Commentary Game B Intro - video breakdown - sense making (1hkvmCYH_7w)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=1hkvmCYH_7w

All right, welcome back. So we’re trying something new. I’m here with Manual Post. And this time what we’ve decided to do is we found a video we want to do a commentary on. I had someone in one of the premier streams request a video commentary, and I started working on that. I’m actually going to do that, I think, separately. And what happened was, in the meantime, Paul VanderKley tweeted out this video. And this video is the introduction to game B. This video was so terrifying that I said, everybody has to watch this and tell me what they think, because I didn’t know, is it me? Is this real? Can it be this bad? And we got back some interesting answers along the lines of, yeah, this is not a good thing. And so I said, well, this might be a good thing to do a commentary on. And then what happened was, so I watched it myself, by myself. Manuel watched it himself, by himself, and came to his own independent conclusions. And we’ve since watched it two more times together, because we’ve compiled these notes. And so the reason why we care about game A and game B, roughly speaking, is that it’s a thing that Jordan Hall talks about. And he was talking with John Vervecky, and they brought it up a few times. And so since we started as sort of Jordan Peterson, John Vervecky guys, and we’re firmly in the Vervecky camp, we’ll say that this is sort of relevant in the sphere. And we’ve had a lot of game A, game B people come to the John Vervecky Discord server, the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Discord server. And so we want to kind of address that. And also, these people are everywhere. I see them on Clubhouse, right? And the ideas of game A, game B, I don’t even think they’re necessarily incorrect as a descriptive map, but I don’t think this prescriptive or predictive. Those ideas are everywhere. And a lot of them lead to, we’ll say, a particular place. And so what we’ve done is we’ve taken a bunch of notes. We have notes on, we’ll say, the textual content, which is just reading through the transcript, which we also did in addition to watching the video at least three times, just reading the transcript. Without, we’ll say, the enchantment of the music and the visuals, which we’ll get into that. That’s important, right? And then we went back and did all the visuals and the music and the symbols, the little tricks that we think they’re employing. And not to impugn anyone’s honor, the video was made by people, and people are moved by spirits. And sometimes they don’t know what moves them. So I’m not saying these people know exactly what they’re doing. They’ve got this all calculated out. And it’s a very well-planned mechanistic thing. I don’t believe any of that. But we play out patterns. And that’s what the channel is all about, navigating patterns. We play out patterns. And so we want to show you some of the patterns that have played out without making any claims as to whether or not they’re deliberate or whether or not people that did them understood them or any of that. Because this isn’t about placing blame or anything. This is about arming you with tools and frameworks so that you don’t get enchanted or fooled or fall into narrative capture. So on that note, go ahead, Manuel. Tell us what you think. Well, I would add that there’s maybe one in time that we can be sure about. They did want to enchant you, but that doesn’t say anything of the other motivations within that enchantment. Good or bad. Yeah, enchantment’s not necessarily good or bad. Right. So yeah, right. So there’s this element where it’s the surface level engagement that we had with the video. And then when reflecting on it and rewatching it or reading the transcript, there’s this depth and even highly religious undertone in the structure and in the conveyance. And that, in some senses, is unreal to observe. So yeah, on one level, it’s amusing. But on the other level, it’s also really scary, how many things are going on and how they just get bombarded at us. And then if we don’t take this deep dive into it, they stay hidden, even to us. And the fact that we have each other to contrast and sense make, that’s also important. Because when you open one door, it’s like, oh, yeah, you can look at it this way. And then you see five other things. And they’re through the same door. So yeah, that’s how this came to be. And we spent a lot of time on this. And there was a lot of things to get out of it. So we’re not going to get to all of it. And that’s also not the point of the video. So we want to get off a little bit with the structure of the video without you having seen it, so that you can get a sense of what to expect. What is going to be presented to you? And it also allows you a way to disengage from the enchantment in the moment, because you have an expectation that you can hold when watching. Yeah, well said. Yeah, and again, the point is to help break the enchantment. We have lots of hours in on this. And it’s not just us, because we get opinions from lots of people. So we’re using that distributed cognition, that collective intelligence, this idea of collective sense making to help us along. Because some things are so deep. And whether they’re intent, I don’t think they’re intended. Because it’s hard to see how anybody could intend all of this, or even most of this. But we follow these patterns. And so finding these patterns is an exercise that requires an intelligence larger than any one of us. And we do have a lot of help. So I just want to highlight that. We did all spend a lot of time on it, and energy, and attention. And that’s really important to note. So why don’t we just go through the notes summary that we have. And do you want to start off, Manuel, or do you want me to start off? Well, yeah, you can go. OK. So in this game B intro video, there’s three games actually mentioned. So this game A, game B binary doesn’t actually exist in the narrative they tell, which is interesting right off of that. Why are you comparing two things if you’re mentioning three? And I think there’s a deliberate reason for that. So there’s really the first game, which is the referent game. It’s the utopia. It’s the perfection. There’s game A, which is the game we’re stuck in. And then there’s game B. Game A stops working due to population explosion. So I’m sorry. The first game stops working during the population explosion. Game A gets further corrupted by the fact of the population explosion. It emerges from this idea of too much population. And then game B is a dream. So even in the video, it’s not manifest. And it’s not clear that it will be manifest. So they’re not appealing to determinism. And the way they tell this story is by using three wisdoms. The sage, which is truth in retelling, the matriarch, which is life, purpose, regeneration is represented by the heart. And the third wisdom is the chief, which is the body and represents building. And then they’re establishing a lot of these truths through a historical story lens, where they’re using nostalgia to hijack your emotional valence and to appeal to something we’ll call it pure, roughly speaking. And that’s part of the, say, overall outline of what they’re doing in the moment. And these notes are called mostly from the transcript, which is a very different read, by the way, from watching the video. So that’s where I’m getting this from. And that’s sort of, say, the high level outline of, we’ll say, the framing of the story. Right. So then one thing to note about it is that they’re trees. So they’re coming in trees. And the trees are used as a thing to build the story on. They’re important to the story. So then they split up the narrative between the past, present, and future, which is analogous with the game A, the original game, and the game A, and the game B. And they embody that spirit that is a strawman representation of these aspects. So they’re not making a coherent argument about the future. They’re making a set of assertions that are in the spirit of the narrative that they want to convey, which is an enchanting narrative. So that is the aim of this drama. And they start off with this idealized state. And then there’s a regression from the noble savage, like the purity of being in accordance with nature, into a society that is controlled in a hierarchy. And it’s a possession by an evil spirit called a parasite. And it’s controlling all of us. And that is the evil that we’re currently under. And then they lift you up out of the state with their ideal, the thing that they’re presenting to you. And salvation will come to a mystical invocation of the tribe of which you’re a member, and that the cooperation manifested through this tribe is going to be based on feeling right, because they’re not giving a definition. They’re appealing to your capacity to magic it into existence. And then that will bring the solution into the world. And then it’s important that that’s based on the authority of the three sages. They convey that as an authority to you. So you’re effectively having to trust them. So there is an introduction of a scene with stars and they’re representative of the potential. And that potential is then harbored in the person who’s going to play this game. And that person is going to play the role of the hero that is going to save us from this bad, parasite infested reality that we’re in. Yeah. Yeah, it’s interesting, right? Because they end up in the video flipping, right? The narrative of your role and the global narrative of the project itself, right? So the big goal and the history. So they’re mixing in these three time frames constantly. And they’re basically giving you, through the narrative, they’re making you the hero in several ways, like how you get into the story, right? What happens to you once you’re in the story, right? And then the wisdoms are acting as the ideals, right? And that sneaks you into participation. So they’re assuming that by watching that you’re participating or you’re going to participate in their project. And again, there’s nothing wrong with that. Like I’m saying, I’m not trying to impugn anything, right? But that’s what they’re doing. And they appeal to these ideals and this utopic vision, this first game, right, to constrain your direction, the direction of your attention, roughly speaking. They’re using evil, the idea of the perfect garden, the Garden of Eden, right, and end times, right? So they’re saying, oh, we’ve got to run away from end times and towards the garden. And here’s what the garden looked like before. And this parasite is the demon. And it’s not a mere demon. It’s a demon that controls everything you do, roughly speaking. And there’s no clear cause of the parasite, right? It just seems like a snake in the garden or something, right? It’s just there. And it seems to cause and be caused by game A, which, again, seems to be caused by overpopulation, roughly speaking. And there doesn’t seem to be a way to excise the parasite. But also, the things that the parasite give us, roughly speaking, need to be capped, which is an interesting twist on the enchantment, right? Because you need all the things from game A, right? Because they avoid overly demonizing game A, which is a very good move, obviously, right? Oh, we’ve got a lot of good things from our technology. So let’s not throw away all the good stuff. But you need that in order to get to game B effectively, right? So they talk about through, which I find sort of interesting. Yeah, so then they’re trying to appeal to you as a person, right? So you’re supposed to identify with the player. And then you wake up in the world. And then you’re chosen, right? So you’re special. And they call you waking up in initiation. And they afford you a symbol of recognition in the way of a coin, which is a thing that affords you a status among them, right? So it places you a part of them. But it’s also a remembrance. It’s a thing that’s appealed on at the end of the movie, where they effectively say, oh, you have this sign that proves that it’s real, right? That proves that you’re chosen. That proves that you have the ability to manifest this utopia in the moment, right? And that proves that you have access to the specialness, the special skills that the three wisdoms have unlocked in you, right? And then your responsibility is to keep that connection open, to keep that special way of being informed by them, which is somewhat like mind controlled, open, right? So they’re explicitly invocating that. And yes, so in the end, there’s also this grasping for the parasite, right? But the parasite isn’t the continuity between the other world and this world. But the continuity is the connection to the sages. So that’s the thing that they rely on. Yeah, the coin, the coin that you’re given in a video game happens outside of the video game to maintain the continuity and also the realness of the video game world, which is interesting. We’ll go into that more at the end. Yeah, and then there’s this whole appeal, because the video is set up like the Matrix, right? It’s a Matrix clone, clone story, roughly speaking, right? There’s an appeal to domicide, which is what the Matrix is about. Like, oh, you feel like you’re in the wrong place, right? You feel like, right? And then they go through that in the Matrix. And in this, they go through the same thing, right? They give the same mini narrative about, wow, something doesn’t feel right. And now that you’re in the narrative as a hero, you’re seemingly able to resist the parasite. But those three wisdoms are there guiding you, roughly speaking. But you’re sort of dependent upon them in some sense, because they start out guiding you into the world. And then in the world, they’re dragging you around, basically. And you’re asking them questions, and they’re, well, in the beginning, not answering the questions. And then they start answering some questions. But it’s not that they’re not giving answers. They’re not answering the questions, which is a different thing entirely, right? So it’s good to know. Like, when you’re asking a question and you’re not getting an answer to the question you asked, that’s a thing that should set bells off in your head, for sure. Not saying it’s bad, it might be fine. But it also might not be fine. And that’s what you have to sort of discern for yourself. So they establish the authority in a number of different visual ways, too. And they give you this path to be saved from the possession of the parasite, roughly speaking. But they give you a lot of agency. They give you a lot of ideas of proper action and how to manifest, we’ll say, the new utopia, Utopia 2.0, which is, roughly speaking, game B in this outline. Because we came from Utopia, which is you contrast Utopia, the first game, with game A. And they show you this clear path. And then you want to get back to Utopia without losing all the things you’ve gained. So you need a Utopia 2.0 because you’ve got to integrate. And it’s this cooperation through this mysterious tribe that they reference. So they’re referencing tribalism, but in a positive light. And they’re saying there’s a positive tribe you can be part of that will help you manifest this in cooperation with others. And this idea of proper action, roughly speaking, is a way for them to hijack your agency and your power. Because your agency is, to some extent, your power. It’s not all of your power, although all the elements needed for power are in your agency. So that’s another component to keep in mind about the narrative and how it plays out. Right, so that’s the aim of the video. That’s what they want to get from you. So the authorities, they have ways of connecting to you. So this is where the enchantment starts coming in, in a heavy way. So they’re making appeals to nostalgic elements, like Eden, the Garden of Eden team is, oh, that was a place or a way of being that was nice. And they want to have that back. And then they’re presenting you with a tribe, so that’s granting you a level of intimate connections that you don’t have in your current domicided state. And then they’re also representatives of fruits and fundamental principle. So they’re inheriting the authority from the principle that they’re representing without making clear how that connection is there, like that’s asserted to you. So all of these things, they set up this empty shell of a story for you where you can project yourself into and cast yourself as the hero. Like they give you the ways to fantasize on how you would give yourself self-expression. And even in the end, they have the three sages, which are mind, heart, and body. And then they say, these are essential things, and they need to be represented. So then they give you even slots which you can identify with in the final solution, which is maybe a joke. So yeah, so that binds you. And then in order to give more openness of interpretation, they enter with a set of paradoxes. So they have this idea of cooperation, out-competing competition, which is like there’s really strange going on. Are we then cooperating, or are we competing? The parasite is the cause of game A, but is also caused by game A. It’s like, how does that work? And then they’re making this appeal to this natural arising solution that’s going to be magic into being. But it’s also explicitly saying that you should take control of destiny. So it’s like, are you providing the solution, or is this solution enough? What’s the deal there? And then they have this really strange thing where they say, culture is effectively a psychotechnology. They use the word technology. And it’s implied that culture is created to solve things. And then culture is also naturally arising. So is it a strategy, or is it something that just manifests and works? So that’s a little bit like the strange contrast that they’re providing you with. And why would they be doing it? Like, what is to be gained there? So yeah, we think that there’s an element of making you rely on them to provide the solution. Because how are you going to solve that? You’re not going to do it. But they pretend to have the solution. So you’re going to have to get that solution through them. And then, yeah, so they explicitly state that the knowledge of that solution is impossible. So they’re even, in some sense, admitting their own ignorance. But they’re also implying that they have the solution at the same time. So that’s another paradox. But that’s a paradox on the level of their existence and their purpose. So yeah, and then in the end, that’s all coming together in this technology tribe, and where the tribal nature can be manifested through technology. And then because technology can allow us to connect to the whole world and to many people, then magic happens. Yeah, yeah, that tribalism appeal is everywhere. And it’s sort of snuck in. It snuck into the visuals. It snuck into the text. It’s sometimes used to highlight something bad, but also as a force for good. It’s like, OK, well, I guess. I mean, that’s true. Tribalism could be bad or good. It really is a neutral valence. But it’s also the solution to solve the current domicile problem that they introduced. And they set up a location for you to flee with the solution, which is roughly speaking called technology, right? And this idea of they’re sliding in the humanism. They go, technology allows us to be all one tribe, effectively one of the big messages in here. And the way it does that is by providing you with what they claim to be our intimate connections with the community. And then they talk about how that is the technology that allows the scaling to the globe. And so all of the things that would be solved, if we just lived in smaller villages and, say, extended families, can also be solved, but at a larger scale with the technology that connects us all, right? That’s the pitch. That’s one of the pitches. And it’s like, oh, I don’t know that intimacy works that way. Intimacy is specific, not general. And you’re confusing the general and the specific there. And part of the solution of this global humanistic vision that they’re giving you, roughly speaking, is everything that’s been built by not them, because most of the things of the world we didn’t build, and no even handful of people built, will say they may have enabled it. Ford didn’t build all the cars. Henry Ford may have enabled cars to be sold and built, we’ll say, at scale, sure. But he didn’t build them all, right? So that’s a little bit different. But they need to be put in this space called public domain. And there’s lots of problems with the public domain because the public domain doesn’t exist in some sense. It has to be managed. The public can’t manage it. Otherwise, you run into what’s called the tragedy of the commons. If you’re not familiar with the tragedy of the commons, you should look that up. And it’s not the only one either. But it’s one of many interesting dilemmas that happens when you have commonality. So the solution that has emerged over time, and it emerged. It was not planned. It was not thought about. It was not directed from some human force of whatever, nefarious intent or anything, is government. So really, the only thing that controls the public domain, in all cases where the public domain is, is what we call government. Now, we can argue about different types of government and whether or not we need government. But anything that emerges as the result of the idea of public property or shared property or common property is government. And it will have all the same qualities of government, good and bad. And so their idea is centralization, right? They want to seize everything. And then moving it towards what would be a government. Because there’s no other. You either have to move it to a specific person or a group of people, which would be a corporation, or a group of people that would be a government. But those are your only three options. So unless you want someone to own everything, that’s a monarchy. Then you could have some group of one own everything. That’s a corporation. Or you can have some agreed upon group of managers. That’s a government, right? And so they’re just ignoring the idea of public property and the tragedy of the commons and the fact that you can’t have neutral things in the world because they need to be cared for. The agents need to care for things or they decay because entropy, it doesn’t need anything bigger than that. And then this sets up why they appeal to the first game. It’s really just an appeal to what I like to call objective material reality as the pure ideal world, right? As a state where there’s something that you can put things and they’re in the public domain and they’re pure forever. But that state doesn’t exist, roughly speaking. Yeah, and that’s also the part where you as an individual or as a group, you have limited capacity to interact. And when the world is wholly open for you to interact, you need to have the capacity to sense make within that space because it’s impossible to have a relationship with it, right? So then your government would also have to have partially the function of sense making where they’re leading the flow of information. And then we get into a whole different can of worms, which is literally the kind of worms that they’re complaining about, right? Like the kind of worms where it is, there is this narrative, right? Represented by the parasite that is taking control of you, right? And then they’re basically gonna superimpose a different narrative, but someone’s gonna have to write that narrative. So, yeah, so if we look at the vibe that the video is trying to convey, right? Like they’re using this idea of the matrix, right? Which is for a lot of people, at least in the target group, like it’s something from the youth, right? And it’s highly culturally relevant, right? Because it also has this element of you escaping from the mind control, right? Which is in the game as well, right? And then the game is represented in a bit style, which is also something from the same target group, right? From their youth. So, and that grounds you into a certain consumer paradigm. And then the music that they use, they also use that to bind you in the video game frame, and they use it to highlight importance in the video, right? And they also use it to lift you up, right? So they’re conveying this emotional message with it, and we’ll point it out later. So, and then the game itself is telling the story of a noble savage, right? Like, so in the past, everything was nice. And that’s also represented in the way that they depict that. Yeah, so that’s what we call the Garden of Eden, right? And then we get hijacked by the overpopulation, right? Like, so people cannot maintain that way of life because they get forced into a different way of life by the people who were like already in that game way of life. And that’s a representation of the falling of civilization into sin, right? Like into decades. And that is then represented by the parasite. And the parasite traps you in a frame where their solution, the solution that they’re representing is the only option, right? Like, the parasite is on you, it’s gonna retake control of you, and the only way that you can resist being re-controlled is by opening your wisdom centers to them. And then you were special, you were the one that was chosen, like they opened your wisdom centers and you have the responsibility to keep them open. Thereby, right, like they’re lifting you and your agency up, right? Like, because they’re not really saving you, but you’re letting them save you, which is in some sense even worse than being saved. And then, yeah, you have this empowered self and that allows you to act within the final solution, the technology trap, right? That restores intimacy, right? Because they’re having these three aspects, right? So basically they’re saying, well, you have wisdom of the mind, wisdom of the heart and wisdom of the body, and we’ve been talking about connectedness, I think in previous videos, right? Like these, if you have all of these, you have a level of connectedness, right? That’s correct. And that’s the promise that they leave you with. And yeah, and then you’re the savior of yourself in your domicile and you’re also the savior of the human race by participating in this solution. So yeah, I think that was kind of like several ways of looking at what they were presenting to you. And I hope that these ways will allow you to look at what’s happening in a different light. Yeah, yeah, and it just sort of occurred to me, Manuel, one way to think about the government is the agreed upon authority for distributed cognition, right? Like we all agree that these are the people that are gonna do our distributed cognition and then make decisions based on that distributed cognition for the rest of us, right? It’s just another submission. It’s another trade-off that you have to make in order to live in a large society where there’s a population, but also in order to build technology, because you can’t have corporations without government. It doesn’t go well, then the corporations own everything, right? So, or the government may be a monarch, then the corporations own everything, right? We’ve seen that in history too. So, and before we sort of go into the video. Well, I wanna take that, right? Oh, okay, go ahead. So they have this picture of a pyramid of a hierarchy, which is actually the representation of government and of specialization required by the more complex structure, right? So part of the argument that is implicit is, okay, we have overpopulation. Well, the overpopulation requires more complicated interaction, and the complication of the interaction requires specialization so that you can have optimization, right? And then you inevitably get into this hierarchy, and then they’re pretending that you can end up in a non-hierarchical state in the end. Right, yeah, no, that’s a good point, right? The overpopulation enables specialization that enables technology, right? So you want specialization because it enables technology, but then they wanna shrink it all back down and keep the technology piece, right? And get rid of the government that is basically, it’s not the top of the hierarchy, or it shouldn’t be when it is. You have problems, and maybe we have problems, right? So I’ll make a claim there. Maybe the idea that we’re treating the government as the top of the hierarchy is the problem, maybe it could be, or we’re trying to replace what is the rightful top of the hierarchy, that could be too, that’s something to keep in mind. But yeah, you’re right, they put it in a pyramid, right for you, it’s very clearly a hierarchy, and then they kind of indicate that that’s gotta go. And they do at the end sort of replace it with what appears to be a flat structure, but you’re not keeping technology. Yeah, yeah, you’re definitely not keeping technology though, and that’s what they’re not understanding. So yeah, I wanna go over the, we did a treatment of just the visuals and the music, which was exhausting. But yeah, the idea that, again, it’s the matrix. So you start out as a real person, you go into an eight-bit game world, and then you come out a real person again with proof that the eight-bit game world is real, and certification that you are the chosen one, roughly speaking. So whether you wanna be anointed a hero, or whether you thought you already were a hero, it fits both sides of the entry into the hero narrative. Some heroes are reluctant. Right, right. Some heroes are reluctant, and they’re pushed into it. And in this case, you could read it that way, and some heroes are like, I know I can get the golden fleece, or whatever, I know I can. And it also caters to that. It doesn’t matter, you’ll read it whichever way you read it, which is interesting to note. Narratives aren’t one, you know, you gotta give Cohen Derrida some credit, even though I’m loathe to do so. They’re not wrong about some of this. They’re wrong about the cause of it, right? But they’re not wrong about some of it. The author can’t understand the author’s intent because there’s a spirit driving the author. And so when a story arises, there’s lots of different messages in the story, for sure. And there’s messages that the person writing the story didn’t see. This is akin to psychological projection, although it’s a slightly different phenomena, but it’s the same sort of idea. So you’ve got this initiation in this gold with this space background, and space refers to potential, right? And it invites the participation, right, in the pacing and the music, right? And then, you know, they’re doing this symbolic enchantment through a new icon, right, which is a video game, roughly speaking, an explicit video game. So unlike the matrix where you go from real world to real world, in this, you go from real world to clearly something like a primitive metaverse. And, you know, I know it might be a stretch to say that, but that’s the look they’re going for deliberately. Right, so they’re putting you in, well, a world in which everything is known implicitly. I think that’s important. Yeah, so we kind of missed this introduction because there’s this woman who sits behind the computer and she starts taking in questions. And she starts taking in questions and they weren’t in the transcript, right? So she starts asking questions. And then what happens? She gets supported, right? She gets motivated to ask more questions as if that’s a good thing, right? It might be good, right, if you’re asking the right questions and if the answers are leading you somewhere. But it’s implied that the asking of the questions makes her special, right? And it is actually the thing that allows her to get accepted within the game. And then there’s this element where she has to commit to accepting, participating in game B without knowing what game B is, right? So there’s this moment of choice, which she actually navigates away from the choice. And then there’s this enthusiasm, right? Like there’s this engendering of this positive spirit, this spirit of change that allows her to bind herself to this new destiny. Well, yeah, and it’s important that all the questions that are being asked are related to Domasa, right? So there you get to identify in a specific way with this person, right? And especially because the target group is supposed to be the nones, right? Like the people who lost their home in religion and they wanna have a new way to participate in the world. Yeah, definitely important. Yeah, I like that. I like that. And you’re popping into this game. And the first thing that’s happening basically is there’s more stars. So we’re back to the potential. So it’s the potential in the beginning, and then you pop into the epic game and there’s the stars and the potential again. And they’ve cast the main character as a human initially in the role of Socrates, deliberately invoking a savior. Socrates deliberately invoking a sage, invoking the sense of curiosity, right? And those questions are not answered directly, right? But they’re encouraged. So the additional question is encouraged because when you’re in that mode of wonder, which when you engage in this video, you’re in the mode of wonder, right? And so fair enough, they’re dragging you along in that rather deliberately. And the authority says that this is all good and that it all makes sense, right? And the authority sort of appear above you, right? And they give you this whole continuity. So it’s stars, you pop in, it’s stars. So there’s this continuity there. And they start offering this alternative right off the bat, right? Through characters looking down at you as authority, and they’re shining, right? They’re shining characters. They’re calling out to you, right? So they called out to you from inside this ultimate reality, roughly speaking, right? And when you get there, they call out to you again, right? By presenting themselves. And the stars are covered up by them. So they very much like represent that whole ethos. Right, the calming down of the potential, right? The ideals manifest, and they’re literally gonna say that they’re the ideals. So it’s important to realize, right? So the characters on the back looking up, right? So there’s an element of lifting up, right? And then while later they’re gonna introduce the parasite as well, right? From which you’re disconnected, right? So that you have clear vision, right? So there’s all of these aspects where they’re the ones that are putting you in right relationship, which is to be fair, right? Like that’s what they’re supposed to be doing, right? They’re putting you in right relationship with the world, right? And then again, right? Like, so there’s a bunch of questions by the main character and the main character does not get answers to the questions, but she does get answers. So now we’re in a new relationship like now there’s answers provided, but it’s not the answers that are asked. And then in some sense that is initiating the transformation from those wisdom centers into you, right? It’s like, okay, like you’re not looking at the world in the right way, we have the right way and we’re gonna provide it for you. And don’t rely on yourself if you have that damn parasite knowing it. Yeah, yeah, those are good points. Yeah. And then they start making the reference to game B within that narrative framework. So they’re pretending like initially you’re questioning and curious and that draws you in. And then they’re setting up very deliberately another narrative, right? So it’s this wrapped narrative idea that’s what the matrix story is roughly speaking, right? And they’re initiating you into the world as a player, with an urgency call roughly, right? From a deep voiced, authoritative sounding figure, right? So these are important sort of symbolic ways that they’re forcing the narrative onto the viewer, right? Because again, they drag the viewer in because the person in the movie was a viewer and then they got dragged in. And so that just trains your attention on the fact that you too could get dragged in or are dragged in, right? And so it’s very much wrapping the story is very, very deliberate in that. And then there’s these invocations made out of a sense of caring by a female authority that they have to hurry because the parasite roughly speaking is gonna take over, right? Or could wake up or something. It’s a little vague on how the parasite actually works which again is an interesting fact of the video. So yeah, and they’re using a lot of the music with this and doing a lot of scene changes. Yes, so do we wanna have that depicted for the audience maybe? Yeah, we can do that. We can show some of the scenes real quick. Let me… Right, and so you can see the start is just on the questions, right? But then what happens is they’re popping into a world with this scene and it doesn’t start this way. It starts with just the clouds and then the three characters appear out of pretty much nowhere. And that’s the problem is that it’s moving through this this worldview, right? This idealized, this is the first game sort of worldview where you’ve got this wooly mammoths and there’s people living together, right? And the invocation is towards, you’re temporarily free, right? There’s humanity and technology and nature all right in the scene. And the technology here is roughly what they’re carrying. So in video game, you might carry a magical item. Everyone here has a magical item. And there’s music in the background. It’s sort of tricky to see, right? But there’s music by the village. They’re playing music next to the dangerous wooly mammoths which I find that- There’s a sense of harmony represented by the music and the fact that there’s these dangerous animals so close. And then the thing that just like blew my mind is like, there’s this cave next to the village, right? This is the implication that they came out of the cave, right? From darkness into light. And now we’re in this Kumbaya harmony thing and we’re having paradise, right? Like they’re literally going into the fact that there was this relationship with nature which is renewal cycle. And like there’s no consumption or parasitic relationship of human onto nature. No, there was this harmony so that’s the thing that’s being invoked here in image and then with music and then also the narrative that these people are gonna present. Right, yeah. And they do a really good job of mentioning to you that you’re gonna be the first of the new sort of tribe, right? And then they’re giving forth this crazy narrative and they’re invoking magic here explicitly, right? And you can see the magical power there come up and that’s what gets represented on the coin roughly speaking too, right? It’s supposed to be the thing that ties the narrative inactivity together, right? So you have a very static screen, static narrative. It’s all tied together in this symbol and again, each of the sages has mystical items, right? Or technology, technological items. And then they move through this explanation of this utopia, right? And how it endured for a hundred thousand years. Everybody lived like this with woolly mammoths. None of them get killed off or anything, right? Only good things happened, right? They ignore all the bad things and just pretend like, well, that’s really what the first game was all about. And we’ll say your parasite that’s weakening you didn’t exist back then, right? Because everybody did, again, we don’t know where it comes from. I don’t think they explained that at all. But the culture is the thing that is the quote technology that solves a problem, which that’s part of the framing of this whole thing. And they’re invoking all of these ways of being, like regeneration, which is good. But the problem with regeneration is it pretty much breaks the first law of thermal dynamics. It’s this idea that things just perpetuate magically with no loss. And again, entropy, we live in a world with entropy. So that’s not gonna happen. And they do this whole idea of meeting everybody together in this stewardship thing, which roughly speaking is called empathy, right? Stewardship is, oh, you’re responsible for your fellow human being thing. It’s the same old tired, in my opinion, humanistic argument that they made in the 1920s and before and slightly after, right? This is what the great despots built their empires upon is this idea of this humanistic idea, roughly speaking, meeting everybody. We might wanna show the parasite framework. Put this parasite like hugely on the screen to take us a little bit back to- I don’t think it’s in back of that. No, I think it’s back. Where do you think it is exactly? Cause I didn’t think it was back here. I don’t think they’ve even talked about the parasite yet. Oh, there it is, you’re right. Yeah, you can see it on them. They zoom in on it. And it’s pulsing and they throw it is really in your face. And I think that’s important, right? So this is the setup, right? So you’re in this world, right? Like there’s all of these elements that are put in relationship to each other. And this is the starting point. This is where we start from. And then they start swapping into the next chapter. Maybe just like seven, something minutes. Yeah, it’s six minutes in. Yeah. This is a little bit more advanced, right? This is still a game. No, this is the next scene change. Yeah, this is the next scene after the first one. Yeah, but this is still the primary game. All right, so here, this is where they’re talking about the first one. This is where they’re talking about the relationship to nature, right? And the technology is attuned to the world that they’re living in, right? So there’s this element of integration that’s really highlighted in the relationship. And then there’s the symbol of the tree that they point out there, right? Which is then what’s basically the cycle of life of the tree where it’s like going into life, bearing fruit, dying. And then that is how things are supposed to happen. Like that’s the correct cycle. And then that is connected to the magical symbol that was in the air in the previous scene. And that is gonna be imprinted on the coin as well, which is conveyed in this scene to the main character to initiate her as part of the people who know, the people who are aware. Right, right, right. And then it flips to this idea to, this is the chapter on game A itself, right? So you have a little bit of say technological development in the last, in the description of the first game. And then they flip to this, which is basically a standard board game thing, right? That you’d find in Catan or civilization, right? Games like that. And this is where they start explaining the tribalism. So there’s no tribalism in the first game. And then this tribalism sort of arrives it’s presented as a problem, right? And there’s this rise in the musical tempo, right? And so they’re giving you this sense of motion through the music, right? And then there’s sort of the reason why they do this is to modify this board. And they modify the board slightly by flipping the things over to show the overcrowding. And that’s what shows up here is all of this ridiculous overcrowding, right? And then they continue through time and they show an actual, you know, we would recognize as a city city, right? And this is just a natural progression. The things that don’t change though are the characters in the game, right? So they’re really playing with narrative framing, right? The characters are in a frame and what they’re doing is moving the frame around the characters and keeping the characters the same. And again, I’m not saying that’s good or bad. I’m just pointing out that’s what they’re doing. So- Understanding on a high place where they have overview of the situation, right? So there’s all these implications in how these characters have a relationship to what’s going on around them. Yeah, exactly. And you notice they start out in a high place. They go to an even place with the village and now they’re back on a high place again, judging. So if you wanna do the U-shaped story structure, which, you know, I’ve got my issues with, but it’s better than nothing. And then, you know, what happens is they sort of progress through this is there’s that pyramid that you love Manuel. Yeah, so this is the hierarchy. And it’s really funny because what they’re doing is they’re coming into the pyramid from bottom up, right? So usually when you deal with anything, you start with the most important first, right? But that’s not the message that they wanna convey, right? It’s like, you wanna say, oh, look at here, here’s all these poor farmers and slaves and look at all those people above them, right? Like that’s the message that they convey when you’re going from bottom up instead of from the far or down. And yeah, well, like we had some criticisms about maybe things not being in the right place. But yeah, like the point that we made, right? Like there’s this necessity, right? Like, so all of these things, right? Like they’re distinguished by the role that they fulfill in society. And the role that is higher upon the pyramid is the role that is more difficult, right? Like it requires more of the person, right? Which would be normal for any hierarchy, right? So it’s deemed to be bad, but from my perspective unavoidable. Yeah, and also you’re right. The trick really is you mentioned the most important thing first. And the thing they mentioned first are farmers and slaves. And then they go through this thing that’s supposed to represent, say, the number of things and their quote, caste importance in society. I would argue they got that totally wrong. Like they just, it’s just wrong. But they don’t recognize it. Maybe one good way to think about this is the perspective of farmers and quote slaves, which by the way, they didn’t have in Egypt. I know contentious argument. No, they didn’t. They believed in Ma’at. You can look up Ma’at, double A, M, double A, T. Farmers have to tend the land. They have to care about when the sun comes up, when the sun goes down, what the moisture is. They have to prepare for the weather. So they have a certain framing that they have to conform to. That type of knowledge, the knowledge we’ll say of being in harmony with nature, that way of understanding the world is not available to everybody. It’s not available to everybody. Not everybody can be a farmer. Not everybody can be a good farmer. And farmers also need helpers who are just going to take their word for it when they say, no, no, no, water this today, but not tomorrow. And the person doesn’t understand because they’re not used to watering it every day. Fair enough. Maybe you listen to the expert farmer in that case. So you can see there’s hierarchies within these hierarchies. And the things that Pharaoh pays attention to are more global in scope, if you will. They’re like, you have to make decisions at the level of how can I get something done that needs to be done for the majority while hurting the least number of people? Because that’s what leaders do. They make trade-off decisions at a layer of reality that doesn’t treat people like people. Yes, but I would argue that’s unavoidable. And so when you don’t recognize that that’s true for every single, and I would argue this is a bad caste system that’s out of order and wrong, even for ancient Egypt, but that’s a different argument, when you have that sense that there’s different perspectives. So for example, what does it take to run three farms instead of just one? It’s a different skill set entirely. Like management is a different skill set and not everybody can have it and you can’t just teach it to people. In fact, teaching management to people usually ends poorly. So it’s really in a way an invalid way to look at this. And again, the music plays a big role here. And they keep kind of switching up, right? So we go from that, roughly speaking, into this back to the board, right? Only, and this is where war starts. And you can see the background behind the map as well. Right. Lava, fire. Right, they’re very much trying to emphasize that behind the map is this war. And they… Right. Yeah, go ahead. And then they have this idea of, okay, so now there’s this new game, right? And then everybody’s converted to the game or killed. Right? Like we’re now in a new paradigm and there’s new rules and the previous way of being is inaccessible. So there’s this invocation of this transition and the inability to go back and the inevitability of war as a consequence of living together. And then they go into this amazing, or they zoom in actually on the mountain going into it, which is a reference to resource gathering, right? Because they need resources to maintain their society. But also, right, we had the cave at the first scene, right? So now we’re back into the cave, right? Like we’re back into the unconscious. We’re back into the realm of the demonic, right? Like the darkness. And then there’s these effectively slave workers who are molesting the land that cannot support them forever because they’re removing resources from the system as opposed to having this harmonious relationship. You can see the redness, right? Like which is in relation to the war, right? Like it’s invoking hell. Like the inability to see clearly. Like all of these things are in there. Yeah, yeah, it’s really sort of amazing how well they do the imagery. And then they pop back out of this whole thing back to the same place you were before, except it’s on fire. Everything’s broken and there’s dead animals in the field. It’s like, wow, but it’s the same, right? And there’s these little eight bit animations rolling. But again, the music keeps getting heightened up in tempo this whole time to show this progression because progression is a very big part of this. This idea of progress, of continual progress is sort of all over this thing. And there’s this sense of despair in the voiceover. We can’t return to the first game. We can’t do it, right? It’s not explained why, it’s just stated axiomatically. And again, you need to state axioms. So I’m not demonizing the axiom, but mind your axioms. When people just state stuff axiomatically, give it a little note in your head. Oh, okay, did they actually prove their point or whatever? It’s worth knowing. And that whole sequence, this whole appeal to progress as such and showing the progress as the narrative, right? So in other words, what I mean is they’re showing the movement of these things, which in many cases didn’t happen this way, right? Because there’s a cycle of war and no war and war and no war over and over again in history. So history is much more rich and interesting than this. And the wars aren’t for say resource reasons, right? Or maybe they’re always for resource reasons, but you have to expand your idea of what a resource is, right? Because sometimes a resource is ego. Because sometimes the conqueror just wants to conquer to have more land, not because they need more land in any way, shape or form, say material. And this sort of flattens that out and makes the primary mover for everything in the narrative progress, this idea of progress. And it’s appealing to archetypal progress because I would argue that there’s ways in which progress and some people do this is going back to farming, right? And this is a famous argument between a couple of founders of the United States. Do you wanna have a farming society or do you want a technological society? And yeah, that’s a debate that’s obviously, yeah, still going on today to some extent, right? Is what kind of society do we actually wanna have ultimately? Yeah, so they made this argument about being in the cradle of civilization, right? So I think they’re talking about the Nile Delta and every scene is supposed to be a representation of that place, right? And then, right, like Mark was talking about this archetypical structure that they were conveying, right? But there’s also a sense of inevitability of the archetype playing out in this specific way that is also conveyed, right? And now it’s pretty good that they get into this modern place, which is also game A where there’s no war, right? And they even have like gardens on rooftops, right? Like it’s not that bad, and there’s even this element of the preservation of history, like the pyramids in the background. But yeah, like now they’re stating, okay, we’re out of history, right? Like we now have a problem formulation, we have game zero or whatever the original game which isn’t an option, and game A isn’t an option because it’s self-terminating because of resources, stronger technology, like it’s just gonna explode. Yeah, so in this point, right, like you can identify with the hero again, right? Because it’s in our current time and they’re gonna bestow powers upon the hero, right? This is where they have like the second level of initiation in some sense, right? Where you’re getting privy to the capacity for the solution and that solution is then introduced in the game B side of the equation. Right, right, and so then they jump to this whole game B chapter, and this is what they do, they sort of descend from where they were, they’re still on a mountain, they’re on the side of the mountain, right? Overlooking this flying car future with, instead of gardens on the roofs, there’s gardens on the walls, right? On the outside walls of everything too. So it’s, you know, there’s domes, there’s waterfalls, right? And you know, you’re basically living in this realm of nature, man, although they don’t really show man here, which is kind of interesting, right? And technology sort of being in this synergistic harmonious relationship with one another. And you know, they talk about all of those, you know, from the bestowing, and then they switch into like the, say, the fully formed idealistic non-manifest. They make this explicit, that it’s not a manifest world, right? That it looks like this. Yeah, so can you go a little bit further than the zoom out? So I think they start to zoom out from the, mountain even, but yeah. So there’s this place, right? Which has this integration of nature, technology and humans, right? And then there’s ways of participating. So you have the yoga on the left, then you have the children playing on the bottom left, and then on the bottom right, there’s a more participatory way of playing where technology is introduced, and then in the center, there’s the education, and then you even see people doing research. So there’s this element where they’re, they’re reinvoking these three sages, but then through people, right? And how that should work, and it’s all idyllic. And at this point, they’re also starting to use fancy words like biodomes, and mesh networks, and then they do this strange move where they basically drop you into, well, what is this Mark? Yeah, they just isolate you in the middle of this idyllic vision, and you can see that you’ve got the parasite, and then they sort of shrink you down, and then everything bursts into this new area, right? This new space. And then it’s very much a, what would you call it, creation narrative, right? A creation narrative. So all this stuff starts to kind of happen, and then everything coalesces, and then boom, you’re floating in space. It’s like, space, yay, right? You’re just kind of hanging out there. And there’s all this happy music building up, and they say explicitly, it’s incomprehensible. The work to achieve this is incomprehensible. Well, the nice thing about them saying this all along is that this is too hard, or we can’t really tell you what the vision is like, is that they’re not giving you an answer. What’s it gonna take to do this? It’s incomprehensible. Okay, but have you considered that if something is incomprehensible to you, that maybe you shouldn’t try to make it happen, because maybe it can’t happen? So, and look, sometimes you have to appeal to I don’t know, it’s too hard, but we’ve got to try. I totally get that. But it’s mysterious that throughout, they refuse to define what game B actually looks like, or how any of it works, or how you can actually do it. They just say, you’ll find your tribe because you’ll know it when you see it. It’s a lot of hand waving. And oh, by the way, we don’t know how long it’s gonna take, or what it’s gonna take. But we do know all the stuff needs to be put in the public domain, that we know for sure. It’s like, oh, that’s interesting. Who’s running the public domain? So again, it’s back to, and you see again, the space theme again, and it’s back to incomprehensibility. And then we flip out again. And well, let me do this first. There we go. So we’re back out into the real world. Yeah, so there’s this girl we started off with, and she’s like, waking up, literally, in the world, and she’s like, wow, what just happened? She’s trying to sense me. And then first thing that she’s reacting to is the threat, like the parasite, like this thing, where she’s trying to grasp the parasite in her back. And that’s also the place where the first shot is on, on her neck. So there’s all of this implication, but it isn’t there. Like the parasite isn’t there, which, well, you could start asking questions, right? Like, okay, what is that about? But then instead of having that parasite be the thing, the affirmation of her experience, she gets the coin, right? And the coin is her connection to the sages, right? Like you have the symbol on the coin, and it is the continuity of the coin, between the state of the game world and the real world, and then the potential that she’s going to manifest as the consequence of being the hero of the story, right? Like the thing that she accepted on the screen at the start, but now she has full knowledge of what that entails, although we kind of refuted that knowledge is actually there, like that is the message that’s being conveyed. And then, yeah, like, so then we go into this last final screen and… Yeah, but find the others, and they give you a website so that you can find ostensibly the technology tribe that they mentioned, although I don’t think they call it the technology tribe, that’s sort of a name that we’re coming up with here, but… No, no, no, no, I think they did. Well, maybe, maybe. The idea that we need that technology and all that, and you’ve got to find the others, right? You’ve got to find the people that are like you to get together in, look, at the end of the day, what they’re talking about is a religion, right? It’s a set of beliefs that we all agree to and agree to operate as if they’re true, right? And so they’re actual beliefs, and that’s what they’re saying, is find the other people with the actual beliefs that we’ve outlined, and the problems that we’ve highlighted here are, there’s a lot of humanism in this, and humanism has been used before for appeals, for people to get together and do things, and that hasn’t ended well yet, and I don’t anticipate it ending well ever for technical reasons, but this is the end of the video, and then they roll credits, and it’s very persuasive. It’s very persuasive, and when I first watched it, effectively what happened from my perspective is every alarm bell about every dangerous thing, thing with a lot of, we’ll say, influence went off in my head, every single one. I was like, wow, they’ve just employed the whole kit and caboodle here to move people in a direction, and things that set me off are not things like narrative capture. Narrative capture does not set me off. What sets me off is narrative capture with no content, so if you say something like, we’re gonna manifest, game B, and we can’t define it, and we don’t know how long it’ll take, and we don’t know what we need, but we need you, that sets me off because there’s nothing I can do there. I know I can’t participate. Anytime you tell me I’m a hero, and you appeal to authority to prove that, that sets me off. I’m not saying it’s not true, of course I’m the hero, that’s a different issue, but you gotta prove it, or I have to have that proof validated by me, not just told by you, and that’s part of my framing for fixing or noticing these things is that kind of contrast. I don’t just wanna be told something, I also wanna be able to participate in the thing that I’m told. If I can’t participate in the thing that I’m told, then I take a different tack to it. I don’t not do it, but I take a different tack to it. So what did you think, Manuel? What thoughts did you have watching this video for the first time? Well, when I was watching it for the first time, I was really, really shocked by the things that they were trying to push in my face, and we’ve been keeping pointing out the appeals, but the lack of content, right? So there’s a bunch of appeals and there’s a bunch of structure, right? And then there’s implications within the structure, but they’re not made explicit, right? In some sense, they’re not even doing anything necessarily wrong, but what they’re doing is they’re creating the space for you to make the mistake yourself. And then that also absolves them from responsibility. Like, so there’s a whole bunch of stuff going on there. I think at the end, there’s this, okay, so there’s these three aspects that need to be in a community, and with the implication that everybody can be self-expressing themselves in that community in a valuable way, right? So that’s implication one. And then the second implication is the relationship between these groups, right? Like, because we were talking about this religion idea that, okay, like you’re supposed to effectively buy into a set of religious ideals, right? But then there’s also this maintainance of individuality, and then there’s this implication that all of these individuals have the capacity to cooperate while maintaining their individuality. And that’s not going to happen. That’s not a thing that we want to happen, because if you don’t have to cooperate, don’t cooperate. So there’s all of these, well, if you think about it for a second, you’re going to end up in this problem. And they never think about it. They don’t invite you to think about it, although they pretend to invite you to think at the start, but then they force feed you a whole narrative, right? So there’s that contrast as well, right? So there’s this subversive element of all of these things is just calling out to me. And then there’s all of this, well, flat out false or suggestive framing, right? So when you’re going up a hierarchy from the bottom and the hierarchy isn’t organized correctly and whatever, like, what are you doing, right? Like, what’s going on there? Like, that’s not okay. And telling you that there’s only one solution to game A, which is game B, right? And then leaving out like a whole dimension, which we’ve been focused on, which is the religious dimension, which is actually the thing that they’re effectively invoking, making a religion, right? So there’s this implication that religion is the solution, but then they’re never mentioning religion at all, right? Although they’re trying to represent the religious aspect through the sages, which are these divine characters that guide you, right? But they’re implied to be grounded, right? Because they have these ethnic connections to these wisdom traditions, and they have connections through the philosophical structures that they’re representing, right? So there’s all this implicit unrecognized connections, and when people make those things, right? Like, basically what they’re doing is they’re trying to own something that exists within a context, and then they’re disowning the context. And like, when that happens, you have to be worried, right? Like, then manipulation is happening. Yes, right. No, that’s good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The crystals, right? They all have a scepter or a magic thing floating behind them, or some light, halo, right? There’s all these religious intonations in there, and I like the way you frame that. Like, when there’s framing being put around something that people aren’t taking responsibility for, right? They’re not leading, right? Then there’s a problem. And yeah, I see this more clearly now that you said that, right? There’s definitely a way in which they are doing things and not taking responsibility. So they’re leading you a place and not stating, no, no, we’re leading you to this place, right? So if game B doesn’t work out, well, it’s incomprehensible. So it’s not our fault that you got involved in this technology tribe, and then it didn’t work out, because we didn’t really tell you it would work out. So, and that’s anti-aspirational in some sense, right? But again, you’re giving them their agency, you’re giving them too much agency, and saying, you have to take care of this yourself, even though we know it’s incomprehensible. Really? That’s paradoxical, that’s dangerous. And again, they’re appealing to religion without making a religious appeal, right? Because they’re doing it through symbols and through the music and through the statement of ideals, and they’re using progress, the time progress, and the idea of technology as progress, which I very much disagree with, but they’re using those ideas and making those constant. Like these are the benchmarks. So you’re measuring against those automatically, would you realize it or not, right? The same way they’re using the first game to measure game A and game B. So we’ve got the first game, which is utopic, and we’re measuring the difference between game A and game B using a relativistic framework against the utopic vision that never existed, by the way. A historical utopic vision that is totally completely full of it, right? You’d have to deny things like the rapid depopulation of Neanderthals to believe that when there were woolly mammoths around that we were living in harmony. Like that’s absurd. People fight for lots of reasons, and resources aren’t those reasons. Not never, but they’re probably less than a third of the time. If you look in history, you take it really, really seriously. And I think it’s that deep irresponsibility. We don’t wanna lead people because leaders in the past have been bad, and we don’t wanna get corrupted by quote power. You can see my video on power. I have a different definition, right? Fair enough. But we also don’t wanna make any promises, and you can’t. It’s irresponsible to make promises if you’re not leading, right? Ooh, so we’re not gonna do that, but now there’s no aspiration either, right? And so they’re giving you a vision and telling you how the vision’s incomprehensible, or it’s hard, or it may not manifest. Fair enough, but why don’t I wanna get involved with something that may not manifest? I’d rather be told a quote noble lie, and try to manifest it, than to be told this may not manifest, and not have a leadership behind it. That’s just me personally, right? Again, I like things I participate in. So you come to me and you say, I have a great idea. And I go, great, how can I help? And you don’t tell me. I mean, I’ll listen to your idea, and I’ll try to encourage you, but I can’t participate, so I’m not gonna do anything. I need to be told how do you want to participate, because maybe there’s lots of ways I can participate, or maybe there’s only one that I don’t know about. I have no idea. And also, participation’s a negotiation between people. Like you can’t just start participating any way you want, and that’s why you need leadership. Like this is the value of having leaders, is that they work these things out, and they don’t work them out perfectly, because you can’t, right? But they do work them out, and having them worked out is better than not having them worked out. And yeah, that’s really important. So yeah, any closing thoughts before we shut this down? Yeah, so then the other aspect is the sense of urgency that they’re invoking. So they’re invoking the sense of urgency to the parasite, but they’re also invoking the sense of urgency to the unsustainability of civilization, right? Which is also just stated axiomatically, like, okay, like that, like whatever. Like, so what does the sense of urgency do, right? And the music, the sense of urgency to music too, yeah. So there’s a conveyance of importance, right? But there’s also this sense of removing the opportunity for decision by you, because there’s only one way out, right? Like they’re removing the optionality and the ability of you to engage within the proposition that they made, because urgency supersedes skepticism. Yeah, no, that’s good. Urgency supersedes skepticism. Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, the urgency shuts off your ability to do critical thinking, right? And so, yeah, and that’s part of the framing throughout, is there’s at least three or four ways in which they’re invoking urgency. Urgency with the parasite, the urgency with the meta crisis, as they’re calling it, which I think is a garbage category. And they’re, of course, I don’t like the word meta at all, ever. I’m always suspicious when people use it. Sometimes it’s appropriate, but almost never. And that idea of progress and not losing the progress. We don’t wanna lose that progress, man. We made a lot of progress in the game, and we don’t wanna lose it, right? And it’s like, well, yeah, you don’t wanna give up all the cool stuff you have to get what you really want. So how badly do you really want? If you’re not willing to sacrifice anything that you have today, and they’re not, right? All the sacrifice is by the people who hold the technology and need to give it up to the public domain. There’s no sacrifice from you. So what’s the value? Like, if you’re not sacrificing anything to get the thing that you want, is the thing that you want something that has any value? I am not making a claim here, but like, kind of think about that for a bit, right? What is the relationship of the thing that you want and value? And if you want value A and value B conflicts with value A, but you have value B, like how much value B do you give up to get value A? And it probably doesn’t have to be all of it, but it probably has to be some of it, right? And they’re very much not dealing with these conflicts, with these trade-offs, these decisions that have to be made. And you’re right, they’re removing the idea of decision, right, through skepticism, by invoking urgency. And that’s very suspicious. That’s very suspicious to me. I don’t like that. Like, oh, we have to act today, right now. We can’t stop and think about these things, you know? And look, fair enough. Sometimes people spend 10 years trying to figure out where to put a road when it’s a 10 minute decision. I get it. But these aren’t easy problems to solve either. You can’t just say, oh, all roads can be decided on in 10 minutes, because that’s not true, right? You always have to add the nuance and be curious and add all that stuff in, because I think it’s actually super important. So. And maybe we can flip it around, right? So if they’d have a good argument, right? And they trust that argument, like why wouldn’t they present you with the argument? Like, it’s not that the concepts that were dealt with were that low level. Like, they’re talking about mesh networks and like fungi networks in the earth, right? Like, so they are appealing to the fairly intelligent, aware people, right? And then if you have a good argument, like why don’t you trust the argument? Like, why don’t you lead with the argument? And when people don’t do that, like what’s going on? Like that, then they’re in manipulation territory, immediately, right? They’re appealing on their ability to convince you, to convince you as opposed to the truth of their project. Yeah, no, you’re right. Yeah, we’ll say the consistency, reliability, accuracy and precision of their model, right? Would be something you could rely on independently or into subjectively. And they’re not appealing to those things. They’re appealing to emotional valence, they’re appealing to your raw emotions, right? They’re using the framing very deliberately to lock you out of critical thinking mode, right? And that’s what timelines, like progressivism and technology and the idea of technology as progress do. They lock you into not being critical about the technology. It’s like, you know, a lot of people make this argument, right? They say, well, yeah, Twitter’s definitely a dumpster fire or whatever, right? And bad and whatever. But if we build a new Twitter, and we use the technology to constrain people so that they can’t act out the dumpster fire, then everything will be fine. Forgetting that they just made the argument that Twitter, who was done by a, you know, look, Jack Dorsey’s got a utopic vision. Good for him, he’s an idealist. He never intended any of that to happen. He states that explicitly. It’s like, well, Twitter already tried that and it failed and you wanna do it again, expecting different results. I think I have a solution. I think we need to limit the amount of characters that people can use to make a mess so there will be less mess. Yes, that’s an excellent argument. Right, and it’s just foolishness. So the solution to too much technology, according to these people, is more technology. It’s like, I don’t find that convincing. I mean, maybe there’s a magic technology that you’re referring to and that’s what you think is gonna happen. Let me, but state that, right? Don’t make an argument that sounds an awful lot like, well, yeah, technology’s a problem and these social media sites are terrible and all of this stuff has gone horribly wrong and, you know, it’s evil Mark Zuckerberg or whatever, which certainly isn’t the case, although he’s got his issues, believe me, and I’m not a particular fan, but like, he’s not, he didn’t set out to build what Facebook became. That’s for sure, that’s kind of explicit. That’s kind of who he became. And what, oh, good point, and what he became as a result. Yeah, none of that was intended. It’s a spirit that happened, but if your argument is we need more of that or a different one of those, I am unconvinced. I will remain unconvinced. I remain unconvinced long after I’m dead. That just doesn’t logically follow, right? We’re just breaking Aristotelian logic completely. And look, you’re welcome to propose something that’s not Aristotelian logic to resolve it, but propose it, right? I’m cool with Aristotelian logic isn’t sufficient, and therefore we need to understand it this way, but now you have to make that case. And I’m perfectly happy to hear that, but that wasn’t made here for sure. And mysteriously, it’s never made in any of these things that I can find. Daniel Dennett doesn’t make those sorts of cases either. He just rah rah, humanity now, humanity forever, one big community, blah, blah, blah. No, it doesn’t work that way, right? And you end up quoting certain nefarious historical actors from the past without realizing it, like Daniel Dennett does actually. Or enacting the patterns of argumentation. Or there’s many ways that you can follow in people’s footsteps without realizing it. And then like Mark Zuckerberg, you’re on your journey, and then like, when are you gonna hop off the train? Are you gonna hop off the train? So yeah, there’s all of this complication, and we intentionally didn’t wanna engage with the video because we wanted to have this frame of reference, right? In which you can look at it objectively, right? Like from a third person perspective, that’s the better way to describe that, right? Where you’re disengaged from participation in the thing, and then I’d invite you to watch it on your own and maybe leave your interpretations and things that we left out in the comments. We’re gonna put the link in the description. And yeah, like, yeah, try to be aware of this manipulation and how it’s affecting you. And the purpose of this video is not so much to bash on this video, but it’s more to afford you the opportunity to see these things manifesting when you engage with them and allowing you to have sense-making that allows you to have right relationship to what’s presented. Well said, Manuel. Yeah, we’re trying to provide you a framing so that when you watch the video, you will, instead of say, falling prey to some of the enchantment, you will get a master class on manipulation, on maybe intentional and unintentional forms of manipulation that are all around you. And this video is just such a stark example of so many things that are wrong with what people are doing, right? And wrong may be incomplete. Like, maybe they don’t realize, oh, you have to be a leader if you create a structure, because otherwise, if you’re creating a structure and you’re not leading it, somebody will lead it and it will corrupt. And then that will be your fault because you created the structure, or at least partly your fault, right? So you can’t get around the responsibility for that no matter what you may say or think, right? You can’t, you have to take your own ideas seriously if you’re gonna put them out in the world and you have to foster them and care for them, not alone, right? Because that’s bad. You need collective sense-making. You need this distributed cognition. You need this collective intelligence to do this correctly. And hopefully having the two of us go over this and work for literally hours, taking notes on this video will help you so that when you watch it, you can notice, pay attention to how it makes you feel, right? Do some relaxation before you watch the video and start to get in touch with what you’re feeling in the moment and try to remain as well as you can detached. I mean, we’re meditators, so maybe we’re a little bit better at that, hopefully. But you don’t need to meditate to be good at it. And you don’t need to meditate to notice like really strong emotions. And if you’re not feeling really strong emotions watching the video, that may be good because maybe you’re immune to this sort of enchantment. Good for you. But if you are, you can at least be aware of them and see what that does to you in terms of your thinking and whether or not it narrows your thinking or reciprocal narrowing addiction, roughly speaking, or whether it broadens your thinking, reciprocal opening, and opens you up to possibility and potential and how it affects your idea of agency. Any, anything else, Emmanuel? Yeah, so there’s this idea, right? Like you create something, so you put a spirit into the world. I think that’s the right way to think about it, right? So if you’re not at the head of the spirit and that spirit gains enough momentum, right? Like damn, that spirit is gonna do things, right? And you’re at the point of origination, right? Like, so you’re responsible for that that is happening. Right, and then if you’re watching the video, right? Like what is the spirit that’s being invoked by this video? Right, like is there a way that I can understand not so much what’s being said, but what is being invoked by what’s presented to me, right? And then maybe start focusing your sense-making on that aspect, right? Because that’s the thing that the creator is creating it for, right? So the message within what is being presented to you might not be the same message that the author is trying to convey to you. And then when you don’t have a relationship with the message of the author, like that message of the author is gonna have a relationship with you. And then, yeah, you get into places you don’t wanna be. Well said, well said. All right, on that note, I think, yeah, watch the video. We’ll have a link in the description, right? I’ll put a card here too and see what you feel. Be careful and realize what’s going on and that this isn’t the only video doing this or things like this or pieces of this. And it’s not the only group out there pushing these ideas or very similar ideas. They may sound different, they have different names and it’ll give you something to look out for. And hopefully that will help you to avoid certain forms of enchantment and narrative capture. And thank you so much for watching. And hopefully you found this commentary and breakdown helpful. And absolutely let us know in the comments if you have any suggestions or ideas or you noticed something that we didn’t because I’m sure there’s way more there than we could cover. And yeah, have a great day. Yeah, I hope you all enjoyed it and thanks, Manuel. Thanks, Manuel, always a pleasure.