right? Doesn’t make it good, right? Like, it doesn’t make you like that person, right? That just means that there’s a part of you that you’re not looking at properly. Yeah. Yeah, I think, too, there’s so many little pieces that come up. Like, there’s a point where they’re telling Barbie, like, no, you aren’t the things you own. You aren’t your house. You aren’t your clothes. You aren’t. And it’s just like, so there’s that rejection of material definition, right, which is great. There’s a denial of materialism in the movie, right? You know, there’s all these crazy sort of messages that are unconnected and often completely contradictory to one another, right? And it’s a really strange way to present a string of ideas with no coherent, well, we would call it narrative, right? But I would call it no coherent story points. And there are threads for the characters, but every single character thread is contradicted by that character and by other characters. It’s such a strange sort of way to make media. And to the point with Bubbleviz here, I’m sick and tired of movies where the boss is a woman. Well, and, or the boss is a woman, the man is goofy, the woman always wins the argument, women are masters in fighting, et cetera. Well, and they don’t watch Barbie. I mean, nobody should watch it anyway, but yeah, I mean, man, that’s all over this movie for sure. And that’s part of the problem is that because everything’s in the movie, anyone can identify or be validated by the movie, identify with or in, and be validated by the movie. And most of your patterns in life that people are, we’ll say struggling with or treating as problems, even though they’re not, are addressed in the film in some way. And that is sort of what’s really shocking about it ultimately is the breadth of sort of human issues that are addressed and the way that they’re addressed. So yeah, the question is, what’s your goal? Right. I think, I think I mentioned Dutch TV before. I think Dutch TV was a lot of experimentation for the sake of experimentation. Modern art is just provoking doing the new for the sake of showing that you have what it takes to do the new irrespective of the consequences. And I think, I think there’s, yeah, there’s something really dark in that, right? Like it’s not thinking about the consequences, the reverberation. And there has been a lot of criticism, especially from the feminists actually on the movies, right? Like that they were misrepresenting certain things and probably fair in some sense, but. Well, no, no. I mean, the reason why is because their goals weren’t met. Right. And so they, if their thesis is, if we own all the methods of communication, if we own all the quote propaganda, whatever the hell that means, if we own all the lines of communication, we control social media, and they did for a while, you know, and, and then we do something like, you know, insert a spokesperson for a beer into the system, then all of a sudden, our superiority will be recognized, our power will manifest, the spell will work. And then it doesn’t. Right. I think that’s what you’re seeing. But to your point, a lot of what’s missing is this whole concept of, tell us, right? Final, final cause, your goal, like the ultimate goal. And nobody in the, in the Barbie movie has a goal. Some of them have jobs, a bunch of them have roles. A lot of them have identities. But all of that is subverted overtly within the film, at least once. And what ends up happening is you don’t have anybody with any goals. And so there’s no real conclusion to the movie. A lot of people will say it has four or five endings. That is true. It has five endings, you know, which is like, you can’t have five endings to a movie. Right. And yet, right. And I think part of the problem is this constant rebellion against the idea of goals. And, you know, look, Neutrino, you can’t force a new Jungian archetype. Like, that’s not a thing that you can do. You know, collective consciousness hijacking, I don’t think it’s hijacking. I think that, yeah, if you don’t pay attention to the point of my live stream last night, you don’t pay attention to your unconscious, bad things are going to happen to you, or at least unknown things are going to happen to you, and you’re not going to understand the world. And then you’re going to end up identifying as these NPC characters. Because Panda is an NPC in the Barbie movie, and Joker is very much playing an NPC in the Joker movie. And so the question is, why are you identifying as somebody who has no power and no control over the world whatsoever? Because that just is manifestly not true, because other people do, and they’re fine. So you’re going to ask yourself, what are you doing wrong? Is it that you’re just constantly rejecting answers that work because you’re uncomfortable with the trade-offs? Is it that you just don’t have a goal? You think you have a goal, like, oh, I want to make a lot of money. Making a lot of money is not actually a goal. Is it because you’re unwilling to ask yourself the question, what am I willing to give up that I have today to get what I want tomorrow? Because maybe you have a goal, and you don’t have anything worth giving up to get it. I would say that’s a poor goal, but I think that might be a factor, too. People have these visions of what they want to do, or what they want to be, or where they want to go, but they are not getting off that couch and stopping that game machine, or stopping watching crazy live streams from Mark, Manuel, and Adam, or whatever it is, listening to the podcast, or eating the Cheetos. I don’t know what you guys are doing. I have no idea. But maybe you’re not willing to give that up to get to become the next Elon Musk. He doesn’t even own a house. Do you own a house? You don’t even own a house. Well, even if you do, it’s about getting yourself away from those attachments as well, I would say, because all of the guys I was talking to on that Sunday, these are guys who are relatively active. A lot of them go to the gym and that sort of stuff. But the problem, well, one of the problems that you can outline in terms of what happens when you have no goal, I think you do see that in the Barbie movie, because at least one of them, at least when it comes to the relationships between the sexes, is the guys with no goal. Well, firstly, all the Kens, it seems to me anyways, they want to do something. They come back to Barbie land from the real world and they’re going to build something. And that doesn’t last. They don’t actually maintain it. They build something unstable or something like that. Who knows? I don’t know. But they fail in that and then they just revert, I think. Do they fight amongst each other as well? Is that what happens after that? Yeah, so there’s internal strife. And I think that’s a very good analogy for what happens when, because the Kens in that movie are actually, let’s say, doing something, well, they’re doing something in a world, we don’t even know if this is the real world, right? But let’s just say, let’s just say best case scenario, they’re trying to do something. They fail and then they revert back to basically being NPCs or they were always NPCs and they fight amongst each other. So it’s destructive. There’s a tearing apart going on there. And so even if you’re in, even if you go out and do something, you still need to turn back to something generative, something good and kind of help re-instantiate that rather than, as might happen among young men, get distracted by other things and actually have things fall apart around you, even though you’re trying to do something out in the real world. And if that doesn’t go well, perhaps you might end up like somebody like a Joker because all that fragmentation will leave you on your own. You’ve tried loads of things. Maybe you’re going a little bit insane. Maybe you regress back to childish notions about the world. Who knows? Yeah, I like that. Yeah, Joker very much does that. He starts questioning his past, right? And he starts disrupting his history, tearing down his mind. That might be a bad idea. Maybe that makes you go insane. And maybe if you do statues in the real world, that makes you go insane at the cultural level. Yeah. Yeah. What’s the line from Joker? I thought my life was a tragedy, but then I realized it was a comedy. And that’s the line that he says just before he smothers his mother in bed. He’s a matricide. He kills his own family. Yeah. So it’s interesting. What you’re talking about is basically people are in a hole, right? Like they have a problem and then they go to the boot camp to fix the problem. And then they’re on the other side of the boot camp. Right. And then it’s like, where are you now? Right. And then it’s still spin. Right. And we’re going to have to do the treadmill again. Right. I mean, you can see the same. Well, that’s the game. But that’s the game, right? That’s why people say, it’s just a game or it’s all cavefade, right? Or it’s all a different game, right? They’re always referring to the game, game A, game B, right? They’re always making it. That’s why they think it’s a game. They accomplish the proximal goal. And then now what? Right. And that’s why they’re going after that. And we’ll say the Eastern philosophies. I want to address Mills. So the film breaks all the rules of film and storytelling and features a lot of fragmentation. Is this the real message? No. The real message, Mills, is why the hell is anybody watching that? If they’re watching, well, why can it be made? Why is anybody, once it’s made, watching it? Why, once you’ve watched it, are you finding things in it? If there’s really nothing there, as I contend. And I mean, I could be wrong, but I’m just giving you my, you know, my take on this. Like, you will see whatever you will. If you want to, if you want to weirdness, go and watch Paul Leandro Clay’s breakdown of Barbie and watch Ben Shapiro’s breakdown of Barbie and watch critical drinkers breakdown of Barbie and watch Brett Cooper and Ben Shapiro’s breakdown of Barbie. And then watch Jamie and Walters breakdown of Barbie. Okay. And now you tell me what the hell the movie’s about. Because Vanu Clay doesn’t know. Ben sees what Ben sees everywhere all the time. Like, it’s the most generic vanilla Ben review of a thing that could possibly exist. Right? Brett Cooper, I don’t know what this chick sees. I’m a little freaked out. Like, I’ve seen the movie. I understand what she’s talking about. All the things she says are there. There’s no overlap between these descriptions. None. None. Vanu Clay doesn’t deny that everything that Ben Shapiro says is in the movie is in the movie. He doesn’t deny that everything critical drinker says is in the movie is in the movie. But he also doesn’t talk about any of it. And he doesn’t see the same problems. How is this possible? But again, the fact that he even got made would be one thing. There’s lots of weird movies that get made and nobody watches. Everybody thinks it’s visionary. And then I watch it and I go, yeah, you’re looking at schizophrenia on a screen, dude. You’re seeing things that are definitely or not in the movie. Right? And whatever. That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’m not. Those movies don’t make a billion dollars either, though. Right? And so what the hell is going on? Yeah. And what, like, someone needs to invest in this movie, needs to promote it. Right. So they’re thinking it’s a good idea. Right. It’s like, why are you thinking this is a good idea? But then it works. Yeah. Yes. I think it’s a good idea. But then it works. Right. So it’s not some art house. You know, look, they thought Good Will Hunting was a good idea. They were right. But I think it’s one of the best movies ever made. Can confirm. Whatever. But and they invested a million dollars in the script and stuff. Would find fair whatever. But also, also, then you get this this phenomena of people actually watching it. And then you get this other for my because the art house films never get watched. And then you get this other phenomena of people finding things in it and identifying within the movie. I’m literally Ken. He’s literally an NPC in the literal movie. Yeah. Yeah. On a large scale. And yeah, I mean, the conversation they had on that in that Sunday breakfast didn’t seem to be limited to that one space. Right. These these guys weren’t just kind of, you know, specific pulling it out of thin air. There was there are other people who were seeing this and saying the same thing or saying similar things. And going from there. Yeah. And I think, you know, I like this bubble. This little house on the prairie greater than Barbie. Well, yeah, there’s a there’s an actual story there or set of stories, even. Right. Little House on the Prairie is in the little the little house on the prairie message is in Barbie, too. That’s the problem. No, really. Oh, I like not having to think and getting beer for my man. It’s it’s not hidden. The thing that really bothers me is the subversion is almost not subversion because there’s nothing hidden about any of it. It’s all stated plainly and matter of factly and easy to understand terms that a four year old would understand. Except that there’s a bunch of contradictory statements that don’t hold together. And in some cases, they’re in the same sentence said by the same character. And I just don’t know what to make of how you are relating to that, because you can’t relate to a contradiction. Like, that’s a problem if you’re relating to a contradiction. It’s a problem if you’re not seeing why insanity is a problem. It’s a problem if you think that the world is pushing you down when in fact, all you have to do is stand up and there’s no force holding you. So there’s this idea of ADHD, right? Like, like we have a really short attention spell. And I think that’s kind of what it does. It grabs you and then puts you at a different place and then grabs you and puts you at a different place. And if you don’t have a critical mind, if you come there to be dragged along, yeah, like that’s just feeding into something of the spirit of the age, right? And then to go- But you’re not being dragged along. See, this is where the problem, I agree with you totally, like I’m totally on board. There’s something about the short attention span here because they’re not noticing the contradiction and resisting it. That could be two different reasons. It could be both of them, right? One is they don’t notice contradiction. That’s a problem. Another one is they see contradiction and don’t see a problem with it, even though it’s definitionally an actual condition that can’t exist, right? Or the other one is they’re seeing a thread and ignoring the contradiction, which I think is what’s actually happening, although I’m open to all- Okay, so to go back to the tolerance, like what is tolerance? Well, tolerance is living with acceptance of contradiction. It can go that far. Yeah, I agree. Well, we are on our tolerance is evil campaign a while back, I think. I think that’s still correct. Yeah, but I think, right, like if you tell tolerance as a virtue, right, like you’ve been preconditioned to resist this idea of judgment, right? Because if you’re judging people, you’re evil because then you’re denying their true selves. So I think, well, or maybe you’re supposed to postpone the judgment, right? But then if you’re in this ADHD stroboscope of frames- Judgment never happens. Yeah, you forget before you get to resolve the thing. And then maybe then like when you’re in bed at night, your brain goes haywire and the disaster happens, right? Right. Well, so where kenergy comes from is this final battle between the two kens, which is the whole thing’s so weird. And they have this dance-off. And in the middle of the dance-off, they both go towards each other and these little, I think they’re hearts or something, these white sparkly things start spewing from both of them, like from the combination of both of them, right? It’s this very emergence is good sort of framing and spread everywhere. And I think that’s where the kenergy thing comes from. But also, and this is really, is cognitive dissonance childish too? I’ve never called anything childish, but children do things. If you do them, maybe you didn’t mature. If you want to cast that as childish, I think that’s bad framing. I think you get the world wrong. No wonder why you’re confused, right? I’m not casting things as childish. Children have cognitive dissonance. Of course they do. Most people have cognitive dissonance because when you speak, you are not being true to yourself in most cases because you have an unconscious, see my live stream last night, sanity is wrapped up in this, see my live stream on sanity. No, really, these answers are actually there in those monologues for real, right? And that’s the problem is that ultimately the framing matters. And that’s why, Neutrino, the German socialists weren’t very tolerant. You can’t build things and be tolerant. It’s A or B. It’s a binary, and you can say not all contradictions are not created equal. You can say that. Contradictions don’t exist. If you see a contradiction, that means your frame is screwed up and you need a better frame. You don’t live in a world of contradictions. You can’t live in a world of contradiction by definition. This is where people are confused. That means you need better framing, probably a larger frame, maybe just a different frame. But the trick of different frames is you can put anything in a political frame, you can put anything in an economic frame, you can put literally anything in a social frame, you can put anything in a psychological frame, you can put anything in a scientific frame. You can put everything in a meta-frame always. There you go. Right. And that is of no use. The thing I just stated means there is no use to it. You can tolerate all those frames too. There is no use. You can’t build anything because you spread out in too many directions. When you spread out, you flatten. That’s the flattening of the world. This is the participation trophy. You don’t have one trophy. You split that trophy up. You’ve cut the value of that trophy up and you’ve distributed it equally among the members. Now there’s no looking up. There’s no way to cooperate because we’re on a flat plane interfering with one another. It’s not good. You cut the norm out and you spread it across all the members. That’s what democracy is. It’s literally democratizing the ideal. That stuff works amazingly if there is an ideal that is held high because it’s embodied within the zeitgeist. Not brought down. It cannot be brought down or reduced. That’s the problem. People keep reducing the ideal and then going, we have no commonality. That’s because you destroyed the ideal. Again, in the beginning of Barbie, it opens with a 2001 theme. The exalted Barbie is this big statue above the plane. Then they all start worshiping that thing. They state explicitly in the movie, the real world does not manifest what the Barbie prototype Barbie wanted to manifest. It doesn’t work out the way she expected. It’s not a hidden message. It’s an explicit, overt message. Gee, we tried feminism and it didn’t work. You think? I could have told you that years ago, but okay, I mean, at least we’re here now. Then, oh, well, what we really need to do is de-identify Barbie, make sure she’s got no actual force in the world, and that’ll make it better. You already did that. That already didn’t work. That’s part of the problem. I want to go here. This is where the problems start. The thing that we don’t tolerate are ideas because the ideas are corrupting society and making people do things, which is the reason why this movie is so toxic, because it affords the generation of ideas without constraint in a generative fashion. The constraint has to come from the person themselves. If you’re lost, you’re not going to have that constraint because that’s the opposite of being lost. When we’re talking about tolerance, it’s the tolerance for ideas. The implication of that statement is that people are their ideas. There’s a bunch of people that are acting that way, but I got news for you. That’s not true. People are not their ideas. They can let go of ideas and they can adopt other ideas. If you’re having bad ideas, that would be my advice to you for multiple reasons. One of them is that certain ideas don’t get tolerated. The inevitable question, Manuel. All forms of rebellion and all contradiction. We shouldn’t tolerate them. Everything that is putting itself higher, all this pride stuff, is like, no, we’re not supposed to pay attention to you. All of these things, all of the stuff where it’s like, I got the agenda to fix the world, also, nope, just a hard no. Things manifest in the world by cooperation. We should cooperate on the basis of, I’m going to use the word informed consent, but it should be on the basis of a shared fate. A bond that is shared through being connected in such a way that you’re unable to let go of the other. If that person suffers, you suffer. That is the prerequisite for being generative. When we start having framings, we can’t trust the public to do the right thing, so we need to check on the public because we have to enforce it in some way or we have to nudge it or whatever. Stuff like that is- But it’s worth thinking about where does this attitude of tolerating everything come from? It’s a fear of you personally might have to give something up or change. That’s all it is. That’s in the Barbie movie. She wants nothing to change ever. It is stated, no, that only exists in the realm of ideas, which ironically is not the Barbie realm, which I find amazing. I’m like, but it really kind of is, and yet it really kind of isn’t for them because the two realms become connected. Because when you try to manifest your ideas in the real world, you’re manifesting the ideal, the platonic form, or I to us is a better term, for that idea, and that impacts the real world. Your ideas matter, and if you have bad ideas, you can have a bad life. It’s not the only reason you’d have a bad life. You can’t just have good ideas and have a good life because that’s not our option, but also if you have bad ideas, you’re definitely going to have a bad life. If you’re going to have a bad life, you better have the best ideas possible because that will make your life as best as it can be given the bad ideas. Interestingly, in the Barbie movie, which I just feel ultra-vindicated, they actually talk about the better, the perfect being the enemy of the better. They don’t use quite that framing, but I’m like, vindicated, totally vindicated. Like, yes, the perfect is the enemy of the better. I was like, that is what it is. Thank you very much. Glad you’re listening to me. It’s what’s in the zeitgeist. That’s in the zeitgeist. The question is, what are you willing to give up to get that? What are you willing to give up to engage with these concepts to build things? If you don’t want to work nine to five, you’re going to have a hard time getting a paycheck. Now, there are other ways to make money. Getting a paycheck isn’t the only way, but you’re going to have a hard time. If you’re not willing to give up that time and give up that regularity, because it’s nine to five, five days a week or whatever it is, it can be three days a week, 12-hour days, whatever, if you’re not willing to give that up, you’re not going to get that thing. Everything in life is a series of trade-offs. If you want the ideal, if you want this perfect image and you’re not willing to give up anything, then you’re going to get screwed up. And that’s the thing. And what perfect being an enemy of the better is a contradiction. No, it’s not. Actually, it’s not at all. You just don’t understand what contradiction is. It’s a statement of fact that can be proven and should be evident by your experience. And if it’s not, I would say you probably have a problem there. And what is a contradiction is the perfect is the enemy of the good. That’s ridiculous. The spirit of it is correct. The formulation is just wrong. I don’t know what else to say. It’s the enemy of the better. Because good is an end state and perfect is an end state. And those two end states are actually equivalent. Something that is perfect is also considered to be good. Not exactly, but it’s almost a one-to-one match. And actually, the thing that they’re talking about when they make ridiculous statements like the perfect is the enemy of the good is they’re talking about your inability to get started in the right direction is due to your casting of perfection into the future and your unwillingness to risk it. And that is not a contradiction because one is an end state and one is an action. And so they don’t even overlap in some sense. And perfection is something that reciprocally narrows into a specific. And it will pull you away from being the agent, being in different games. Because if I focus on coding a program and I don’t take care of my health, then I end up not being good at coding. So when you’re looking for perfection, you can say, well, I’m going to be the perfect human being. I’m like, okay, define perfect human being. Well, I learned that from Matt Ridley’s The Red Queen, which is a wonderful book. When you start actually engaging with evolution, the implications of the evolutionary theories, inferences, and bad ideas and hypotheses that are involved in the so-called theory of evolution, you run into this problem of perfection. Nassim Taleb also talks about it. And I want to address Neutrino. As a person with bad thoughts, how can I protect myself from your intelligence? You can’t. You’re doomed. You’re on this earth with us. You’re screwed, dude. That’s part of the problem. This is what people won’t understand. You are submitted to every single person on the planet. Sorry. And you’re submitted to a bunch of things like gravity, and you can kind of get around it if you have enough money and you go into space. But really, this is impractical. There are constraints to the world into which you were born. I’m very sorry to hear that. We all have that particular issue, right, or set of issues. Too bad. Suck it up and move on with your life. Really. Do something good with it. Or at least something better. So here, are you contradicting us? Contradict is to say against, right? So if you’re contradicting yourself, right, you are speaking against yourself, which means that you’re self-denying. Like, I don’t understand how you would ever be okay with having a contradiction within yourself. That means that you’re unhealthy. Like, that means that you’re sick. You need to resolve something in your spirit. Or in your physical being, right? Like, a virus is a contradiction to a healthy state of existence, right? And, you know, Neutrino, we didn’t bring up submission. I don’t know why you brought up submission and you used tolerance before, or intolerance in that case. You’re just mixing up your words and probably just conceptually unable to disambiguate the nuances in what’s being said. Submission just wasn’t part of the picture. But you’re submitted to a bunch of things like gravity, hunger, tons of things we’re all submitted to. I don’t know what else to tell you. And yeah, you’re submitted to other people. Like, you didn’t build the internet and you didn’t create your electricity. And there’s a bunch of people involved in that and you’re kind of submitted to all of them to some extent. And that sucks, you know? But let’s say, perfect is like a compass bearing and better is like a physical destination. No, better is movement towards the compass bearing. Everything in the world is not a noun. Stop being in the propositional tyranny. Better is movement in a direction, hopefully, towards the perfect. Yeah. Humans are the synthesis of the infinite and the finite. No, they’re not. So no, it’s not a contradiction. It’s false. False things are not contradictions. They’re just wrong. Neutrino, how do I heal my sick spirit from not agreeing with much of what you say? No idea, dude. You could let go of your anger and resentment and just start agreeing and seeing how it works out. And Bubble Viz claims that he loves gravity. I want to see some evidence of that. I want to see like a certificate of love. He says it keeps him grounded. I want to see a picture of him loving gravity. That’s why I also love gravity. Picks or it didn’t happen. That’s correct. Me and you, Bubble Viz, will take the picture. Neutrino can create his own electricity as much as you or any other man. Thank you. No, you can’t create as much electricity as me. There’s a technical reason why, by the way. That is just false. Equality is false. That idea is absurd. Well, and the idea of change over time is in the Barbie movie. The idea of self-identification, self-control, self-realization, all of that is explicitly stated in the Barbie movie. It’s very much, and I think Manuel, actually you had the best sort of summary, right? It’s very much a coming-of-age movie. It’s just that you’re coming of age in a very philosophical way. You’re not coming of age in the way of getting your first girlfriend, like you would say movies. It’s non-participatory in a sense, right? The expiration isn’t there because it’s, well, we went through this in the Plato’s Book Club, right? It’s like, what is education? Well, education is the relation to the ideal effectively, right? The recognition of perfection. When we don’t get educated, but instead we get presented with answers or presented with ways of looking at the world that we can’t embody, right? There’s no way of relating to it, right? Well, I’m supposed to be objectified, but I also should reject being objectified because that makes me not a person. It’s like, well, what do you do with that? How do you have a good relation to that? The only way to win the game is not to play, right? So the only way to resolve the Barbie movie is not to watch it. There you go. Exactly. The only way to fix some of these, quote, problems that people keep inventing is not to invent them. Then you don’t need to solve them anymore. Mills wants to know if Christ is a contradiction. That’s easy. No. Okay. Yeah. The epistemic humility on this stream is impressive. Your two cent words have no purchase. Hard for me to hear arguments other than wrong. Well, we’re not making arguments. So I don’t know what you’re hearing, but that’s not what we’re saying. Well, you know, literally not making any arguments for anything. That’s why I asked earlier when I said, what is it that you’re disagreeing with? And I got no answer. Well, then maybe because as we’re not making any truth claims and there’s you have nothing to disagree with. So why are you disagreeing when we’re not making truth claims with which you can have a disagreement? That is an interesting question, don’t you think? Right. Which sort of goes to the point. And BubbleViz claims he did not watch the Barbie movie. Look, I just got back from it like two and two hours and 30 minutes ago or so. And don’t watch it. It’s it’s there’s it’s a trap. The force of gravity will prevent you from going. The force of gravity. Wrong. All my arguments are wrong. Well, they are all of the type of wrong since they are said by the wrongness of your name or something. So you fear contradiction. I haven’t heard any contradictions. Please contradict me. That would be great. That’s what you why you shoo it away. I don’t fear anything. Like I don’t understand. I’m saying it doesn’t exist. I don’t feel things that don’t exist. Sure. Whatever. I don’t mean to contradict anyone here. I mean to understand the existence of contradiction can be denied. OK, it’s easy. You just go. OK, so agree about contradiction. OK, so when I’m not saying that contradictions don’t exist, I’m saying that when you perceive a contradiction, you are in wrong relationship. Yeah, your frame is too small. And so in order to resolve that, you have to reengage in a different way. You have to learn a new way of participation and that participation can resolve the contradiction. And sometimes it’s well, not sometimes. Probably you experience a contradiction because you’re holding on to something that you don’t need to hold on to. So you bound yourself to something that is not serving you. What is the self-contradictory nature of reality? Reality doesn’t have a single nature. And it certainly isn’t contradictory. And reality doesn’t have a self to refer to. So this is a weird way to talk about reality because it’s not a person. Mills claims temporal analysis. So Christ was not all at one time, but became deified at a later point in life. And not well, you’re just that’s because you’re using time. And he’s outside of time, according to the Bible, from what I understand. So I don’t know why you’d use time since it doesn’t exist in that frame. But you can try to fit him into a smaller frame where time exists, and then you’re going to have this problem. Or you could not have the problem by not making the mistake of putting him into time when the Bible says he doesn’t exist in time. Again, it’s a perfect example. You can create all these theological problems all day. This is why theology for me is bankrupt. The same as so-called modern philosophy, which is just modern solipsism is a better way to talk about it. Are you responding to Ben Franklin? Yeah, I don’t. It’s all these crazy frames, man. We create these issues, and we can just live a happy life. It’s actually, or at least a contented life. It’s actually possible to just live a contented life, and not get into, what does the joker really mean? And why do I identify with him? Or you just go out and grow some feet. Have a meal. Have a meal with a friend. Well, yeah. So actually, I don’t think that Trinity is a contradiction within time either, but you have to recognize the fractal nature of the manifestation. When you try to universalize a understanding, that’s inappropriate, because the way that something manifests is different on each layer, because it’s in a different frame. So the way that it’s going to present itself is going to be different. Right. Yeah, that is where people have a big problem, is that they’re trying to do things like universalize and overreduce and resolve something that some alleged smart person, who’s probably actually just a three-year old who’s been listened to when they shouldn’t have been, has posited as a question or query that needs resolving. What is that just wrong? Yeah, to go back to the contradiction, right, like if you absolutize one layer of analysis, you end up with contradictions. If you add in the new ones of having different layers of analysis, well, they’re somewhat analog to each other, right, but if you have different layers of analysis, you can create the space that can hold the tension that you’re perceiving in your contradiction without contradicting each other. Yeah, yeah, I think, yeah, I think we really don’t understand, say, the ending of the movie War Games, right, which is you have the computer, play tic-tac-toe against itself until it figures out that tic-tac-toe is a game for a child, literally, right, and then it says, a strange game, the only way to win is not to play, and the way it does that, and you see the fractal nature in that movie, because it’s an excellent movie, right, is it plays war games over and over again. It plays global thermonuclear war over and over and over and draws the inference from tic-tac-toe being a pointless game to that being a pointless game, and then it doesn’t launch the missiles. So the solution to nuclear war is just not to have one, and then you don’t have one, and then you don’t have to resolve all the problems inherent in trying to have one. It’s like, you know, like, yeah, you know, and, and, and, you know, and I think, I think Andre here, I’m Kenno, better than being a Kanto, yeah, well, sure. Oh, that’s Kenno. Kenno is in, you know, yeah, pretty, all the Ken memes. Excellent, and, and that is the, and that is the problem, right, is people get caught up in, they want this fantasy, right, they really want to be the person that resolves the country, like Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, right, or the Isoc gap. Everybody wants to resolve the Isoc gap. It’s like, why isn’t it just there and okay? Can you explain to me why it’s not okay to have an Isoc gap? Can you explain to me why Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, which is a mathematical certainty, by the way, is not okay? Right, and if those two things are true, or even just Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, what does that say about whatever philosophical alleged system you’re allegedly using? It says a lot, right, it says a lot, and it also says something about the limits of math, right, and it says something in that about the limits of systems as such, and it implies the problems of closed systems and reciprocally narrowing, which Manuel and I have talked about elsewhere, and is also addressed in the model video on navigating patterns, see the Knowledge Engine video. It’s great, it really deserves more views. All right, so, may be helpful to distinguish between the contradictory, the absurd, and paradox. Are there not some things too great for us to understand? Look, dude, I’ll take a definition. I think you’re welcome to make one. You just haven’t done that. I feel like you guys see yourselves as sitting right outside of Plato’s Cave saying, I told you so, to everyone who walks out. Okay, well, I guess we have to go there now, don’t we? So earlier today, we did the book club on the Republic. We happen to be at book seven. The beginning of book seven is Plato’s Cave. Let me make this as freaking clear as I can. Everything that every single person has told you about Plato’s Cave is a freaking lie. No, really, and I’m going to do a video on it because I’m hopping mad. It’s a lie. No one gets out of Plato’s Cave in the story. No one, ever. That doesn’t happen in this book at all in any interpretation of it that we can find. Okay? That didn’t happen. Didn’t happen in the book. Plato didn’t write that down. That is not in the text anywhere. People who tell you that are lying to you, they are liars. Now, either they’re lying because they’re stupid or they’re lying because they psychologically project it. Okay? But that isn’t in the text anywhere. Okay? I understand why stupid people or ignorant people or hopeful people misread the text. I get that. It’s a total misread of what’s in the text. You, personally, right now, can pick up the freaking book or an online copy of it and go look and show me which person or people actually get out of the cave or the den or whatever it is. The answer is no one. Also, the answer is there is a trick that he’s using to say if somebody were released from, they don’t get out on their own at all, right? This would happen. But that occurrence never happens and it’s not an option there. The only reason why they talk about it is to say, is to highlight the nature of what happened when you’re in that circumstance. Also, you were not put in that circumstance. You were born into that circumstance. You are born in bondage with unable to move your head. That’s what it says. It doesn’t say anything else. I read it this morning for the book club because I always read the, we only do about half a book per thing and you can watch the stream. I don’t know if it’s out now or if it’ll be out later today or tomorrow, whatever. It will be out and I go into this and I actually take Manuel to task about three times because everybody makes the mistake. So, I get it. It’s an easy mistake to make but it’s also wrong. That’s actually very important. No one walks out of the cave. No one goes towards the sun. The sun is stated explicitly by Plato to be the fire in the cave. For real. He actually says the sun is the fire in the cave. Okay? Like, none of the things you think are true about Plato’s cave are likely even remotely accurate to the text. So, they are misquoting, misframing Plato entirely and that makes me mad because, boy, I knew I should never have read this book. I just knew it. I should have stayed in ignorance. Ignorance is bliss. Now I’ve created a bunch of problems and now I have to solve them all. I will be doing a video on this at some point in Navigating Patterns because I’m hopping mad. I’m going to go over book seven by itself and the parable of the cave and basically show why these people are full of garbage when they talk about it. They have no idea what they’re talking about and they’re just plain wrong because all the stuff they’re talking about in the text is not in the text and much of it is explicitly contradicted by the words of the text. So, they’re the ones creating a contradiction which doesn’t exist. Plato doesn’t have the problems they say exist with the cave because Plato doesn’t make the claims that they claim Plato makes about the cave. Sorry, just gonna say that. Okay, so I’m gonna have to deal with this. It’s like, no, but there’s wrong ways. There’s lots of wrong ways. Like, it’s simple, right? Like, there’s a path that you can go through, right, which interpretation is possible and outside that path you’re in contradiction, I’m going to have to get the word again, with the text. Like, what you’re professing is different than what is being presented to you. And so, like, it’s not about having the right interpretation, right? Like, first of all, there is, well, as far as we’ve gotten, there is no clear message in the text, right? So, if you’re doing an interpretation on a text that hasn’t crystallized into something yet, then what are you interpreting? Like, you’re literally interpreting something that wasn’t intended because there’s no intention to be comprehended. And that’s exactly the complaint of the Barbie movie that I’m making. You will see whatever you will see. No two people will see the same movie if they watch Barbie. It’s not, I’m making a much bigger claim. I am saying that it is actually impossible for any two people anywhere to get the same thing out of Barbie. There are so many pieces in that movie that can get put together in so many different ways that it is just never gonna happen. You’re gonna see a mirror of whatever it is you’re going to see. And Plato is of, like the Joker, is of exactly the opposite type. There’s a clear set of messages, but it’s not one message. And so, to talk about a right way to interpret, there are many messages in this book, right? There are many messages and or in the sub books, however you wanna frame it. And that’s the problem is that when you make statements that are contrary to what is in the text, you have inserted something into the text. That is what has happened. I can prove this to anybody by saying, show me where in the text it says, right? Show me where you got this from. Okay? I have done this in the past with many books, although not the Republic, although recently the Republic. I usually get no answer ever from anybody, no matter how much time I give them to answer the freaking question. I am not making a claim. I am asking them to show me how they got to their conclusion. Okay? If you think I made a claim when I asked you how to show how you got to your conclusion, you have a big problem with the world. Like making a claim is saying something like, Plato says you can get out of the cave by yourself. Okay? That is a false claim. Plato does not say that in book seven. And as far as I know, he doesn’t say it anywhere else in the text. And if somebody says that, it’s wrong. And anybody can independently verify it with a copy of the text. This is not some crazy claim that like, I’ve looked at the virus and I can tell you that it’s spreading through the air, but it doesn’t go through masks because I looked in my magical whatever device. It’s not a claim like that. It’s a claim that you personally, if you get off your lazy ass, can go verify by yourself. You don’t need any help. You copy the book. They’re free online. Right? Those are very different ways of talking. And if you saw something in the text and I asked you what you saw, I’m not contradicting your statement. I’m asking you to validate and verify what you’re saying. I think that’s reasonable. Like people should not be allowed to just make random claims and let them stand. You should push back on bad claims. If somebody says Hitler was a good guy, you should say, no, he wasn’t. And you can qualify that and say he was a good guy when he saved Germany, because he was, but he was a bad guy when he did everything after he saved Germany, because he was. But this is important. Right? So when we have an interpretation of Barbie, why would you need to agree on your interpretation of Barbie? Right? Why is that a thing that you want? You want to find agreement, but you don’t have to agree on the interpretation. That’s just ludicrous. When I do things, I do things because I value them. I value different things from Mark, and so I’m going to draw different conclusions because they serve what I value. And so I don’t need to have agreement. Now there are some things that are so problematic that they will put me into disagreement with reality. They would mean that I’m untrue to reality. But then that’s not something between me and Mark. That’s something within me. And so I need to find a resolution independent of Mark. If Mark is someone who can actually help me resolve that, that’s great. I’m grateful for him because he does that all the time. But I don’t need Mark to do that. There’s many other ways that I can get there. But I have… You can use Adam. I can use Adam. Right? Yeah. But… And so it’s not about trying to find a heritage unless someone is actually propagating something that is actively negative. Right. Well, and see, that’s where we’re caught up in the difference. The person claiming authority and saying, I’m going to string up the heritage is not the same as the person saying that person is making a false claim. There’s no equivalence there whatsoever. They can be the same thing, but then they’re the same thing. But they’re not the same thing by default or by design. Again, this is a nuance of the world, the detail of the world that’s actually paramount ground importance. The fact that you can say the claim that somebody is released from the cave is false is not the same as saying this person who claims that Plato doesn’t claim that Solon is released from the cave is a heretic who must die. Those are fundamentally different statements. They have absolutely no overlap. Right. And why would you equate them? And I’m not even making claims. I’m saying that isn’t in there. Bring me the evidence. Right. So either you can bring the evidence and everybody who looks can agree on it because it’s the same book and it’s the same text, or you can’t and you’re freaking wrong because some things you’re just wrong about, some things I’m just wrong about, some things even Adam is just wrong about. And I think Manuel was wrong once too. I’m not sure. Maybe. I don’t remember. I think I removed that from my memory. Perfect. This is weird. You’re pretending like we’re making claims and proclaiming authority and casting heresies. We haven’t done that here. But I can tell you anybody who makes a claim that you by yourself got out of the cave did not read the Republic or read something into it that wasn’t there. This is not what the book says. It is not in the book. Like I, why is this hard for you? Like when I say this is the truth, then I make a claim. If I don’t, I share a way to look at things or I profess an opinion or whatever. Like not everything is a claim. Like I don’t understand how this is difficult. Yeah, look, Adam, why don’t you talk about sort of your experience and your viewpoint on what people are seeing in these movies and why you think they might be identifying in this way with these, whether it’s the Joker or whether it’s Ken and Kennergy or whatever aspects, because I don’t know all the aspects. I’m not in contact with the same age group as you’re in contact with. And certainly you have a much wider experience with this. And also, you’re normally, not right now, but normally you’re in Ireland. So that’s a nice European take on things too. Well, a lot of this identification with fantasy, I think, largely comes out when the age group was kind of coming of age. So when we were young, there’s like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. There’s a lot of fantasy, actually. I think How We Got Here series actually kind of gave me some perspective on that. Burn Power? Burn Power, yeah, the announcement. Great channel. Great channel. Yeah, How We Got Here stuff. And then you can go to, I watched the 2000s video and that very, I mean, you could watch the whole thing. It goes from the 1950s or 1940s to present day. It’s very long though. So strap yourself in. Why is it that I’m hearing, you know, let’s get some Kennergy guys. You’ve got some high Kennergy going or Ken is literally me or Joker. And I think it’s largely because, at least for young men, there is a kind of, young men, let’s say in the old world, probably elsewhere as well, there is an abstraction from intimacy in general. There’s not really much in the way of community, whereas in the past, perhaps these young men, many of these, I mean, these guys, they’re strong. I think they’re very capable. But there’s no, let’s say there’s no room for them or place for them to actually get in and start doing something generative, leading, right? Many of these opportunities are either not there or for whatever reason. And when it comes to identifying with somebody like Ken, I think if you just look at the physique of Ken, if you look at this kind of, apart from the kind of more personality aspects from the aesthetic side, you know, then you’ve kind of got some in on like, okay, these guys want to be, they want to have some relation with, let’s say, women, right? They want to have some ability to get stuff done. Of course, Ken doesn’t actually get stuff done ultimately, but that’s kind of by the by. I think actually that might be part of it as well, because it’s very hard to, depending on where you are in the old world, probably in the new world, you can get more stuff done depending on where you are. And you’re not going to, you’re not going to have much receptivity to, you know, a young guy like me or whatever coming in and trying to run the show or even attempt to run something at all. Joker, the identification with Joker, I think, comes from a feeling of probably rejection from community and let’s say society in general. But when you have a lack of community, and that is just something that’s very persistent, I think over time, especially to young guys, that can feel like a rejection because again, there’s no place for you to leave. There’s no things to organize. There’s nothing necessarily to build. And if you’re in the old world and you want to build anything, you’ve got to get all these permits. If you want to work on your car, you’ve got to, you know, the insurance, depending on where you are, the insurance might allow it. And yeah, I think that’s what they’re identifying with really. And also the camaraderie, the kens, yeah, of course, the kens. There are many, so there’s camaraderie among young men. I mean, like, you kind of get that at the breakfast, but there’s still not that, there’s still, as I was describing before, that kind of lack of deep close bonds of friendship in the way that you might have, you know, let’s say between Frodo and Sam or even just between men of kind of relatively equal standing. And so there’s not much in the way of actually forging on ahead, doing, building virtue, being generative. So that, you know, and I think that this idea of generative, which I know we struggle with all the time, the idea of generative is the key to making meaning. Meaning isn’t in a rock or under a rock in your garden. You’re not going to go find it. You don’t find meaning. You co-manifest meaning. And then how do you do that? You do that with strong bonds that can hold you and the things you’re trying to connect with. So I would say meaning crisis is a function of the intimacy crisis. The male manifestation of the intimacy crisis is the meaning crisis. And you can see that manifest, well, you can see the intimacy crisis manifest and goes to the shell from the 90s. It’s right there. It was so shocking to me. And I think that, yeah, people are identifying with these lost characters and these lost characters, these NPCs, however you want to frame them, the cape babe, whatever you want to, whatever frame you want to put them in that vein, means effectively that they do not have access to connection as such. And the Barbie movie is all about no connection. Holy macaroni. She walks off at the end by herself alone. They split up effectively, even though they were never together, but they were kind of together. Right. The Barbies are all together having girl parties and the Kens never have any Ken parties until they take over. So they have to take over the world. Right. So it’s like the Kens are always standing aside, always, because ultimately the Barbies trick them using their feminine wiles for real, like stereotypical feminine, pretend to be dumb, right? Look pretty. All of these tropes are right there. And I mean, it’s just terrifying that they’re there and that men feel like the women are harming them in that way. And that the only option is you have to look pretty, but not too pretty because then you’re slutty. Like these are binaries that don’t, lots of women navigate this just fine guys. If that’s what you’re seeing in the world, then it’s you. It’s not them. It’s you. It’s not the world. It’s you. Right. You’re seeing this and that’s you. That’s your perception. That’s your perspective. And it can be better. You could have a better perspective on these things. Right. You have a better way of relating to the world. And the question is why don’t they have a better way of relating to the world other than, Oh, that’s where I am. I’m Ken or, Oh, that’s where I am. I’m Joker. That’s the real question. And are they, are they going after other characters or, I mean, you see like the Chad meme and stuff, but I don’t know how prevalent identification is as in that’s literally me. Well, there wouldn’t be as much as, you know, that’s literally me in that, but they would be looking to that image. They’d be looking to that confidence and that kind of stoic reserve and trying to relate positively to it, I suppose. And because it’s very hard. It’s very hard for young men in that respect, because it’s hard to see it manifested in the world. And it’s hard when you don’t have an example, when you don’t have good examples to generate that on your own. Now, I think that can still be done, but when you don’t have a kind of an apprenticeship aspect to that, where the older men are kind of showing the way and then when you don’t have the community in there as well, yeah, they’ll just keep on identifying with memes out of context. And, you know, they’ll reach around for like any kind of thing to grab onto. And at the moment, that’s mostly, I would say, memes. I mean, it’s interesting to look at kind of how this manifests somewhat in the real world, because there was an incident, I think, in the Seattle airport, you know, and this is something guys my age would know about, of the kind of the what’s his name, Sky King, right? And this is a guy who just hijacks an airplane and then nosedives it into an island. Now, he was the only one who was died in that. But there was a kind of, even in the way people were relating to that, they said, you know, he flew this plane, he was kind of trolling the ground crew. But before he goes down, he says, I’m going to do a barrel roll before I nose down. And then, you know, that’s what people relate to rather than for the fact that this man is, you know, it’s a real tragedy is that this man had a wife and kids and like, you know, something weird was going on there, and something, let’s say, unholy was going on there. I think that’s the fear. That would be a fear for a lot of guys around my age to end up like that, you know, to kind of go become so nihilistic or whatever that you would do something like that. To be honest, a lot of guys my age would probably don’t even have much hope in getting married, which is another thing entirely. Right. And he was married with a kid. Yeah. Right. He was married anyways. Right. So there’s like, Well, a lot of people are like, oh, they just need to get married and have a kid. And it’s like, yeah, that doesn’t work either, guys. And then what you’re describing to me, what I’m hearing is, there’s no exemplification of an ideal. Now, the ideal may be there and people may be rebelling against it or rejecting it or whatever. Right. Or it might be that the ideal is gone, or maybe the ideal is there but nobody can see it. Right. This is when I talk about. So what I got out of it is independence. Right. So when we’re talking about Frodo and Sam, they’re not in the same role. Right. Yes. Like, they’re complementing each other. Right. And there’s a dependency that’s being met. And when we’re all trying to be independent, right, especially the women, how can you get the intimacy, right? Because I think that’s the struggle of Ken. Right. Like he has nothing to appeal to because there’s an independence there. And then when we’re bound, right, like the dependence is, in some sense, the thing that holds us, right, like we can lean into it. And therefore, it makes us more, it gives us more agency, right, because it’s resolved through someone else. But now we’re vulnerable. Right. And the vulnerability brings with it a responsibility. And that’s a tragic thing. Right. With the guy in the airplane. He’s like, he did not take the responsibility for the way that he was bound in the world. Right. So he was seeing himself as independent, even though he was. And that’s probably why he did it. Right. Like, because if he could experience and be in the dependence that was there, then he would have had a different relationship, right? Like he would have had a different aim. And doing that would have not been an option. Like it wouldn’t even be conceivable from his perspective. And I think this is this is one of the things that we’re missing, right? Like there’s things that can become inconceivable because they’re just no longer of our option space. And all the things that we think have to be part of our option space is like, I got a message for you. Like they don’t. Like you could have a completely different set and you’d still be fine. And that you have to realize like how profound that is. Like everything you’re holding onto, you’re not dependent upon. Like you can let it all go and something else can take its place. And something else can take that place. Well, and that’s, but that’s the issue. Like you can’t let it all go and have nothing take its place. That’s the nihilism. Is that you can somehow disconnect and then in disconnecting, you can stay in that state. No, you can’t because you will look up to the sky king. And it’s such a weird name, right? The sky king. Because he stole a plane. That makes you the king of the sky stealing one plane. That is such a bizarre framing. And it’s so like it just ignores most of reality. Right? It ignores most of the of the observable things around us. There’s more than one plane. He didn’t have the biggest or the best or the fastest or whatever, whatever measure you want to use. He wasn’t at the top of any hierarchy. Yeah, but the real disturbing thing to me is he had a wife and kid. People keep saying have a kid, it’ll fix the problem. No, it won’t. There’s something very deep going on here. And like Barbie is beautiful, but it lacks true or truth and it lacks good or goodness. It isn’t in that movie. And in that way, the beauty is the destruction that is the Barbenheimer. It is the nuclear weapon of postmodern storytelling. It’s a nuclear weapon. You are going to see, like you do an AI, a fun house mirror reflection of yourself in that movie because there’s nothing of the writers in it. There’s nothing of the actors in it. Those things are not there. Yeah. Yeah. Nothing of the story in it. Yeah. And it throws a wrench. It throws a spanner in the ability of people around my age, younger and older to navigate the ones, particularly older, as I said, the younger guys there were 17 and 18. They didn’t really have as much exposure to the stuff that they were, the other guys were talking about. And so they just kind of kind of drifted off somewhere else. They went earlier, but all these other guys are like, they’ve got jobs, they’re doing pretty well. But there’s something, I guess there must be something that they aren’t seeing in what they’re doing that might be preventing them from relating to the good more positively. That’s a lot of intimacy, right? Your inability to connect with these things larger than yourself or things outside yourself. Like I said, so we’ve got the Marvels movie coming up and they showed the trailer and now it’s not one person with superpowers. It’s three girls with superpowers, right? And they’re swapping off and they state explicitly in the trailer, we need each other. You can’t do this alone. So now we’re moving back out of the me alone by myself Ubermensch model back into the, how do we get together and cooperate model. And that’s in the trailer. You can see they’re like, not this one. This one’s doing something wrong again, right? You see the struggle with, well, what happens when you engage with other people? What happens when you engage with distributed cognition? Well, all of a sudden there’s all these trade-offs that have to happen, but also you get a better insight to yourself. Is it perfect? No, sometimes people are going to tell you things about yourself and they’re wrong about them. And you want to resolve that, Dan. And it’s like, but you can’t. Like at a certain point, you’re just at the limit of what is resolvable. And you just have to take the trade-offs that you can get and acknowledge the idea of constraint. Yeah. Yeah. And on that front, like it’s at least in my local kind of situation, I hope I trust that things will get better if I help and do my part and just, you know, I mean, like we’re doing stuff after breakfast, we’re trying to get, you know, move around. It’s helpful when you’re rather than just sitting around because I mean, right, having a meal, enjoying meals, fine. But you can see that you can, you know, you just sit around there and sit around there. That’s, you see the kind of things start to spiral. It’ll actually narrow. Whereas if you’re walking, generally, you know, you’ll see that things can have the ability to open up because you’re, you know, that’s the whole Aristotelian thing, right? His whole school was called the Peripatetics, meaning the guys who walk around. But there’s also something, right, where when you start putting things into action, right? So walking is an action that you can still talk in, right? But the point of action is that you are drawn in, I’m getting a little bit flowstady here, you’re drawn into the participation, right? And the drawn in-ness of the participation draws you out of your head, right? And so when you’re sitting, right, like, effectively, like you’re in the cave, right, you’re stuck with your one side at one piece, the options that are available to you, especially if you don’t have access to intimate connections, right? They’re really limited, right? And they might even seem binary to you, right? Even though they’re actually not. It’s like I can either go along, right, and I can basically prop up my status by adding my grains of sand, right? Or I have to reject the social thing because I don’t have any other means of engagement. And so either you blow up, right, like there’s this whole negative phalanx that you impose, or you go along. And I think that’s the place where a lot of people are trapped, right? Like they are like, go along, get along, which is tolerance, right? Or like, I have to be the evil guy. Instead of finding a way, right, to redirect into a participation, right, where something else can be shared. Like, why are we talking about Barbie? Right? Like, yes. What made that the thing that we have to commune around? Right. Yeah, or try to commune around. Because maybe a movie like that is the only movie that enough people can find something in to relate to. But the problem is there’s no higher message. There’s no higher goal. In fact, those are all explicitly smashed on purpose. And so we still can’t commune, but we all have, and this is how memes work too, right? Memes are contextless. It’s Darmach and Jalad at Tanagra. Right? It’s that Star Trek Next Gen episode that’s all metaphor, which is just, it’s absurd, but whatever. But that’s what memes are. They’re the instantiation of that, where it’s contextless representational communication. Right? That’s what a meme is. And then it’s like, okay, but I didn’t see the office. That context doesn’t exist, but I see something in those memes. And it’s not what you see if you saw the office. And even if you saw the office, it might not be the same thing. So we think we’re communicating, but we’re not actually communicating because we’re not towards a higher thing. And the Barbie movie is a good example of that. You may think, I resonated with Ken, and I also resonated with Ken, and I also resonated with Ken, but you all resonated for different reasons. What good does that do you? Because you’re still split apart. And that, I think, is the problem. We’re split apart. We don’t have intimacy. Right? There’s a trust crisis, but a trust crisis is a function of intimacy, I would argue. Right? And that’s what the problem is. How do we revivify, regenerate, re-enchant intimacy for persons, right? Get them in with the idea of cooperating with others around them. And that, I think, is the big lesson from all this. Barbie is just the representation of a flattening of the world, where equality is the order of the day. There’s no higher ideals that you have to worry about, even though you may state that you know you need them, right? You have to state not only that you need them, they also have to be there, and you have to agree on them. And that agreement has to be close enough in interpretation that you can move towards it, and then you can have a chance of being generative. It’s just a lot of steps. And everybody wants like a magic pill or a bullet or a philosophical answer or whatever, and it’s like, no, it’s a lot of hard work, dude. And you have to work at it. And you have to work at it. You can’t let other people work at it. That’s not going to happen. And that, I think, is sort of the real point. And I think that’s a good way to wind it down, is to say, this is a perfect example of flattening of the world. And so, Manuel, what do you want to say in closing on this sort of morass of identity framing and meaning crisis through Barbenheimer and the Joker? Well, I think it’s the signal of despair, a veiled cry for help, a promise of a really difficult future. Because let’s just say that this is a correct representation for a significant part of the population. Then where are they going to end up? They’re going to be susceptible to ideologies in ways that nobody was ever susceptible to them before. They’re going to be desperate. If we’re going to have to believe the climate stuff, right? We’re going to have changes on societal skills that are imposed upon us, as well as changes within the society. And they’re going to be in friction with each other. And I saw the word escapism come by. That seems the obvious path. You can see organizations already preparing for non-participatory members, well, dismembered whole society. Yeah, it’s going to be a wild ride. Okay. Adam, what do you think? Take us away from Barbenheimer identity framing, meaning crisis, and Joker? Well, one thing that I didn’t really touch on, but I’ll just touch on a little bit here, is that when it comes to young men and getting past this Barbie stuff, the first step is abandoning any use of irony. Because at this point, there are a lot of young men who still don’t know when they’re being serious. And so they’ll be playing around with whether they should act or not, whether they really meant it. Well, I think it’s time to go out there. Willingly submit yourself to something higher and to go towards the T-Los, even though things may look grim at the moment. Because actually, as time goes on, they may actually start to look less grim, even if the external circumstances actually don’t change, but your perspective on it changes. And yeah, I think, you know, young men, stop watching Barbie, stop doing it. Go out there, try and get married. But you’ve got to look even past the marriage, dudes. You have to look for intimate relationships and community. And if it’s not there, try and build it. Because even in the trying, there’s something to be learned. So yes, is there anything else I’m missing? Joker. Yes, Joker is a great film. Barbie probably isn’t. And yeah, this is the second time I’ve wound up with shooting from the hip. So I’ll leave it. Walk out of the movie theater, men, I compel you. That’s great. Yeah, those are nice summaries. Yeah, I just, in summary, I’d like to say, look, we’re living in a time and a place and these things are happening around us and these poor people who are either stuck in a meaning crisis or stuck in the intimacy crisis. And I think that the intimacy crisis manifests very specifically and differently in women. And hopefully I’ll get some smart email to discuss this with me. Maybe Catherine or Andrea with the bangs. My talk on intimacy with Andrea the bangs has over a thousand views. She has a wonderful channel, you should check it out. My talk with Catherine on navigating patterns is not doing quite that well, but hopefully we’ll pick up soon. And I think that’s like really important is that you’re seeing the manifestations in the media. You have been for a while, you go to Michelle, right, the matrix, things like that. But you’re also seeing people identify with this postmodern, frameless world. And that is going to have negative consequences all around. It’s already having negative consequences. It’s going to have worse negative consequences all around for everybody. And so we have to be able to deal with that in such a way that we don’t make it worse. And the question is, what do we do about that? And that’s where our focus should be. Our focus should not be on what will the government do about that or what should the government do about that or what should some new world government do about that because my government tried and failed, right, or what should my community or, you know, even my church, like, no, you, what should you do about that? Because the only way this works is with the one thing that we all share, which is our time, energy, and attention being put towards fixing things. You can’t expect somebody else to do the work because maybe they can’t, maybe they don’t want to, maybe they don’t see what you see, right, but they’re not where you are and they can’t fix the people that you have access to. So, and they can’t, they can’t use your skills to do it. So you need to find out how you can help people and help yourself. I talk about the three frames. I’ve got a video on that on navigating patterns. Check that one out, right? And it’s really important. It’s really important. It’s important to figure these things out because the intimacy crisis is here. We’re in the middle of it. And that’s the problem is that we’re stuck in the middle of this issue. And we need to start acknowledging that and finding a way through it and avoiding movies like Barbie and understanding movies like Joker, which I still think is an excellent film, so that we can figure out how we personally as a person can do things in the world that are generative towards the good to help other persons. And in doing so, we’ll help ourselves. And I think that’s a good place to end it. Let’s get together. And that theme is actually in Barbie. It’s everywhere, right? We need to start getting together and stop arguing with one another over theology, philosophy, terminology, having stupid conversations, have a meal together, go fishing together, right? Do a book club together. Find commonality. It will help you. I did something sneaky. I had a meal with you guys. Yes. All right, everybody. Thank you very much for watching. I hope this was helpful to people. Have a lovely day.