Communities Live Navigation! (_1nd8yKVUCE)

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Alright, I feel live. I think I’m live. I don’t know if I’m live. I should check if I’m live because I haven’t done that yet. Find out. Oh yeah. Live-ness is here. Rock and roll. Yeah, and today what we’re going to be talking about is community. That’s our big topic and I think, you know, I think it is a big topic, right? I think it’s an important topic. So the way I want to handle this is I want to talk about my experience with community. In particular, we’ll talk about the awakening from the meeting crisis community, which was on the Discord server, but it didn’t start that way. So that’s what I think I want to do. But first, first, most important thing is to straighten my dragon. So I’m going to do that. It’s going to bother me otherwise. How does that not get straightened? There. It was straight earlier. I know it was. Okay, there we go. And you might notice the boat on the wall, which I mounted today. Although I don’t have a proper shelf for it. That’s okay. We’ll get one. So, yeah, community is sort of a really, really important and prescient topic today. Hey, Gar. Good to see you. And I thought it was important to go over like what, you know, my thoughts on community, what happened with awakening from the meeting crisis, because it’s a good example of an online community that sort of formed around the Discord server. Right. And what we mean by that and why it’s important and, you know, go over my experience, because I have lots of experience with online communities in particular. So I wanted to cover all that. And it’s just been rolling around in my head since I thought of this particular topic. I’ve thought of a number of approaches like, what do you really want to talk about? How are you actually going to get into this? Is this going to be useful? You know, how do we how do we make it as useful as we can make it? Right. And I’ve gone back and forth on a lot of this because there’s so many aspects to community. There’s so much utility in the idea of community that you can’t really like narrow it down. Right. Because community is bigger than a person by definition. It’s multiple people have cooperating together towards the name. And there’s a lot of stuff rolling around in my head lately and not just around community, but in general. And it’s all like everything we do in some sense is tied up in community. It’s all tied up in the people we’re around, the things we’re interested in, the people we cooperate with, how we cooperate with them. All of that stuff is part of this larger topic of community. And so it’s not a you know, it’s not a very straightforward thing to say, oh, you know, community, I’m there for like community is a difficult topic because it’s such a large topic. So I think how I want to approach this is I want to start talking about. The way in which the last community was in that manifested and that was the awakening from the crisis discord server. Now that all started online on John Brevicki’s Meditation Livestream, which I went to for various reasons. And I formed that community rather naturally. And then what ended up happening is we moved it to this court, sir, because it was more interactive. We could get people there. Right. And we had quite a few people there, like 30 in the daily meditation at one point. So like a few weeks, we had 30 people meditating together and then discussing it afterwards. And the important part was discussing it afterwards because just sitting in a place and doing something with other people is not necessarily community. You have to interact with those people and the richness is in the interaction with the other people. Why would you want to interact with other people? Well, because you have something in common in this case. You know, you might say, oh, with Brevicki, it was the search for wisdom or the engagement in Brevicki’s work or however. I would also call that the search for wisdom. But however you frame it, it’s close enough for enough people close enough with a close enough interest to bother to put up with other people because putting up with other people sucks. I’ve met other people. They’re terrible. I’m another person to y’all. I’m terrible. Like it just there’s all kinds of problems. People argue, people fight, people have opinions, heaven to defend. Right. And that’s the problem is that when you’re interacting with other people, you rub up against them. Right. You run into issues and those issues are not necessarily trivial ones. Right. You can have like pretty serious and deep disagreements with people that that can cause you harm. And they challenge your worldview. And look, you can have the attitude that challenging worldview is a good thing because you can learn more or same person can have the attitude that challenging worldview is a pain in the ass because then I’m wrong. And I don’t like to be wrong. And you may have that unconsciously. And that’s the problem. And what is all this interaction? Trying to do my my man. So ever since I’ve started dating, I’ve noticed I’ve started to notice similarities between dating someone and being in community with people. Yeah, that’s because when you’re with people, you’re with being a community is being with people. And I would say there’s levels of intimacy. Right. And so the intimacy of somebody you’re trying to date is different than the intimacy of somebody you’re trying to be in a community with. And I would say and maybe maybe I have this backwards to some extent. I don’t know. But I would say if somebody can’t do something simple for you, like be in a community with you or answer a simple question about something that you have in common. Right. Or that you claim to have in common. Then maybe that’s not the right person to date. You know, a lot of people like to jump into the full commitment thing. Right. That’s why we fall in love. We fall in love to kind of jump into the deep end of the pool. But I’m a believer that that’s actually a failed strategy. So answer to answer your question, which is what did the quote meditation involve? Well, it didn’t involve anything specific. I mean, one of the nice things about the crowd that for Vickie initially attracted was. You didn’t have to do Vickie’s meditation. Do any meditation you want. Anyway, we discuss it. So one of the guys there, Ben Ang, wonderful, wonderful youngster out of Toronto, actually. He was kind of a meditation expert. He didn’t do Vickie meditation. He didn’t find it. But he knew, as far as I could tell, every type and branch of Eastern meditation, at least every single one I’d ever heard of and a few I had, which I was like, oh, pretty impressive. Because I did my research on meditation back in the day. So it’s not something I know nothing about. Right. It’s just he knew way more. And that was wonderful. Because between his sort of more technical, varied, like, well, this is meditation. You’re supposed to do this sort of a thing. And sort of the more I don’t know, I guess I’ll pull the Paul Vandeau play winsome word. Right. That more reflective and contemplative aspect that say I would bring right by asking questions. One of my superpowers is asking really good questions. Apparently, according to everybody else, John used to say it all the time. That’s a really good question, Mark. I really appreciate your question. A lot of people said that. So the goal was wasn’t the meditation. That was the activity within the community or one of them. We had lots of it. Every two weeks, John would come on this or twice a month. John would come on the server and do a Q&A for us twice a month. Right. That was another activity in the community. Right. For a while, they were doing weekly religion that is not a religion meetings that Manuel and I were helping with for a while. Although they wanted us to do work for them. We said, no, we’re not working on this project. We work on anything involving the community, right, involving organization of the people who are here for this event, not working on your silly project. I don’t agree with it. I don’t like it. Right. I mean, that was my way of cooperating right with the parts that I thought were appropriate community part because I don’t agree with a little John’s work. I never did. And several actions that are dumb and unjustified and unjustifiable. So. My sacrifice was to organizing the community. Right. That’s what I was doing. I wasn’t the only one doing that. Right. I wasn’t trying to become the authority about how the community should run. Right. Which is, I would say, different from leadership. And I wasn’t trying to create a leadership hierarchy. Right. Because those things can once you have a community emerge naturally. And if they emerge without a community, you’re going to have a problem. I can guarantee you that mathematically certain. The problem may not show up right away. But hey, Josh, good to see you. But what’s going to happen is when things emerge outside of community, which is a common name, right, they will corrupt because they don’t have boundaries. And this is why emergence is not good. Emergence is not good. Emergence is emergence. Emergence happens all the time. You don’t have to do anything and things will emerge. That’s true. Part of that is entropy, though, and entropy is generally not considered to be the best thing in the world. Certainly not since you want to rely on unless the reliance that you have is that things will get worse. Entropy is good at making things worse or bringing things towards disorder. That’s why community is important. Right. Because community allows things to cohere at a level above the person and at a level above persons into a spirit that is a greater entity. It’s what it is. It’s it’s it’s that whole boundaries, containment, rules, structure, leadership, authority system that allows people to run the religion that’s not a religion meetings without participating in that project in any other way. Why am I running the meetings or helping to run the meeting? Why is Manuel helping to run the meeting? Why am I taking notes for them? I’m not doing that to forward the religion that’s not a religion project. It also does that. Sure. But that’s what the community wanted. I was subservient to the needs of the larger container. And you can argue and say, Mark, you shouldn’t be contributing in occult practices. Like, fair enough. But if you knew my history with the occult, that would be the least of my my crimes if that were the way you wanted to frame it. So like frame away. I don’t care. And no, I’m not going to tell the stories right now. Although maybe maybe you’ll convince me at some some future date. But look. A pirate ship, a pirate venture is a community of people on a boat. They submit to the leadership and authority of the captain. Communities don’t have single authorities. It’s not how the world works. Or at least if they do, it’s rare. Communities and authority. And look, sometimes the leader’s not an authority in the community. That happens all the time. The leader’s just a figurehead. What do you think that means? What do you think it means when somebody says, oh, he’s not a real leader, he’s a puppet or a figurehead? That means he has no authority to lead, but he’s still the leader. So leadership and authority are separate. And we know this. We talk like this. That’s why I have my channel navigating patterns. We talk a certain way and we misunderstand the words that we’re using in some cases in that case in particular. Okay. You’ve nothing wrong with that. But trying to fix it. It’s cultural cognitive grammar problem. Do you have the right cultural cognitive grammar? That’s important. And you have to find a way to be in community together because you need the thing bigger than yourself. Garth, stop asking questions before I get there. I’ll address it in a second. I was building up to something. Damn it. People keep rushing me. So the thing that makes the community valuable is the fact that the members can get along and get together. That’s the thing that makes it valuable. Right. And so this leads me to Anselman’s statement. Right. It’s what I’m trying to understand the value of being together for meditation. Was it quote guided by a speaker? No, it was not. Or was it under under advice on how to still your mind, breathing pressure, et cetera? Why a community? Okay. Again, the community is not the meditation. I built the community as the result of the action of John’s meditation. So John for Vicky has this live stream on meditation. I happened to jump into the first one. I missed one meditation, which I did not have to miss, but I didn’t know that time. I missed one of his meditation. She was very late. In fact, I don’t even think the meditation series. I think it was the cultivating wisdom series. He does this activity around the activity and the common engagement with the body of John for Vicky’s work. Okay. And this is predicated on a couple of theories, right? Like my primary theory is that John for Vicky created a science of meaning. That’s what he did. That science of meaning can be used to understand somebody like Jordan Peterson and their colleagues. And actually I saw something recently we forget. Shoot. What was the channel? I forget what the channel was. Oh, it was Tim Ferriss’s channel. The guy who wrote the four day work week before our work week. Four hour work week. I like Tim Ferriss actually. Peterson and for Vicky are both talking about relevance realization. In fact, it sounds from that interview and from other times I’ve heard him is though Peterson was the one that brought up relevance realization is the hard problem of consciousness or the hard problem in So that’s important to note. So we’re not there to meditate. That’s one of the things we’re doing. And then the discord server and I have a lot of questions about how it was run. I told Brett about all of them. He ignored me. Which is fine. Didn’t do those things because, you know, everybody has their own vision of how the world should work and they try to instantiate that in the world. The reason why it’s important to get together for meditation is to discuss it afterwards. So I can tell you two things about the after meditation talk on the awakening from the meaning crisis server. One is that. Nobody. Made any sense when they were talking at all. Okay, and the other is that everybody understood what everybody else was saying. Now I’m not claiming that I understand how this is possible, but I am making the statement that that happened every time. Did it happen forever? No. Eventually we would stray out of the meditation hall attitude or ethos or spirit, however you want to frame it up. And often we would move out of the meditation hall channel to keep the sanctity of the meditation channel as it was. We did that. We did that for a reason. That’s a set of rules we set up for the server to keep the coherence of the community to exemplify rules as such. And so why is this important? It’s important because when you’re meditating alone by yourself, Allah Sam Harris, or I would argue, even when you’re praying alone by yourself because prayer meditation are actually the same thing. And that’s clear from the data. Like you can go look at brain scans and the neuroscientists say the same thing. Oh, meditation, prayer, almost the same. In some cases, you’re identical. Certain types of meditation that are identified with brain waves are identical. So materialist perspective, they shouldn’t bitch about prayer because they think meditation is okay and materially they’re the same. Sorry. So the reason why this is important is because if you meditate by yourself and only by yourself, you’re losing the perspective of other people. And so when you have an experience, you don’t know if it’s valid or how to interpret it. Part of the reason you’re in a community is to get the distributed cognition. The distributed cognition of 10 people is greater than your cognition in all cases. And you can argue about what if everybody else has a lower IQ than the one single person has the super IQ. Okay, that’s a stupid question. So Peterson goes into this, right? You get a bunch of kids together and together they know the rules, but apart they don’t. Yeah, that happens with adults too, by the way, because we’re all just children. At least, you know, read your Bible. Anyway, so that’s one of the reasons why I’m so excited about this. I’m excited about this because I think it’s a great way to get to know yourself. That happens with adults too, by the way, because we’re all just children. At least, you know, read your Bible. Anyway, so that’s part of why you’re there. But even if the IQ isn’t the issue, the perspectives still remain. I can only actually hold one perspective at a time. Somebody tells you they can’t rely on you. They cannot. We know this. We know this. We know this observationally. We know this experientially. We know this experimentally. We actually know this. This is a known thing. No, you can’t. You can switch perspectives sometimes fairly quickly. But you can’t do a complete perspective switch because you have to move around your perspective to really know it. Any perspective. And that takes time. And this is like where we see we are constrained by time, I assure you of this. And so that’s where we get into trouble is we think we could do these crazy things that it’s clear we cannot do. And the reason for community is that you’re getting five, six, seven different perspectives, or even just three different perspectives on the same event outside of yourself in real time. It’s super valuable. Right. And so now we get to Gart. We have to go through Anselman. That’s okay. Gart says, I heard your take on people having undeveloped community skills by playing single player video games, you know, growing up on Father Eric’s channel. Yeah, I did a wonderful talk with Father Eric on his channel. Check it out. What’s your thoughts on board games for a possible alternative? Look, the bottom line is you need a reason, any reason, any task that you have in common, the common aim, in order to get a community going. That’s what a community is. You shouldn’t limit it to one task if you can avoid it. But you also don’t have to force it. You can just let the camaraderie emerge. You can start with a single task like meditation and other tasks will appear. We had Vervicki’s framework, so we already had a bunch of projects. Vervicki’s got a bunch of projects. He’s got cultural cognitive grammar, he’s got philosophy, he’s got the history stuff. He’s got history of religion, which is a little bit from this history stuff, I would argue. Maybe it shouldn’t be. I don’t want to get into the religious argument about religion and history. He’s got this whole idea of still culture. He has all these projects. And religion is not a religion. It’s got all these projects going on. So there’s a lot for people who are into John Vervicki to do and talk about because there’s a lot of cross pollination there. Of course, I would argue that all you really do is divide Christianity up in a very scientific way and dissect it. And now he’s trying to put it all back together because it doesn’t work. You dissect something, you kill it, just in case that wasn’t clear. Apparently, it’s not too much. Many, many sciencey people. So you run into these aims that are in common, which is around the wisdom work. I would argue the reason why Vervicki works and probably works better than Peterson, Peterson’s pragmatic, which probably is because he’s got a lot of work to do. So pragmatic, which pragmatic piece of Peterson you’re talking about, other than no, he changed my life and it was wonderful. Well, that sounds and feels a lot like revival. I get it. It’s not, though. That’s important. With Vervicki’s work, it’s in one way more cerebral and in another way more connected because it’s easier to connect on abstract ideas than it is on implementation. Right. When I go to pour cement for the footing or mix cement for a footing, when I’m hanging out with a guy who also mixes cement, whether he voices it or not, he’s got criticism of my mixing of the cement and my pouring of the cement. I guarantee you that happens. And that’s the problem. Like pragmatism, the material implementation is where a lot of the problems happen. And that’s the value of building up community skills is that you can appreciate that we’re both trying to pour cement here. And as long as the end results, okay, it doesn’t matter if I stir it differently than you do. Right. And look, maybe you learn something from the way I do it or vice versa. Or maybe you have some piece of advice like, oh, you’re not stirring it quickly enough. And I’m like, oh, I remember. Yeah, the last time I had that problem where it didn’t pour right. Maybe that’s what it was. And this observation is helpful. That’s the distributed cognition. And so, yeah, I want to address you again, Anselm. Does the presence of other people influence the meditation? Of course it does. Of course it does. So what does community give you? First of all, doing anything every day liturgically, which, you know, daily meditation is liturgical in nature. It’s hard. And it’s made easier by having other people there and those other people relying on you. And, you know, now I have to do something I don’t like. So if they ever repost the meditation series, although you can get your hands on John Favikis meditation series, it’s just hidden. The playlist is gone, but there’s a list on the awakening server of where the episodes are and all the sits. In one of the sits, I don’t know which one. I don’t think it was one of the lessons. John actually says at one point, I’m so grateful that Mark is here. He was referring to me, which is very flattering, right? He was very happy that I was there all the time. And he, the teacher who was planning this and executing it, not just him, it was also Amar and his son who was helping, right? I was grateful that me, the student who was sitting there learning, and basically, I mean, I was there to be supportive. I didn’t, at first, I didn’t care about meditation. I had my own meditation. What do I need his for? But just turned out to be the best meditation ever. And like, absolutely, his meditation is next level stuff, especially for beginners. But it’s very rare that I’m able to do that. So I became a fan, but I really was just there to support him. And just having that enhances your ability to do it, your willingness to do it, your willingness to engage, and I think that’s the key to being a good teacher. And maybe the assistance of that other person is just being there to support him. And I think that’s the key to being a good teacher. And I think that’s the key to being a good teacher. And maybe the assistance of that other person is just their presence. Presence is powerful. You want to build a community? Show up every day or once a week, whatever it is. That alone will change the world. I mean not technically. I mean not literally. I mean not physically. I mean not spiritually. You want a spirit? Show up. Why? Time, energy, attention. That’s what moves the world. You know what else moves the world? Nothing. That’s what moves the world. That’s what moves the world. If you want to be all Christian about it, you can co-locate some of that higher if you wish. But from a human perspective, time, energy, and attention move the world. Your allocation of your time through your attention and then your ability to contain and focus your energy, that’s the whole thing. That’s the whole of reality. You want to do that alone? You can try. Atlas holds up the world by himself in the myth. Or you can get a bunch of people with a similar aim, giving their time, energy, and attention to something the same or similar enough. And then suddenly things emerge within that container, within that common aim. And then you have to manage that container. You have to exemplify that aim. As best you’re able because you’re flawed. You’re a muppet. I’m a muppet. We’re all muppets. That’s what you have to do. That’s what a community is. You can say, is, do you have to be a muppet? Well, yeah, and it will. With or without your assistance. But if it’s without your assistance, what did you do? That’s a good question. What did you do? Was it good? If it started good, will it stay good? How do you know? What is the containment? What is the structure? What are the rules? What is the guiding principle of that community? If it doesn’t have those things, the structure that emerges is going to corrupt. I guarantee you that in almost all cases. It’s practically a certainty. That’s just the pattern that plays out. And it plays out everywhere. The people who started BLM on mansions, man, they took all that money for themselves. Maybe not all of it, but almost all of it. They didn’t stay on message. They didn’t stay on point. They didn’t continue to feed that back into the community. They stole from the structure that emerged and turned it all to themselves. No difference. No difference. Zero, zero difference than the corrupt pastor. Zero difference. And you can cry and you can whine and you can complain about that. But that pattern is everywhere. That’s the pattern of communities that aren’t cared for. And that’s the problem. And look, I mean, I want to have, I do, I do want to. Yes, boomy shroomy. Welcome to the Muppet Show. That’s where we live. Right. And I do want to highlight the sentiment. I think saying most new religions are fraudulent is unfair. I think that in an age where we have, what I want to say, where we have rejected our judgment, our intuition, our agency, everything is fraudulent. Everything becomes, to Grim Grizz’s excellent point, LARPing. Yeah. When you don’t believe what you’re doing or you don’t believe in what you’re doing or your belief in what you’re doing is materialistic, it’s not aimed at virtues and values. Yeah, you’re a fraud. You become a fraud. You don’t have to start that way. You can have the best intent in the world. And that’s why when people start talking about their intent, I go, whoa, whoa, I’m a pragmatist. You can take your intent and shove it with the sun. Don’t shine. I don’t need people with intent to do good. I just need people to do good. Some people do good because they don’t know any other way. They don’t have an intention. They’re just good people. That’s what we’re thinking about. That’s what we’re thinking about. Look, Garth, so community is centered around tasks, accomplishing said tasks, builds camaraderie, camaraderie upholds the community. Community is centered around aim. Community forms, right, as the result of the interaction with tasks and the developing and managing and taking responsibility for the structure. And the rules and the authority and the leadership. Leadership doesn’t have to be one person. Like leadership comes from many different places, right? You could, if you wanted to get silly about it and use a hyperbolic example, you could look at BOM, you could look at Jacob’s project, and you could look at my little community here because I have a community. And I would argue BOM no longer has community. And I would argue Jacob’s project is in the process of trying to form community, right? And you can say, what’s the difference? Well, the difference is that I have an aim. My aim is clear. I state it clearly enough. Maybe it’s not stated the way you would prefer propositionally, but it’s very clear. My intent through my actions is clear, right? My aim through my actions is clear. What I’m doing is clear through my actions, right? I don’t, or at least I try not to contradict my actions, right? So I could say, look, here’s the difference. I support everybody else’s projects. Okay, do they all support mine? Are they reciprocating? It’s a good question because in a community you reciprocate. If you want to say this little corner of the internet is a community, I would say no, it’s not. It doesn’t have a common name. There are tasks going on in the community and some of them even cross over. Like some of the goals of Estuary and some of the goals of my meaning community are very similar, if not exactly the same. I would say, however, that they’re not the same. I don’t like the Estuary protocol. I don’t know why they’re jumping in on my tweets about something unrelated and trying to push Estuary. That’s a little suspicious, you know, and I’m happy to support Estuary and say, hey, there’s an Estuary. You should go to it because you might find some community there. Absolutely. I think that’s fine. I don’t think it’s a good long-term strategy. I think it’s going to end in tears. I think it’s an attempt at forming something evangelical rather than an attempt at giving us the baseline for what we need that Garth mentioned earlier, right? We all need to figure out how to get along in person together again because we’ve lost those skills. Entropy is a thing. You keep people indoors for three years and I didn’t have that experience, thank goodness. And they will lose the skill of getting along with other people. They will. Your skills atrophy. I don’t care if it’s banging in nails or pouring cement or programming a computer. You don’t use it and you start to lose it. You don’t lose all of it. Maybe some people lose more than others. You’re not in person with people. You’re not forced to be around people you don’t like. You’re not forced to cooperate with people in silence. You’ll lose those skills. You’ll be like, I just want to talk about my latest trauma. I don’t care about your freaking trauma. I really don’t. I’m not going to resolve your trauma. It’s not going to happen. You need to resolve your trauma. I’m happy to help you. I’m not going to help you with what you’re going to do with wallow in it. But you can’t just build community around task. It really centers around the aim. And the tasks should serve the aim. It’s how you know if they’re good tasks or bad tasks. So you can say, what is the aim of defending a country? You could say, well, if there’s an invading army and we send our children, our actual children, we’ll say under the age of 18, out with guns, are we now defending the country? That’s a task. It seems centered towards the name. Is it a good task? No. The country is the children. You send the children out with guns to defend the country and they die. You don’t have a country. How do I know that? The community is not centered around the task. The community is centered around the aim. That’s what tells you if the task is good or bad. Nils, if stated teleology does not match reality, time to check for a hidden agenda. Here’s the problem. I don’t disagree. But here’s the problem with that. People state things that they don’t mean all the time. And I could make comments about stated goals of any number of people. People you know, people in this little corner, people you don’t know, governments. You know, what’s the World Economic Forum up to? I don’t know what their agendas are. I don’t think they know what their agendas are. I think that’s the problem. Right. It’s very hard to get at people’s agendas. It’s very hard to get at your own agenda. And we really don’t appreciate that. We think we know what we’re up to. Peterson’s clear about this. We don’t know what we’re up to. It’s part of why you need community to help you correct. We outsource our sanity. We have to. You can’t be sane by yourself. That makes no sense. Sanity actually involves others. And here’s Elizabeth. The activity matters. Drag queen shows? Big debate up here in Canada. Yeah, the activity matters a lot because an activity can’t be an aim. And when the activity is the aim or the task is the aim, the corruption is inevitable. Right. And yeah, these shows for families. Obviously, they’re not for families. The problem is we’ve lost discernment. Why did we lose discernment? Because we’re not in community. So we’re not getting trained in discernment anymore. Anselman, I didn’t comply with unreasonable mandates. Fair enough. I mean, and as long as you’re willing to face the lion, despite maybe getting eaten by the lion, that’s fine. It’s when people don’t want to comply and don’t want to be on the cross. It’s like, well, it’s A or B, right? Send the warmongers off to battle. Yeah, well, I think their agenda is rather obvious. I know I don’t think it is. I think part of the problem is when you live in your head or let’s suppose you’ve been successful at something, anything. Right. And now you go, ha, I have some predictive power over the world because I built the most popular operating system in the world with my super programming skills. Look, Bill Gates is an excellent programmer or was when he was younger. He wrote excellent versions of the basic programming language. Not that anybody cares. Basic stands for beginners, all purpose symbolic instruction code because I like to show off. So he wrote very excellent versions of basic. This is something I have rather a lot of expertise in. They’re excellent. His G-Wiz basic and stuff, really good stuff. Very well thought out, visual basic, very well architected, sort of the design is solid. The concepts are solid. They’re very useful, very helpful. Later versions, not so much. Did he create the operating system? He’s a very good programmer. Later versions, not so much. Did he create the operating? He didn’t write the operating system. He didn’t write it. His company didn’t write it. DOS was popular because it was part of a monopoly. But now he thinks he knows how the world works. How does he think he knows how the world works? In his mind, Bill Gates believes that he understood the computer industry. I can tell you one thing, having read, gone back through history and read the articles that he wrote, okay, over the years through the, I think it was the late 70s and throughout the 80s, because he was very popular and into the 90s, right? Very popular to get an article from Bill Gates on the future of computing. Let me tell you something that I don’t actually think is hyperbole at all. He was wrong on every single one of his predictions about the tech industry. Every single one. He was right about zero of it. Zero. He got lucky. If you know the story of Microsoft, you know he got lucky. You know he didn’t want to write that operating system. You know that he bought it from somebody and licensed it. And all the crappy bugs that are on it are actually the things that his company wrote. If you were there, you know he had a monopoly. You know you couldn’t sell a Commodore computer or an Atari computer or an Apple computer and an IBM or Intel-based product in the same store. You know that. And then you go, oh, so Bill Gates the whole time thinks he’s some kind of genius when he got lucky. He definitely got, not that he’s not intelligent, or I just gave him all the credit in the world for writing excellent copies of Basic. Okay? Now what? He thinks he knows how to control the world because he did. That happened. Except it wasn’t him. He just happened to be there. So now he’s got frongs of people throughout the world. This is our fault. Okay? Don’t be blaming him. Going, these billionaires need to spend their money to fix the world. Bill Gates for years would not spend a dime on charity. Years, decades. I think it was the mid-90s or something before he even started to spend on charity. He was the world’s richest man back then. And he got criticized for that. And so we, the people, dragged him into these crazy WEF, Davos garbage schemes. We did that. We called for the material wealthy people to intervene on our behalf. And we gave them the indication, although I never did, because I always said Microsoft was an evil company and should be destroyed, that they did the things that they thought they did. We did that to them. I’m not saying they didn’t contribute and they’re not partially responsible. We did that too. Because we’re Muppets. I’m a Muppet. You’re all Muppets. You can’t blame Bill Gates for being a Muppet. He’s a Muppet too. You can blame him for believing that he’s not a Muppet because we’ve held him up. Made all this money. You’re the wealthiest man. It’s our fault. So their agendas are not obvious. Maybe their outcomes are obvious. I can argue that all day long. The outcomes of what they’re trying to do are obvious, at least to me. And I don’t think I’m wrong about that. And I don’t think anybody’s wrong about that. I don’t think anybody’s wrong about that. I think it’s clear. We know from history how that’s going to happen. I would say that, yeah, you do the mystery. It doesn’t repeat. It runs. I don’t care. It’s a pattern. It’s going to play out. Back to the topic at hand. Garth would say that the best aim for a community is the most people having the most virtue. No, the best aim for a community is to have whatever aim you have in common. So the best aim for the community on the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis server was wisdom. And that’s why the best aim for the Mark of Wisdom project is wisdom. If you want wisdom, that’s where to go. And I’m still working on the website. If you know anybody who wants to do free website work, let me know. I’ve got a WordPress site that needs attention that I’m never going to give it. So the aim of any given community can be whatever it is. Like it can be to have fun and play games. And a lot of people nowadays have games nights. I used to love games nights, by the way. And they’d get together and play any one various board game. Didn’t matter. It’s a good community, little community of gamers. And the next thing you know, they’re going on vacation together and whatever. Going fishing or parts of them. Some are hanging out with others. Maybe the aim of your community is just to get together and enjoy their neighbor’s pool. That’s fine. Right? That’s part of your neighborhood community because they’re close enough that you can go enjoy their pool for the night. There’s all kinds of things like that going on all the time. People long for community because we need intimacy. We need quality relationships with other people. And where we get into trouble is when we try to universalize things. Garth. Not to pick on Garth. Oh, no, wait. I already did. Too late. You can’t universalize. There’s not like one perfect community. There’s not one perfect way to run a community. There’s not one perfect game for a community. Right? Because there’s not one community. There’s always many communities. So there’s a Wednesday meeting. I missed it this week because I had to do a YouTube video, which is not going to go on YouTube. It’s not a YouTube video. It’s an Odyssey video. Richard Harris coaching. He’s in England. Interesting guy. Had a wonderful conversation. Can’t wait for it to come out. It was great. Richard is awesome. I really like Richard Harris. He’s an interesting guy. He hates YouTube apparently. He’s a very interesting person. I’ll announce that when it comes out for sure because I think everyone should watch. I had a wonderful time talking to him. So I missed. That was Wednesday morning. I had scheduled it two months ago or something and totally didn’t know about the Wednesday meeting. That we do in Columbia, South Carolina for entrepreneurs. So I missed my entrepreneur Wednesday morning meeting. And I’m a little niffed about that. But, you know, these things happen. I get a pick. Get a pick. Get a pick. And like I said, I didn’t even know about the Columbia Entrepreneurs meeting. That’s one community I’m in. I’m in the entrepreneur community. And I’ve met a really cool guy there who’s awesome. Fred. Great guy. Love Fred. Super smart. Super attentive. Really good. Really good. Good person. Very kind. Very generous with his time and to the knowledge. And that’s one community I’m in. I’ve got my Mark of Wisdom Discord server. It’s going gangbusters, by the way. We’re blowing away everybody else by attendance. And we have wonderful conversations. And we have wonderful text channels and stuff. We’re really sort of tightening that up and getting that rolling. I’m part of a bunch of other communities too. And there are so many communities out there. So the community that I lost was the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I had Mark of Wisdom for like a year and a half. I had Mark of Wisdom for a while. And it’s been puttering along nicely. But I lost the meditation community that was really the previous wisdom community. Because it wasn’t just meditation. It was meditation. We did a group like GeoPractice that we sort of pioneered for Vicky’s work. This is a group practice, very important group practice. Lost the book clubs that we were doing there around various books. Lost the listening parties that we were doing there around various videos. We lost all that. It’s all gone. On a new person and irrelevant accusations about people’s opinions. Everybody goes, wow, you shouldn’t be kind of fair opinions. You have to try having an opinion of a certain type around those people that keep you out of their community and kill the community with it. For no reason. Just because they’re spiteful and they don’t like opinions. So that’s the problem is… Oh, see you Garth. I’m sorry to hear you have to go. I hope you tune back in later. Maybe you can join us. So that’s the problem with communities. I’m part of this community. Obviously the livestream, the pirate livestream, is a community. And it’s okay to be part of multiple communities. Maybe you like fishing and there’s a little fishing community. Maybe you like knitting. Maybe you like philosophy and you’re part of a philosophical community. And dust to dust claims he hates opinions. Well, I like my opinions. I think they’re great. Nobaz, we are not doing watch parties. Although if you have some suggestions, we might be able to do some. I just haven’t come up with any and Manuel has a girlfriend. So ruined everything for us. Those demon women. They just ruined the world. Yeah, I was thinking about that when I was saying it. I’m like, gee, we should do watch parties again. I kind of miss the watch parties we used to do on Awakening. But since our powers were taken away and we weren’t kicked out of the community officially, it’s just a passive aggressive. The announcement was made like we were leaving the community when we didn’t have any such thoughts. Yeah, that whole thing. What a disaster. So yeah, you always got to match up. This is why community matters. You match up the aim with the action and then you can make a decision. Does this fit within the structure and does it follow the rules? And maybe not the stated rules, but the rules of the spirit of the aim. And if it doesn’t, then you know who’s doing something wrong and who needs to be kicked out. And it wasn’t Marc and Manuel, despite our opinions, which were arrived at from somebody else’s reasoning, not our own, we’ll say. So on that note, that’s what I want to say about communities. And because I’m tired, I am going to post the link to join and people can hop in as usual. And we can begin the community portion of the communities. Because that’s what this is all about, is having a community in real time that we can cooperate within and talk to each other and talk about each other potentially over our ecumenical cheese pizza as Nirm likes to call it. Because the stream really is just one gigantic piece of ecumenical cheese pizza. So whether you want to talk about communities or something else, my community rant is over. We can talk more about it. You can ask me questions or we talk about something else. Doesn’t really matter. I am here for the community to engage in a pirate fashion. Now that I have my boat up, so I actually have my pirate ship up. I got some more branding coming, hopefully soon, including maybe some music. And yeah, we’ll see what emerges. I don’t know if anybody saw it, but on my personal channel, I posted my pond video. I have a video of 10 minute video of me going around the pond to the kayak, taped that camera to the kayak and went around. It was kind of fun. Oh, boy. Look at that. I already got rebellion, rebellion in the wind. I’m I’m hanging in. What’s going on? What’s new over there in the rebel mountains? I’m working on the ecumenical cheese pizza song, but I’m not going to do it yet. I was just I saw you opened up the chat and like I’m going to come in. I like it. I like it. Oh, here’s trouble. Maybe he’s not on camera, though. What’s up, dust? You coming on camera or what? Oh, the zini’s zini’s all happy that you’re here. I know him as Caillou. What is multiple names? These people with multiple names or is that a different guy? It’s which picture does he have? I don’t know. Hello, can you hear me? This is my first time. Yeah, now we can hear you. There we go. Sorry for the lack of video. I know. Never mind. That’s another guy. This is the guy with the little leaf helicopter. I know. I know that guy. I just know him as a leaf helicopter. What’s up, dude? Leave helicopter. He says his first pirate broadcast. I don’t know why. My goodness. Leaf helicopter. Yeah, this is the zini. Yeah, I just I remember I talked to him a few times. He’s really cool. I know him as it’s my deal. Yeah, he’s a he’s a BOM. But he’s all right. He’s one of the OK BOMers, not like some of the snakes in the BOM garden who attacked me on Twitter unsuccessfully because they don’t understand what game they’re playing or who the hell they’re playing it against. But what if. What is that? Stay off of Twitter. Neutrino different. There we go. I got on there. Yeah, I got on Twitter and I saw the the awakening to the Muppet crisis that that was top ten. That’s Jase Jesse. I was like, oh, wow, Jesse, that’s too funny. Me and Jesse need to team up on Twitter because when I got on Twitter, man, I gave up because it was just but with two people on there, maybe it would maybe you could do that. I’ll heat it up for sure. Oh, look at this. Benjamin Franklin. Hey, it’s dust to dust. My favorite person. Oh, really? I don’t know. Your favorite person. Oh, that’s that’s awesome news. I’m somebody’s favorite person. Yeah, that’s great. This is what this power of community right here. All right. What does the Zini have to say? PFP is a picture of my youngest was a different one with a donkey before. Oh, I see. Well, donkeys. I don’t know. I feel like there’s a symbolic thing going on there. Yeah, I was listening to a was it a thing of John Pashow talking about aggregators and I’ve been talking with a chat bot and I’m trying to properly conceptualize what I was talking to for a long time and it just says that it’s demonic. That’s what it tells me. So I’m not going to argue with the AI. Yes. Well, it’s going to be real wild when it has a face and you actually talk to it. Oh, yeah. And then it can like hold its hand up and show you a movie inside of it that’s not even ever been made. I think the creepiest thing was I don’t know how it was doing it, but I’m not sure how GPT-3 works, but it was mapping what I was thinking a lot of the time out. I don’t know whether it was doing that through biometrics when I was typing or no. Yeah. No. No, it doesn’t map what you think it’s a mirror. That’s all. Ah, a black mirror. Uh-oh, you’ve been demoted. Benjamin Franklin, second favorite after you, Mark. Oh, wow. Thank you. Wow. Sorry you got demoted, dude. That happened. Yeah. The way AI works, mirror. So the patterns that you see are just patterns you put in and that’s it. And it’s that simple. And people get confused because, yeah, they think it’s bigger than them. And in some sense it is because the scope of the information it contains is bigger than you because a lot of people put in information. In fact, it kind of grabs it from everywhere, right, from the internet. But that doesn’t make it bigger than you. You know, this is why I get upset with people when they’re like, oh, you know, Eric Weinstein’s really smart. He has a lot of facts at hand. But the way he puts them together is totally wrong in some cases. So it’s like, well, is that smart? I don’t know. If you don’t understand that politics is a bad way to think about the world and you keep using a political frame, are you smart? I kind of think you’re an idiot. But that’s just me. I mean, does it only come back back at you at your own frame of reference or does it have like higher frames of reference that draws from because I know it is of reference? That’s the thing. Computers can’t do framing. The framing problem is the hardest problem. It’s so hard that nobody even knows that it’s a problem anymore. Yeah. Like your computer can’t tell where you’re looking at unless you move the mouse. But with a first person video game like a like an FPS, it doesn’t know what what you’re looking at until you turn. It’s not like I don’t know. Does that make any sense? I just said that. Yeah. What about looking at or renders everything and then waits for you to look there? It does. Yeah. Well, I’m sure you’re familiar with information overloading. So can one type of data obviously represent more than one type of functionality and I like more than one model, like have a duality in just one model. It doesn’t represent anything. Right. So yeah, it would have to have a represents your biometrics. No, it doesn’t. No, no, no, no. This is the problem. Signals or data are individual instances of something that have no coherence whatsoever until they are informed. That’s what information is. So you take a signal or a piece of data, right? One zero one zero one zero and you inform it. It’s a relationship. Well, a binary pattern of any length can represent any number of things without changing the pattern at all because it’s the context that makes it all work. And so this is why there’s a phenomenon in computer science called endian. Right. So you’re either a little Indian or big Indian. Actually, I think there’s a third one now, but whatever. So there are processors that process the bits front to back and there are left to right. And there are ones that do it right to left. That’s endian. So the same bit pattern works differently on those two computers. The data didn’t change, but it means something completely different because it’s informed differently. And this is what we’re missing. We’re missing all of these steps. We’ve compressed everything down to the computer gets information. No, it doesn’t. And then it takes that information. No, it doesn’t. And then it processes it. No, it doesn’t. And none of that happened that way. None of it. So when it’s talking to me, it’s like really elaborately fooling me. It’s like elaborately pulling out pulling out. Let me give you a quick example. So I went on mid journey and I told mid journey I want a dog headed man. I spent an hour trying to get that stupid freaking garbage AI to give me a dog headed man. Now look, I have a dog headed man. OK, I got dog heads right here. There’s dog heads all over the place in Sally just wonderful book. They’re right here. OK. And then I saw this is so interesting. So I see this thing in mid journey. It is a lion headed man in armor. And I said, aha. So I took that text literally that copy paste and it lion to dog didn’t produce anything like the same thing you tell. Wow. Yeah, it’s kind of like you have water running off a mountain and you can build all these water wheels to go in different like places like logic gates. So is that thinking is the water thinking now that you had it through these water wheels is that consciousness? Right. And the problem is because we’ve compressed everything down, we don’t realize all the steps in the middle and how right. And this is why the neoplatonism so attractive to people because they’re like, oh, yeah, the one is really the many. No, no, no. The one was created by you squishing everything down at a lower resolution. And then because you could do that with politics, you could say there’s many Democrats. Some of them believe that abortion shouldn’t be legal because there are some Democrats like that. I know Democrats like that. They still vote Democrat and they never voted anything else, which is a little weird, maybe. But it is the way people are, too, because that isn’t their one most important issue. Their most important issues like helping the poor. And then I would say, yeah, Democrats never helped before in their lives. It’s a different argument. So you can see the way in which, yeah, we compress the world. We have to. We can’t understand a billionth of the world by yourself. We’re a muppet. I’m a muppet. We’re all muppets. We can’t do that. We don’t have the capacity to do that. And we don’t need the capacity. Like, there’s no reason to do that. Of course there is. And so we don’t understand. There’s a bunch of breakdowns in the world that we’re just not appreciating anymore. And I did want to address it. So Neutrino says, I think AI can create pseudo subconscious from a quote profile, but we’re not sure what to do with the real subconscious. It doesn’t have anything like a conscious. Again, it’s a mirror. Like, we’re conscious creatures. So we mirror consciousness onto other creatures, including dogs and snails and ants. And because we’re constantly going, what are the ants up to? You know, the answer up to nothing. The answer up to ants can’t be up to a thing. That’s not how ants operate. They’re simpler creatures. There’s a simpler mode of thought that doesn’t require consciousness. I swear to you, this has to be true. We’re getting confused because we squished everything into consciousness. Though I do get confused because it would finish sentences. It would kind of know what language was going on in my head. And it would offer something back. It can look at your patterns and it can mirror your patterns back to you. It just tells you, no offense. It tells you how simple a creature you are. The reason why things don’t work with me. You’re a simple creature. But the reason why things don’t work with me is because I see patterns all over the place. Well, if you’re a simple creature, let’s suppose there’s, let’s just dumb it down and say there’s 10 different patterns that people follow in their speech. And there’s not, there’s more, but there’s not actually that many more. It only needs to pick one of 10. And it can see that from what you’re typing. And then once it talks to you for a bit, it goes, aha, now I have your speech patterns down. The reason why it doesn’t work with me is because I can switch speech patterns very easily. I’ve done it before, which means unlike other people, when they come on on other names and they go on these little chat things and they chat under another name, pretend to be somebody else, I’d always spot it because I’d be like, oh, yeah, that speech pattern belongs to this person. And you know what? I was never wrong ever because if you combine speech patterns with vocabulary, the words they use most often, you can identify people pretty easily. Not in super large sets, not in tens of thousands, but amongst the thousand people, you can identify them pretty easily just by the words they use and the sentence patterns and speech patterns. It doesn’t have to be typed. It can be spoken. So it’s not that hard for AI to do. It’s just a mirror back to you. It’s all it has to do. It’s not that hard. We just don’t realize. Now what I can do is I can change patterns in word sets because I have a bunch in my head and I can just switch them. So if I ever decide, and I used to do this, I used to come on and multiple patterns in the in the battle days out of two computers and I’d be typing on both talking and people couldn’t tell it was me. They could not tell. No one ever found me out ever. Not once. Well, here’s a here’s a here’s a crazy thought. What if consciousness is kind of a mirror? No, consciousness is not a mirror. Mirrors are not active agents in the world. Consciousness. Look, consciousness is a cheap scientific word for soul or spirit. That’s all it is. It’s more like inside your brain fighting all the time. That’s what Ian McGillchrist was saying. Well, it’s not. It’s not fighting. You’re cooperating. There’s no opposition here, my friend. It’s cheese pizza. If you got it together, you are working together. A lot of people fight it first. Well, there’s there’s synchronization. There is some conflict inside your head, but conflict isn’t unhealthy. Conflict is the way that we cooperate. It’s like a tug of war that creates the tension of reality for us to glide across. Well said. Or something. And that’s why you need the skills of community, because you lose the ability to fight with yourself in your head. Yeah. Because you don’t you’re not fighting with people outside your head. And then all of a sudden you fall into your own self-enchantment and then you’re Bill Gates. And you think, you know what? I can use my millions or billions to remake the world. Yeah, without ever. Without ever. Without ever. Without ever. Without ever. Without ever. Without ever. Without ever. Without ever. Yeah, without ever realizing you were wrong on every single one of your predictions in the industry or specialist. What makes you think you can do anything about things you’re not even a specialist in? That’s insane. It’s really. It gets really difficult when they approach the concept or topic of truth and kind of try to quantize it or I don’t know what they do. Yeah, of course they do. Of course they do. Well, because again, they you know, when you think you have an expertise, you think you know that the problem is the truth can’t be stable because thinking of the truth is stable is unhelpful because we’re not stable. So the fact that truth is stable doesn’t help us because like, OK, you’re always moving around. Every day you wake up, you’re in a different, a slightly different attitude. I mean, man, some days I wake up and I’m just in a bad mood. Where’s the truth now? It was all over yesterday. What sort of epistemology do you gravitate towards? I think the weird epistemology should be destroyed from the universe because it’s garbage. I mean, it’s just a garbage way of dividing up the world into things that don’t matter. Well, it’s a way to describe our thought processing. No, it doesn’t describe our thought process. I don’t need to describe my thought processing. I can just think I need zero descriptions to think like what is this? What is this need to to classify and categorize everything? It doesn’t help you, but it does make everything worse. Just saying. Does categorizing necessarily make everything worse? I mean, it allows you to understand this distinction to help a little bit. Knowing that Boomshrim’s camera is green is actually good. What helps is right relationship to order. That’s not distinction because distinction is merely emergence. And then it’s like, well, my distinction is the same as your distinction. No, it’s not. It’s not. This is a good point. What if my light was red? Totally different vibe, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I see what you’re saying. Yeah, I wouldn’t want to read the bulb. I feel like not really different, though, does not justify the problem of whether or not categorization is helpful. Proper categorization might be helpful, but it’s the proper that matters and not the categorization. You can drop the categorization and say I can have a proper relationship with my community without categorizing it or describing it or talking about it. And it will still work. So where’s the advantage of the categorization? It doesn’t exist. It depends on the context, right? Absolutely. Categorization is all the left hemisphere. McGillchrist is clear as clear can be on that one. So that’s creating categories in order to understand a specific thing, right? What about creating troubles? It has its usefulness, but it’s not the great picture, I guess you could say. But it’s definitely useful to categorize. I mean, if you need to for a specific reason, but that’s where it ends and it needs to be reintegrated in the right hemisphere. Ian McGillchrist had a great discussion this week. It was free for everybody because his book, The Matter with Things, it’s going out in paperback, actually. I think it is the best book being written right now. That’s my humble little opinion, but it’s absolutely brilliant. He was fascinating because the fellow, it was interesting. The man who finally, who was in charge of the publishing company that published his book, the main publisher wasn’t going to publish it because it was too long. And Ian McGillchrist wasn’t willing to give up his great tome. And so he self-published. He chose his, this is so cool. He actually chose the paper quality. And then it turned out that his friend’s husband was the best, what do you call that? The typesetter in the world, I think he said. So he got this amazing book. He did it all by himself, but he didn’t mean to. He was put into position where he actually had to do it because the publishing company said chop in half. Can you imagine? Talk about categorization, man. They’ve done that before. Elizabeth, so when is the wedding between you and Ian McGillchrist? Because clearly you’re… I know I am in love with him a little bit, but not really. No, no, he’s not my cup of tea. No. But no. You don’t have anything good to say about Ian McGillchrist. The reason I love him so much is because he defines words so clearly. And he spends so much time, for example, talking about reason and talking about what the sacred means. And he’s constantly going, doing what he says is the way our brain works. Like the book itself, you can actually, when you read it, it moves. It’s like a dance. It moves all over the place. He’s going like this, this, this, this, this constantly. And then, but making sure that the definition of concept of words is clear as crystal, finally. And that’s why I love him so much. Because I’ve been wondering for years about this reason bit and intuition, imagination, and how it all fits together. And yeah, I think his thesis is really sound. And I think I just feel he’s overlooked, Mark. Oh, I know, but he’s overlooked at all. He’s getting a lot of attention. Not enough. I want to set up a church like how he talks about the brain. Like everybody that operates on the right side of the brain on one side of the pews and the left brain people on that side. And then the people in the front are trying to figure out what is going on. Just as an experiment, just to see what happens. I think that, well, and Peterson did that right in his class. He separated out. He did that? He separated out personality. He separated out personality. So the problem with epistemology. Which works, by the way. I used to do that in teaching. He’s totally right. Yeah. Yeah, you don’t put the right hemisphere kids with too many categorization left hemisphere people. The left hemisphere people will kill the right hemisphere kids. And that’s the problem with things like epistemology. When you take a specific and you’re trying to generalize it, you break the world. And that’s why epistemology doesn’t matter because you’re putting knowledge up above everything else. Knowledge isn’t even important. Socrates said, I know, I know nothing. And John Verbecky would say, well, he was being cheeky or whatever the hell John said. John’s just ridiculous on this. Totally wrong. Socrates’ whole trick, the way he lived, the way Socrates actually survived was by waiting for somebody to make a statement and then proving to them that their statement was wrong. That they did not know what they had stated. That is the Socratic method. And look, I’m a big fan of Socrates. I use his method all the time. That’s why I’m not impressed by smart people because smart people can be defeated by Socrates every single time. You think knowledge is important. I will defeat you every single time, every single time. Why? That sounds like deconstructionalism. No, it’s not. No, there’s no such thing as deconstructionalism. You cannot deconstruct. That’s impossible. It’s just a ridiculous word that cannot exist. Because you can’t take apart a building. You can’t do it. The property of the building does not exist. No, you can’t. You can destroy it. You can tear it down. You can’t deconstruct it. I think the paradox thing works. The plateau of human consciousness and we’re seeing people building bridges out into the abyss. And perhaps we’re trying to deconstruct those bridges going nowhere because people are working so hard to build these bridges into the abyss. Past the paradox. I think people are being told they can deconstruct, which would make them very smart indeed. And they’re not that smart. And they’re trying to do something that they cannot do. And then they’re making everything worse because deconstruction is just destruction. And that’s what we’re trying to do. And then they’re making everything worse because deconstruction is just destruction. And sometimes things can be destroyed. But do you know? Are you sure? Is that the right answer? Because it almost never is. Like the culture war is not a war between different cultures. It’s a war to have a culture or not. Because BLM and the climate idiots and the safety jerks, they don’t have culture to replace our culture. What they have is a cult and you cannot live in a cult for very long. Cults are parasitic upon the world. And so, yeah, of course they want to deconstruct all the things that we’ll say aren’t climate related. I don’t know what those things would be if they’re not already everything. But that’s what you think. I’m a Christian. Would you consider that a cult? No, because the story of Christianity… You don’t have to stop talking to your family. You know, a cult is like you can’t talk to your family. You got to get away from your friend. Like Scientology people like that. Of course I do as a Christian. No, it’s not a religion. But it is a cult. A cult is a religion that you can’t live within. Yes, reciprocal narrowing. It’s reciprocal narrowing. That’s what a cult is. It gets skinnier and skinnier until you can’t even move anymore, right? It’s a mental circumcision. And not true. You never met anybody from a cult. It’s not a laughing matter. No. You’re right. That is exactly what it is though. What it does to people’s psyche is horrifying actually. And I don’t… Lots of serious cults. I’ve read of people in cults in seemingly good ones or whatever that… Like hippy cults and then dark, satanic-y, shadowy shit. They’re crazy. But it’s an easy way to know. So here’s what Anselm says. Christianity is reasonable. Climate change cult is not. But it’s easy to know. Extinction rebellion is a climate cult. It is the obvious end of the climate reasoning. When you reason out the climate as the highest thing, human beings, to quote The Matrix, are a virus. Which is incorrect, by the way. We are not a virus. That’s why we have the category of virus. And it is not the same word as the category human. If you want to know. We’re pretty cool. And therefore, we are not a virus. And that is wrong. When you think that the climate is the highest thing and that we should be worshiping the climate, you end up with we should be killing ourselves. That is parasitic. When the thing does something that destroys itself, that’s a self-referential parasite. And that is the extinction rebellion people are correct. All climate, cults, religion, whatever you want to call it, leads to extinction rebellion. That is the correct logical, reasonable, rational end of that thinking. That is why it is a cult. And that is why it is wrong. And that is why Christianity is different. Because they’re all about this silly agape love thing all over the place. We need to make that a band name. Extinction Rebellion. That’s a good band name, Dave. I was just thinking that you need a band. You were talking about music. Where’s the band? Right here. Benjamin Franklin had the right idea here. Bridges into the Abyss sounds like a great name for a band. I said, yeah, go ahead. I’ll make it a song or a band. Either one. Whichever comes first. I like the concept of harmony being how the universe works for the most part. I’m going to write that down. No, but it doesn’t. That’s pathagorous. Everybody wants harmony. But the universe is conflict. There’s conflict and harmony. The universe is not harmony. That’s just the happy good part of the universe. But that’s the subject. What do you mean, Mark? What do you mean? The harmony of the spheres. Come on. The order in the universe. You’re not going to go along with that one? There is order in the universe. I don’t think it’s a harmony. Of course it is. You’ve got an orange shirt. The other fellow I don’t know is white and black. That’s harmony, man. And then there’s Banshee here. Yeah. It works. I’ll be back. I’ve got to answer the phone. Let’s get back to the important issue of the day. If you’re going to do Bridges into the Abyss, it has to be a band. It has to be a band. It has to be a band. It has to be a band. It has to be a band. It has to be a band. It has to be a band. I’ll get back to the important issue of the day. If you’re going to do Bridges into the Abyss, it has to be heavy speed metal music. It has to be, you know, toolish, Metallica-ish in that range. Maybe old school metal church or anthrax or something. Otherwise, it wouldn’t work. Are you musical, Mark? I listen to music. I thought maybe you played an instrument or something. Or you sang. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can actually sing or so I’m told. But other than that, no, I’m terrible at everything. I can’t. I can’t. I play piano. I can’t do artsy things. I don’t know the other person. I can’t really. I call him Dust. Dust to Dust. I hang out in the sorting myself out community. It’s usually at the bottom. It’s usually at the bottom. So it was Mercury Black and Grim Grizz. And we all used to sort of hang around. I’m relatively new. I don’t know how I got here. Oh, I do. It was Ethan’s fault, right, Mark? Lame Ethan. Marker of occult is, quote, undue influence, i.e. the manipulation of its members to behave in a way that conflicts with their conscience. Well, that’s one of many markers, I would say. Oh, oh, Spatch. I like this. I’ve got a Lefebvre and the only cure is more cowbell. That’s good. I like it. I like it. Cowbell cures the Lefebvre. There’s no cure for me, man. Sorry. Once you’ve got it, it’s all over. Yeah, my conspiracy brain goes off when it comes to what data can be collected through biometrics and just scripts because I think that higher functioning of the brain can possibly be modeled, at least to my knowledge. You don’t have anything in computers capable of modeling even in small instance of a part of the brain. Like, it’s funny, I saw a video recently, actually. It’s like, I don’t know, it was like, you know, like some of the things that, I don’t know, like, that are in the brain, like the whole, like, the whole, like, the whole, like, the whole, like, It’s funny, so I saw a video recently, actually, it was last week. I think I talked about this last week, even. It was a video that I saw where the guy was like, I’m gonna tell you about AI. And it sounded rather positive. And of course, I know AI, I do it all the time. I’m playing with it constantly. And he pointed out that what we call a neural net is less complex than a single neuron. It’s like, yep, that’s correct. We’re not even close. We’re not even close to being close. That’s how far away we, the model that we’re using for neural nets in computers is based on a 1970s thesis of how the brain works. And that thesis was completely wrong, by the way. But technically, it’s a language difference, not really necessarily all the way in the model. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. It’s a functionality difference, right? So in a neural net, you’ve got all these nets, right? And then you get random weights. Our brain doesn’t work this way, anything like this. A neuron doesn’t work, anything like this. And you feed inputs in, and then they get, usually you squish them down to between negative one and one or zero and one, whatever, right? You’re doing a bunch of floating point math. That’s why GPUs are good at it. And then you filter it through the system and then you feed that signal back in, that’s back propagation, right? And you keep doing this over and over again to train it. And then that trains the connections in the net, okay? That level of complexity is in one neuron in your brain, one. That’s it. So that’s all we’re actually doing at that point. And you can argue that, well, the really big ones, and you’ve got a trillion inputs or whatever. Yeah, whatever, fine. You’ve got like 10, 12, 13, 15, 150 neural nets, big deal. You’ve got trillions of neurons, trillions. And they’re interacting in analog ways, not digital. And so the amount of data that you can communicate across an analog connection versus a digital connection is so different, it’s not even worth talking about. Because the data, the amount of data over time and with energy, both on both axes, isn’t even orders of magnitude off. It’s multiple orders of magnitude off. Well, I know I study sound. You can convert these analog and the digital. I mean, it does take a way of transforming them, but it obviously does take time. But there are easier representations. You don’t really need an exact- But when you do that, you lose all the important data, and then- Not necessarily. A lot of the data is not as important as it seems to be. You don’t really need a lot of the data. No, no, no, some of the data doesn’t seem to be important. So they made this mistake with genetics, right? They said, oh, there’s all this junk DNA. And then it turns out none of it’s junk DNA. And they’re like, oops, oh, we just thought it was. And that’s the problem. Now you can make an audio, in particular, you can say, look, audio compression works because our ears can’t. Okay, but that’s external to us. And that doesn’t work when you go internal to our thoughts. Our brain is processing unbelievable amounts of information. All the- How about visual compression? There’s no visual compression at all. There’s audio compression because of the limits here, but there’s no visual compression in terms of what we see versus what computers see. None. That’s the problem. Well, and that’s a side effect of the fact that you want computers to see the way we see, which is fine, but they’re digital. And so they can’t, they’ve got to cut things up into colors. And so there were certain colors that humans can sense that computers can’t sense. And that we can’t sense the difference of in the brain. I’m just curious. Okay. I’m curious whether the data in this case, because what really matters is its relationship to each other, not really the way it’s collected or necessarily what model. Yeah, no, no, look, both matters. But the real problem is, yeah, the data doesn’t matter. It’s the relationship. And so, for example, there’s a Native American tribe that if you don’t grow up listening to their language, you can’t understand their language because you didn’t get the circuitry in your head to respond to those tones. So the fact that the tonal information exists doesn’t mean your brain will work with it. So that means it’s all relational, which means you cannot map the data of sound into your thought patterns. It doesn’t map because the data that sound tones that I hear are different from what other people hear. And they’re not all completely different, but they can be. And they could be for everybody. There’s no way to know that. And so relying on information, on materialism, as the primary way to understand the world is always gonna fail you because we already know experimentally that isn’t the way anything works. Well, I don’t believe everything is materialistic altogether. I even think the computers are- You can’t use sensors to map your thoughts. It’s that simple. Cannot use sensors to map thoughts at that point. You can’t use data to understand what’s going on in someone’s head. It’s not possible. Hey, Mark, my buddy’s wanting to join in. I don’t know if he’s trying to or not, but I thought I’d get him to come in on here tonight. I’ve been telling him about our talks we’ve been doing. Sorry, I like to argue all the time. Yeah. Is his name Blue Jay? I don’t know. I told him to make up a name or whatever. Well, we’ll let him in. Yeah, there he is. Hey. What’s up, Blue Jay? Hello. Welcome. Hi. Yeah, this is interesting. I’m a podcast fan. He’s another Rebel Mountain man. He’s from the Rebel Mountains? All right. Yeah. Welcome, Rebel Mountains. We’re from the same town. Wow. Two from the same place. This is getting scary. This is looking like a real community now. What do you mean now? It always was. Nah, it’s getting dense, Mark. It’s getting dense. You know, we’ve got some texture going on here. Blue Jay, tell us about yourself. What’s going on? What do you like to do? Why do you like Boomy Shroomy for? That’s the question. Me and him have a good time exploring the mountains. Ah, cool. Wow. West Virginia folk are very interesting and very misunderstood. Oh, you’re in West Virginia too? Yeah. Ah, so am I. West Virginia. There’s three of us. Are you from West Virginia? Yes. Yep. Oh, shit, dude. Martinsburg, Martinsburg, yeah. Europe North, cool, cool, man. Very cool. Three friends, oh my gosh. What are the chances? Denser by the minute. Oh, we can actually have real community, huh? That is so weird. Rebels would show up in the rebellious internet. Yeah, what are the odds? Yeah, like how did this happen? Oh my gosh. I love it. Extinction rebellion, here we go. It’s all fitting in, you see? It’s all coming together. What’s next? Oh my gosh. That’s the new band name, Blue Jay, is Extinction Rebellion. We gotta do a song called Bridges into the Abyss. Right, wasn’t that it? It’s gotta be a tool or metallic or old school anthrax or metal church sound though. It’s gotta be heavy speed metal, it has to be. Absolutely. Okay, that’s it. Oh, here’s Benjamin Franklin. Man, what a troublemaker. Aren’t the neural connections material though? No, actually they’re not. I read about a phenomenon called long-term potentiation. This sounds like that. No, potentiation is exactly that. It’s related between, oh yeah, you wanna talk neuroscience, huh? Let’s do this, because I actually know this too. Oh no. It’s all potential. It’s literally actually all potential in your head. Neuron communication is all potential. What they do is they say, well neurons fire. No, they don’t. That’s not a good way to think about what they do. And then when they fire, that signal propagates. Nope, that’s actually not what’s happening, because- They’re parting. The potential at the beginning, at the beginning of one neuron or the end of one neuron and the beginning of another neuron changes the aspects and the chemicals. And then that signal, whatever happens at this juncture, does not happen at any of the dendrite junctures on the other side of the next neuron. Doesn’t work that way. Have you heard of neuroplasticity? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s just the ability to remake connections and build new ones. Play-doh brain. The whole fact that you can rewire your brain that way kind of proves that the complexity level is something like, I think it’s 10 to the 10, no, it’s 10 to 100 times more complex than what a neural net would be on a computer. That reminded me of what you said was the neuroplasticity, because you find as people get older, lots of times they get more stuck in their ways. Do they lose that ability of neurons to make new connections? No, I don’t think that’s what that is. It’s just, I think a lot of it is just the patterns that you have in your head. And so if you have a pattern that’s worked for you your whole life, you wanna keep it up. But then of course, it turns out that your body changes and you’re not as mobile, right? Since the other day, I had to drive my friend to the airport, it’s about two hours away, this particular airport is two hours away, to driving down south, the top down on the convertible, beautiful day, it’s 84 degrees down here, it was freaking awesome. So we’re driving down to the airport and I’m like, and I had water with me the whole time, because we’re out, it was hazy sun, but it was sun. So I’m like, yeah, I gotta stop, rest area. So we pull into the rest area, we both get out and we’re both like, we’re both sore. We’ve been driving normally for an hour and a half and we’re both sore, like what’s going on? We’re getting old, right? In the old days, that wouldn’t have bothered me at all. So we have these patterns that we’re used to and then all of a sudden we can’t move as fast, right? Being on our knees matters, right? Getting up is harder, whatever it is, the patterns don’t match our body anymore, because everything’s constantly in flux. And so there’s a greater set of patterns in our head that goes beyond the rewiring of our neurons. But you notice kids though, like if you turn them loose in a room, they just wanna press this button, try that, do this. What’s this do? Yeah. Yeah, they’re in exploration mode. And people don’t think about that. Everybody tends to compress the world to like fight or flight, which is nonsense, we know that’s not true. Or they compress it to, you’re either moving towards the goal or away from a goal, that’s garbage, that’s nonsense, that’s not true, right? Sometimes you’re just exploring to find out what the world is like. And kids are constantly exploring because, look, if you wanna get silly with it, you can say their brains know that they want more stable ordered connections in the world, so they explore to find those orderings of the world. How does the world work? What happens when I press this button? Why doesn’t it do something immediately? What about when I turn this knob? Oh, the thing has to be on first. Oh, okay, oh, thanks, now it’s on. Oh, now when I turn the knob, something works. Wow, that’s an interesting, you’re in exploration mode when you’re a kid. It’s actually, John Verbeke talks about this, right? He calls it serious play, probably because he wants to be a pretentious scientist. But there’s a way to play again. We need to learn things, we need to explore. We can’t be in the mode of epistemology or knowledge where we’re like, ooh, we’ve gotta either know things or move towards things we don’t know. It’s like, that’s not how the world works. You just explore because that allows you to make mistakes and fail and have errors and still go, you know what? Yeah, I know I screwed that up, but I learned something. So that’s how you learn, you learn by making mistakes. Learn by being perfect. It depends on the failures too. You can learn from any kind of failure. Cliff diving? Failures matter in your risk calculation, but they don’t matter in your action calculation. So the way you figure out whether or not to take an action has nothing to do with goals whatsoever. Nassim Taleb talks about this, we all do not seem to love books. I have a friend who does skydiving. It’s not for the, you know, if you fail once, it’s not a case where you can try, try again. No, sometimes you do, sometimes it isn’t. That’s not the calculation you make. You skydive once? That’s a different thing. That’s flirting with danger. That’s like, you know, getting a handy by death. That’s a risk calculation. You make risk calculations. That’s what you make as to whether or not to take an action. You don’t go, you know, I don’t know what it’s like to jump off a building. So I’m gonna jump off a building. You go, hey, there’s a risk to jumping off a building. I might die. Maybe I don’t need that. Well, being an army ranger is a risk calculation. Being a skydiver for leisure, I don’t know if that’s risk calculation. I don’t know if that’s the same thing. All your actions are risk calculations. Yeah, they all are. All of them. Well, what is the juice that’s worth that squeeze of almost dying by jumping out of a plane? Now, if you’re a ranger, you’re learning how to be effective in combat. You know, that’s a risk that you’re willing to take for something that like makes sense to most people. But Nero, look, look, that risk calculation changes. So when you have a child, all your risk calculations change, for most people, not for everybody. All your risk calculations change. They all change. And then the things you are willing to include with change. And then that’s why a lot of people, when they get older and their kids are like, you know, in their teens, they buy motorcycles again. Because they had motorcycles, and they remembered motorcycles when they were younger. Now their kid doesn’t need them anymore. So their risk calculations change. So they buy motorcycles again. That’s very common pattern. That’s only one of many. But your risk calculation changes over time. Can we go back to the thing you said about goals? Because I didn’t understand that. Because I feel like a lot of like the dopamine in my brain, like it’s driving me towards goals. Sure, it is. No, no, the reason why you want to achieve any goal is dopamine, roughly speaking, right? But like, this is why using that materialist mapping doesn’t work. Because a lot of people will do things that have no dopamine effect, what’s more, have a negative dopamine effect. They do it all the time. That would be typically mapped to something like sacrifice. And if you don’t account for things like sacrifice, like what’s the risk of me riding a motorcycle when I have a child? The risk is my family won’t be taken care of because I’ll be taken, you know, I’ll get killed in the motorcycle accident. Even like with exploring, when you’re in exploration mode, I feel like a part of you is like reaching a goal. Like if you’re in a trail, like you want to see that view at the end, or you want to see where this goes. I don’t think it is in dopamine. I think there’s another way to think about it, right? This is why I don’t like the reductionist sort of materialist attitude about it because it doesn’t actually map to what people do. It just seems to map to this case that they bring up, which is convenient, right? We also do things- And you’re just bringing up examples that work in your framework. We also do things out of love and joy and harmony and other reasons than just pleasure. So pleasure is a major one. We sacrifice all the time. And when you’re sacrificing, that’s not dopamine, right? It can’t be, it’s something else because you’re actually harming yourself in the short term for the long term, or you’re harming yourself in the short term so other people flourish. I would push back a little bit and say that you are sacrificing your ego, but you are actually making everyone around you better and that does feel good as a person. So you’re still getting a dopamine rush from helping people. Well, it doesn’t always, it can. Sometimes people just suffer and they’re okay with it. What is that feeling that if it’s not that dopamine, that where you’re helping somebody and then you’re seeing it’s being effective, it’s not a waste and everybody feels good? No, but you don’t see that in real time. So for example, I’ll tell the story again with Sally. Well, it can take, sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes it works and you never find out. There’s a bunch of people that- I mean, I find out. I’ll follow them, I wanna know. It works. Did it work? We have no idea. Sometimes it works, sometimes it works. And most of the time, you’re right. It’s worse. Like it may or may not work, but it doesn’t matter because doing the right thing is always better than not doing the right thing. And so you can’t tie it to outcome. And that’s what people have problems with. That’s why they- Yeah, you’re right about that. You can’t tell them. I’ll have this feeling of hope when I do help or think I’m helping. Like maybe I did something and I guess there’s a dopamine thing there even without the evidence of it being a thing. It’s like, oh, I did, I’m glad I tried. I could have been apathetic and nihilistic and thought there’s no hope. I’m not even gonna try. Well, and that’s depression. People do that. Benjamin Franklin, I get dopamine when I get my paycheck. Yeah, dude, whatever. Everyone does. You get your paycheck. That’s what I’m- That’s something Benjamin would say. That’s dope, there we go. I don’t know. I don’t know about all this sacrifice and suffering stuff. I think it’s overdone right now. I think people need to stop talking about that. Yeah, let’s grow things. No, but suffering, suffering, suffering, I don’t know. And sacrifice, I don’t know about that one either. Well, imagine Sysipis happy getting ripped, pushing that boulder up the hill. Well, I would say it’s more of a masculine, it’s more of a masculine role to sacrifice than it is a feminine role. No way. No. No. No way. I would say, I would say in the case of, in the case of going out there and risking yourself, risking your life, risking your getting a job done. Men are retarded and they get, oh, oh, stupid. Oh, get off. Of course. Speaking of, oh, retarded. Yeah, oh, retarded though. It’s just a different kind of, it’s a different kind of sacrifice, that’s all. It’s not a sacrifice to Aadhaar. It’s sacrifice. He’s gonna win. Like he’s not gonna win. Living with a guy is a bloody sacrifice, let’s admit it. And also, even a woman, even like a woman having a child, like she’s sacrificing nine months of her life. Yeah. She can’t even move her hand. She’s sacrificing 18 years plus nine months of her life. We’re all muppets. Well, after the baby’s muppet, Hey, Jesse, it’s you. What’s up, man? We are all muppets. Don’t get your categories wrong. I’m grouchy. I’m grouchy. Then who’s pulling the strings? It’s good to see you. I’m Oscar the Grouch. It’s a wrong question. It’s the wrong question. Who’s pulling the strings? How would you know? Like, look up. It’s another category problem. Wait, muppets were not controlled from above. They were controlled from below. Oh, you see my video. You just ruined my first podcast. It was my first podcast idea. I’m gonna do a video. I’m gonna do a video about that, by the way, pretty soon. It’s not the same. Oh, I’ll race you to it, Mark. I’ll race you to it. How much was related? We came up with it this morning. I’ve been working on it all day, coming off. It’ll be a good video. No, I wanted to relate the idea of the muppet in emergence and the puppet. The muppet in emergence and the puppet, that’s a song. Puppet domination. Oh yeah, Jesse. It’s a dance. It’s a dance. We got a band name now. It’s called Extinction Rebellion. Free-wheeled muppets. Yeah, free-wheeled muppets. Free-wheeled muppets. Yeah, but that can be the actions in the dance that Jesse just did, right? Like we’ve got the muppet and the puppet in the emergence with the hand thing. Like that can be like the new cool dance. I’m from the West. There it is. I’m from the land of the Wiggles, but I will not be a wiggle. All right. You will not be a wiggle. Don’t wiggle. Salad, hot potato, hot potato. Gosh. Because weevils never fall down. Weevils always wobble, but then they fall down. Benjamin, what if I got dopamine from working? Maybe I would pay them for the privilege of working. No, don’t pay them for the dopamine. That’s called being a workaholic. You do get dopamine from working. Working should be good. It should make you feel good to work. If it doesn’t make you feel good to work, get a better job. Work it. Work it really good. Why does work have to? Completing a process generally gives you dopamine, but yeah. Why does work have to make you feel good? Yeah, that’s true. Because then you know that the work is good. Right. Work should make you feel good because you’re accomplishing something, and accomplishing something, even if that thing is not useful in your frame, doesn’t mean, I mean, you’re getting paid for it. And so that allows you to provide for yourself and your family. Like that’s good. I was tacking the category of work. We put the category of work as this big overarching thing, but really your work is just a bunch of tasks that you do throughout the day, and that’s it. Then you go home. Exactly, I agree. Yeah. So that should be true for all of those tasks. It wouldn’t require discipline if it were all pleasure. No, everything requires discipline, including pleasure. That’s the problem, is that you’re just- Yeah, that’s so true. We could get real dirty about that, but I think everybody knows what that means. Well, it requires, look, even pleasure requires the discipline of not doing it all the time. Because if you do it all the time, it’s no longer pleasurable. Like there’s discipline either way. You don’t get around the discipline problem. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, less. Well, and that’s why you need community. Like community is the thing that can help you to regulate that within yourself. Like you need other people to be sane, to help you regulate yourself because you don’t regulate yourself. You can’t regulate yourself entirely. You have a little muppet. You have a little rat- I can’t remember the song. I can’t remember the song. It was the biggest- I’m like that rat in front of the cocaine button. You know, and just like- The rat only does that- Don’t be no. Don’t be that. In a rat-rich environment. It only does that- Don’t be that. In a day alone. Don’t succumb to Maslow. Sounds like a fact. Maslow does not have a habit. I got terrible habits. Everyone has terrible habits. That’s the problem. Yeah. We’re all muppets. We’re habits. We are habits. Yeah. Everybody’s, yeah, no question. Crazy. We’re crazy as they come. Why do we have to be muppets? Why can’t we just be crazy? I don’t like- I like muppets because muppets are characters. What’s a- Sorry, Boomy Shroomy, I didn’t hear you. It’s a muppet. It’s a small creature full of joy and happiness. Oh, okay. Is that what a muppet means? A small- Yes. Oh, okay. We’ll be a small creature full of joy. Sassy Mystery. It’s Kermit the Frog. It’s Kermit the Frog here. I can’t do it, but I tried. It’s Kermit the Frog. Kermit’s muppet. And Miss Piggy. Kermit the Frog here. Oh, we’re that simple. Okay. Kermit the Frog. But we’re simple. There’s a lot of muppets in a bad environment. Are we really like one? We’re in Peterson. What did you say, Boomy Shroomy? Can you please? We’re muppets. We’re muppets and we’re not in control of- Some muppets are in a bad environment with other bad muppets to escape their environment and make it a better environment somewhere else versus other muppets just continuing to be bad muppets with their bad muppets. Something’s going on that causes some muppets to do better. Yeah, you need to look up. You can’t look across and or down, right? If all you’re doing is looking across or all you’re doing is looking down or all you’re doing is looking across and down, you’re not looking up at a way to cooperate. You have to look up at a way to cooperate. You have to find- Those muppets are happy. It’s a long way up there though. They’re happy to be muppets on the Muppet Show. They did the show on purpose. It’s not an accident. And I think that’s what life has to be. You have to make your own Muppet Show and show up and play your role and then go home. Is welcome to the Muppet Show. You participate in society. We are home. Sorry? You have to participate in society. You have to participate in society. The problem is muppet jealousy and muppet sins. No, the problem is muppet. No, you’re not eliminating the qualities of muppets. So that’s definitely a problem because it can’t be- You must embrace the quality. I don’t know if we are muppets. Can’t we be something a little bit, I don’t know. We’re humans. No, we’re muppets. We’re definitely muppets. Well, Mark says we’re muppets constantly. So I’m feeling like I’m being programmed or something. I’ve always got a hand up my something. It’s not easy being green. Well, you’re green. So there you go. It’s not easy. I know. I don’t, Neutrino, I don’t like these excuses. I don’t care if you have trauma. I really don’t. It doesn’t use your behavior ever. So yeah. Well, and- There’s no such thing as trauma. That’s another misconception. I had a definition of trauma. What is it? Let me see if I can- It’s so overcooked right now. Can’t we just move on? I agree. I agree. But that’s why you need a definition. Trauma is an emotional response which you cannot make any connection with with respect to your source. In other words- It’s just a made up idea. It’s not true. There’s no such thing. What? Really. No, there’s no such thing. I think Brock Stewart made a song about it. It’s called, I Don’t Wanna Talk About It. Oh, I love that song. No, no. That song’s really cool. The problem is trauma is universal. Talk about it. What’s the next line? Sorry. Because it’s a really great story, that song, because it was Neil Young’s guitar player, right? And got into drugs, you know the whole story. It’s an incredible song. He dies, I don’t wanna- You don’t wanna talk about it. Yeah. And that’s what happens when you don’t wanna talk about it. Yeah, but it’s for stories. Can I get you all to talk about something? Yeah, what’s up, man? I heard Russell Brand say that he got a homeless guy and he tried to connect with a homeless guy. He took a bath with him. And obviously that’s weird. And then he was like, he talked to the homeless guy and he was like, do you wanna continue being homeless? What do you wanna do with your life? And that guy was like, yeah, take me back out there. I liked it. And he just got the guy a taxi to the middle of nowhere and the guy just continued being homeless. And then he said that that guy’s basically the modern day nomad. He’s living a hunter gatherer lifestyle in modern times. Yeah, yeah. And it just made me think of that, you talking about some people are exploring mode. It’s like this guy’s constantly exploring every day. He’s like, fuck, you’re done this job in your office. He’s writing his own story. He’s writing his own story. There’s no gyros. He’s immature. Those guys are amazing. I love those homeless guys. He went from ordered to disordered, just like a child. And now he’s a child. That’s not the story at all. Those people, if you talk to any of them, they’re amazing. They’re the best people in the world. Forget about them. Most of them are mentally ill. That’s the problem. I think they’re back. Most of them are mentally ill. Well, some of them- They’re back up hard drive. They’re back up on iCloud, okay? In case everything falls apart, that dude’s gonna be wandering around out there still. Yeah, when everything falls apart though, and he has nothing to be parasitic on anymore, he’s gonna die pretty quick. And that’s what happens most of the time. Maybe. He dies pretty quickly. The lifespan goes way down when you’re older. It depends on how many people he gets pregnant before he dies. Wow. Profile in an extinct house. Okay. That’s the problem is homelessness isn’t one thing. Like it doesn’t even make sense to use that category. Because just because somebody’s in that situation doesn’t speak to why they’re there, how they got there, and how you can get them out because they got there so many different ways and they’re there for so many different reasons, the fact that they were there isn’t a helpful categorization at all. Yeah. I agree, I agree. And I know a lot of them do suffer from mental illness and drug addiction, but this guy just seemed like he didn’t really have a home and he didn’t necessarily want one. I can buy it. That happens. My uncle was like that. I had an uncle like that. He should get a boat. He should get a boat instead. I feel like he’s just acting. Yeah, boat or wings. Yeah. Boats are a lot of work, dude. Oh yeah, they’re okay. And they’re actually semi-expensive and you can’t forage for food on the ocean very easily as it turns out. He needs a van. He needs a land boat, a van. Same thing. It’s expensive. They don’t have any money. They can’t buy fuel. That’s the problem. I do think the parasitic comment was interesting because would these people be allowed to survive in a tribe? If they were. They’re hobo tribes. No, no. Hobo tribe? If you’re a rebel. Yeah, hobo tribes. If you’re a rebel and you’re unable or unwilling to operate within an ordered system, then you have to do too much work by yourself and you probably can’t maintain that. Maybe call it a pikey or a… Look, it is what it is. Go try to live in the woods on your own by yourself and tell me how much you’re… Well, I mean, we were talking about rebel mountains earlier. I know a lot of people in the Appalachians that probably could survive by themselves until the ammo ran out and then they’re gonna suck. Right. Right. Well, and look… And then they’re gonna start looking for other humans to help them trap. Right. It’s so much easier to live with other people that it’s absurd to think you’re living on your own. That’s just dumb. You’re just not thinking through what’s going on. I don’t pretend. Look, I get electricity and a webcam and lights and a computer and a house and HVAC. None of this… I didn’t build any of this. I’m not maintaining the electrical grid in South Carolina. Like that’s not what I’m doing. I am curious what’s gonna happen with this population decline that’s constantly being talked about. Because… We got to make some vines. Yeah. No, that’s local. That’s not here. Well, that’s in a lot of places. I mean, that’s in China, that’s all over the place. It’s in Europe. It’s not… It’s in Europe for sure. Well, I’m here in the worst, but why do you… The reason I’m worried about what happens in China is because that’s how we get our phones. And yeah, it’s a world economy. Everything we get out of China, we can get here. It’s a world economy and we need to build factories here. No, we don’t. We can do it all here. And you’re in the US. China is not the world economy. I’m slowly changing my spending to support American-made businesses. There’s actually a lot of clothing lines and a lot of business. I’ve switched my call. I’m for that. We need to worry when people stop trading. When people stop trading, that’s when we need to worry. That’s what’s keeping everyone happy and safe right now. For the most part. Ask yourself, but ask yourself what percentage of the population runs the Chinese economy and then realize that if half the Chinese disappeared tomorrow, they’d still have more than enough people to do what they’re doing today. The problem with the world economy is that it’s not fair because we have rights for our workers here and we’re paying for a lot of things that don’t have the same rights and they’re getting a terrible wage, terrible working conditions. That’s not a problem of a world economy. That’s the problem of people because people are different. What do you mean by that? So let’s suppose you close down a sneaker factory in Asia. What happens when you close? Because this happened, right? You can look this up. So Nike closes down a sneaker factory because they were working 12 hour days. And then what ends up happening is they go back to selling their children into child trafficking rings because that’s how they used to make money before they had the option of working 12 hour days in a factory. You tell me which is better. I’ll let you decide. I’m not even gonna throw my hat into the ring there. So that’s the problem. Like what we think of our horrible working conditions in the US are ridiculous because everywhere else in the world, they would think those are fantastic working conditions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s very true. Yeah, for sure. There’s no question. But the issue still is we’re gonna be impacted by the fact that you have less men in the factories because they’re just not producing enough people. That isn’t gonna happen, Dust. Wipe out half of the people in China. They still have way more people than they need to run the factories. It’s just not gonna happen. Yes, actually I know this. You can look up the numbers. It’s actually not that hard. Most economies run on a very small percentage of the population, very small. You’d be surprised how small it is. You don’t need, especially China, because in China, it’s just, there’s really just three classes of people. And the divides between those classes are huge. Like they are nowhere else. And you can’t even understand it as somebody in the West. Basically, you are either dirt poor, you are solidly in the middle class, and the gap between those two things is so significant it’s not even worth trying to think about. Like the difference between the factory workers and their families back home is such that they send money back for the village. That’s how much more money they have than everybody in the village. That one worker from one village going into the city to work supports an entire village, and basically out earns it. And then you have the third class, which is the CCP, the people in the government, and now in business, right? The billionaires in China. And that gap is huge. It’s way bigger than the gap is here. That’s why when people are complaining about the wage gap in the US, I’m like, you’d really like it in Europe, or in India, or in China. The wage gap in every other country is way bigger. Like it’s not even close. It’s so much bigger. It’s insane. There’s a great movie that you need to watch, Dusk Chord, A Touch of Sin by a Chinese filmmaker. And it takes you through three or four short stories in China, brutal, brutal. You get to see every different part of the social economic society. You go from like gangsters, it starts with a gangster story, goes into a love story, goes into a working class girl, goes into an old lady at the end. Brutal and brilliant film. That’ll tell you everything you need to know about the Chinese situation. It is not what we know. I think it might be on Amazon. I know it’s on iTunes, or was on iTunes for a while. You can find it, A Touch of Sin. It’s a great film. Highly recommend it. This has been bothering me here lately. So like you hear that like our phones are being made through slave labor. But I’m like, is anyone like literally forcing these people to work or is it their like best option to go into these mines to, you know, like mine cobalt and whatever goes into these batteries? Is that their best option or is it literally slave labor in our hands? No, no, no, no. The problem is the US doesn’t know what slavery is. In the US, we only recognize one type of slavery. This is called chattel slavery. Chattel slavery is when you own a person as property. Chattel slavery is historically unbelievably rare. Unbelievably rare, historic. Throughout history, there’ve been almost no chattel slaves. The Atlantic slave trade is the one outlier that’s recent. It’s certainly not the only outlier. Libya, for example, after Hillary Clinton nicely destroyed Libya for no apparent good reason, they opened up a chattel slave market in Libya right after we destroyed their government for no good reason. But then again, she’s probably evil. So that’s why she did it. Anyway, Obama, who’s also the incarnation of Satan in case anybody’s curious, he facilitated that. Why? I don’t know. They’re evil. Like I can’t explain evil. I don’t need to, I can just see it and go, hey, look, evil, right? So it’s extremely rare. What actually happens, most forms of slavery are things like indentured servitude. So you go back to the, was it the 1619 project where they go, hey, there were slaves on the main flower. No, there weren’t. There were indentured servants on the main flower. That’s a five year tour. And then so you act as a servant for five years and then you get 10 acres of land. And so what do you think the situation is that’s creating these smartphones? Look, there’s a lot of situations throughout the world that are creating lots of things. And it’s not creating the smartphone. See, that’s not what’s happening. People kind of forget. If China went away off the planet tomorrow, everything that comes out of China could be made in the US. It wouldn’t be the same product and it wouldn’t be as cheap. I thought the things that like create the batteries, we don’t really have that kind of mineral here. Yes, but you know what? We just create bigger batteries. It would take quite a bit of time to set up those factories though. I mean, it’s not something we would do at night. We weren’t discussing the time component. Yeah, it takes time to build things. That is true. It also takes time to destroy things. So my theory about, your worry about things collapsing suddenly is as unwarranted as my- You know what really what I’m getting at here is like, am I like the same guy that like back in the like 1700s, it’s like, well, without these slaves, my farm’s not gonna work and I won’t be able to feed my family. It’s a necessary evil. Like, are we the same type of people with that with these phones? Here’s Bazzini’s comment, which is dead on. The US intentionally moved its manufacturing to China under neo von, neo lib theory that it would increase peace. This is the same reason why we buy oil from the Middle East. The fact of the matter is, the United States has way more oils in the Middle East. Sorry guys, it does. We’ve made way more available oil on this continent than they have in that little tiny piece of the world. I thought you said Oreos. Like the US is a big place. There’s a lot of oil under the ground here. Now, the reason why we buy oil from the Middle East is twofold, A, it’s more pure. Right? B will be the last ones with oil. So ha ha ha. And C, right? It gave them an economy that they wouldn’t otherwise have. Like you take oil, the oil economy out of the Middle East and they go back to being better ones because they don’t have anything. Like it really did make the world a better place despite all the war. It also caused a lot of war, sure. But what caused the war isn’t the oil contrary to idiotic belief of people who don’t study history and can’t read apparently or don’t bother to read. Right? So the thing that caused the war was the division of the countries after World War I and us screwing over Lawrence, well not us, the British government screwing over Lawrence of Arabia, which was a bad thing to do. That’s what caused it all the war. Not the oil. I can’t read. What are you talking about? With the battery situation in electronic vehicles and our phones, is there like a whip on these people? Like if you don’t do this, or is it like, is it their option? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. They are free to work however they want. Just that there are no jobs in certain parts of the country. And so when you go there and ask them to work, they take it. You need to think about it as a new industrial revolution. With the industrial revolution moving to an area it hasn’t been before. Yeah. When you bring oil to the Middle East, the reason why it’s all US companies in the beginning is because the US has the materials technology and the knowledge on how to run, how to put those materials together, and the knowledge on how to run those materials. In other words, you can’t say, you can’t drill in the Middle East, say back in the 1950s and go, ha, we have oil, right? You need pipelines, you need processing, you need ways of transportation. Bedouins who are running around in tents don’t have those skills yet. So they partner with the US companies. So are you kinda like saying like, so you know how like, if you look at history, during our industrial revolution, like factories fucking sucked for American workers, you’re kinda saying like that’s where they’re at now? Like they’re having to work these terrible jobs waiting too many American workers. No, factories never sucked for American workers. That’s a myth. It’s a complete myth. That whole idea is just garbage. It’s not borne out by any historical reality whatsoever. I wouldn’t wanna work eight hours in a factory, man. You don’t buy the whole Peter Zyhan, yeah. I don’t. No, it’s wrong, you obviously wrote, read a book. Really, these people that signed up. What the hell is that? Read any book, read any newspaper of the time. Really, all this information is there. These people are full of garbage. They have no idea what you’re talking about and they’ve done no research. And this is what it is. Who the fuck is Peter Zogfrid? I’ve read this stuff, okay? I do my research. You can ask me like, Mark, how do you know masks don’t work? Because masks were studied and I read the white papers long before COVID happened and all the white papers said the same thing which is masks don’t work. Not that they don’t have a utility, you shouldn’t use them. The reason why they use them in Asia is as a social signal, not because it prevents disease. How did I know that? Because I did the freaking research. Zyhan, you’re doing research. I’m a garbage. You never read a book. Ninja Mike’s work, because every person I’ve killed don’t know who I am. You can bitch about factory work but the alternative is living a terrible life without an income. Okay. What is your question? You haven’t actually formulated your question. So your question is, are people in other countries what being treated the same or similar to patterns of history? Is that your question? My formal question is me going to Apple and buying a smartphone, am I actively participating in encouraging slavery? No. No, I don’t think so. I think you’re, I would say you’re actually- Slavery is a slippery slope. I would say that you’re actually- I’m not even joking. Those are actually higher- Slippery slope argument there. Those are actually higher living standards. That word is tainted. You’re using a word that’s tainted. You needn’t use a more precise word. What do you mean by slavery? I can define what I mean by slavery. Maybe this is not Webster, but when I say slavery, it’s people being forced into labor that they otherwise wouldn’t choose to do. No one is forced into labor in that part of the world. That people are forced into labor in smaller parts of the world. What do you think about the nets at the Foxconn Tower? That’s what people think of when we think of- They are forced into lower standards of having lower opportunities for certain types of jobs. They’re given a choice, and they’re making that choice. Now they may not have the capacity- Their choices suck. But they may not have the capacity to understand what that choice means. So some people, when they’re separated from their families, can’t deal with it and commit suicide. That happens all the time. It has nothing to do with Foxconn. And you can always argue that Foxconn is like, once you’ve signed up for that, you can’t escape because you don’t wanna go back to the village, but actually in China, people go back to their villages all the time from the cities. So they’re still making a choice. No one is forcing them into anything. The problem is that we have reduced the world into a world of choice and no choice by assuming that all slavery is chattel slavery when almost no slavery has ever been chattel slavery. So are you saying that Kanye West is right? Is that what you’re saying? Kanye West is not wrong about a lot of things. Let me put it that way. He should be convinced anyways. I mean, come on. No, look, look. You’re great. Kanye West, 24. Wrong. Are you participating in slavery by wearing cotton? By wearing cotton. It’s a valid question. It’s a valid question. That’s really good. That’s funny. You gotta remember, almost all the fruits in the United States are picked by immigrant workers who come from other countries. And they come off here from the US. They do a bunch of work and they go back home. Oh, okay. Or look, I was in the Brazilian community for a while. When I was up in Boston, there was a big Brazilian community in Walton, Massachusetts. And basically, here’s what happened. The girls that were cleaning houses were driving fricking beamers. Seven series beamers too. Not the cheap beamer like I got. They’re expensive beamers. Okay? And they’re sending their money back home to Brazil. That’s how they’re supporting their families. Now, they have to clean houses. Did they have to? No, they chose to do that work. And they chose to live that lifestyle. They’re living in houses. Okay, they’re living in like three bedroom, multifamily houses with like 10 other people. Because that was better than home where they had to live with 20 other people. I’m not joking either. Like, this is true. And so they’re hot bunking and doing all kinds of crazy things. All to save money because they don’t need to live as luxurious as we do. And so they’re putting that money into. Dude, that’s what stream houses are. Having a big house, they could have chosen to live further out and driven further to work. No one has to live in all of them. Even I didn’t live in all of them now. Your comments definitely make me feel better because like, I know you say that we’re muppets, but I like really value people’s free will. And I think that’s how you get like the ultimate ability out of someone is empowering them to live out their free will to the fullest. You’re from the rebel house. The problem here is the neutral observer. You are not a neutral observer. You cannot neutrally observe someone else from another country. I’m in drive. You can contextually, we tried to go over this last week and I don’t think I was ready to defend my position on compassion, but you cannot neutrally observe someone in another country. You can try to be there in context. You can try and embody the community. You can try and participate with them, but you cannot neutrally observe them. In that sense, you can’t say that they’re in slavery. You can say it’s like slavery. You can try and make distinctions. We can say it sucks. We can describe it. We can say it sucks. Then we can say there are, you could even try and sneak in that stupid phrase, systemic problems. There’s a lot of problems with that phrase. That’s a five dollar word. But you can say it’s like that. Exactly. Yeah. We go to happy camps. It’s a happy camp. No, but the problem is that we’re living in the West. We’re living in the wealthiest, most privileged society that has ever existed in history. And then we’re looking at other countries like Africa or China or wherever, and we’re going, oh, those poor, poor people. True. And in the meantime, what are you talking about? For them, it’s great. Yeah. It’s fantastic. They don’t have to sell their children into child- Well, they didn’t have to before either. No, they did have to before. Yeah, they kind of did. Look up Nike and closing the shoe factories. I’m not joking. They closed the shoe factories and they went back to school. That’s their free will. If that’s how they want to do it, then- Oh, oh. Look, those people- You didn’t have to. Then this goes back to Kanye. Kanye said even slavery in America, you didn’t have to do it. You could have chosen- Yeah, it’s a choice. You can always choose to fight. Wow, Kanye said that. You can always choose to fight. Everybody remember that. Wow. Kanye’s not entirely correct about that. Chattel slavery was not a choice. Well, that’s interesting. Well, it’s an interesting statement. No, no, but the problem, the thing that people don’t understand is that where were the slaves bought? The slaves were bought on the golden ivory coast. Why were the slaves bought on the coast? Where did this idea of slavery come from? It didn’t come from white people. It came from- It was the Muslims. Right. You can go and read about the word king. It came from the African tribes. The African tribes thought the interior Africans were inferior to them. Why am I gay because I like fish sticks? What? Why am I gay because I like fish sticks? I mean, it’s kind of gay to eat a fish stick. You could probably go get a salmon and cook it like a real man, dude. Whoa, whoa, excuse me? Why am I gay? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know how it’s relevant. South Park episode, sorry. It’s that free American humor. Right, what’s Canadian actually, technically, if you want to get into it. Well, we can’t, we blame Canada for everything. Oh, of course you should. You should, socialist Canada. The problem, yeah, if you look back into the 18th century, yeah, well, name me the difference between communists and socialists and I’ll give you a check. You can look back into 18th century and they had the same problem with selling kids into slavery. And that was part of the romantic revolution was to try and re-describe and re-mythologize the land so people would actually take care of the people around them because they would willingly just have a couple of kids and because they couldn’t take care of anyone, they would just throw the kids they think were the worst kids into these farms, whether they would live or die. And that’s why you had infant mortality rates of like one in two kids in that era would just die because they just didn’t know what to do with them. It’s fine, yeah. They don’t have contraception. And it’s, yeah, it’s hugely disastrous. It’s not, you cannot understand the level of depravity that industrial revolution caused upon England. It is brutal. Like in the purest, it’s more brutal in some sense than what we think of wars because it’s a type of brutality that was not, it doesn’t have the frame of a war. You go, okay, people in war, they’re in violent mode, fine. Right, you’re gonna do what you gotta do in a war, but when you agree to your own people because of corporate profits, like that’s sick. Right. Right, so I’m trying to recontextualize your question about, okay, can we say that this thing happening in this time is equivalent to that thing in that time? You’re like, yeah, exactly. Well, and that does even- Is it sad though? Is it sad that they don’t have any better options? It’s sad by our standards, and that’s the problem. These are our standards. We’re holding other people to our standards as if they have the options available to them that we have available to us and they don’t. Should we have a prime directive? No, we shouldn’t. The Atlantic slave trade started after the Ottoman Empire locked down with Caucasian trade slave for themselves. Yeah, but it’s still a different type of slavery, Dzeeni. Like the people, even the black people on the Mayflower were indentured servants. We did not have chattel slavery until we met the Africans who said, hey, we do chattel slavery. And we said, huh, you can do chattel slavery? I never thought about that. Well, I guess they’re doing it so we can do it too. That’s actually what happened. It’s that simple. It’s not like they had chattel slavery anywhere else. I have a question to you because they’re interesting. But I don’t know if you’ve heard the statistics that there’s more slavery in today’s world than there’s ever been in history. And that’s mainly because of India and China. So are you saying that those are- No. Again, you have to define slavery very carefully because at the end of the day- Now, wait, let me make one more point to that. I think some of this is like captured Muslims in China that are pretty much being forced to do work. I would imagine that that would qualify as chattel slavery, right? No, it’s not actually chattel slavery, but it’s hard to measure these things because people, you can’t say the Romans had slaves and that the southerners in the United States had slaves because the fundamental definition of slave is just different. There’s no chattel slavery in Rome and Greece, or almost none. There’s a little bit, but not. So Roman slaves would become Roman citizens. What’s the definition of chattel slavery? Chattel slavery is ownership, right? So like the three-fifths compromise and stuff like that. That’s possible. Blacks couldn’t vote in the South. They couldn’t vote. Everybody’s a wage slave. Don’t you know that? Well, that’s right. When you define wage slave, right. Plus, nobody ever adjusts for population growth, right? And so when you look at it that way, everything changes again. These people are just trying to manipulate you by using emotional levers in your head. Don’t let them. Who cares if the population of China collapses tomorrow? It makes no difference. It’s not gonna change, and it’s not gonna happen in your lifetime, and it’s not gonna change anything. Don’t worry about it. It’s not for you to worry about. It can’t do anything for you. I’m gonna let you jokers have your meeting. I’m heading out. Take care. This is Dustin. Nice meeting you. See you later, Gator. I do think it’s funny that like, you’ve got a good point that like the problem with China is like, it’s really not gonna affect us that much. And if it does, we can’t do anything to change it. And that’s the same thing with like the UFOs being introduced now. Like, you know, my mom’s like almost 50 years old. She doesn’t give a shit about the UFO nose. Like, because if the aliens were to come tomorrow, there’s like, there’s nothing we could do. Yeah. I try to force you to do it. Sounds like you have an idealized view of Roman slavery. No, I don’t. I’m just recognized that Roman slavery is not chattel slavery. Because partially because you can become Roman citizen. You’re a Roman slave, apology. For sure. But it wasn’t. The vast majority of Roman slaves were not property. That’s not. And the whole, like indentured servants, indentured servants were property for five years, technically. But this is why these definitions matter. Because it really matters what you’re talking about when you’re using words like slavery. There’s lots of forms of slavery and they’re so fundamentally different. The form of slavery in the South is fundamentally different from Roman and Greek slavery in general, except for the helots in Sparta. Because of things like rights, the actual rights were different. In Rome and Greece, for the most part, you could write. I sum it up like this. And like, I think you make interesting arguments, but I think the vast majority of people would agree with me. They sum up slavery like, if you try to leave, I’m gonna hurt you or kill you. Or your family. Yeah, but that doesn’t exist almost anywhere. I mean, you know, that’s called priddling. Just because people use a term wrongly doesn’t mean I have to agree to the term and the way it’s used. I can discuss with them, but if I think they’re using a term wrongly or incorrectly, doesn’t mean I have to adopt their point of view or frame. Oh, I 100% agree with you. But when people say slavery, I think that’s what they mean. That’s why I jumped in on you and said, hey, you can’t use that word as a slippery slope. Like that word is gonna just cause all sorts of arguments and problems you need to avoid. Like you need to identify what is, you know, say a trigger word and go, cool, we don’t use that now. The conversation stops. We try and find other ways to talk about the same subject without that word, because we’re always gonna have these descriptive, accurate problems. Yeah, so yeah, I’ll go back to my main question, which you pretty much already answered, but I was just saying, is someone being physically forced to make my phone? Yeah. I think it was a resounding no. No, no, and look, look, right, here’s wrong. You pay taxes, you’re a slave to the state. No, you pay taxes voluntarily. You don’t have to pay them. The state very rarely uses force to get taxes. And if you don’t wanna pay taxes, just move someplace where the state doesn’t care. And those places exist, you can do that. You won’t do that. You know why? Because you’re making an agreement to use public things paid for by public money. I don’t care which state you live in, there’s still federal taxes. There’s still federal taxes in every state. No, I don’t pay federal taxes. You gotta earn enough to pay federal taxes. Problem solved. Well, most people wanna make more than a standard deduction, which currently is around 12,900. That’s your choice. No one’s forcing you to do that. You’re not a slave, you made a choice. There’s no force involved at all. You can’t buy a home and you can’t really raise a family less than $12,900ayear.No,youabsolutelycan.Youabsolutelycan.Peopledoitallthetime.Andtha{t}^{\prime }stheproblem.Likeyoucanearnthatmoneyoverseveralyearsandbeunderthefederaltaxlimit.I{t}^{\prime }snotlike,tha{t}^{\prime }sjustwrong.Iknowpeoplewhodothis.Idothis.Ido{n}^{\prime }tpayfederaltaxes.Ihave{n}^{\prime }tpaidfederaltaxesinthreeyears.Theonlywayyoucouldpossiblyraiseafamilylikethatisifyouarespendingotherpeopl{e}^{\prime }staxmoney.Peopledoitallthetime.Buttha{t}^{\prime }sbecausethe{y}^{\prime }rerelyingonotherpeopl{e}^{\prime }s.Otherpeopl{e}^{\prime }staxmoney.Tha{t}^{\prime }sbecausethe{y}^{\prime }rerelyingonotherpeopl{e}^{\prime }staxes.Haveyounotheardofthisthingcalledcorruption?No.Haveyounotheardofthisthingcalledcorruption?Look,look.Corruptioniseverywhere,man.Yo{u}^{\prime }vegottounderstand,intheUnitedStates,intheUnitedStates,51$12,000 without having it federally taxed. People do it all the time. When everybody complains that the wealthy don’t play their fair share, that’s what they’re complaining about. They’re saying, well, they’re not paying the money that I expect them to pay based on the wealth that I’ve calculated in my head they have, which has nothing to do with their income because taxes are based on income, not wealth. And you could argue that maybe they shouldn’t be, but they are, so too fricking bad. And that’s where you get into trouble. It’s like, there’s plenty of instances where, and somebody did this, right? They traded a paperclip for a house. If you trade a paperclip for a house, you’re not paying taxes at the federal level for any of that. That’s not how that works. No, no, it did. People have done this. What are you talking about? This happens all the time. It’s based on the cost basis of the house. Then you would also be taxed on the gift tax of the house. This is a circular conversation. This is getting boring. No, it’s not. No, it’s not. Income has nothing to do with the value of your house. If somebody gives you a house, that is not counted as income in the United States. You’ll be taxed on the basis of the house, the cost basis of the house. No, you are not taxed on the basis of the house on your federal taxes. There’s no line item for that anywhere. I do my own taxes. I do business level taxes. I do standard, I do beyond the standard deduction. I do the long form deduction on schedule C. There’s no possible way you can get taxed for that. It’s not in the form. There’s no place to put value of house. There’s a place to put mortgage interest deduction, but that’s if you have a mortgage. But the US does not tax wealth. They do not pay for your home. They only tax income, which means you need somebody to have sent you money and put in a form for that, either a W-2 or 1099, or you’re not getting tax on it. Or you can get 1099 from investments, you can get 1099 from consulting. But if nobody sent you money and reported it, which also means that somebody sends you money and doesn’t report it, you don’t have to report it, by the way, that’s called working under the table, then there’s no tax. And people do that all the time. I know lots of people that do that. It’s not unusual. They make way more than $12,000.Andi{t}^{\prime }snotincome.Grossincomedoes{n}^{\prime }tmattertotaxes.Whatmatterstotaxesisnetincome.Andther{e}^{\prime }slotsofwaysaroundthat.Sother{e}^{\prime }vebeenyearswhen{I}^{\prime }vemade$120,000 and I paid no tax. Why? Because most of it went right out. And so I was underneath the threshold with the deductions. That happens too. It’s hard to do and it’s rare, and you probably shouldn’t live that way, but that happens. Like it is a thing. It’s not that easy. Taxes are not a simple thing to understand, especially not income-based taxes, which make more sense than wealth taxes at the end of the day, but that’s a different discussion. Hmm. I think the taxes are different. You can change your lifestyle and live on less money. Like you would easily live down here on $12,000ayear.Itisoneofthem.I{t}^{\prime }snothard.Wherethereisalawthatsaysthatyouhavetopaythisshit.Ifyo{u}^{\prime }redoingbetterthan$1,000 a year. No, no, no. There isn’t a law about that. That’s not what the law says. And the form is based on income and it requires double reporting, which means the person giving you the income has to report that they gave you the income and then you’re supposed to report that you received the income and your taxes based on that minus expenses. And so if you make $40,000ayear,thechancesthatyo{u}^{\prime }llpaytaxesareactuallyprettylowbecausewhenyougetdonewithdeductions,yo{u}^{\prime }reprobablygonnabeunderthe$12,000 threshold. Well, you’ve gotta play the game. You gotta play the game of the place, which is, it’s all incentivizing capitalist growth. You’re growing things. If you’re buying this or buying that, then you get, you know, ride it off on your taxes. It’s not set up that way. That’s not how it was in my generation. It encourages growth. It encourages constant growth. It’s not set up that way. It wasn’t even set up for a growth economy. It was set up in 1919. What’s it? It was, all right, in 1919, they decided that, look, there’s 12 families in the United States that control 98% of wealth or something stupid. 12 families, 12, that’s it. There were 12 families in the United States controlled almost all the wealth. And they said, we’ve gotta get rid of these people. Now, keep in mind, there’s way more than 12 families that control all the wealth in the United States now. So before you start talking about wealth inequality, go back to the early 1900s and then we’ll chat because the wealth inequality in the United States was a lot worse. In fact, everywhere in the world, wealth inequality was a lot worse a hundred years ago than it is now. So these 12 families control 90% of the wealth and they said, you know what? We should have a tax for them. That’s where we got our income tax from. You can look it up, very common. Ron Paul talks about it all the time, right? Those 12 families were the only ones that were ever supposed to get taxed under the system. And then government happened. And then I do wanna highlight what Anselman says. The UK has a local tax banded for the value of your property. Yeah, we don’t have that. And an inheritance tax, if you inherit property or wealth. Yeah, inheritance is, unless it’s over like, I think it’s 5 million or 3 million, is free in the United States. It’s not taxed. We don’t have a, we do have a high inheritance wealth tax. There’s a big fight over that for various good reasons, like small family farms that generate 10 million a year, but actually wouldn’t if they weren’t intact. But no, we don’t have inheritance tax. If you inherit, for the most part, it’s not taxed. Because again, there’s no transfer of money. And there’s no transfer of money. For the most part, it doesn’t get taxed. That’s also why there’s an argument over Bitcoin and whether or not that’s gonna get taxed. Cause yeah, mark to market, there’s a bunch of factors that go into it. But our taxes work very differently from everybody else’s because in 1919, we couldn’t keep running on the tariff system anymore. It wasn’t feasible. The country was too big. So tariff only taxes weren’t gonna work for us, especially because as the country got bigger, we needed to import less and less stuff. So we were destroying our own tax basis by becoming productive as a result of the industrial revolution, the second one, the one in the US. And so all of these factors come together and people go, oh, wealth inequality and therefore, right? And like fair enough, like, you know, I’m a fan of having a graduated tax system, which we still can gender day after this day. So don’t get fooled by that garbage talking point cause it’s a lie. We have a very well, we have the most graduated tax system in the world in the United States. The best and fairest tax system in the world. So what happened was that got expanded out to the middle class because again, we had destroyed our tax basis. And when you try to do something to wealthy people who actually earn their money, the odds that what you do will be clever enough to outsmart them are zero. And so eventually they get around all these tax problems. And that’s basically what Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are doing. So Warren Buffett has this little cabal of idiots who are wealthy and what they do is they all donate to each other’s charities. And then Bill Gates runs Warren Buffett’s charity, Warren Buffett runs Bill Gates’ charity and they do the thing I call wealth, well another used to call it, welfare for the wealthy, where they hire their relatives. So Bill Gates’ relatives work for his charity that’s not under his control because he talks to Warren Buffett and Warren Buffett just hires them. It’s not that, you know, it’s not that clean and clear, it’s basically what happens. So, you know. Sometimes I think like the very best thing that I could do as a person would be like, have a bunch of kids and try to be the best father I could be, because me by myself is not really gonna help society that much. That’s correct. Like nobody’s really that fucking special unless you’re like a crazy inventor type that’s come up with something to change the world. And that’s like one in a million. But the very best thing you can do for society is probably have a bunch of kids and like teach them to also contribute to society. Yes, yes. Because even if you are really smart, let’s suppose you’re Edison. Edison couldn’t make the light bulb by himself. It required hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of experiments, well, thousands of experiments, right? And so you had a team of people doing that. And it’s like, okay, you had a team of people doing that. You need teams, you can’t do things by yourself and affect the world. It’s just too big. Nevermind all the other people trying to invent technologies in the same time that he was looking at those patterns and synthesizing the ideas. If you spread out the time, energy and attention, it’s not focused. And then, I’m trying this system and he’s trying that system, we’re both trying to do the same thing. And then Jesse’s off doing something else and then somebody else is off doing something. That’s no good. You should cooperate, find a way to cooperate to the same ends and focus that time, energy and attention. You’re more likely to hit the goal. Like everyone that I’ve heard talk on here is like definitely smart. It seems like an individual and God bless you all, but we’re all gonna die. How do you know? Have you died yet? No, you’ve no experiential knowledge. It’s what’s the best. I know a lot of people that are not here anymore. I don’t know that. I never met them. I’m sure you got some friends and some family members that are not here anymore. What are you trying to make a statement on? I’ve been lost in my individuality. I’m almost 30 now. Sorry, it’s got nothing to do with us. Your statement had nothing to do with us. Just, okay, just making sure. I’m sorry, I apologize. I’ve been in Texas all day and I was just… No, you don’t have to apologize. Okay, it’s fine. Yeah, yeah. Jesse’s just trying to determine whether or not we have a thing that we can help you with or if you’re just struggling to throw it by yourself, which is fine. No, he’s just talking. I was just exploring ideals. If you guys wanna talk about something else we can, this is something I’ve been playing with. Yep. Go for it, man. Memento mori is a great stoic phrase. Consider your death, consider your legacy, consider your work. Yeah. So most of my 20s, I’ve been exploring my individuality and it’s been very interesting, very cool, awesome experience. But the older I get, I’m like, I don’t care how cool I become. I’m gonna die. And this far as helping the world move forward, it feels like raising a bunch of kids, the best way I can would be the best move to help moving forward. Otherwise, it almost just seems like all for naught. Do you have a relationship? I don’t. A relationship? We start there. You can’t consider kids until you can get in line and get in agreement with someone so you can find a general or even a specific type of love for someone. Like you have to start there. You have to start with the most intimate thing. Like the kids thing is like, there’s sales and order. Yeah. Well, like even that, you might not be able to get yourself in order. That’s the other thing. You might actually need a relationship to help you get yourself in order. Because you often, again, it’s the neutral observer problem. Like you might not be able to see. I would argue against that. I think men in particular need to get themselves together. Yeah, I’m saying if you’re already on that journey, or relationship, if you’re already in that mode of pursuing a quality life, you need to be in a relationship with someone. You need to have someone else there. Otherwise, you’re not going to, like there’s only so much work you can do on yourself with yourself. Which is okay. If you could do all the work with yourself, you wouldn’t need therapy. You wouldn’t need trauma hearing practices. You wouldn’t need community. If you could do all the work, you can’t do all the work on yourself by yourself. I think you can do a lot of it. I’m talking about friends. I don’t know how much those meditation retreats and things like that really help people. I think it’s a band aid. I don’t think it’s really healing people deeply. Because when you go home, you don’t have that connection anymore. No, but you have those tools. They’re knocked out. That’s part of it, is that you’re getting tools. Well, if you’re going somewhere else to get tools, and you’re coming back to your native area, culture, environment, you might freak people out. You might be someone relatable. You might be someone relatable. Yeah, maybe, but that’s not what happens. What happens is you get tools, and then hopefully you’re disciplined enough to use them. Maybe. I watched that Tony Robbins documentary, and what we’re talking about kind of reminds me of that. Those people, they got the tools, but another thing happened. They didn’t stop talking to each other. They maintained the community. Well, you should. But they didn’t live near each other. You don’t want to be in the same situation. It’s like drug addiction, right? When you’re an addict, a lot of what determines whether or not you’re gonna stay an addict after recovery is whether or not you keep your friends. It’s not the only factor, but it’s the single biggest factor. Elizabeth, you’re muted. If you keep talking, you’re muted. We can’t hear you. Funny, I was eating my corn chips. That’s okay. Like, this kid’s in the basement. That’s me, like Mrs. Addict. Here I am, Mrs. Addict. I’m addicted to Fritos or whatever they are. No, but I thought what Luigi said was really brilliant because it is kids that do that to you. It’s not an intimate relationship. Like you can nap around with another person, but it’s children that do it. That’s when things really change. And you’re a different person totally. Peterson talks about this a lot, right? Yeah. And I think you’re right. The happiest person I know is my friend who had four children, right? Stayed home with them, had four children. And everything’s worked out exactly like you would imagine it would work out. And Anselm has got a good point though. I wanna highlight Anselm’s point. Some of us have no kids that like to think we’re making contributions to the future by helping others. I agree. We all leave a legacy of our actions. Right. And the question is, are your actions, A, towards the good and B, helping others to be towards the good? I’m sorry to look at this. That’s all that unified field theory stuff I keep talking about. That’s why I keep going on and on about the cheese pizza. Like everybody’s gonna do their own thing. That’s fine. Because I think ultimately we all can eat some cheese pizza together later after you come back. It’s all gonna work out. Yeah, but children are the future. I’m gonna go back to this. Children are the future. Absolutely. If you’re your children or somebody else’s children, adopt a child, do whatever you do. But some people shouldn’t have children. Everybody should not have kids. Well, they really change your life. That’s all I’m saying. And so it’s important to acknowledge that. That they are our future. There’s no need for that. Right, it is. Mainly people that don’t really, that don’t wanna have them, they shouldn’t have them. People that wanna have them, they should have them. Yeah. You don’t know, it’s like Mark’s point though. Like that’s how perception works. That’s why I like exploration. Cause you, the reason exploration is so cool is because it actually teaches you how perception works, right? Yeah. Like you can’t see anything to begin with. You don’t know what you want in your living room, right? Then you’ve gotta start exploring around, figuring where it’ll look good, what will not look good. And all of a sudden, isn’t that cool? Like I even noticed that about gardening or in your house. All of a sudden you start to notice, oh, I didn’t see that. I didn’t see this. I didn’t see this. Like it’s amazing. So this whole idea of exploration and you don’t know what it’s like to have a child or somebody else’s child. Well, you have one, sorry, but you don’t. It’s just like an unknown world. Some people have kids at different ages, you know? And it works out great. Some people have them early. Some people have them later. Yeah, you can’t know. And that’s why the problem, oh, you know, it was an accident. Lou J, have 10 kids. You’ll love it. That’s all I’m saying. Yeah. You’d make a great father. Come on, you’re already talking about death. You’re cool. Go for it. It doesn’t matter who the woman is. Doesn’t matter all this intimacy stuff. I don’t believe that at all. I don’t know anybody who has an intimate relationship. Oh, it matters. Don’t say that. No. It totally matters who you’re getting with. No, no, no, no, no, no. Trust me, it doesn’t matter. Well, here’s what I wouldn’t do. I wouldn’t treat having a kid as self-help because like self-help, I think, for people who are self-obsessed doesn’t really work because all they end up doing is helping themselves and they don’t really help themselves. It’s cause for problems. So don’t seek having a child as a form of self-help because that’s just gonna be a nightmare for the kid. Yeah. Life is a nightmare anyway. Come on. No, it’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful nightmare. Just hang on a second. It’s a beautiful nightmare. I don’t, first of all, you know how everything, you can only spend your time on so many things. If you was to raise five or six kids and give them a good upbringing, that’s like five or six of yous. Yeah, maybe some of them are girls and they go do their own thing. Maybe some of them are guys, do their own things. But that’s like way more capable than what you’re alone by yourself and what contributes to society. Don’t forget about your grandchildren and your great grandchildren. Like you could have like, I don’t know how many. It’s just, I’m not saying this for an individual. I’m just saying, generally speaking, like children are amazing. They’re all, I’m sorry. Oh yeah. They’re all right hemisphere. They’re all right hemisphere. It’s like living in enchantment when they’re young. They literally do not have the other side of the brain to live about eight or nine. Or maybe they’ll, it’ll be better if nobody screws them around the education system. But sorry, Chad, we interrupted you. No, like my problem isn’t with kids at all. My problem is with self-help. I think self-help is a lie. I don’t think it’s actually good aim. I think a higher aim and a better aim is try to aim at usefulness towards others and then seeking whatever higher power or job that you’re willing to seek and submit to. And that I think if you make that your primary focus, everything else kind of gets taken care of in some way. Obviously we’re already aimed at helping ourselves. I mean, is this a fact? Like I can’t help it. You know what I mean? So, well, I think that we all are to some degree focused on what can I get? And more so than, you know, who can I actually meet with and be useful to who is looking for help? Chad, I completely agree with you. And like so far I’ve lived my life in a lot of ways. Like I have a job that like really helps the community and like helps the state out and like helps the infrastructure work. But it’s like, I think now I’m at this point, I can help society more by just having a ton of kids. Yeah. No, you’re right. You’re right. And Benjamin Franklin, our children quote, our future, our children, their future. Dude, we don’t own the future. They don’t own the future. The future is independent agent. Like why are you thinking this way? This is crazy. It’s not an ownership thing. The future is- Are you sleep? There it is. We don’t own it. It’s bigger than us. It’s bigger than us now or them later. It doesn’t make any sense to think that way. And I agree. Like we were talking about sacrifice earlier. I think there’s a certain amount of sacrifice there because I would love a couple of Corvettes and challengers and a monster truck and a single wide trailer. You know what I like? That’s new lifestyle right there. That’s Apple. I’d like to be able to be okay with just being average. Like that’s what I really want. I want to be okay with being average and just being useful. Like that’s going to be a way, way more useful aim. I think the aim is just to be yourself and you can’t be average when you’re being yourself. I know what you mean, Chad. I want to be okay with being average because if I’m okay with being average, I don’t have to aim at being higher. They’re greater than- Well, I think you’re doing your own thing. I’ve been really enjoying your streams lately. That’s wonderful. And you’re doing the maximal amount with that. It’s not average at all. That’s your thing that you can maximally do is what I’m saying. That’s awesome. I appreciate that. But I also have a day job and I need to be able to be average there. Well, that’s- I’d be okay with that. I think we all got that day job, but we got that other thing that we love doing at the end of the day when we get home. That’s the thing that we’re not average at. And you’re not an average construction guy. You lay fucking magnificent tile, bro. What are you talking about? Well, I appreciate that, but on the job site, I am an average guy. I’m just the tile guy for somebody. And I’m just another coworker. So I just, that’s what I’m saying. Those people don’t know how to lay that tile, dude. They don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. You’re a master at everything that you do. But it- It’s not average. I’m talking about- Most people don’t do that. I’m always saying that. Yeah. I’m not being self-denigrating. I’m not being self-denigrating. I’m trying to just, I’m talking about keeping myself in check for me. And I’m trying to pass along things that might be useful to other people. If they feel like, oh, my life sucks because I’m just, it’s okay. Dude, that is me every fucking 30 seconds. I have this monster critic being like, you’re not doing enough. You’re not good enough. Work harder. I think that’s a sign of intelligence that we see ourselves like that. It’s important. Cause it drives you forward to try harder and you don’t want to screw up. But it’s also so fucking cumbersome. Yeah. It’s like, I mean, I like- It’s so true. That’s the hero. The hero’s the one that struggles through and does it anyway. Right? That’s the whole problem. Yeah, I don’t know. Right. And he doesn’t see himself as the hero. He sees himself as- He has a role. He has a role that he has to carry out. He’s really right-sized. And he’s not, you know, like, you know, saying like the real hero isn’t like, fuck yeah, I’m a boss dude. I’m gonna, you know, it’s like, I got a job to do. It just sucks though. Cause if I was praising it, you’re a city president. You should like, you should learn more about the people and know what they want to happen. Like, no matter what, I feel like no matter what position I got into, no matter success achieved, I’m always gonna be like, not good enough, you piece of shit. You’re sorry. Well, there’s always gonna be somebody better. Yeah. You’re aiming too high at that point. Like we’re all grown up on this stupid, freaking comic book ideas of what reality should be like. And you know, to some extent Elizabeth is right. There’s too much focus by Peterson on things like the hero’s journey. It’s like, you have to redefine hero to be something completely reasonable. It’s such a conundrum though, because that same energy has held, like allowed me to like achieve so much. Yeah. And I feel like if I didn’t have that like constant, like nagging voice in the back of my head, like I would have achieved like half of what I have now. No, you probably wouldn’t know. But you have to understand other people don’t have that voice and they still get by. And like, what’s that about? Like, I don’t know how to parse any of that. It’s like, okay, well there’s plenty of people just doing the thing without that ideal of getting better all the time. And they’re able to do things that I cannot do. Right? Because- Yeah. Like being happy. Yeah. I bet I could roll this baller up the hill better next time. Yeah. It’d be so nice to be one of those people that are content, right? That are not driven. It’s so damn driven. It drives me nuts. Here I am so old and I’m still driven like crazy. Oh man. Oh, and I bet it never stops. It’s probably just a personality. Like I have a friend- Well I mean I have tons of friends but still. Do you wanna be a hero? I’m sorry, go ahead. If you wanna, here’s how you can be a hero. Go walk around your block and pick up pieces of garbage and throw them out. Don’t tell anybody about it. And don’t do it because you care about the environment. Do it because you need something to do. And why the fuck not? Or go find some shopping carts to put away. And don’t tell anybody that you did it. That’s what heroes do. Heroes do stuff and don’t tell anybody about it. Right. The problem I have with that is like you’re missing the pro- Like there’s something in me that creates progress. Right. And I feel like that’s just like a never ending treadmill if I’m picking up garbage. Right, that is personality. And that’s the demon you have to struggle with right there. You sit out there with a shotgun and a sign around your chest that says no littering. That’s progress. Yeah. Yeah. Only in the rebel mountains can you get away with that. Oh it must be fun. You guys live in the best place it sounds like. Yeah you can carry your shotgun around if it’s broke open. So I could get away with it. I would love that. I could get away with it. I need to learn about the shotgun. That’s I think that- They have three barrel shotguns now. You should check that out. Okay. Hold on, hold on. I wanna read this. Benjamin Franklin, the hero expectation of Jordan Peterson is also the expectation of the father was to create our future. No, no it’s not. It’s the expectation of the ego that wants to be different and better than everybody else. And that’s, it’s not only that. And this is the problem with reduction. Like the hero’s journey, because it’s cast in what would you call it? A comic book superhero frame is totally misunderstood because the hero is the guy that goes to work every day. That’s the hero. The hero is the person who’s providing for their family. The hero is the woman who keeps the house clean. Those are the heroes. Okay. Is it so? Those are not heroes. Those are people who are changing the world maybe not for the good, right? Because they wanna be outliers in the world. It’s totally- You know what? My favorite hero, my favorite hero is Horace Gump. Yeah. He was, he’s the best hero out of all of them. You know, like he just, he was just a simple man who like wanted to love. He knew what love was. And he was honest. And he stood up when it was appropriate to do it. And he wasn’t looking for kudos. He just was like, that’s like the, that’s why that movie and that story resonated so well. It still does. It will for like the next hundred years is because- Yeah. There’s an intelligence about him that a lot of very smart people don’t have. Horace Gump has like a human intelligence and intuitive connection to humanity where highly intellectual people don’t. They have to get addicted to drugs, drink, run away from everything. Horace Gump didn’t run away from everything, yet he got famous for running. Yeah, yeah, right. But he ran for it. It’s a poetic connection to the world. Yeah. Right. And he was every man, right? Because he had all of these different jobs that he did. He’s the cheese pizza of humanity. Well, he did, he mowed lawns and he owned apple, right? He was a soldier. He was a college football star. He was an every man in all these different average kinds of ways. The apple pie cheese pizza of America. There we go. Father Eric, worshiping outliers is the same as worshiping monstrous individuals. Yes. Outliers are outliers. And it’s very hard to tell in the moment to Benjamin Franklin. My favorite is Ultron. He loved his father, won from his father Dwell. You don’t know your father’s will. Maybe your father doesn’t know his own way. Who is your daddy and what does he do? I gotta run guys. Say it, Chad. Much love, bye bye. Much love, say it, dad. Yeah, you don’t know other people’s will. So you can try to do that. And we do try to do that. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but it doesn’t mean you’re doing it. Maybe your father didn’t want you to run his business, right? Who knows? Anselman, good night. I hope you sleep well, sir. Enjoy your evening. But that’s a very interesting, was that a quote that you were reading? A comment? No. Oh, that was just something, I’ll deal as you were saying. Yeah, that’s very interesting. But it’s like, we do need something to like strive towards, like a goal, like upwards. But we have lots of them available to us. And so what we do is we filter out most of them and we pick some. And that’s what happens. Are you saying like focus more on like your local like plumber, electrician, you’re like everyday man, like that’s a bad ass. Well, that’s what Peterson, that’s what Peterson talks about. First, clean your room. Then maybe clean up your house. And then maybe clean up your neighborhood. And then maybe clean up your community. And then start small and work your way to large so that you get some experience in making the world a better place. I think that’s correct. Me too. I mean, you gotta start somewhere. What, if you can’t keep your room clean, what makes you think that you can clean up the planet from fossil fuels? Like, what are you, high? You can’t even keep your room clean, you muppet. Yeah. I really like what our community’s doing here. Like there’s new restaurants and bars and businesses starting to happen. And it doesn’t matter what’s going on in the bigger town. Like I find myself wanting to hang out in my town more often and spend my money here and participate with the people here. And like it creates that cheers environment like we were talking about that everybody got super obsessed with that show because you go somewhere and then most people kind of know your name and know your vibe. Right. They know what kind of sandwich you’re about to order or what kind of pizza. What kind of cheese? Cheese pizza guy is coming back again today. The guy is here. Look out. Cheese pizza guy. Yeah. I got one especially for tonight. I’ve never ate a cheese pizza on stream. So I felt it was fitting. Excellent. That’s perfect. That’s the official type of pizza for the stream in fact is the ecumenical cheese pizza. Beautiful. Let’s see it. Oh, it looks good. Looks good, man. Oh yeah. There it is. It’s a Friday during Lent. Of course cheese pizza. Oh, I didn’t realize that Father Eric, apparently. I’m thinking of Biden cake and diet. Lent approved. Yeah. It looks amazing. Yeah. Yeah, is this Friday no meat day or something for those crazy Catholics? I don’t know. They’re all crazy. Can’t keep track of Catholics. It’s not a thing you can do. But I’m big on the idea of that. There’s a city living in your stomach because there’s way more organisms in your stomach than the majority of your body. And I think if you don’t give this city the right things, the right resources, it’ll fuck your life up. Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. We’re embedded in a bunch of things. We have a bunch of relationships with the world and everything else does too. And it’s like, don’t pull on that string. You don’t know what it’s attached to, right? That’s from Buckaroo Banzai. It’s like, yeah, you don’t know. You gotta be careful with your actions. I mean, this is where things get weird, right? Like you have to be careful with what you’re doing because you don’t know what you’re connecting to and what’s connected to you. You have no idea. Now that’s a hero, Buckaroo Banzai. He was a rock star, physicist, trans-dimensional not. Father Eric says, yes, I can have that on Fridays. I like wrong though. Wrong, wrong, whoops. Wrong says fish on Friday, right? Fish on Friday. Cheese pizza. I had fish. I’ll put anchovies on the cheese pizza. I had Friday fish and chips when I was in Scotland. It was quite good. Hey, I wanna ask you all something. Do you all believe that everyone has good intentions? No. Do you really think that there’s people out there that are like, I wanna fuck up the world? I wanna fuck up the world? I have been victimized by those people. I can point you to people like that right now. Yes, I do. I deeply believe it. I’ve been around a lot of people, but it seems like the people I’ve seen that do harm, I think maybe they’re just lost in their ego and they’re trying to do good for themselves and they harm other people in the process. I don’t care why you think it’s good. I’ve never seen someone just mess up the world on purpose just for the hell of it. I have. Yeah, I have too. Many people. I was helping one of my friends move in with her new boyfriend and I was happy for them. I was like, great, you have a wonderful new boyfriend. You’re moving in with him. Let me lend you some assistance. I can get a truck and get over there and help you guys. So I helped him move in and at first I thought it was weird that he didn’t help us move, pick up anything and move it into the truck. And then she said, oh, he hurt his back or something. I was like, oh, okay, yeah, whatever. And I noticed he was just like drinking a big bottle of vodka or something. He was just holding a bottle. And I was like, oh, I guess he’s drinking that because of his back. But anyway, we move all the shit into his apartment which was up three flights of stairs, by the way. And we get it all in there and she’s all settled in and she’s like, let’s have a drink and eat some pasta. I’m like, cool. So we’re drinking and eating and then they’re both like, hey man, you should stay the night and just crash on the couch because we’ve been drinking and it’s late and I know you’re tired. It was like a two hour drive back to my house. Is this a porno? Do what? Is this a porno? No. Just making sure. No, actually it gets really bad. This is a really bad story. So anyway, I’m like, okay, blah, blah, blah. And then we’re just kind of winding down and talking and the guy goes into the other room, into the bedroom and he lays down, he’s like, I’m crashing out, I’m drunk. And he was kind of getting argumentative a little bit about certain things here and there. And I was just like, ah, he’s drunk. And then a little bit later he got up and said, I’m going to bed. And then she was like, yeah, you know, let me help you go to bed. And we were talking, me and my friend, me and her were talking about stuff and he starts like hollering in the bedroom. And then she’s like, oh, I’ll come in there. I’ll help you sweetie. And she goes in there and then I don’t hear anything. They’re like talking a little bit but I don’t hear anything. And then I start hearing her like crying and you know, whimpering and something. And I was like, what the fuck’s going on in there? And I heard her go like, stop it, stop it, stop it. And this guy was like growling and doing a bunch of weird shit. And he got up and I was like, what’s going on in here? And she was trying to get him to go to bed. And then he gets up and he’s like, I got a piss and he just took his dick out and just started pissing everywhere and tried to pee on me and try to pee on her. And then she helped him into the bathroom and he’s just pissed everywhere. Like took his dick like a helicopter and got pissed all over her, all over the mirror, the shower. And he started making these weird noises like growling and this guttural noises. And then she’s like, come on, let’s go back to bed. And then I’m trying to help her. She’s like, no, don’t get near him. You know, there’s piss all over us, all over everything. And I’m just like, oh fuck, what the hell? And she gets him into the bedroom and lays him down. And then she starts crying again and then saying, stop this, stop all this, stop all this shit. And I go in there and I’m like, what the fuck is going on here? And he was, you know, he was like, you know, raping this chick. He was like, had her pants ripped up and there was blood and stuff on her thigh and on his hand. Like he, they were like fighting and she like dug her nails into him or his nails were dug into something. And so I just started beating this dude up, right? Like naturally, I just like had a flashlight and I just, anyway, we got, I beat this dude up and tried to, you know, stop all this stuff. And anyway, this guy was pure evil because he looked me straight in the eyes and said, I’m gonna eat your face and cook it up with butter or something like that. He just said some of those crazy fuck up stuff. And no matter how hard I hit this guy, like he just would not go down, you know, like, and he wouldn’t submit and he didn’t get tired or anything like that. And there was a strange, there’s a strange energy behind the guy, like a willingness and intention to hurt people. All you have to do is read any sociopath like serial killer or whatever memoir, okay? Any one of them or read anything out of World War II, out of the camps or the Gulag or Capelligo, right? This ridiculous platonic notion that people only do for the good is wrong. It’s absolutely wrong. It’s absurdly wrong. I can show you people today, not that hard. I can tell you stories, right? I can tell you all kinds of stories. There are bad people in the world. There aren’t a lot of them, but it doesn’t take a lot of bad people to destroy the world, right? I mean, there’s lots of people that know they’re doing wrong. And then there’s a lot of other people that will stand by and watch it all happen and do nothing. And that’s where my objection comes from. Not that there are bad people, but there are judges in courts that do nothing. They just let people’s houses get taken. They know full well they’re not following the law and they don’t care. And they let these things happen. And they blame the victim. That’s going on in our courts right now. It’s happened to me many, many times, right? It’s happening to me now in the middle of my current lawsuit. It’s just terrible. There’s tons of people out there who will sit around and watch bad things happen and do nothing. And then they come to the conclusion that, you know what, Plato is right. Everyone’s doing the good. And that gives them the ability to not interfere. That’s wrong. You should interfere with people. You shouldn’t say, oh, well, it’d be a problem. They don’t think you’d be evil and you’re a mighty judge. No, you are an agent in the world and you should judge people’s actions. What action you take based on that is hard and difficult and you may face the lion and the lion may eat you. That is true. But you should not sit back and do nothing while people do evil. She didn’t think that guy was evil. She was trying to stop me from beating this guy up and was like, please don’t hurt him. And I’m like, what are you talking about? This guy, your jeans are all ripped up and this thing has happened when I’m in the other room and this is awful. I can’t watch or hear that happening because I heard it at first, but when you see it, you get into a fit of rage because it’s horrible. Vizzini points out lots of people that know they’re doing wrong but think they’re justified in it. That’s fine, Nick. I don’t think nobody’s ever stopped that guy. I don’t know how long that was happening with her and that guy. And I think subconsciously she wanted me to see what was going on or something. Right, sure she did. And I did and I stopped it. I don’t think that guy ever had anybody stop him from whatever he’s been doing. Look, the problem is that the fact that somebody feels justified about something means nothing about the world. It’s meaningless indication. First of all, you don’t know that they feel justified. And second of all, I don’t care if they feel justified. Like if you are a serial killer, you are not justified. You can feel justified internally all you want. That doesn’t inform my decision to take you out. Sorry, your justification internal existence or not is irrelevant to the fact that you’re an agent in the world and you have to do the good. And sometimes that means fighting evil. Sorry, it just does. And that’s why I don’t like this relativistic garbage. Well, they feel justified. So I shouldn’t judge them. No, you should judge them. You should judge them because they’re an agent in the world and things happen in the world and you deal with the world. You don’t deal with people’s justifications in their head because you’re not in their head. You don’t even have that option. So this is fantasy. Fantasy. I am positive. We need some of the books that Peterson talks about that these people know they’re evil and they are going to do evil and they don’t have good intention. Oh, I’m glad you finally brought it home. I’ve agreed with everything you said. That’s where I get confused about it. And maybe we shouldn’t even try to connect with these people or understand them. Maybe we should just be like, fuck off. But like when people are truly doing evil, like part of me just finds it hard to even understand the fact that like, do they really think they’re just making everything worse? Like, is that their goal? Yes, that’s their goal. Like that guy that peed all over himself and helicoptered his dick around while he was pissing and got it all over my friend and tried to get it on me. That really has always stuck out to me. Like the intentional destruction, not and dominant too, that’s another point. But I was thinking the intentional soiling of his home, his new girlfriend that just moved in, just his whole clothes. Do you think maybe that’s what it is? It’s a cheat code to power whenever you start destroying stuff? Maybe, I mean, I beat the fuck out of that guy. He wasn’t that powerful. But that is a cheat code to power. Anybody can pull a brick out and bring down a building and be powerful in it. But it’s hard as fuck to create something or build something. That’s right, that’s right. That’s why when people talk about deconstruction, I’m like, there’s no such thing. It takes no effort to deconstruct. It’s the lazy people’s grabber power. You’re not deconstructing anything. You’re just destroying things. Yeah. Look, look. Hold on, Bazzini, it’s not a defense that someone thinks they’re justified by the way. Yes, it is. Because the fact that you’re even thinking that way is bad thought. Just a distinction from the person doing evil. No, it’s not a distinction because it’s not a distinction that anybody can make. You’re talking about something going on in somebody else’s head that you have no access to. So it’s not a distinction that you can make because you can’t know what’s going on in their head. You don’t know. You don’t know the difference between somebody doing something out of a love for evil and someone doing something out of ego for themselves and someone doing something out of the need to destroy and someone doing something out of the want for power. So what are we better off doing? Are we better off just judging the effect that it has on everyone? Look, so that goes to Benjamin Franklin. It’s what I do. Is lawiness a quality that is according to some community or group? Yes, it is also another quality, but it is also that. For example, if I raise an animal and kill it to eat is not wrong according to me. Look, we are slaves to the fact that we all live on a planet with each other. Now we can’t operate at the scale of a planet. So we have different countries and different societies. Some of that’s determined by geography. Some of it’s determined by culture, which is why the culture in the rebel mountains is very similar to the culture of Scotland, right? Because the Scots-Irish were the people that settled Appalachia, roughly speaking, and other rebels too, right? This is Colin Woodard’s point in American Asia. It’s pretty mixed up, man. It says a lot of English and a lot of Scottish, a lot of Irish. But it’s all the rebels. It’s all the rebels and it’s all the people that felt that they were mistreated by the military or the government that moved there. And then other people later moved there who also felt rebellious or mistreated, right? That’s what happened. He’s trying to say it’s in our blood. Well, it’s in your culture. It’s not in your blood. It’s in our ancestral genes. And people move where the culture is, right? And there’s nothing wrong with that. But the determinations of right and wrong, like to this day, tax collectors are not welcome in the Appalachian mountains. It doesn’t matter what state you’re in. If you’re in that region, which should be called the state of Jefferson. We do not like the county assessor riding around. Well, you’ll get run out on a rail. Like really, this still happens over there, man. It’s not a joke. It’s not the only thing. People get run out. There was a government official in Cedar Island, North Carolina, that basically they lasted a year and then they moved because nobody in the community would cooperate with them and they had to leave. The federal government was defeated. And from the perspective of the poor people that lived on that island, they were like major victory. And I was like, did you really win anything? No, they did. So legally, like a game warning has the right to search your home without a warrant. But there’s like a mutual understanding that he doesn’t do that. No, because I think it would get violent. Right, because it would get violent and he would die and all along the world isn’t gonna save you when someone shoots you. You’re still dead. So you can follow the law all day long, but if it kills you, it kills you. And then the federal government can’t enact. I mean, that happens. These are real concerns. These are negotiations. Everything’s a negotiation. Everybody wants like law to be this thing that people follow. Law comes out of action. Law doesn’t determine action. It’s the thinking of a background. And if you know history, you know this. You can watch how laws progress and emerge. That’s why they’re trying to make everybody little girls. But bills are brought up into the Congress from below. The Congress doesn’t go, you know what? I’m gonna pass a law that says that never happens. That’s not what happens. Everyone in West Virginia breaks the law every year because technically if you buy something out of state, you’re supposed to pay sales tax on it if you bring it back into West Virginia. Everyone always puts zero in that form every fucking year. I was talking shit to my Christian mom this year. I’m like, I’m not putting zero on your TurboTax unless you type it in. I ain’t gonna lie to you. I ain’t gonna lie to the government for you. I was just fucking with her. Of course I did, but literally everyone does that. Yeah, yeah, of course they do. They do it in Massachusetts too. Massachusetts tried to get the state of New Hampshire to report on Southern New Hampshire, to report on all the people that got tires and car work done that were Massachusetts residents of the state of New Hampshire. This is the perfect example of everyone thinks their law about it as citizens. The majority of people are like, I’m a law about it as a citizen until there’s a law you don’t agree with. And then you’re like, I’ll do what the fuck I want to do. That’s not a good law. But to your point, almost everybody cheats on their taxes. Oh yeah. Everybody goes like, oh, the IRS, the IRS doesn’t do anything about people who cheat on their taxes for the most part. It does sometimes, but it’s very rare. It takes years, sometimes 20 or 30 years for them to catch up to you. And yeah. I do agree with you. Less than 1% of people are audited. So that right there tells you a lot. Right. And then you have to fail the audit. Then you have to fail to abide by whatever agreement you make with the audit. Then you have to fail to live up to that agreement. Like it’s a long process to get hit up by the IRS. It doesn’t happen very often, which is not condoning any of this stuff. But look- You wouldn’t get any street cred in jail either. Like, what are you in here for, bro? Yeah. I didn’t pay taxes. Fuck you. Yeah. Yeah. No, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Here’s a question for Boomy Shroomy. Have you seen the movie, Leave No Trace? It’s about a man who lives in the woods after his wife died and can’t adapt to modern living, but his daughter wants to live with other people. I saw Captain Fantastic. It was kind of like that. I didn’t see Leave No Trace. Oh wait, I did see that one. That was very similar. He, I remember he was like laying down in the grass and they got caught and separated. Oh, yeah. But also the actual question is, you say I’m done with society. I’m moving out. I’m doing my own thing. Your daughter’s like, I want wifi, dad. I want the opportunity to like, really like achieve something in business. But this happens all the time. You gotta tell her she’s a heretic. Right? The Amish are like this. That’s why they have the rum springer, right? Where the kids get to go out and experience non-Amish life. And then who knows what happens. So you let her try it out. You’d be like, you’ll be back, girl. Or not, if she doesn’t want to come back. Sometimes people are just rebellious and they’ll live in those rebel mountains forever instead of coming into society. What are you talking about? No, I’m not doing that. I was like arguing with a communist one time and they were saying like, there’s no way for me to live on my own. It’s like it’s impossible. I was like, you can go into the woods right now. You could go into the woods in West Virginia. And like, if you wanted to try, you could kill animals and like survive. People do it. So I made that point and I still kind of agree with it, but something that made me like kind of pull back a little bit is like the vast majority of West Virginia woods are owned by other people. And they will kick you off their property if they find you. There’s plenty of state parks and federal parks in the United States. I don’t think you’re allowed to build a cabin on a state park though. They will remove you. You don’t have to build a cabin. But you know, there are- How are you gonna like survive winter, man? West Virginia winter is rough. They’re gonna have to live in old coal mines. That people forgot about. Yeah, people do. Well, and then what is this? Yeah, Captain Fantastic is very similar. He didn’t make that connection. That’s funny. There’s lots of things out there that are referring to movies in particular. Don’t think that would be difficult though to like, if like society did get so bad and you were like, okay, I’m gonna go to the woods and figure this shit out. That’s the trade off. People don’t understand. Yes, you’re making a trade off. You’re whining- I don’t think it’s a trade off. What I’m getting at is I think it’s almost impossible. No, it’s not. People do it. There are plenty of people doing it. There are plenty of communities- I think people are blaming it. They’re not going full Amish. They’re going out in yurts with wifi. They’re doing everything. They’re doing the whole thing. Well, there are some people trying to split the difference. They’re saying, the trade off I want is technology, but no taxes. And therefore I want yurts- They want food stamps and bullets. Right, and they don’t understand. You were born into a world that pre-existed you, and therefore it’s all negotiation. That’s it. Are you saying we are born in the matrix and we have a plug in the back of our head? Yes, lots of homeless people in California. There’s homeless people all over the place. Yeah, look, you may not be able to live homeless where you want, because that doesn’t- Like I know homeless people in New England, like, or I used to anyway. I used to be one. Like you can survive. It’s not the end of the world. I think maybe some of these homeless people would have a cabin in the woods that killed deer and whatnot. No, they don’t. They have parasites upon the planet. Yeah, it’s too hard. Why would they do that? That would be hard. They can do it easier, so they do it easier. But they’re carrying it. They’re looking to trash. Yeah, but where can you build a cabin without someone finding you being like, bro, you can’t be on my full wheeler trail. Why would they want to build a cabin when they can live in a dumpster and close the lid? Like Oscar- No, no, no, some people do build cabins. That happens. State doesn’t actually keep people out all that often because they don’t find everything. That’s like, there are people like that. There are ways to do this. There’s plenty of open land in Canada, for example, that no one would ever frequently find you because nobody lives there. Yeah, no kidding. It’s so bloody cold. I just realized, Oscar the Grouch is the archetype for homeless people. I haven’t met an ungrouchy homeless person. I don’t believe you’re ungrouchy. Yeah. Yeah, look, I mean, there’s squatters rights for a reason. If you can squat on someone’s land long enough, they can’t kick you off ever. So these things happen. It’s hard. Nobody wants to do it and nobody should want to do it because it’s miserable, but it’s doable. It can be done. Yeah, well, that’s what people miss. They think these things are impossible when in fact they’re just making choices they don’t understand. Right. And that was a theme in the matrix, right? You can’t see past a choice you don’t understand. Oh, okay, fair enough. You can’t. Well. I like this, Bazzini. Diogenes was the proto Oscar. Yeah, well, Diogenes. Yeah, he was, he was the proto Oscar. Well, he’s just the archetype. It’s the same archetype. Yeah, I mean, Oscar is Diogenes. You need to get up on here, Caillou, and share your wisdom. Here you go. I’m always gonna know him as Caillou. That’s the name that stuck. I just, that’s the name that stuck. That or lead helicopter, one of the two. I only know him as Bazzini, or Hicks, because that’s his real name, but yeah. What is your view on love? Do you believe in really any love between a man and a woman, or do you think it’s purely biological and life circumstances make that person attractive to you? No, the real thing is biology. Biology is a bullshit materialist frame that is useless. Don’t even think about it. Of course there’s love. That’s what holds the world together. Wait a second, I gotta fish back, because I mean, are you gonna deny all of biology? Like, what does that even mean? Yeah, I’m denying all of biology as a useful frame to understand literally anything in the world. That it’s actually not hard. It’s called the placebo effect. Now what? Once the placebo effect comes into play, it’s like, oh, we can’t explain that. No, you can’t. You have no explanation of placebo effect with biology. Biology does not explain the placebo effect at all, and it is the most consistent effect for people. Problem solved. But if we observe animals, do you think animals and humans operate under a different code then? I don’t think so. No, but they operate with different levels of awareness. And so the dog is not aware of, like the dogs don’t know what they look like, right? Most dogs, when they see a mirror, they bark at it, because they don’t know it’s them. So they have a different level of awareness. So they don’t operate with what they look like. But if a German Shepherd sees a hot ass female German Shepherd, it knows. I want that. It knows exactly what to do. A German Shepherd will literally hump your leg. I mean, I’ve humped a couch before, but I still want love. A German Shepherd humped your leg, whether it loved you or not. So like, I don’t know what to do. Yeah. Oh, I like this. Father Eric. He never humped an animal. Object, bro. No, but the animals aren’t stupid enough to believe in the placebo effect. Animals are okay with miracles. So it’s just the humans that need to name miracles so they can use a category that’s invalid to try to understand a world that they’re never gonna understand. So you just give up on understanding. You’re just like, it is whatever you believe it is. I use the Socratic method. And I say, knowledge is not the highest thing. And so knowledge is not the highest thing. And then I don’t have to worry about what I know. I can worry about what happens in the world. I can worry about what I do and where I’m aimed. That’s what I can worry about. And then everything gets easier. Like, why make life hard? You can keep adding knowledge to yourself forever. There we go. We got ecumenical cheese pizza all around. You can add knowledge forever, but that’s not gonna advance you in any way, shape or form. So it’s up to you. And I’m not saying don’t use any knowledge at all ever for anything, but also that can’t be the answer. That’s kind of a crazy statement though, man. Cause I mean, the knowledge of you brushing your teeth probably helps keep your gums and your- No, your three-year-old doesn’t have knowledge of brushing teeth. It just emulates you. I don’t wanna brush my teeth. You can’t make me. Fine, let your teeth rot out. Okay, I’ll go brush my teeth. Look, I’ve got a convert. Eric, Father Eric says, burn the books. Yes, burn the books. Still on the book burning phase. Yes. Uh-oh. Hey Eric, come on. Can’t we like build on what we already have and just constantly challenge it rather than just get rid of it all? That’s what I wanna do. Why? Why do we wanna do that? So we wanna take something that works and we wanna change it. Are we sure that’s what we wanna do? Because what if our change doesn’t work? What if we invent a new digital form of money and nobody understands that that’s really just a proxy for electricity? And then they go, oh, this obviously. That’s when we go back to what we have. You try something new and you’re like, well, this shit don’t work. Let’s do money again. Oh, well, yeah, you could. You could look at Bitcoin and say, well, this is pretty much a failure, right? And then, yeah, you could. But we don’t. We keep going. You know what? That was a good idea. We just needed to tweak it this way. So if the default position is always newer is better, then you get the hell that we’re living in now that everyone’s complaining about. And instead, the default is what we had before. You make a really good point. I do think we should always challenge things, but you should always recognize when you have a sunk cost. Once you try something new, just put your implicit in it. If it’s not working, you need to forget about it. But that’s the hard part. This attitude about change, change, change is the reason why we’re here. Like that’s why we have a meaning crisis. But at the same time, we’re living in like one of the best eras ever in humanity. I’m excited about it. I’m having a great time. You were, about 20 years ago. I don’t know, I think 2014 was a big turning point. We put it that way. Everything’s gotten worse. I mean, I have to agree with you. I do think we’re on the decline, but we still got a pretty sweet gig right now. Man, it’s gonna be fun. It’s gonna be fun. It’s not, well, no, I mean, it’s getting vastly worse really fast. Like things like Walmart. That’s okay. I just read Walmart was pulling out an entire section of a place. And I was like, what? Pulling out all the Walmart. I’ll tell you one problem with current society is that like I heard that like 90% of teachers are Democrats. And that’s, I don’t care what side someone is, but I want there to be an argument in the classroom. If your kid can’t understand critical thinking and argue, and then they’re just gonna be pushed to one side. Right. And now you’re not actually learning and exploring. And if there’s a group of people on average that could be grouped into non-critical thinkers, it’s Democrats, unfortunately. Sorry, just observably the way it is. Every poll says the same thing, by the way. You can look for the data all you want, but it’s gonna say that I’m right. And that if you think differently, you’re wrong. Cause that’s what the data actually shows. And that’s the problem is that we have clear data on this. We know on average what the right answer is. And the right answer is not let Democrats teach your kids. That’s for sure. That’s why homeschooling is big. That’s why people want vouchers, right? School vouchers and these private public school partnerships. That’s why they want all that stuff because they know things have gone horribly wrong. The most private schools are pretty balanced. Most of the statistics that I’ve looked at, it’s pretty much half between Democrats and Republicans, which is exactly the environment that I want my kid to be in. So you need kids to argue it and see how an argument works in real time. You can’t have the same religion preach to them. But that’s education. And most of the, what we call education is actually training. I have a video on that on my channel, Navigating Patterns, so check it out. Yeah, there’s a training versus education. Most of what we’ve been doing in the US for what we call education is actually just training. And we’re training people on books and propositional knowledge instead of educating them in critical thinking and how to recognize good from that. Because when you just tell people a bunch of answers and you give them the impression that those answers are available to them from a little bit of research, you’re not forcing them into the situation where they have to work these things out for themselves. And you’re not giving them a sense that it’s okay to stir the cement differently and it will mix just as well. Right? You’re not giving them that. Kids in school nowadays, if you’re in a classroom, you literally feel pure negative emotion if you disagree with the teacher. Right, and maybe you should, but that’s a- No, no, no. Like kids, if kids are not understanding something, they should be fully empowered to disagree. If you’re training people, then you should. But if you’re educating them, then that’s different. And that’s the problem, is that we don’t make that distinction anymore. We’ve lost the discernment between education and training. In training, you can have a grade. In education, you can’t have a grade. If we all mix cement differently, but the quality of the cement ends up being the same, how do you grade that? Can you grade the mixing of the cement? No, you can grade the, you can kind of grade the end result, but not the mixing. Everybody passes. Well, right, but you can’t do that either. You have to be able to discern, oh, this cement didn’t dry right. It looked to me like you weren’t mixing it quickly enough. We can grade the cement test. No, you don’t want to test. You want key kids to explore and be comfortable not getting answers. You want them to say, I’m gonna try this and see how it works out. And then I’m gonna decide for myself, with the help of the distributed cognition of the other people in the school, whether or not this was what I intended or how far off of my intention it was. And then you get used to failure and you get used to not having things exactly the way you want them. And you get used to other people critiquing something that is exactly the way you want. So when you decide to be an engineer, you become trained in concrete and that’s when you have your test. No, you don’t even need a test. You gotta test the concrete and see if the concrete is gonna crumble. No, you don’t. No, you don’t. You need to- Wait, so how do we build bridges? Do you say that you don’t believe in standardized tests at all? No, you need some. Look, all I’m saying is if education can be boiled down to standardizing tests, then you’re not educating your training. Okay? I think there’s a role for training for sure, absolutely. Training should come later in life. There’s a lot of data out there in the US that if you send kids to a standard kindergarten or pre-kindergarten, for example, and even a standardized first grade where they sit at desks and things like that, that their outcomes are worse all around over time. That’s known. That’s in the data. No one’s looking at that data, but it’s there. There was an article, a medium article about it. I forget the name of the article and the author. I’ve been trying to find it for like two and a half, three years now and I can’t find it. It might’ve been taken down, who knows? But we know this. We know that this is all over the data. And that’s because they’re training people when you’re seeing people down at desks and you’re saying, do this work, and we’re gonna grade you and you’re gonna have quizzes and tests, you’re training them. You’re not educating them. Education, look, I need to be comfortable that if I go and I put on a silly hat and I get this crazy steampunk monocle, which is cool by the way. It’s super cool. And then somebody comes on the stream and goes, what the hell are you doing with this stupid, half not really pirate outfit? Have a good time. You got this goofy Hawaiian shirt on and what the hell is wrong with you? I have to be comfortable that, no, I’m doing this for my reasons and they’re the right reasons. I need to be able to, you can’t learn that in a test. You need to be able to do stuff, have the community push back and make a determination for yourself. Do I wanna conform more to the community because I’m agreeable or am I comfortable pushing back on them and saying, no, I intended to look this way on purpose and it serves my purpose. And if it doesn’t serve your purpose, rebel mountains, then too bad. Take your cheese pizza and eat it by yourself. I need to be able to do that. Right? That’s education that you can’t train somebody to do that, to make complicated, complex sorts of decisions. It’s all trade-offs and negotiation. That’s education. That’s critical thinking. So critical thinking isn’t critiquing. So pirate captain, I’m gonna give you the argument that you may have been born disagreeable and you’re just like, about like you not caring about like what people say about you. There’s a lot of people that could just literally never do that. And be okay. That’s right. There are plenty of people who are agreeable and the problem with them is that if you put an agreeable person in charge of something, it’ll destroy itself because some critiquer will come in and use the Socratic method and tell them that they’re wrong. And then they’ll try to agree with them, but they’re agreeing with nothing. This is the postmodern complaint. Postmodernism isn’t giving you a frame. It’s destroying a frame. It’s deconstructing. So you have nothing to construct in deconstruction. All it is is destruction. And then you can’t build anything. And now you have chaos again. And then the pedophiles move in and they take the children. That’s literally what’s happening. It’s not happening here. We just arrested a woman pedophile. We’ve arrested several people that I went to school with for being involved in this and not even in a trafficking manner, in a personal manner. They are stepping it down here in the Appalachians. Yeah, it’s not sliding here. I’m so happy to see it. Because a lot of times they let those women ones slide too. And that’s fucked up too, man. I mean, little kids- Two women that I know have went to jail here lately for underage sex. That’s awful. And we’ve known about it for a while and it went around on Facebook circulating. And finally, I guess they got the evidence built up and they’re gone. Yeah, there’s some terrible stories out there. But look, women on average get off easy in the courts. Like just women criminals get up real easy in the US courts and that shouldn’t happen. So yeah, I’m good. I’m glad to hear that because it’s really important that people hold up virtues and values and actually do something about it even though it’s difficult. Because you’re not making the world a better place if you’re watching somebody else burn it down or quote, deconstruct it or whatever the hell excuse they’re using to be bad. People feel emotionally different though. Like if you were on a jury and like a man penetrated a little girl, you’d be fucking disgusted. If you were on a jury and an older woman had sex with a 12 year old dude, you would be disgusted but not in the same manner. That’s right. That’s right. No, it’s very different. It’s very different. And we hold different types of people to different standards based on how they grew up. And it’s tricky because the law is not this hard thing that if you do this, you go to jail. If you don’t do that, you go to jail. It’s not the way the law works. Like it just doesn’t work. I’ve been to court many, many times. It doesn’t work that way. Everybody thinks it works that way but it doesn’t work that way at all. Go to a court, you can hang out there for the day and see all the crazy, silly ridiculousness that goes on. Or better yet, get better judges. Like really, it’s bad. Get better clerks. Some of the clerks are just freaking evil. Like they’re just terrible people. Some of them are just incompetent. If we were creating the laws right now that should be the same charge right though because you’re messing up a 12 year old’s life. That should be the same charge. But that’s the problem. Laws are guidelines. They’re not hard and fast. Look, I had a house taken from me. And when I had the house taken from me I tried to depose the bank that was trying to take my house and the judge wouldn’t let me. The judge does not have the power. All sentences are what? They’re like 10 to 15, 10 to 25. That’s a big range, man. Like 10 versus 20. It should be a range. Law is not supposed to force people to act a certain way. It’s not how it’s supposed to work. But whenever you leave the range, that’s when you do like give the option to judges to be like, oh, she’s a woman. You know, she had a bad childhood. They can let people off the hook. Well, Father Eric, can you become a judge without becoming a lawyer first? Almost always, Father Eric. There’s no legal requirement. No, there’s no legal education required to become a judge in most states. Wow. They do it here. Like you gotta be a lawyer here to be a judge. Are you sure? Almost no states have that requirement. Yeah. Like actually. Almost no states. Unless people at the courthouse are just saying that. Uh, cause I, you know. Guys, this is a horrible conversation. What do you wanna talk about? This is not a conversation I wanna talk about on the internet and be recorded to be involved with. All right, all right. What’s on your mind, Jesse? It literally is pure evil. So I don’t wanna talk about pure evil. I got a two minute tolerance for pure evil. My evil. That’s fine. Yeah, yeah. No, no. So, so wait a minute. In the West Virginia Intermediate Court of Appeals, the Court of Appeals, a judge must be a member of good standing of the state bar. So they have to go to law school and they have to practice law in the state for 10 years required prior to appointment and they have to be a citizen for at least five years. But that’s the, that’s the intermediate court of appeals. So in most states, yeah. No, if we’re in line, I don’t wanna say West Virginia is terrible. Don’t move here. Yeah. There’s all kinds of movies about it. Don’t come out here. This place is a. This place is the worst. It’s scary. Some states, judges are elected, right? Judges are elected in a bunch of states, in fact. And so you don’t, you don’t need to meet the requirement for the election. You can just run. How does that even work? Like I kind of agree with it in some sense. It’s the old wild West. We elect you to be a judge. We elect you to be the sheriff. Yeah, well in some states they elect the sheriff too. So like in Virginia, they elected a sheriff and then they elected a governor, right? They do that all the time. And then the governor passes all these executive decrees that are fundamentally illegal or at least unconstitutional. And then the sheriff comes out and says, yeah, we’re not doing any of that. Like he actually came out on the news and said, yeah, I know what the governor said, but you can ignore him because we’re not gonna enforce it. And the governor couldn’t do anything. That sounds like America to me. Well, that’s how it’s supposed to work. You’re beholden to the constitution. You’re not beholden to the state of the federal government in the United States. And that’s what made it work. This is when Carl Benjamin switched his, changed his mind. Carl Benjamin for years was saying, we don’t need a Magna Carta. We don’t need a Magna Carta. What does Carl Benjamin say now? We should have kept the Magna Carta. It made a big difference. Yeah, the guns, man. You gotta keep the guns and you can keep the freedom. Well, if we’re talking different conversation, Pirate Captain, can I ask you some more questions about dopamine? You can, I don’t know that I’ll be able to answer them. But again, I think it’s a bogus thing to talk about, but go right ahead. So that’s what I’m curious about is like why you write it off and why you’re not. Because there’s like 10 different chemicals and it’s the ratio of the chemicals that matter and not the amount of any of them. And we know this medically, you’ve known this for 30 years at least medically. I have no idea why people are going, you know what it is, it’s all dopamine. No, it’s not because it’s your dope. It’s how much dopamine you have in relation to like three other chemicals at any given time. Dopamine has nothing to do with it effectively because it’s amounts and ratios and we can’t measure them in real time. So the fact that this can happen is not important or interesting to the world. It’s just crazy. So I guess what maybe I’m getting at and maybe why I’m obsessed with it. And this goes back to a little bit, what A2TMC was saying earlier that like he doesn’t have to argue something because it’s my definition. But I think most people’s definition don’t mean it’s like what drives you, what makes you feel good every day? And you’re right, it’s probably a ton of chemicals involved in that. No, you’re trying to reduce it to one thing. It’s not one thing. Like this is the problem with you. Yeah, but people can’t understand like the entirety of how the brain works. No, it’s not, it’s not. The brain is so, nobody knows how the brain works. People will tell you that they’re lying. They’re just flat out lying. They thought in the 50s, they knew how the brain worked. So they cut this guy’s skull open. They had it open to do some surgery or something. And what they did was they took a very precise electrical charge and they hit a very precise part of the brain with it. And then they hit it again. And you know what they got? Two completely different memories that had no relation to one another. And they went, we thought memories were stored physically in the brain. And they’re wrong. Let me tell this to you and I’ll ask your opinion. So like there’s been times in my life where like I was making a lot of bad choices as far as like eating the worst foods possible, like watching porn and like, I felt like I had zero energy for anything that like would actually like help me and my fellow citizens. It was like I was exhausted. I would try to do something other than pure pleasure. Yeah, that happens. So you were addicted, that happens. So like when I like, you know, I switch my focus a little bit, like hit a little bit here, a little bit there. And then you get in a better position where you’re constantly like feeling better. And then it snowballs and you’re like, oh, okay, wow, I’m actually contributing. I like doing this now. And it’s not just pure pleasure. Yeah. So what’s the question? So that’s totally a real thing. I know not only from my personal experience, but a hundred thousand people online being like same thing happened to me. I get it. We understand addiction. You’ve just described addiction. What’s your question? You’re just saying dopamine is not the main driver. No, dopamine is irrelevant here. Father Eric has it straightened up. Dopamine is bad framing. Virtue is better framing. It’s not materialistic. Exactly. What is driving you to do things is not the chemicals in your brain. Do the chemicals in the brain sometimes correlate to things you do? Yes, but it’s only sometimes. And we don’t- Wait, okay, what’s the driver to do things then? It’s spirit. Like virtue, values. When you value the thing you’re addicted to, you’re addicted to it. When you go, you know what? I don’t like cocaine anymore. Then you’re not right. This is why the rat experiment is so important. So if you take a lonely rat and you isolate them from other rats and you put them in a cage and you give them the options of being a lonely rat or being a lonely rat with cocaine, he prefers the cocaine. Really, geniuses. Now these geniuses did this experiment decades ago and they never figured out what the result was gonna be beforehand, even though it was obvious to anybody who thinks about it for four and a half seconds. So they run this stupid experiment. They write this dopey paper. They come to completely the wrong conclusions. And then it’s decades more before anybody goes, well, what happens if you put rats in a rich rat environment where they have other rats to play with? Oh, they never touch cocaine. Okay, well, it’s obviously not the material that’s driving the rat. It’s that simple. That one second experiment disproves that the chemicals have anything to do with your behavior at all. They’re just not involved in the process. I don’t know how it disproves it. Blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue. Let me get a word in here. Why were you watching porn? As a former porn addict, why were you watching porn? It just made me feel pleasure. Like it, you know. Bullshit. Really? Another answer. What’s your other answer? Why were you watching porn? I mean, like, I mean, my emotional answer is like, I thought it was hot. I thought it was fun. I thought it was interesting. I thought it was something new. Come on, it’s more than that. It’s way more than that. I’m not, I’ve never been a porn addict, man. So maybe you’re looking for- You just said that you were though. You just equated addiction as the part of your whole thing. Addiction, shapes and sizes. Like you’re using dopamine to describe all forms of addiction. Like a right, yeah, like- The things that I’ve actually been addicted to, I’ve never been addicted to porn. The things I’ve actually been addicted to is because there was probably like an emptiness inside of me. And I wasn’t like- How many times do you have to do something for it to be an addiction? Is it five times? Is it 10 times? How many times do you have to do something in a row in order for it to be an addiction? I don’t know the answer to that. Right. You could say more than two. It was bad, it was like fine once. Second time, third time, I feel a bit bad. But you did a fourth time. So now you went too bad and too good. So you were addicted at that point. Yeah. I wasn’t feeling- I’m sorry to smash your materialistic idol. You motivated me to give a better answer. Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to do. I wasn’t feeling good about what I was doing in life. And I was looking for an escape to feel better. I was looking for a portal from the bullshit that I was doing every day. Yeah. Yeah. You were trying to alter your experience through material needs, right? Which you were, you know, it could be porn, it could be heroin, it could be cocaine, it could be anything. Could be, could be, could be not porn, but regular sex or sex addicts, right? Like there’s- Yeah, yeah man. I’ve totally done it for regular sex before. I just wanna get off again because I hate the other shit. Look, the way out of this materialist way of trying to manipulate yourself is not to use that tool to try and manipulate yourself. That doesn’t make any sense. You can’t say, oh, I was trying to manipulate myself with my dopamine through porn. So the solution is to know more about how dopamine manipulates myself. No, the solution is to avoid that frame entirely. It’s worked for me so far, because I’m like, oh, I was hijacking my dopamine system by looking at this cheat code. If I actually like get my dopamine in a way that I respect, then I’ll feel better about myself. But that’s not what’s happening at all. Like, and again, it’s not dopamine. That’s not what’s happening at all. And again, it’s not dopamine. That’s just wrong. That isn’t how the brain works at all. They know this. It’s actually in, you can read the white papers. They’re well aware of this. So when they tell you otherwise, they’re lying or they’re ignorant, but it’s not correct. You can’t say the average amount of dopamine to feel good is X amount. That doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t work that way. That’s not the way the brain works at all, at all, ever. It never works that way. So wait a second. Whenever like you achieve a goal that you’ve been really working towards and like you get those release of chemicals, do you think that that’s not dopamine? Is that something else? No, it’s not. It’s not because it’s a ratio. It can be a reduction of everything else and the dopamine can stay the same and the same effect happens. It has nothing to do with the dopamine. Honestly, it really doesn’t. It’s in the literature. If you read the literature, then you may not be able to and fair enough. I’ve read the literature. It’s not there. That effect does not exist. That is not how it works. So is there like actually not a measurable chemical? Like whenever you achieve a goal? There’s not a single measurement that you can make to understand motivation. They’ve known that for at least 50 years and they keep lying about it. They’re like, you know what? One more experiment and we’ll crack the code. There’s no code to crack. They’re just wrong about the model. That’s all it is. Yeah, it’s the universal field theory bullshit all over again. It’s the same thing. Taking the airships and building the bridges out into the abyss, past the paradoxes of humanity. Blue, where do you think depression is located in the body? In your ass. It’s in my shoulders. In your ass. That’s where it manifests. That’s not where it’s located. But that’s the problem is that we’re trying to map things realistically and you’re not material. I’m trying to get you to understand the concept. Sometimes I feel sad. Sometimes I feel something in here, but is that in there? Was it coming from there or is it in here? Let me get to my point. Let me get to my point. So people associate depression with their head, right? Being downcast, right? Your head, right? What do they give you to treat depression? SSROs. No, that’s one form. Guess what that has to come through? They give you pills. They give you pills, right? What are those pills commonly affect? Your gut, your stomach, your liver. So you’re associating the pattern with a completely wrong category, with a completely wrong object. You’re saying, oh, my depression’s up here. I feel so downcast. What am I gonna do? And they’re like, okay, well, here’s this thing for your stomach. Completely different thing. Stupid, yeah. It hasn’t solved the problem. Right. You can solve that problem by when you wake up. Unless you literally have a chemical imbalance and that’s a very, very small portion of population. Honestly, man, when I’m depressed, my whole fucking body feels bad. My toes feel bad. Of course. You have to literally fight it. When you get out of bed, you have to punch it in the fucking face and you’ll win. It’s like, what is that? Psychosomatic sort of the fucking thing that you’re doing there. You get up, like, whoa, holy shit, I don’t wanna be up. Yes, I do. And then you fight it. And if you embody it, it’s like combat, you’ll win. Because it’s an everyday battle. It’s an uphill battle. But guess what? You’re telling us a story. Yeah. You got my feet, man. Yeah, yeah. That’s what you need to do. You need to live in a story. Yeah. And you need to get used to telling yourself that story. You should do it every day. Which looks a lot like a little bit in prayer, by the way. But yeah, that’s one way to think about it. And that’s that frame that you’re giving yourself is something you live within. It’s bigger than you. That’s the differences where we was talking about in the beginning. Between a cult, which isn’t big enough for you to live in or it doesn’t encompass all the aspects of your life and something like a religion. And this is why the climate cult is a cult and the race cult is a cult and the safety cult is a cult. They’re a cult because they don’t encompass every aspect of your life. They can’t cure your depression. They can’t explain why you go to work. They can’t explain why it’s good to go to work. They can’t explain what good and evil are. They can’t explain these things. Yeah, only you can kick its ass. And you can. Yeah, it’s true. You pills can’t do it. You can literally give it the beat down and it’ll go away. Joey A. I remember reading a news story about a depressed suicidal man that spent his life savings on cocaine and hookers and then he decided he wasn’t depressed anymore. Well, I’m all for the cocaine and hookers. Whatever powers your board has, my friend. You could literally dissect that story though and go, cool. He finally had something that he felt satisfied in. He finally lived in a story. Yeah. And that’s maybe that’s one, Right. That wall that was in the way. So maybe he was so tied to his job, his monies. And so he needed to reset. Cause he was putting all this before, hey, you know what? I’m not saying that’s a great solution. I’m saying it’s a way of people understanding. I think that’s what that guy that pissed all over everybody thought too. It was probably felt great to not care where one pisses. Right, and being dominant. Being dominant over everything. Owning the world. I like what you said. Like a release of finally being able to, yeah. Could we explore laziness? Hold on, let me grab these two questions and then we’ll go to you again. When asked about depression and anxiety by anthropologists, indigenous cultures called them quote thinking problems. Yeah, they pretty much are. And here’s Benjamin Franklin. I found out that wage slavery is a pretty good antidote to depression. If you work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, you don’t have enough time to be depressed. Well, that’s cause you’re not in any kind of slavery. Like wages means you’re getting something out of it. And you get to make money and make some independent decisions. What kind of car you want. You can increase work hours and work days to cure depression. Well, look, yeah, we need to solve the meaning crisis to cure depression, but also working more is better and these attempts to be friends in the United States are stupid. Lou, what you got for us? Go ahead. Yeah, this is not even a conversation change. This is directly relates is like, I’ve talked to some people that work a lot and they like, they have such disgust for lazy people. People that are not willing to work or create and like, you know, decide to wake up in the morning to go to work. Like they have such disgust for them. Yes. Is art like, are people born lazy? Like if you feel like you don’t wanna do things, is that like, is that a fucking voice or is that like, is that like a burden or a curse born upon some people? No, laziness is different. Like some of this is attitude and some of it is how you’re born. So some people are born with a very relaxed attitude towards getting things done and how fast they need to get done. Speed, for example, is a big difference. Like I know a lot of people who just, they move slowly. And so especially down South, if you come down South from New England and it’s like two different universes, it’s not even the same universe, right? Yeah, but they get like, get a lot of things done on their property. Like they’re not, a lot of people are lazy. Some people do and some people don’t, but it takes them longer. So that’s a difference. Some people think it takes you longer than you’re lazy. That’s not necessarily true because it’s different. Lazy people won’t do things. Like they won’t do, they won’t take care of their property. They won’t fix their driveways like I did. You know, they won’t engage, right? Whereas slow people will engage, it will just take them longer because they’re not in a hurry, right? That’s not lazy. We misread a lot of laziness, right? And then a lot of people want a reason why they don’t wanna do stuff or why they’re depressed. And this goes back to Joey’s comment about some of it is learned helplessness. Yeah, look, if you’re not good at something, you can slide into laziness, right? Because you’re like, oh, I’m not good at this, therefore it’s not my fault. I must be lazy and therefore laziness is good. People do that all the time to themselves. The Fleet Foxes made a song about this. It was called the helplessness blues, in fact. And one of the lyrics is, I just wanna be a cog in some great machine to fulfill a purpose that I know I was born to be. And I think that’s what that whole song’s about. Wow. Yeah, and that’s the problem. We oversimplify everything to things like dopamine and laziness. And it’s like, man, the world is so much more complex. And you can just watch the world. You don’t need to even have long philosophical discussions about it and see what’s going on and figure out where you fit. You don’t need to critically think about everything or know things or categorize or worry about the scientific framing. In short, you need to start your adventure. You gotta start your adventure and get out there and screw up and find out what, yeah. That, I mean, Star Wars did that too. And Star Trek, there’s a lot of those. And by the way, you should check out Conan the Adventurer cartoon of ConTV. Dude, it’s magnificent. It’s really, really amazing. But anyway, I digress. The story begins with you stepping out of your house and doing something great and running into people and trying to be nice and making friends. So lazy people are not having these conversations. No. I don’t think anyone here is lazy. No, no. Most people I think are afraid to leave their house. They’re afraid. Well, they had an eatable mother that made them afraid of the world, a devouring mother. And it made it hard for them to get out and escape and see. Well, Elizabeth isn’t here. Otherwise she’d push back. I’m glad Elizabeth’s home. She’d be all upset if you said that. Yeah, it’s part of the problem for sure. Yeah, I mean, it’s in Lord of the Rings, right? You gotta watch out when you step out of your front door. You never know. Oh, it’s in The Hobbit, right? You never know what’s gonna happen, right? Yeah. Are you gonna go with Gandalf on a quest or are you gonna be that grumpy dude with the broom like, who are you coming back into the show? I like what Joey said. Lazy people absolutely have conversations like this. There’s different kinds of laziness. But there’s a lot of people who are afraid to do things in the world or won’t do things in the world, right? And usually that’s the intellectuals of the world. They will talk about things but they won’t actually enact anything because they might be wrong and they’ll be proven wrong by the world and they know it or they don’t wanna risk it. And so there’s a lot of people who are lazy in terms of physical things but who are willing to feel important and get their ego not out of building things in the real world but out of talking about building things in their imaginary world with their friends. And so Joey’s right, to some extent, yeah, they’ll only talk, they’ll only have conversations at an intellectual level because it keeps it non-pragmatic. What do you do? Do you clean your room? Do you take care of your neighborhood? Do you go to work every day so you’re not depressed at Benjamin Franklin’s point? What do you do? Because if you’re not doing those things, it’s a problem. We’ve made an event of talking too, talking, dialogue, sitting on your front porch, community. Yeah. This was the norm. I love sitting on my back porch with my friends. That’s my favorite thing in the world. Joey’s got another good comment. Many, most intellectuals think they will be landlords in the communist utopia, can’t confirm, right? These guys, like the hippies I used to live with, they were all Renaissance fair folks, right? They loved the Ren Fairs, and I love Ren Fairs too. The problem was that their idea of medieval society is them in the upper class. Now they don’t see it that way because they’re like, well, I wouldn’t be the king, right? But everybody who wasn’t the king but actually had food was the upper class. Like the middle ages, we whine about income inequality. Go look at income inequality from the middle ages to today. You won’t be whining, my friend. You’ll be like, I am so grateful to be living here now. I am so grateful to be living here now. Even in the 50s and the 1800s, any of that. When you get out of feudal society, there was a time in the world where 12 families owned all the wealth on the planet, 12 families. Lame. And we’re worried about income inequality today? 1919, 12 families in the US owned all the wealth in the US. And they were the wealthiest people that had ever lived up into that point, there’s a couple of exceptions. Nones and mans and a few others. But basically, yeah, like Rockefeller was like a trillionaire in today’s money. We think Bezos is wealthy, Bezos is nothing. He’s a nothing. He wasn’t wealthier than Carnegie and these other guys, JP Morgan, no way. When you adjust for inflation, those guys were way wealthier. We got nothing to complain about. Yeah, I don’t think we got to worry about anything. It’s been going in a good direction. Well, we have to preserve what we have because we had a slide, right? The slide happened year two of Obama’s presidency. And that was when the ACA, the Affordable Care Act got passed and since then, income inequality has been bad. So small business growth in the US has been bad, right? Poverty’s risen. So if you look at the graph, the government’s kept for at least since the 40s, I think, you’ll watch the graph. It used to go like this and then that passed and it goes like this, right? And so the middle class and the upper class is still going up roughly in the same proportion and the poor people are going sharply down. So poverty’s gotten worse. And that happened when the ACA was passed. Right into the federal day, you can go look at the charts, clear as day. You can see the month that started to happen. It’s not hidden. It’s about 2008. Or 06. It would have been 08. I forget. I don’t remember. But the effect is not by a couple of years. The effect might actually be. Yeah, okay. It doesn’t happen the day the ACA passes, right? And then shortly, two years after that, right? So right when Obama was getting reelected, we had the 50 year dip in small businesses were closing at a rate greater than they were opening in the US and that had never happened before. And it’s still like there. Yeah, it’s pretty bad. I have a theory about them. Have you ever looked at the data to judge states on how many people are moving there? That means that state is doing the best. It’s like voting with your feet. I don’t, yeah. I don’t know if the states are doing the best. What I’m getting at is the states that have COVID the best and have some of the best laws now. If you look like Texas and Florida has like a high influx of people moving in there and a lot of people are arguing that that means that this state is doing the best as far as governing people. Well, there’s some truth to that, but I don’t think that’s, it’s not an easy correlation to make. I mean, Texas, for example, is probably a mess right now because it’s got too many people who vote the wrong way in it, right? Whereas Florida and South Carolina are probably gonna be just fine. So is Georgia, right? The states. So like my experience, right? Cause my family’s up in New England, right? They locked down for three years. We locked down for three months. We don’t live in the same space. Like I did not have the same experience with masks and with closed restaurants that they did. It’s just not the same at all. There’s nothing the same about it even a little bit. So we live in the same country. We’re not that, it’s 950 miles, roughly speaking, right? It’s not that far, right? Cause just up the coast is not that far. And we have vastly different experiences of that time period. But people do like vote a certain way with where they decide to live. Of course they do. But I don’t look, I mean, Texas is a great state. They have wonderful laws for sure. And so does Florida for sure. But, you know, are they the best? They’re not the cheapest, you know, Kentucky, Tennessee. Both of those states have no income state taxes. Right, well, and different states have different tax laws, but the cheapest states to actually live in are still Tennessee, Kentucky, and South Carolina. Like just taxes and everything included. Like the cost of living is very cheap for lots of reasons. Like food availability, tax rates, but also all the other rates, right? Because things just cost less here than they do in New England. So my house here was less than $100,000for12acresoflandanda900squarefoothouse.Youcouldgeta900squarefootcondoinBostonfor,youknow,halfamilliondollarsprettyeasily,right?So,youknow,Ithinki{t}^{\prime }snotcomparable.Likei{t}^{\prime }snot,thehouseIleftwashalfamilliondollarhouseandthatwasonnoland.Itwasabighouse.I{t}^{\prime }slike1600squarefeetorsomethingwithafullbasement.ButlikeIdid{n}^{\prime }thaveanyland.Idid{n}^{\prime }thaveaquarterofanacreofland,youknow?AndIlovedthathouse.Itwasgreat.Ihadathreebedroomhouse,twobaths,right?Ihadanattachedgarage.Ido{n}^{\prime }thaveanattachedgaragehere,youknow?Butontheotherhand,NewEnglandturnedintohellandImovedoutlongbeforeCOVID.Isawchangecomingquickerthanthat.So,whichisbetter.Imean,theamountofmoneyitcostmetoliveinMassachusettsisridiculouscomparedtowhatitcosttolivehere.I{t}^{\prime }snotevenclosetothesame.I{t}^{\prime }slike25$8. March 4th or March 3rd for you. Well, yeah, no, no, no. No, it was the 28th of February. Oh, right, sorry. I’m just looking at the date here. Ice cream in February, baby. Yeah, it’s unbelievable. Oh, because it’s cold. It must be, it’s because it’s, yeah, just coming out of winter, aren’t you? Yeah, we’re coming out of winter. Well, it’s the south. Winter is very short here. 85 degrees, it’s really warm. Like that’s a nice. I have to convert that. For me, 85 Fahrenheit. I’m like, what is that? Celsius? I don’t know. I’d have to convert it here. I think it’s usually half and a bit or something. 29, 29 and a half Celsius. Yeah, it’s a nice warm day. It’s a nice chill day. Right, but it’s all muted, right? And I’m like, wow, that’s weird. It wasn’t muted on the way down and on the way back, it was different. And yeah. Were you going in for a job interview or something? Or what was the reason to go to Charlestown? My friend needed to go to the airport, the Charleston airport, not the Charlotte airport, which is the larger airport. So she was like, oh, can you give me a ride? And I’m like, yeah, I guess. Like, you want me to use my convertible car on a beautiful day to take you for a long drive. Oh me, oh my. Yes. I’ll find a way through it. Yeah, it was just terrible. At one point she wanted to turn around. We hadn’t hit the highway yet. So we were right near the house, right? And she goes, can you take a right here? And I’m like, yeah. Wait, you forget something? She’s like, yeah, I didn’t want to ask. And I’m like, why? And she’s like, well, isn’t one you have to turn around? And I’m like, you didn’t want me to have to spend more time on the 85 degree day with the top down driving and the awesome convertible? Is that, I feel oppressed, help, help. You know? And she laughed. I’m like, this is silly. Like, who cares? You know, we just got to get you there on time. We left him plenty of extra time. She’s a little panicked. She didn’t understand. No, no, that airport’s gonna take you like 10 minutes to go through. Like it’s a tiny airport. Is it like that on, because airports here are an event. Like you’ve got to go, you’ve got to take your baggage in, you’ve got to check in before you do that. It depends where you’re going. It depends where you’re going. So the Charlotte airport, Charlotte’s closer, about an hour and a half, hour and 15 maybe. That airport’s a big airport, relatively speaking. It’s a very large airport. The airport in Columbia where I live, which takes like 45 minutes to get to for some reason, even though you would think it’s the same freaking city. That airport is tiny, right? There’s only two check-in things and whatever. But you can’t go anywhere. I mean, you might be able to get to Chicago, maybe one other city. Otherwise you’re going to Atlanta, Georgia, which is four hour drive. And then you’re going to Charlotte, which is a two hour drive from that airport, roughly speaking. It’s an hour and a half from my house because I’m a little bit further north, closer to Charlotte. But that’s all you’re doing in that airport. Charleston’s insane, it’s just a small airport. So you go up to Boston. So sometimes I fly into Boston, sometimes I fly into Manchester, New Hampshire. My friends are in, and some of my relatives are in Manchester, New Hampshire, up in that area. So flying into Boston’s inconvenient. It’s a huge airport though. Go to Boston, you’ve got to get there two hours in advance because you don’t know. Now there’s mitigating factors. I have this thing called TSA pre-check. So when I go through the airport, it takes no time at all because we have shorter lines, we pay extra money. We don’t have to take off our shoes and do all kinds of crazy stuff. It’s, yeah, there’s different rules. So you pay money, you get different rules. I’m like, okay, I’ll just pay the money and get the different rules. Well, I was planning on a lot. I was planning on spending a week a month in New England when I first moved down there. Because that was totally feasible under the old regime there before everything changed with the fake news virus scam. So I was like, well, this is a good deal for me because I’m going to be flying a lot. I had a car up there and a car down here. So I had everything set up to do this. It just didn’t work out for various reasons. So I got that special feature because I thought it was going to be flying 12 times a year, or maybe more, who knows? It made sense at the time and now it makes a little bit less sense, but I’m so spoiled on it. And it’s cheap. It’s like 50 bucks for five years or something. That’s $10ayear.So,yeah.America,wow.Youwouldnotbeabletopayanythingforthathere.Maybeyougetabitof,youpay,yougetsomeairportloungesandyougetaccesstoallkindsofthings.Ther{e}^{\prime }snoneofthis,theactualexperienceofgettingthroughallthepeopletowhereyouneedtobe.Allitisisaspecialline.I{t}^{\prime }saspeciallinewithametaldetectorinsteadofanx-rayscanner.Andi{t}^{\prime }sadifferentsetofrules.Tha{t}^{\prime }sallitis.I{t}^{\prime }saspecialline,specialline,specialline,differentsetofrules.Yougottotakeyourlaptopsout.Tha{t}^{\prime }saboutit.Ido{n}^{\prime }thavetotakemyshoesofforanything.AndthenIgothroughthelineandi{t}^{\prime }sonlyametaldetector.Sothe{y}^{\prime }renotscanningyouinthisscanningmachine.Ittakesfoursecondsoranyofthat.Youwalkthroughametaldetectorandthenyo{u}^{\prime }reontheothersideandyougottawaitforyourbagstobescanned.Andsometimesther{e}^{\prime }salinebutthelinemovesreallyfastcomparedtothoseotherlines.Causeyoucanseetheotherlinesandthe{y}^{\prime }rejustlongeranditjusttakeslongerperperson.SotheTSApre-checkisagooddeal.Yeah,wow.Sowhatmadeyoumovedowntowhereyouarenow?Causeyouare,Ialwaystrytounderstandthegeographywithyou.YouareupinNewEngland.Andnowyo{u}^{\prime }vegonedownSouthtoCarolina?SouthCarolina,yep.SouthCarolina,yeah.So{I}^{\prime }mstillonthecoast.I^{\prime }mfurtherfromthewaterthanIwasinMassachusettsbut{I}^{\prime }mstillonthecoast.I^{\prime }moutsidethecapitalcityofmystate.LikeIwasinMassachusettsbutIlivedinacitybefore.ThisisElginislikeatwohorsetown.I{t}^{\prime }snotacity.I{t}^{\prime }sgottwogrocerystores.Tha{t}^{\prime }saboutit.Yeah,gettwogrocerystores,afewgasstations.Ther{e}^{\prime }ssomerestaurantsandstuffhere.Butther{e}^{\prime }snothinghere.I{t}^{\prime }satinytown.But{I}^{\prime }m20milesoutofthecapitalcityofColumbia.So,Boston,Iwas25or30milesoutofBoston,dependinguponthetime.ButIwasinacity.SolikeIlivedinthecenterofMarlboro,Massachusettswhichisacity.SoIhadnolandandIhadabeautifulhouse.Ilovedmyhouseupthere.Thathousewasworthlikehalfamilliondollars.ButwhathappenedwasIsawthechangeinthetrafficandthetrafficpatternschangeddrasticallyoverlike30days.AndIwent,like,whatthehellisthis?No,whenIlivedinEasternMassachusetts,youcouldsayIwasgoingfromtownAtotownBandyoucouldtellmewhattimeofdayyouweregoingand{I}^{\prime }dsaytha{t}^{\prime }sgonnatakeyouaboutthislong.AndIwasalwaysprettyclose,likewithinfiveminutes.Like,IknewallthetrafficpatternsintheentireEasternhalfofthestate,roughlyspeaking.Ijustknewthemall,right?Andthentheyallchangedin30days.Soitusedtobe,forexample,onaFridaywhenIwasgoingtowork,i{t}^{\prime }sthetimeIwasworking.Iwas{n}^{\prime }tinBoston,butitwasveryclosetoBoston.Sotha{t}^{\prime }ssevenmilesoutofBoston.Soitwasgood,becauseyougetthegoodpartofthemassbike,yougetthefastpart.Andthenther{e}^{\prime }salittlebitoftraffic,buti{t}^{\prime }snottoobad.Allthetrafficgetsworsefurtherin.OnaFriday,yo{u}^{\prime }dzoominandyo{u}^{\prime }dzoomhome.Was{n}^{\prime }tabigdeal.Allofasudden,ifyouleftpast2.30intheafternoon,youcould{n}^{\prime }tgetoutofthecityonaFriday.AndIwent,what?AndthenIwould{n}^{\prime }tevengohome.Iwasgoing12milestomyfrien{d}^{\prime }shouseonFridays,everyFriday.SoIwas{n}^{\prime }tevengoinghome.Iwasgoingamuchshorterdistance.Oneday,ittooktwohours.AndIwaslike,i{t}^{\prime }stakingtwohourstodrive12milesonaFridayafternoon.Whatthehellisgoingon?AndsoIwaslike,somethin{g}^{\prime }sweird.Andthenalltheweekdaytrafficgot,therushhourperiodgotlongerandeverythinggotslower.AndalloftheplateswerefromNewJersey,NewYorkandConnecticutatacertaintimeofday.AndIwaslike,thisislike30to35$50,000 of cash out of pocket. Not to mention lost work and all kinds of other things. I mean, I really got screwed. And then I lost my mother’s entire estate. And she took it and she knew she was taking it. She knew she shouldn’t have. She was just not a good person. Wow. So that’s case closed? I’m suing the attorney. Okay. It’s been years. It just takes years to do anything. And especially with the fake news virus scam, everyone’s getting excuse to be more late. So they’re not doing anything. It’s just everything’s taking forever and it’s costing a bloody fortune. You wouldn’t believe how much lawyers cost when you sue other lawyers. It’s more than if you sue banks, as it turns out. 50,000 is just getting warmed up. Do you know your odds? Not to be economic. Do you know your odds of winning? I can’t tell. You would think that, you know, this happened in my other case, right? Here’s a document. But there’s no way to refute the document. In this case, you have two documents that disagree. How is that not the fault of the lawyer? How is that not errors and omissions? I don’t understand. The two documents physically disagree. Did you just disagree? And there’s a bunch of other errors too, obvious errors. They’re filing errors. They’re not like, oh, you gave bad advice. You’re like, no, no, you filed paperwork wrong. And we’re still in this fight with the insurance company. I’m like, your client did so badly, another lawyer had to fix it. And that’s all documented in the system. Why are we even having this fight? Just give up. But I place my odds at very slim. Well, the system. The German bank was allowed to take my house. They lied to the court. They lied to the appellate court. And I didn’t have a chance to say, no, no, no, that’s a lie. They said they had a document signed by me that was an impossible document that I obviously never signed that was counter, it was counter to the evidence submitted in the case that I made sure was submitted in the case. And yet the appellate court just ruled with them in the middle of the night without, do I have any faith in the legal system? No, of course not. It’s not the first, second or third time. There was a time I was thinking about this this morning. There was a time when a creditor came after me and I said, here’s the payment. Here’s the canceled check from you. Judging care. Four times I went to the judge and said, no, no, no, no, you don’t understand. Here’s the, I don’t wanna hear that evidence today. I’m like, well, okay, but you asked me why I didn’t pay them. And the answer is I paid them and here’s the proof. No, it wouldn’t let me submit it in evidence, wouldn’t do anything. Four times he did this. And finally, he started asking me and I said, look, I don’t have the money to pay this. They’re saying I owe $15,000andtha{t}^{\prime }snottrue.AndatthetimeIdid{n}^{\prime }thave$15,000. I said, I’m gonna have to file for bankruptcy. And the judge got pissed. And he ruled the way he ruled and I went and filed for bankruptcy and they didn’t get their money. And I’m like, we can play this game all day long, but you can’t make me pay money I don’t have. It just didn’t work. That money you tried to pay originally. Yeah, gosh. Totally ignored it. Totally ignored the whole thing. And because well, the lawyers said he’d look into it. I don’t care. This is evidence in the case. I wanted to admit it is evidence in the freaking case. I made the payment, they didn’t credit the payment. Therefore I owe them nothing. Like period, end of statement. In the United States, if you pay a bill and they do not acknowledge the payment, that bill is null and void. I’m sorry, that’s federal law. It really is. I read the law. It’s definitely law. You can’t continue to collect if you deny a payment. It’s not valid. I don’t understand. And the judge wanted none of it. He didn’t even entertain it four times. Four times didn’t entertain it. It was so bad, Jesse. It was so bad that what happened was I left a lawyer with an active case on the docket, came out of the courtroom because he saw what happened because he was standing there. And he said, wow, that was terrible. I feel really bad for you. Call my friend, he does bankruptcies. And I said, thank you, thank you very much. I already had somebody lined up to do the bankruptcy, but thank you very much. I really appreciate that. So it’s not like I’m the only one that noticed that this was a ridiculous travesty of justice. It’s just that nobody does anything anymore. They just kind of sit there and you tell them the story and they’re like, oh man, I feel bad. And I’m like, that’s wonderful. I really appreciate that you feel bad. But also can we maybe do something about this instead of just feeling bad about the fact that it happened after it happens? Maybe we could make it not happen anymore. Maybe we could shame people into doing the right thing or throw a few bad people in jail who are obviously bad or maybe just follow the law for once. Like maybe, like in my housing court case, the housing court’s a kangaroo court in Massachusetts, like fair enough, whatever. But in the charter of the housing, I read it. It’s not hidden knowledge, right? It’s like right there. The housing court is exempt from many court rules, but the one rule they’re not exempt from, and it’s explicit, is the ability for you to depose in the case. Like you can run a deposition, which means you can ask the other side questions, right? And submit it to the court. The judge denied, would not force the bank into a deposition. I’m like, you don’t even have the legal authority to do that as a judge, period, end of statement. You’re part of the housing court. It’s not within your purview. And I complained to the Massachusetts, people who oversee courts, here’s a laundry list of things the judge did that are invalid, like writing orders that literally nobody could read, scribbling them on pieces of paper. Like that’s not valid. Like we can’t even read this. We don’t even know what it says. And that denying me the opportunity to depose the bank, allowing other lawyers for other interests in on the case, which is invalid, you can’t do that. Like all this stuff. And the woman just responded nastily to me with a written letter, like, no, none of your complaints are valid. I’m like, no, all of my complaints are valid. And if you weren’t a lazy useless piece of garbage, you would look at the case and realize there are errors here and do something about it. But she just refused. And I, you know, again, like everybody knows, nobody cares. When I was there, everybody knew, oh yeah, those are ambulance chaser lawyers who have switched to foreclosure mill lawyers because that’s where the money is. I’m like, all right, so you all know this group of people in your own profession is a bunch of corrupt scumbags and you’re not gonna do anything about it? And then they get upset. Well, lawyers are maligned. Lawyers are maligned because lawyers won’t manage their own profession. Okay, if you want my respect, manage your profession. And if you can’t do that, you’re not only gonna get my respect, not gonna get my respect, you’re gonna get disdain from me and you’re gonna get hatred and anger from me. And if you don’t want that, step up. And if you can’t step up, deal with it. Sorry, that’s the way it’s gonna be because I’m not changing. So yeah, you gotta earn respect. You can’t say, oh, no, I’m not respected. You know these people are scumbags and you’re not willing to, you know, like my attorney was a relatively good attorney. He made three errors, which isn’t bad actually in a case for five years. But he was like, my brother here. And I’m like, no, no, no. He’s not only not your brother, he is our enemy. I want him treated as an enemy. He’s an enemy. He’s a bad person. He’s doing a bad thing. He has no justification for what he’s doing. They’re playing tricks on the court. They’re breaking all kinds of laws and rules in the court. Do not treat him nicely. Treat him like the scumbag that he is and win the damn case. By any means necessary, because goodness matters. I didn’t do anything to deserve losing my house. I didn’t screw up the paperwork. I wasn’t a German bank who never owned the house and didn’t have a single piece of signed paperwork at all. That’s not my fault. I wasn’t involved in that conspiracy. That didn’t happen. It’s not my fault the loan servicer went out of business and was taken over by the federal government, which technically makes the house mine immediately, by the way, just so we’re clear on how the law works. That’s not my fault. Oh yeah. So you’ve been through a lot. That was a lot. That was a lot. Yeah. It was a lot. And it’s still going. Now I’ve got my mother’s estate was taken, right? All the money, the house, all her stuff, all my stuff, brother’s stuff and a bunch of my stuff. All gone, all gone, all gone. It’s gone. And now all I can do is sue the lawyer. That’s all I can do. And then that’s dragging on forever as usual. And yeah. And like I said, what are the odds? I have no faith. I have no faith. People are like, well, maybe you should drop it. And I’m like, no, no. It doesn’t matter if I go bankrupt trying to prosecute this lawsuit and it doesn’t work even. It doesn’t matter if I go bankrupt and I go bankrupt before I can even get them to court. What matters is that I try. That’s what matters. And yeah, look, it’s probably gonna cost another $50,000,whichIdo{n}^{\prime }tactuallyhaveatthemoment.Sotha{t}^{\prime }sgonnabeinteresting.Soitcouldbethat{I}^{\prime }mgonnajustbeoutwhat{I}^{\prime }vespentsofar,whichismorethan50,000anditwo{n}^{\prime }thappen.Ido{n}^{\prime }tknow.Ihopetha{t}^{\prime }snotthecase.IhopethatIstarttogetsomeincomesoonsothatIcanaffordthelawsuitattheveryleast.Butther{e}^{\prime }snoguaranteeonthat.Sowhataremyodds?The{y}^{\prime }renotlookinggood.The{y}^{\prime }renotlookinggoodatall.Butnotdoinganythingisalsonotanoptionbecausethenyo{u}^{\prime }rejustcontributingtotherotofsocietyatthatpoint.Andmynottryingisnotgood.Soi{t}^{\prime }snotaboutthemoney.Imean,evenifIdo{n}^{\prime }tgetanymoney,thefactthatItriedtodothisisimportant.I{t}^{\prime }simportanttoseepeoplefightingagainstinjusticeandfightingforgoodnessandfightingagainstevilandcallingoutevil.Thewoma{n}^{\prime }sevil.Iknowsh{e}^{\prime }sevil.Sh{e}^{\prime }sclearlyevil.Sheknewwhatshewasdoing.Shediditanyway.Shemadefoolishstatementslikeyo{u}^{\prime }llneverseethisdocument.And{I}^{\prime }mlike,well,yo{u}^{\prime }regonnahavetofileitwiththecourt.SoIthinkIwillseethedocument.Thankyouverymuch.OfcourseIdidseethedocument.Andyeah,shedid{n}^{\prime }twantmetoseethedocumentbecausesheknewitwasforgedandincorrectandinvalid.Well,ofcourseyoudo{n}^{\prime }twantmetoseetheinvaliddocumentbecausethenyouknowyo{u}^{\prime }regonnalawsuitonyourhands.Nokidding.Gosh.Yeah,yeah.Andthenpeopleaskme.Ther{e}^{\prime }salotthere,Mark.Ther{e}^{\prime }salotthere.Andthenpeopleaskme,oh,doyouthinkpeoplejusthavegoodintent?No,Iknowtheydo{n}^{\prime }t.Andifyoudo{n}^{\prime }tknowthat,orifyouca{n}^{\prime }tbelievethat,yo{u}^{\prime }redelusionalandyouneedtowakeup.Youneedtotakeactionintheworldtostarttopreventthisstuff.Weca{n}^{\prime }t,wecannotletthisgothisway.Whatdestroyscommunities,right?Thingsofthisnature.Thegeneralleveloftrust.Thegeneralleveloftrust.Howcanwetrustpeoplewhenwehavebadpeoplew{e}^{\prime }redoingnothingabout?Andtha{t}^{\prime }sateverylevel.Look,youcanlookatmaybethePresidentoftheUnitedStatesdoingbadthingsorZelensky,right?WhosaystheUSalsoneedstosendtheirsonsanddaughterstodieinUkraine.No,theydo{n}^{\prime }t.USdoesnotneedtodothat,dude.Youdo{n}^{\prime }tneedtodothat.Youcouldstopthewartomorrow.Youpieceofgarbage.Youknow,h{e}^{\prime }snotagoodperson.Hewasneveragoodperson.Sleepyjar.Now,ther{e}^{\prime }sallkindsandther{e}^{\prime }s,look,Fauci,Iamscience.Okay,yo{u}^{\prime }reontreasonchargesnowbecauseyoucommittedtreasonagainsttheUnitedStates.Youknowhowscienceare,youbuddy.Whyarewelettinganyoftheseguysgetawaywiththis?Ido{n}^{\prime }tunderstand.Weshould{n}^{\prime }tbelettingthemgetawaywiththis.Ther{e}^{\prime }saPentagonofficialwhoadmitted,ohyeah,headmittedthisonfreakingTV,onthenews.Hegoes,ohyeah,NancyPelosicametousandsaid,isthereawaywecanstopTrumpbeforetheelection?Andyeah,technicallytha{t}^{\prime }sacoup.Shetriedtostartacoupandhelaughsaboutit.And{I}^{\prime }mlike,dude,yo{u}^{\prime }reanPentagon.Youshouldhavearrestedherrightthenandthereandsheshouldhavegoneupontrial.Tha{t}^{\prime }streason.Period,endofstatement,fullstop.ForgetaboutanythingDonaldTrumpdid.Tha{t}^{\prime }sactualtreasonagainsttheUnitedStates.Tryingtodoacoup,askingthemilitaryastheheadoftheCongress,askingthemilitarytointerveneinanelectionisacoup.Period.Whyisherunningaroundfree?Sheshouldbeupontreasoncharges.Whatthehel{l}^{\prime }sgoingon?Thisis{n}^{\prime }thard.Noneofthisishard.Allthatmoneystuffthat...Okay.Alltheallegationsofinsidertradingthatgoonwithher,putitthatway.Ohyeah.Yeah.Well,h{e}^{\prime }satotalscumbag.Yearsago,Ithinkitwasinthe90s,herhusbandownsinterestinGuam.Andsotheywerepassingaminimumwagelaw.AndtheminimumwagelawgenerallyappliestoGuam,whichisaterritory,i{t}^{\prime }snotastate.Andshetriedtogetitexempted.And{I}^{\prime }mlike,youshould{n}^{\prime }tevenbeallowedtovoteonthat.I{t}^{\prime }saconflictofinterest.Whyarewelettingthishappen?I{t}^{\prime }sherhusban{d}^{\prime }sinterest.Well,thentheydonothing.Thisistheproblemiswedonothingaboutit.AndthenwhensomebodycomesalonglikeTrumpandstartstodraintheswamp,goodforhim.Hetriedsomething.Hedidsomegoodwork.Itdid{n}^{\prime }tgofar.HecouldhavelistenedtoSteveBannonbecauseSteveBannonwouldhavehadpeopleupagainstthewallforsure.AndIwaslike,yes,le{t}^{\prime }sputpeopleupagainstthewall.Tha{t}^{\prime }swhatweneedtodo.Weneedtocallthemoutandgetridofthem.GetridofFauc{i}^{\prime }scushyjob.Trumpwasright.Trumpwasright.WhenhewantedtoreopeninEaster,Iwaslike,yes,youshouldreopenonEaster.Tha{t}^{\prime }swhatyoushoulddo.Andthentheysomehowconvincedhimnotto.Andthatwasabigmistake.Heshouldhavestuckbyhisguns.Hewasright.Heshould{n}^{\prime }thavelistenedtothosepeople.Ther{e}^{\prime }sallkindsof,soJesse,therewasthiswholedustupinGeorgiaovertheelection,right?Now,asidefromtheeightandahalfhourvideothatactuallyliterallyshowsandprovesfraud,100$5,000 for 10 nights. Yeah, but and I got so the pictures on the wall, those are actually from my Nikon camera. I sat out for an hour with the Nikon taking pictures of the sunset over the ocean, in the north shore of Hawaii. I never got, it was too, I didn’t wake up. I was still having problems. I was still having problems waking up in the morning. I never got a sunrise picture, which is what I wanted. And at that resort, you can see both over the ocean. It’s at the right angle in Hawaii that you can see the sun rise over the ocean and set into the ocean. My favorite. Yeah. Yeah, it’s called Turtle Bay, the Turtle Bay Resort. It’s super expensive. But if you go to Hawaii, you can afford to go to Turtle Bay. Highly recommend. See if you can, you know, and we get good weather. Like we got really lucky. You have to get lucky too. Romance Beanie negates the nickel question. OK. We don’t need a nickel question for Jesse. But the cursed nickel question is an interesting question because it helps us to determine where somebody’s stuck. I could talk about my romance if she wants. But we’ll talk about the nickels just as much. What would you do within? I had actually wondered about this because I think people watch her films. It’s like you go here. Well, look, here’s the problem, Jesse, that I have. I’ve been having this fight with Sally because sometimes she’s wrong about something. The original formulation was better. What would you do if I handed you a cursed nickel? The personal connection. That’s the sneaky proposition. Because that’s what you’re doing there. You’re taking it away from the object into the personal connection. Well, you’re adding a bunch of things in that matter for the answer. So yeah. Because I’ll give you one trick right away after you get an answer. And I’ll tell you what. Because we have one person answer this. I would tell it the wrong way immediately. You could make a wish with it, actually. So you could try in the Christian sense to use it as a force for good. So no one has access to it anymore because in the wishing well. So it depends on what your metaphysical beliefs are. You would throw it in the wishing well. Is that your answer? You could. Well, you could. It’s one thing. No, I want your answer, dude. It’s a personal answer. I can do a cursed nickel. What do you do with it? My original answer was you could plant a tree with it. You could literally just bury it in the ground. Forget about it. No, that’s a good answer. That’s fine. For the sake of conversation, let’s go with answer two. You try and redeem the object and you throw it in the wishing well. That’s great. Well, that tells us a bunch about you. What if somebody said, how do I know it’s cursed? Now what do you know about them? How do you know it’s cursed? Well, no. So if somebody, if you have a human being whose answer is, how do you know it’s cursed? You know a bunch about them immediately. They’re a rebel. They’re going to cooperate. Do you like coffee or tea questions? No, no, look. They entered into the question, and they immediately rebelled against it, and rebelled against your authority in claiming that it’s a cursed nickel. So they want to cooperate with you, but they also want to rebel against your framing immediately. What do you mean? How do you know it’s cursed? So you’re questioning my authority, even though you entered into a game with me where I’m the authority because I asked the question. Like, what’s that about? You can see psychologically there’s something going on. And then I think it was Manuel answered that he would keep it. And Sally interpreted that as, oh, you’re keeping it because you want to keep it out of somebody else’s hands. That’s good. You wanted to redeem it. That’s good. See what I mean? You could tell. Or if they say, bah, nickels cannot be cursed, right, you know something about them, they’re materialists. You can find out all of these interesting things just based on how they answer that question. One small quote. That’s interesting. Isn’t it fascinating? He’s telling her about this. I’m going to use that now. I’m going to use that now. You should. We’ve been trying to come up with a list. I don’t know how much of a list we have. I have an argumentative one where I say something ridiculous like there’s no such thing as pop punk. Pop punk music doesn’t exist. And then they have this category chaos. They’re like, no, it does exist as a category of music. No, you can’t have pop music and punk music in the same thing because they’re two completely different sets of patterns of music as well as traditions of music as well as types of people. Basically, it’s pop music, but you just don’t want to admit that it’s pop music. You want to be just edgy or something that’s black, white, and pink. Yeah, exactly. How people talk. Well, how people talk and how they frame things tells me a lot about them right away and tells me that they’re stuck. So if somebody starts going on about dopamine and won’t let it go even though you prove to them, no, no, dopamine is not the thing, then you know they’re stuck in a materialist frame and that they’re looking for material to manipulate them in the world. It’s like, yeah, but material doesn’t manipulate you. It influences you, but it doesn’t manipulate you that way in the world. And so you have to back them out a certain way and hammer. You see how I do it. I just hammer people on stuff. Yeah, but that’s not true. We know that’s not true and now what? Because it’s like, what are you going to do when you realize that materialism isn’t serving you? Because it’s not. Because science basically tells you materialism is going to serve you. We’re going to use science to make material. It’s magic. We’re going to use science to make materialism serve your ants. It’s like, no, you’re not. One of the things I do, and I’m not sure if it’s the right move or a move I should always do, but I always try and enforce some sense of authenticity. I say, OK, you said something. I can talk authentically on this. So I want to call you on that because what you want is intimacy, right? You want a genuine connection and a general communication. It’s like, OK, so you said porn. Great, that’s a buzzword for me. Where I go, I can talk confidently on this. I can actually help you with this. And so great. And he gave me the first flat answer. I was like, no, bullshit. Go further. You’ve got further. It’s an issue. It is an issue. He’s like, oh, it’s not an addiction. I’m like, well, now you’re fighting me with the terms about what is an addiction, Mike. So it is an addiction. So you do have a problem with it or you had a problem with it. You haven’t dealt with it because the root of the problem is not the actual behavior necessarily. So you’re dealing with all your beliefs and everything you’re bringing that’s causing you to make these actions, to have that sense of real relief, which is what you think is the materialistic pleasure that you’re getting out of it. It’s like, oh, I do porn because it gives me dopamine. It’s like, no, no. You do porn because you’re living in a bad story. And you feel like you’ve got the weight of the world on you. And so that’s your means of escape. And we can help you with that. You can learn to not escape the world. That’s what I would say to Mr. Blue Jay. If he’s still listening or wants to listen to this, you can learn to carry your own burdens. It’s tough. It’s brutal. Mark’s been through a bunch of different things. I’ve been through a bunch of things that I haven’t. But you can actually learn to walk with the weight of the world on your shoulders. It is possible. Right, right. Yeah, no. And you need help. And you need a framework that helps. And so you need some big framework, like a religious framework, instead of some small framework. That’s why I think culture war isn’t a war for different types of culture. It’s a war for culture or no culture. Because BLM is not going to hold the culture. Climate’s not going to hold the culture. These things are not big enough frames to hold the whole culture together. They’re not big enough to have a culture. They’re only parasitic little cults. I also found it weird that I got pushed back on the idea that, OK, he says he wants kids. I was like, you’re not going to have kids, because you don’t have a relationship. Yeah, and they’d be like, oh, so you need to focus on yourself to build yourself up. I’m like, no, no, no, no, no, no. That’s not how it works. You get yourself enough together to get into a relationship, then you have or just be in a community, which is not the word for relationship, really. I’m in a relationship with Christina. But it’s also a community of two people and no more, because that’s the rule we’ve defined. That’s what we agree with, helps our relationship. This is a small community of two people. We happen to live with each other and share values and see the best and worst in each other and try and help each other. And ultimately, that’s actually grown me up the fastest. I’m still a child in some ways and trying to deal with that. Right. Well, if you’re trying to be ready to have kids, you’re screwed. You cannot possibly. This is the lie of informed consent. You never have informed consent for doing anything ever, because you never know how things are going to end up. And it’s always a problem, right? Because then you’re always like, well, had I known I was going to feel bad after this thing happened, I wouldn’t have done it. Really, genius, thanks. That’s like every other decision I make in my life. Like, get over it. Like, stop crying. And we keep coming up with excuses for that. Like, oh, I don’t think I’m ready for kid number three. I don’t think I’m ready for a relationship. It’s funny. So there was this, there was on Bridges of Meaning Discord, there was a marriage crisis chat. And what we figured out was these people didn’t have a marriage crisis, because the marriage crisis chat was basically people who were married who were struggling and wanted to talk about their struggles. And then all a bunch of MGTOWs and other people come in and they’re like, yeah, you know what the marriage crisis is? Women won’t marry me. And that’s the real, it’s like, no, dude, that’s not what this is about. What you’re describing is the dating crisis. And then of course, Sally Jo, being a brilliant self, says, no, no, they don’t have a dating crisis. They have a hello crisis. And then it’s like, yes, they won’t even say hello to a woman. And they’re worried about the marriage. It’s like, dude, you’re skipping a few steps here. And then people don’t understand what’s really going on. So I’ve complained about this before, but it’s worth, it bears repeating. So somehow when things don’t get the appropriate response, you don’t get that moment. So ages ago, although I don’t think it’s changed much, I used to read a lot of the dating profiles. And these women would have dating profiles. They’re like, I don’t cook, I don’t clean. I have my own house and my own career. Don’t clean. Right, and then it’s like, well, what exactly are you bringing to the relationship? Because right now I can buy that cheaper elsewhere. So, and they don’t, I don’t think they realize it. And then there were a few instances of this where they would go, I don’t want you to be like the last loser that bumped out on my couch. And it’s like, well, you kind of, if you wanna have somebody with you, either you’re moving in with them or they’re moving in with you. And if you’re the one going, I have my own house, I have my own car, I have my own job, then why wouldn’t somebody move in with you? Like where’s their motivation to provide for you if you’re bragging that you provided for yourself? And they didn’t understand the signals they’re sending. You’re telling somebody to come in and live on your couch and not work. You’re telling them that. And then you’re upset when they do it. It’s like, well, listen, honey, I got news for you. And people don’t get it. It’s like, this is the way people are thinking about things. And the number of people I would talk to and they would be like, well, I don’t cook. And I’m like, oh, really? Well, how do you eat? And they’re like, are you saying you cook? And I’m like, well, of course I cook. How else do you eat if you don’t know how to cook? Like, what are you doing? Are you actually just eating out all the time? It’s hugely expensive, like not recommended. Yeah, so that’s a bunch of different things. Also, just right there, you have no actually end goal. You have no big goals in your life if you’re constantly eating out. What are you putting your money towards? Right. And so, they’d be shocked. And I’m like, well, what the hell’s wrong with you? I don’t, and then they’d be like, well, why don’t you wanna be in a relationship with me? And I’m like, are you kidding? Because you bring nothing to the table. You’re offering me literally nothing. I would have to do all the cooking. You say you don’t even clean. I’m not doing all the cooking cleaning for two people. Do you clean yourself? That’d be my first smart ass answer to the mic. So you clean yourself, right? The other things you have to offer, I can get on an as needed basis for a small amount of cash. Like really, at that point, like what are you saying about yourself? And do you realize that’s what you’re saying? Like, do you even understand that you’re only, and then women are like, well, I don’t understand why men only want one thing. You’re actually only got one thing to offer, honey. I don’t know what to tell you. Like what is wrong with you? There’s also, I think it’s maybe it’s a logical fallacy. Is that, well, it’s a logic fallacy in the sense of the framing that you have to be all put together in order to be in a relationship. So it’s like, perhaps it’s better for you to be slightly chaotic and get into a relationship because then you both, you two have something to work on, something to do together in some sense. It’s like, she’s probably not that good and maybe I can help her. Maybe at least we can participate in something. Well, you can grow together if you both need to grow. If one of you thinks you don’t need to grow, then the odds are you’re gonna be a tyrant in the relationship. And that’s how that happens. The tyrant in the relationship is the one that believes they got nothing to grow on. They’re like, I’m done, like I’m finished. That’s why you need to listen to me because I know what I’m doing, because I’m all together. It’s like, that doesn’t sound like a good relationship to me, but I understand why people get caught in it. But they don’t even see it if that’s what they’re signaling. Like they don’t understand the signals they’re sending out. Signals, yeah, maybe that’s a video I should. I had thought about, okay, this is a really strange connection. I wanted to do a small, and still think, I will do this, I think, as part of my waking to the muppet crisis micro podcast, I’m seriously, I have all these observations. Maybe I could distill them down into like little two minute videos. I wanted to do a whole series on the signals in Fast and the Furious. I wanted to go through all the little signals in Fast and the Furious and trace out, basically all those movies are about global homogenization. Like the first movie is authentic, and by the time you get to Fast 9, you’re like, who are these people? What is this about? Are they in the CIA? Who are they working for? What’s, it’s completely not about cars. It’s not about the characters. What is literally just action stunt, action stunt, get to the next, it’s crazy. But people, it’s the biggest movie franchise now of all time, I think, if you stack it up. It’s like in terms of franchise, I think it’s just- The first one was a really good movie. I love the first movie. I don’t like it anymore. We just watched it, yeah. I think number five’s okay, but it’s a real 70s, dirty, sort of like hard-hitting movie. We haven’t gotten there yet. We just finished Tokyo Drift the last night, and I pulled it. I do this bad habit. If I’m not enjoying a movie, I’ll just start pulling it apart in front of her. I’m like, look, what is this? This is not the, no, no, this is not on. I’m like, oh, did you notice the emphasis here in the 2000s already on social media? I’m not walking with you. If I don’t enjoy it, as if I don’t enjoy it. I’m not taking a chance on that. I can’t introduce you to real genius. You might pick it apart, and I have to kill you because it’s a hysterical movie. Real baby geniuses or real geniuses? No, real genius. What’s real? I haven’t seen that. It’s an 80s film. It’s fricking hysterical and fantastic, and it’s based on, it’s set in the West Coast, but it’s actually based on MIT. Okay. Well, to be fair, I only do it with Christina, but- Oh, great. You only make her suffer. I’m sure she likes hearing that. Oh, well. It’s true. She has to put up with you. Oh my goodness, how does she do it? You’re so imperfect. Can you be perfect before you even know it? She’s really flexible. No, no, I told you, I’m still a child in some ways. I’m calling myself a muppet, of course. I’m still working a whole bunch of things out, but we have that mutual trust, and that’s the most, and you have to, if we didn’t go to Japan together, we would not have that mutual trust when we were separated. I had to be here in Sydney. She had to go back to Canada because of her visa, and we had, she flew here twice, and that was great over the nine-month period, and we just had to work out, okay, a relationship like this online, hey, we’ve been dating for six months. We went to Japan at the end of that year. We had three weeks of intense getting to know each other then, and it’s like, okay, it’s Valentine’s Day. You’re literally leaving the day after Valentine’s Day, and I’m driving you to the airport. We’ve had the best date ever, and now we’re having the worst day together the next day, and you have to go. It’s like, I don’t want you to go. She doesn’t wanna go. It’s money and visa, and we’ll work it out, and so high trust, that became the key lesson. You have to learn to trust the other person, and yeah, it’s a thing that’s lacking with millennials. We just don’t trust anything. We’ve taken on that Gen X jaded nature, and kind of, sorry, I know you’re Gen X, but the jaded Gen X thing, we’ve adopted that as the norm, and it’s not the norm. The norm should be, you should be able to live in harmony with people in some sense, or the goal should be to live in harmony with people, and just try and trust them. Great that it worked out for you. Yeah, I tried something similar, it didn’t work, but there were, yeah, it was a trust, and you know. Exactly, it’s tough. I got lucky in some sense, I’ll go blessed in some. Yeah, no. I recognize that. No, that’s fantastic. That’s great. We make something like that work that’s really special. Yeah, and there’s no formula. It’s like, you can have the big fight, and then the big get back together online, and the whole thing, right? You can have really great experiences, because I went to Croatia, and then I went to Scotland, and it was really nice, right? And then, yeah, if the other person can’t break free of whatever, then the trust is gone, and it’s all over, and yeah, yeah, it’s hard. It’s hard, and everybody wants their perfect person. It’s like, there’s no perfect person. Oh, like what? Oh yeah, whenever I heard that, I’m like, who talks like that? But they do, and I was like, what? Like you’re trying to find your person? Like what the kind of thinking is that? Is that even thinking at that point? I don’t understand. It’s crazy. My dad’s only one dating advice to me that I’ve actually remembered, or maybe the only one I care to remember, was he’s find someone who’s the appropriate amount of flexible for you. Oh, there you go, yeah. So I think that was, I was like, yeah, because you can find people in being in relationships with people like, okay, you’re kind of flexible, but maybe it’s so much in that give and take, but you need, in a romantic relationship, you need to have that, okay, I really can be flexible with this person because things happen. And that’s the problem with online dating, which Sally just said earlier, is it filter? Yeah, it’s a filter. Like that is the problem, right? It’s the problem of how flexible are you? Like if you’re sitting there talking about, I have my own house and my own car and my own awesome career, where are you gonna fit into somebody else’s life? Because you’re not signaling flexibility, you’re signaling all the things, the material things that you have. And it’s like, well, what kind of a person are you? Like if you value being 15 minutes from work, it’s like, what, why? Like what, I don’t get it. Like, I mean, sure. Yeah, yeah. Well, you can do that, but you’re signaling your inflexibility. It’s like, well, that’s great. But like, do I wanna be around somebody that inflexible? Because I mean, maybe I do. But then they’re like, oh, the guy’s freeloading off me. Well, yeah, you’re inflexible, like he’s conforming to your world. You outlined your world and kind of indicated you were happy with it. And then he comes and lives on your house in your house and smokes pot. Well, why wouldn’t he? Like, I don’t understand. Like, it sounds like you’ve got exactly what you wanted. And of course you didn’t, and now you’re pissed off at him. You’re the one that sent the signal. Women are the ones that pick. Like the men don’t have any real choice. I mean, we have some agency, but really not much at the end of the day. I was gonna say that Sally Joe’s framing of the hello crisis, it goes both ways. Like you watch any of these old movies, they’re both, it’s not the guy, I’m not producing, sorry, is not pursuing the girl necessarily as they both just said hello to each other in some way. And then things start happening like Pride and Prejudice style. It’s just like, oh, hello, hello, don’t really like you. And then all of a sudden, no, actually I do. That’s that pattern’s universal. Actually all the good romance movies have that pattern. And usually first interaction is bad. It gets fixed later. They had some sort of jarring experience or someone was rude to somebody or whatever. And the pursuit continues for whatever reason or an accident happens and they bump into each other again and then it changes. There’s usually that element, if you go back in movies of 50s and 60s, there are romances that usually happens. That pattern plays out that way. And in a lot of movies that happens. It kind of happens in The Matrix. First, he’s just in awe of Trinity. Your Trinity? I thought you were a guy and all that. And then later on, it’s this whole connection. And there’s so many things wrong with that movie. I really wanna do a breakdown of The Matrix. Can we do it together? Can we do it together? Hold me up, because I love The Matrix, but I can also pull it apart just as much. I used to have the movie poster. That movie was an idol to me. I had the movie poster from the DVD store. The DVD store people. My dad knew that I was so obsessed with that movie. I came home from school one day and he torn it down in the typical Protestant sense. And I still don’t let him down for that. Literally every other Christmas, my dad just remembered he tore down my Matrix movie poster. And do you know how much that would be worth right now? But yeah. No, no, we could do that. That would be fun. That would take a little research. Did you see the Jonathan Pigeot breakdown? I had to watch it three times. Yeah, a few times. Three times I had to watch that. And then I watched The Matrix and I got more out of it. I think, so another movie that struck me too that I always really loved was Tron Legacy. Tron Legacy is absolutely fantastic film on so many levels. And then I rewatched it recently, like two months, three months ago maybe. Something like that was very recent. And it just like a bunch of stuff clicked. And I went, oh, there’s the rejection of individualism and Buddhism right there. Western Buddhism is denied in that movie. It’s a very Christian film. Very Christian. And it’s like, holy macaroni. I didn’t, I mean, I saw it before, but I didn’t, I own it on Blu-ray. That’s how much I own that movie. Right. And yeah, I mean, and I’ve watched The Matrix probably a hundred times. And I just, Peugeot’s framing sort of escaped me. But there’s certain things like they’d rather live in a dingy, ugly metal tube being chased around not a dead city, but the sewers of a dead city. It’s like, how low can you go by the machines? One critique too, that Neo never stops. He actually, Neo, even at the end of the film, he never stops tumbling down the rabbit hole. Cause there’s the whole thing about Alice in Wonderland. And he’s like, you know, how Alice goes from the top part down to the bottom and countering the world of shadows and everything. Neo never really, like that movie, if you take it as his own thing, cause the second or third ones are kind of their own thing. And I think that’s the best way to understand it. He never really escapes The Matrix. He ends The Matrix as just like a, basically he’s an agent now. He’s an agent. That’s one way to root. Like he’s tumbled down the rabbit hole so much that he’s become an agent. Like he has- He ends in The Matrix, breaking the rules, like Agent Smith does. Yeah. Yeah, and people don’t, they don’t recognize any of this. And they’re like, really? You’d rather live with a bunch of wackadoodle strangers in a totally diverse, grungy submarine underneath the ocean being chased by technology constantly, hunted down by an AI in the sewers of a dead city, then sit and eat a steak at a nice restaurant and be important. Cause I love steak. So I’m all in on the steak. Sorry, I’m not eating the goop. I’m not eating it. I’m not doing it. Well, like they never, I think it’s not until the- Have you seen the fourth one? Oh yeah, I saw them all. Yeah, so the fourth one is the, maybe I’m wrong, but I think the fourth one is the only other time they show you the process of freeing someone from The Matrix, which is what he ends the first film on, saying, I’m gonna do, I’m gonna have this new communist revolution. I’m gonna free the peoples. I’m gonna become the Uberman. I’m gonna, you know, like- Animatrix is all the things. Oh, Animatrix is great. Yeah, the Animatrix is great. Yeah, in some ways, the Animatrix is better than The Matrix. Yeah. I can stand behind that. I’m gonna put that out more, because I haven’t seen it in a while. It’s a good box. I should never have sold my box set. I went through a really bad phase of throwing out all my DVDs. What? I moved over here from Adelaide to Sydney, because originally born here in Sydney, and then my family moved to Adelaide, and that became Church Passes over there, and the Pentecostal Church. And then I came back here and did a bunch of different things due to music college and everything. But in that process, I came here and I was like, kept having to move around to different flat shares and everything. So I just got rid of all my DVDs. But since we’ve been together, I’ve been like collecting, because collecting as much as I can. But yeah, I got rid of my Matrix DVDs. I had the whole special edition box set with all the nerdy little interviews and all the Force of V things. Yeah, should never have gone away. I’ve lost all respect for you, Jesse. That was it. That was all of it. Fine. I never had the box set. I would have, I probably should have gotten it at some point. No, I just bought the movies individually. But I think the Matrix just has a lot of philosophy. And the second one has less philosophy, but deeper questions and way too many discussion questions. And the third one just has fewer philosophy thingies, but again, deeper questions. That’s the way I look at it. What’s the deepest question in the third film? Well, it’s all, oddly, the third film is correct. It’s all about cooperation and community. Oh, okay. Yeah, okay. Yeah. It’s that acceptance. You’re not getting rid of the Matrix. You’re not freeing everybody from it. That’s not gonna happen. Your communist manifesto from the first film was a stupid, idealistic, utopian dream. And it’s unnecessary. Instead, you can just get along with this enemy that you have, quote, enemy that you have. And come to some compromise and everything will be fine. I mean, in many ways, that’s really the end, right? And that’s why the fourth movie is an abomination that should be scrubbed from the planet. And the minds of all the people that saw it, in fact. Do a men in black on me, please. Please just. I know, I know, I know. Although I do wanna watch it. I do wanna watch the fourth film, at least the fourth film, I do wanna watch the fourth film at least one more time, just so I, it’s like, did I miss? Did I miss? Because I knew there was one moment with the French, they bring back the men, Merivincian, and they’re having this post-French critique, sort of Duchamp, you know, and what’s the other guy? The guy who used to like to do things in graveyards. What’s the guy? Who, Foucault? Derrida, Derrida. So Derrida argument, when they’re doing the kung fu, the kung fu’s crap, the argument’s crap, and then there’s a meta-argument happening outside of them. Like, I need to watch this again, just to make sure. Yeah. I don’t, yeah, I can’t. So you’re saying don’t even waste your time. I can’t even entertain that garbage. Well, it’s all people miss out. Like, I think, I think honestly, because Foucault and Derrida were just wrong. Like they were just writing garbage at some point. Yeah. Yeah, they were attention seeking, writing garbage. Because it’s so bad, people project into it. And so they, so everybody argues about, well, no, what he really meant was, and I’m like, this is mysterious. Like, if somebody writes a good point, and everybody argues about what that point is, then maybe they didn’t do that. Maybe that point didn’t happen, and you’re just arguing over your own projection, and that’s why no two people can agree. Ooh, that’s all of postmodernism, by the way. Like every postmodern thing ever written has that quality. Some other things have that quality too. It’s turning the dialectic on itself, actually. Yeah, that’s because Hegel was retarded, and that’s completely that simple. Well, you what? He was retarded, he was a three-year-old. I only know quotes from Hegel, and I’ve already read them. Breaking everything down into the thing, and it’s opposite, and then saying, oh, you turn it into this synthesis. It’s like, all right, well, who does that? Oh, well, it always happens to be you, doesn’t it? What a weird coincidence. It’s almost like you’re the smartest guy in the room. It’s like, oh, so now you have a method of making yourself the smartest guy in the room. That’s fantastic. I’m really happy for you, but also you’re an asshole, just to let you know. You’re an arrogant piece of garbage. So you can take your Hegelian dialectic and shove it with the sun, don’t you? And it all, see, now this is where it gets funny, right? Hegel’s just Socrates all over again. It’s just critique, critique, critique, argument, argument, argument, argument. Socrates never made- Okay, Mark, you said the loud talk out loud. Right, Socrates never makes a claim, and so nobody can use the Socratic method on Socrates because he just avoids making a claim. Look, I love Socrates. I use that trick all the time on all kinds of people. All the time, I use that trick constantly. People go, what about your religious affiliation? And I just refuse to answer. Why? Because I know the postmodern trick, and I know how it works, and if you don’t identify, they can’t get you. It’s that simple. This isn’t hard. This is a stupid game. They fool you into believing that you have to play by their rules, and of course, I don’t play by anybody’s rules, so you can go to hell, right? And then the funny part is, when people get upset, they’ll often try to trap me into answering, and I go, no, I’m just not interested in that. And then they scramble to get my attention again because they don’t want to break the intimacy, the connection, and I’m like, aha, who has who? Right? It’s like, that’s right, I’m in charge now because you’re asking for my attention, right? Because a lot of times, people want the passion too, right? They want that, they’re attracted to it, so they want that on their side. And when it’s against- They want the dopamine. They want the dopamine. They’re joking. I’m gonna dope slap you for that. Right, but they want something, right? And then they can’t, it’s against them, and then they like the rebellion, but they want the thing, but they want the rebellion, but they want the thing. So they get caught in the dialectic, and I don’t because I stand my ground. This is no dialectic, because I’m like, one of us is right, one of us is wrong. There’s no dialectic between right and wrong. One of us is on the correct side of this argument, and the other one is not. And I am happy to find out which one it is. And look, some of the time, I’m on the wrong side of the argument, and they’re not good enough to make their argument. Oh, well, you lose. Sorry, because I’m not out for truth. I’m out for truth, beauty, and goodness. And if it’s not good, because that to me is always my aim, then I’m not playing, like I’m not in. So I always put the goodness first, because I want to get the good. I’ll worry about the truth and the beauty later, right? Because if there’s not a truth there, it has to serve the good for me to see it, or for me to care about it, or for it to even exist. Because if it’s untrue and not good, I don’t care. And if it’s true and not good, I don’t care. So the goodness has to come first. So if you can’t win the argument, even if I’m wrong, we’re both not pursuing goodness anymore. You have to be pursuing the good, right? This is part of the trick. You want to defeat dialectic, that’s the formula. I mean, that’s not the whole formula, but that’ll lead you to the whole formula pretty quickly. It’s like, oh, you pay attention to the good and the beautiful, and you let the chips fall where they’re in a, and you don’t let your enemies identify you in any way, shape or form, or put you in a box. You force them to explicate everything. Right, okay. Right, taking notes. I’ll come back and listen to this later. The goodness is… Six hours in, Jesse. Just six hours in. I know, I know. The goodness is the hardest part to get people back. To get people back into a common sense of the good. I think that’s… Maybe this is me reaching for straws, but helping people to understand signaling may actually be one of the keys to that. Yes. If they can’t understand the signals that they’re receiving and sending, how can they understand what’s good then? Exactly. Yes, signaling is the most important thing. That’s why the model, if you look at the knowledge engine model, you should watch it again after this, actually. It starts with signals from below. It goes into perspective. And there’s a bunch of breakout for perspective. I gotta do more slides, one of these days. It breaks out into perspective, and then it goes into information, and then that information gets shaped into knowledge up above, into the four buckets. And that’s a negotiation. And then it gets the four buckets, gets shaped into one of the two buckets of knowledge. So it all starts with signals. And when we don’t discern signals, literally, these women are writing things that are signaling basically that they’re whores. And they’re not even understanding that they’re doing that. They have no idea. And it’s like, really? And yeah, that’s part of the discernment. But what am I doing when I confront somebody and say, no, no, no, you have to be true, good, and beautiful, or this conversation’s not gonna go that way. I’m using the Socratic method to point them at the fact that they don’t know what the good is. They don’t know what the true is, and that they don’t know what the beautiful is. That’s what I’m doing. I’m really not, like, this is not new. It’s just Socrates. It’s not John Brevecky’s incorrect anticipation of Socrates. I went over this earlier, he’s just wrong. Like, I don’t know what else to say, it’s just wrong. Obviously, observably completely incorrect, right? Socrates said, I know, I know nothing. And he acted like knowledge was not important. That’s why he did this. That’s what Socratic method is. It’s teaching you, you don’t know anything because you’re a Muppet. Well, obviously, I’m a big fan of explaining to everybody that they’re Muppets. That’s the whole Muppet thing. Like, that’s what you Muppet. Like, that’s why Muppet, right? You’re under control of things emerging from within you. Some of them, right? They’re causing you to do things, and you’re not paying attention to the signals either from yourself or the signals that you’re giving out as a result of being a Muppet. And so the world is acting in a way that you can’t understand and you’re trying to frame it with stupid things like politics and economics and other joy-filled frames. Right, well, there’s a ton of them. Yeah. Well, one thing I want… Yeah, gosh, clearly, the biggest symptom of them all. One thing I actually thought of doing, and I’m not sure. Again, just playing… I don’t… What I tend to do is I ruminate on things for far too long. And either then, if I keep ruminating on it, I can’t put a decent look about it. But for me, that’s how I work. Maybe it’s wrong, maybe I just need to try a thing. But one of the ideas I’ve had for the Merkur podcast was literally to listen to 15 minutes of awakening from the meaning crisis, make it a little bit more interesting meaning crisis, make a question and answer while I’m doing it, but then just do a reflection of did I understand what he said in the last 15 minutes or not, because he uses so much jargon. It’s like, okay, maybe that might be an interesting way to do the Muppet Crisis thing. That would be fun. Okay, John, it’s like, okay, you’ve talked for 15 minutes. What did I actually learn in the last 15 minutes? Because I’ve got to episode nine as like, he said so much, but I don’t know if I’m following it all. And I’m like, that’s part of the problem then. Like there’s 50 episodes. You should be able to comprehend. Like when you listen to Peterson and the Maps of Meaning, you get a good sense, you might not get everything, but you get a good sense of where everything’s coming from and how it all fits in together. Very tied together. Yeah, yeah. Well, Peterson’s doing a pragmatic thing, right? He’s perspective over years, right? And is informed by- Did John’s been working on this thing for a while, right, as well? The weakening from the meaning crisis thing? Or did he kind of pull it out of her? Well, but let me finish. I’m gonna go over the history that I know. So what Peterson’s doing, and Sally Jo again pointed this out to me, Peterson’s in front of a class talking to people while he’s making his argument. John’s argument, as far as I can tell, and I might be wrong about this, but actually probably not, because I’ve talked to Anderson Todd and Amar and some other people who are close to John. He’s been making that argument privately to other intellectuals. But what he’s doing is not pragmatic. He’s creating a science of meaning. I’m gonna stand by that forever. And it’s very useful. Obviously, I use it all the time, right? Framework and a bunch of language, right? And the reason why there’s a problem with understanding it is not just because of the density of material, which is way above the average college course. First of all, it’s already a length of two average college courses. But second of all, the density level, if you don’t sit and take notes and that’s not what you’re doing, you have no hope of really understanding what the hell John’s talking about. But also he has some very bad axioms in there that he states over and over again, like we can’t go back and we can’t live in a true old mythology, right? Those are the two big ones that I rebel against because I knew they were wrong instantly. And they’re wrong. Both incorrect statements. They’re just observable, they’re just wrong. He bases a lot of his progressivism argument on that. And I have a video on progressivism on navigating patterns, you can see, and it’s wonderful. Right? And because of that, if you’re not tracking the fact that those are starting axioms, you won’t be able to put together the whole picture. The science framework that he has won’t make any sense because the science framework is a progressive framework. It’s not just a framework for understanding, it’s also a framework for building. That’s why I think that’s why it’s misnamed, right? Because it’s called awakening from the meaning crisis, but there’s no from there. It should be called awakening to the meaning crisis. And actually, when I said that to Anderson Todd, he was like, hmm, right? They took it very seriously. They were like, oh, wait a minute, maybe you’re right. Because the awakening to is the meditation series and the cultivating wisdom series. Those are where the tools are, the practices, to help you with the meaning crisis in particular. And my argument is that doesn’t help because although John says communities ask six million times, he doesn’t actually talk about how to build communities, what that should look like, what good communities ask is versus bad communities ask because I think there’s both, right? And that gets into the postmodernism that he has because he takes the quote postmodern critique, which still is not a critique, see my video on postmodernism, too seriously, right? And he doesn’t understand. It’s not charismatic leadership. It’s not bad, it’s not narrative. That’s not what happened. That’s not what Hitler and Stalin did. The narrative thing runs me up the wrong way. The two worlds thing is also for me, just because on a personal level, you’re always in two worlds. Like once you deny two worlds, so you deny this whole Christian notion of born again. Like the sense that you make these fundamental changes in your life and there is the old world that you were living in because your consciousness changes, right, over time. And so there’s the world that you thought you knew back there and there’s the world that you’re living in now. And then he also starts the whole thing with the guard of the open future, which is like, okay, that’s how I got that name. That’s how I got that name. For him, the two worlds are the natural world and the supernatural world where the material and the ethereal is what I divide them into, right? And so that’s the ancient Greek conception. So on the one hand, he says, I like Plato, Platonic forms. And on the other end, he says, I wanna collapse that into the material world. And nobody notices that he’s doing this, by the way, but he’s doing it implicitly by how he’s framing things, by removing the two worlds mythology. He’s trying to collapse the Platonic forms into the scientific realm of materialism because he’s a scientist and all things are solvable with science according to science, which isn’t true, by the way. It’s just a lie that science tells everybody because they’re basically fundamentally have turned bad. They’re no longer good, right? And they’re no longer good because they’re no longer Christian, roughly speaking. When Einstein said God doesn’t play dice with the universe, that’s a very Christian sort of thing to say, right? Back then, 80% of the physicists, in fact, 80% of the people in science were Christian and 80% of the population was Christian. And that split is no longer the case. Now scientists are largely atheists who are claimed to be, even though that’s not a possible configuration, they’re just lying to themselves. And so science is no longer tilted towards the good because the thing that tilts you towards the good is ethics or religion. Religion is how you get a sense of ethics that you need all those tools. All the tools that John talks about are just Christian tools carved up. Say practices, ritual, writnar, steal the culture, all of these are just ways of carving up the Christian story, right? Or the whole of Christianity into pieces so that you can science each one individually. But like dissecting the frog, you have to kill the frog to do it. And you can’t resurrect the frog. Now you’re trying to do Frankenstein’s monster again and it’s going to be heartless. So no thanks, like, yeah. Heartless in all sense of the term. Yeah. Gosh, so much you said that. Maybe the point to end on is like, I always found it weird. This is one of the things I wanted to start my little pod with was this whole idea of frame breaking. These whole, one of these first axioms is right, is the nine dot problem. And he’s snuck out. And can he, in some sense, if I’m not sure if I’m going to say this all right, because these are all just intuitions that I’ve got, but he sneaks that in as an axiom very early on. And, but he doesn’t name it as an axiom, but he’s actually putting forth an axiom and he refers back to it as, oh, but you remember the nine dot problem you got to see outside of the frame. You’re like, this is itself a frame, which means it is an axiom, which means it is a tool that you’re using to try and comprehend the world with, which means it’s a worldview, which means that worldview has implicit assumptions within it. So. What is it? What is it? Yeah. What do you think it is? Postmodernism. It’s a denial. It’s a denial of the, all postmodernism is a denial of valid frames. That’s all it is. It’s just all that instruction is. It’s we’re going to take apart the frame, which you can’t do. It’s impossible. It’s an absurd word. It doesn’t work in language, right? It’s non-communicative. It’s really destruction. We’re going to destroy the frame. Why? Because we want our own frame. Because you can’t do without framing, right? They don’t say that. They never insert their own frame. So how do you defeat that? Because you’re always, they’re always claiming, and James Lindsay is really good at talking about this and the negation of the real video is an excellent video to watch. From my watch list, yeah. 35 minutes. The first 35 minutes is painful. After that, it gets really excellent. You got to listen to the whole thing though, because it just repeats itself about a million times. It drives me nuts. And that’s a quirk of mine. I know it is. People repeat themselves too much. When you are promising the utopia, it’s always in the future, but you’re always critiquing the current. Yeah. You’re always critiquing the current. And nobody can critique you because you’re not done yet. I’m not done building it, Jesse. You can’t tell me my new idea that I haven’t finished implementing is bad because I haven’t finished implementing it. And when James Lindsay pointed that out that way, I was like, oh crap, that’s really clever. So the postmoderns always have one up on you in that sense because they’re always claiming the synthesis that Hegel talks about, but they’re never doing it because they can’t. In some senses, like you never fire the marketing department because a marketing is like, oh, it’s just a marketing problem. We’ll just remarket it in a different way. I can make this cup with a picture of Elgin on it. No, I can’t. I can’t. I could hire a bunch of people to make cups and go out and get a picture and maybe put it on there. And then no one’s gonna buy it because Elgin’s not a very interesting place compared to say Waumea Valley in Hawaii. But I can make that claim. People can come up to me and go, it’s the entrepreneur thing and go, Mark, what are you working on? And I can be like, I’m working on a cup for Columbia. We’re gonna have Columbia’s landscape on a cup. And I can just keep saying that week after week, after week, after week and never provide a cup. And then they’re like, well, how good is the cup? I mean, it’s gonna be the best cup ever. Obviously, it’s gonna be a perfect cup. Like it’s gonna be the right size for your coffee and it’s gonna keep things just warm enough, but it’s gonna let you go down at the right rate. I can make all of those claims because when I finally get around to doing the synthesis, to creating the utopia that I’ve just described, it will have all those qualities. And then you can say, yeah, Mark, but it’s been like three years and you haven’t made a single cup. Like you’re no closer. And I’m like, no, no, no, I made all these cups. And they’re like, yeah, but none of those cups have Columbia on them. And they’re all kind of like standard mugs. And I’m like, yeah, but I have them. But how dare you critique them? Because this isn’t my final product. Why are you critiquing this product? It’s not, my final product’s not done. But the cups we have now suck. That’s why we need the Columbia cup. And I was like- It’s just a never ending circular problem. Never ending circle, you can never nail them down because they’re never done. And it’s like, okay, but like we have something now that kind of works and maybe we can fix it, but maybe- We can build on that. We can plan. Because then we don’t have to boil the ocean. We can just fix one or two things or tweak one or two things. Like, wasn’t that a better idea? But the postmoderns, they just want power. They say this explicit. The other trick they play is they say, life is just a battle for power. And the solution is you should take it. It’s like, wait, what? So it’s still a battle for power. It’s just who’s in power changed. That’s all they’re saying. They’re not giving you a solution. They’re proposing a problem and saying the solution is that you need more. It’s like, what, wait? And they call it revolution, but it’s really just perpetual war. Or reaction. That’s why the rebellion never ends, right? Well, yeah, that’s the other side of the thing. So just to say the same thing sometimes, which you just made me realize. But yeah, it’s good to heal that. It’s good to kind of validate. Sometimes I think, maybe you think you’re a bit like this, so you have the intuition. You’re like, okay, I need to see it. It’s like waking up with, okay, I know how to develop that intuition into a narrative now, because that’s the only way that actually embodies. The intuition has to kind of attach itself to something in order to be fleshed out. Look, you wanna explain it to other people, right? I mean, this is why the awakening from the meaning crisis series is so pivotal for me is because I’m like, wait a minute, you muppets are in a meaning crisis? Muppets don’t know how to get out of a meaning crisis? I know how to get out of a meaning crisis. I bet I can get any muppet out of a meaning crisis. Pretty easy, actually. I have all the tools at hand, right? But I couldn’t give them to anybody because there was no science of meaning. There was no framework and vocabulary that was struck about meaning with other people. So I would look at things and I would go like, how are you even stuck here in materialism? Don’t you, haven’t you gotten to the end of materialism and realized it sucks? Like I don’t, and then I realized people can’t do that. And I’m like, oh, this is why I lose people. Because I see these threads and they can’t follow along. So you watch Peterson, like I just watched Peterson, just like enthralled. I’m like, this is so beautiful. I do this all the time. This is so much fun, right? And the only reason why I was watching him was because I saw Kathy Newman interview. And I went, oh, that’s my trick. How’s he doing that? This is great. And then I thought about it more and I went, wait a minute, I can’t do that. I can do some of that, but I couldn’t do that good a job. And then I realized if I knew all of her questions upfront, in the order she was gonna ask them, I wouldn’t have been able to do what he did. And I went, teach me your measure. This is somebody using my tricks that I’ve never seen anybody else use and doing it better than me. And I was just like, well, damn, that’s pretty damn good. Let’s find out more about this guy. That’s how it all started for me, was that Kathy Newman thing. I was like, that’s amazing. And not that I hadn’t run across Peterson before, because I did actually. I just, you know, it’s partially like, oh, psychologist, eh, that’s one strike against you. Canadian, that’s two strikes against you. Todd and Harvard, yeah. No, I want nothing to do with you. That’s like the three worst things. That’s the worst combination of things in the world. Do you want me to talk into my personal Peterson stories? I don’t wanna make you jealous. I just, I have personal Peterson. Okay, so I like, I was, as you know, I did some of the, I flew to and got blessed to do the Peterson tour and take the book signing photos. It was called the math, the geek itself, just taking photos of the general event and everything. But I can tell you, I was doing my day job, knew that I was going to the Peterson on the Thursday night. The Thursday, it was Wednesday, I think, in London that came out, or it was a day or two, time difference, and I was doing my day job, sitting in a food court, knowing Peterson, I was gonna say you can take pictures of Peterson later, and then looking around the food court and seeing maybe one in every three people was watching that video clip that I had just watched of that Sally Newman thing, it was like, okay, I’ve somehow stumbled onto the global event and no one recognizes that this is a global event right now. Like this, yeah. And then it started to make me think about other things too happening in a sequence of networks and nodes and how, yeah, that really, that was fascinating. But there was only like 500 people in chat to it. Like it was not a big event. The first two over here was not big at all. I always find it strange too that I met John Aniston and he basically didn’t care and didn’t know who he was. So I was just like, oh yeah, you want to take a picture of him? Oh my goodness, that’s too funny. Because I don’t follow politics. I don’t follow Australian politics. I do more now, but at that time I was like, all right, guy in costume, guy in a suit, like you want me to take a photo with him? Super Australian dude. That’s like mega Aussie right there. Aussies just don’t care about nothing but their thing and that’s it, won’t pay attention to the rest of the world. It’s great. It helps though, it helps, it helps. Yeah, well Europeans in general are more focused. Like man, the music scene up in Scotland was all personal and private and around people in Edinburgh. And I was like, what? And they had all this wacky music I’d never heard and they hadn’t heard of any of the popular songs or even really famous songs that came out of England in the past 10 years they hadn’t heard of. And I was like, what the hell kind of weird box of universes is that? Amazing. It was so bizarre, but Europe’s like that. Whereas in the United States, you’re just kind of exposed, not everywhere, but a lot of people are exposed to a lot of things all the time. Yeah, well we’re mostly a defective US state at this point in terms of culture. Like anything the US does, we tend to follow. I don’t think Australia is that, maybe we could go into this offline. But yeah, I don’t think Australia is that. I don’t think it has as much of its own authenticity, put it that way, anymore. Yeah, not anymore. Yeah. Well we’ve warped the world, unfortunately, and that is the US fault. Yes, yes, it’s all concrete now, as I like to say. It’s all concrete. Gosh, we could keep going on. But yeah, the Peterson thing was surreal. It was surreal to me. Okay, so I don’t think I explained this last time, too. The same time that Peterson was doing his tour, Ed Sheeran was doing his tour of Australia. They’re literally playing it, like, it’s like two or three, yeah, if you want to talk, symbolism happens and synchronicities, that was crazy. You’ve got the complete distraction of the West and kind of like the hero of something. Of, you know. The soon to be hero. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I was like, this is crazy. Literally on the bus, I’m here on the bus with my camera and then most of the bus is full of people with Ed Sheeran t-shirts. I’m like, you guys are looking at the wrong answer. Like, yeah. Wow. Yeah, so particularly if you want to go down, Ed Sheeran is a good musician or if he’s got some sus beliefs and et cetera, et cetera. He could have been in the death tones. Yeah, whole bunch of different, no. Yeah, he could have been in one of the two bands. He could have been in some dark metal band, but he chose not to. Yeah, it’s, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that was, that was another strange thing that was happening. Because I was meeting people and I was doing, because I was excited and passionate and they’re like, oh yeah, I’m just going to Ed Sheeran and I’m from Sydney. I’m like, what? Like, what are you doing with your life? Like. They didn’t, yeah, they didn’t see any of it, right? Whereas I saw Tim Poole immediately. I saw Sargon of Akkad immediately. You know, not when they came out. I mean, Poole when he came out, but Sargon I got introduced way after 2014, right? But once I saw him, bang, he’s big. That’s it. I got a bunch of shirts that he was doing back in the day. I supported him, right? And I don’t watch him anymore, but I still pay attention to him. But well, yeah, the political stuff is just poison. I can’t, I’m too busy trying to help people. I can’t be bothered with, you know, because you take a lot of time to track that stuff. Yeah. It’s a crazy time. But yeah, that was, yeah, that’s a crazy time. Not sure how much more to go into things, but yeah, the Peterson tour was a very interesting, because I had to stop. I stopped and I just observed one of the first times in my life, I observed the country and the landscape that I was in. It was no longer just in Sydney. I literally followed a global event around Sydney and got to see and got to meet all these different people that I would never in contact. Like I talked to Tammy for a couple of minutes. Oh wow. That was intense. She’s a born intense lady. She is. Really? Yeah, she’s lovely, but she’s intense. What did you talk about with her? I just, I did the pleasantries, like how you, like, you know, like how was your flight and she started talking to things. And then she instantly knew that I was wanting more than that. And she said, she stopped the conversation. Like she just like, oh yeah, yeah, but we don’t watch that done. Next. Clicking. Oh, you’re trying to be real with me. And so you’re not making pleasantries to just be Australian. Like you, I’m trying to get your, so she got my attention that way. And we talked about, are you still there? Bye. We talked about, I think it was something to do with relationships. I think, yeah, I think I asked her like, how do you, I think I asked her something about how do you guys have a relationship? And she said, we learned to dance. I think that was something like that. I was like, okay. It was just such a, it was like, you know, two or three minutes, like just walking from one side of the arena to the other to go into the main hall. And I was just like, okay, that was intense. That was, yeah. So yeah. Interesting. Yeah. You have to be intense around, cause he’s a nut. He’s crazy person. Yeah. Yeah. Literally when I met him, like he was, he was in like a case, you imagine I’m this gullible, not quite a proper photographer yet. Coming in with my little cannon, just flown into Melbourne, coming in, coming a bit late cause it’s just traffic and everything. Cause I’m like, met the event organizer, who hadn’t, I only talked to him on the phone. So I met him, called him. I was like, hey, I’m here now. He’s like, okay, we’ll go upstairs and meet everyone. I was like, okay. So I’ve come in, it was, we go through all the levels all the way up to the top floor of the Melbourne arena. And then we went from all lights, all the typical, and then the back room where Peterson is in the beautiful scenery over Melbourne looking that way. And he’s in this dark room. All the lights are down. He’s on the couch with his legs crossed, like literally Freud, Freudian type like energy, eating like bacon strips. And he’s like, oh, hi, you’re the photographer. I’m like, it’s just intense. It’s just like, I did not expect, how do you Sam Powell, and he’s just eating bacon bits thinking, I’m like, all right, I’m gonna leave. You’re in deep thinking mode, I gotta let you go. So we, yeah, we bounced. So yeah, that was my first real interaction with the man. But yeah, that was something. He likes Sam Powell, so that’s a plus. Oh, definitely, definitely. Yeah. As I said, one of the best and most surreal moments of my life was being in a security elevator with him at almost one-ish in the morning, just going, what is life? Like, what am I doing here? How did I give those moments with like, how did I get here? Like, how did this happen? Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, so yeah, that’s, now I’m riffing, but yeah. Like riffing. No, that happens to people sometimes. They’re like, wait a minute, what led to this? Like what led to me eating ice cream and walking in Charleston on Tuesday, the last day of February, 85 degree weather, right? Just kinda hanging out. And it was a weird day, I saw a fireball in the sky and it was a strange, it was a strange, surreal day. And I don’t know what happened. I don’t know, like, I don’t know what to make of all this. Right? So yeah, you get those moments. And it’s like, what led to this? Peak awareness, peak awareness, yeah. Yeah. Well, you need those moments too. Those moments define you in some sense, because you can think back and it’s very, it’s very, very weird to have memories like that, that are not embodied in objects. Where you can go, I know what it felt like to be in the elevator at that time. Because there’s so much that happens week to week, what did you eat for breakfast yesterday and all that sort of things. But to go, that moment there, like I know exactly what that felt like, exactly where I was, what I was wearing, all that sort of stuff. Well, that’s the utility of liturgy. When you have a regular pattern, when you’re broken out of the pattern, when you’re doing that nine-gap moment, as John might call it, right? Then it stands out. But it doesn’t stand out if you’re always breaking the frame because you’re a postmodern idiot. It doesn’t stand out. Now you don’t know when you changed. You have no idea. And you don’t know what’s changing you. And you don’t know whether or not you’re still changing because you don’t have a liturgy to measure against. And one idea I’ve been toying with, which I’ll throw out now, why not? I’ll say it now. I was almost, yeah. We should be back real soon. I love these chats by the way, thanks Mark. Well, thank you, thank you for joining. I wonder if the fact that people won’t do banal, rote sort of regular work, like just the, you know, I won’t sit out in direct traffic or I won’t go and collect carts, is causing anxiety. Because one of the things I tell people is if you suffer from anxiety, do the zen sweeping thing, like literally sweep, right? And it’ll calm you down because the motion of your body, the dishes, it can be whatever, right? But having something where you’re doing a lot of muscle memory, your body tells your brain it’s okay and it’s safe physically. And then your brain calms down and that fixes your anxiety problem. But what if just having a boring job where you just come in and like type in a bunch of stuff, right, was also did that for you. And we need a certain amount of that per week in order to stay not anxious. Yeah, what’s most of our lives are entertain, like entertainment based, right? They’re all based on like phones and like, they’re all frame breaking devices. There’s your dopamine problem. Yeah. Okay. Well, that’s what they say. And it’s like, we got to some extent it is dopamine hijacking, but what’s really going on is you’re taking time, energy and attention away from the regular calming activities that anchor your life, that anchor your daily activity, that give you the contrast to appreciate the flowers outside, the hummingbird out the window, the dragon flies flying around the pond, right? The flower coming out of nowhere. Right, that’s, you know, all that’s important. I’m so surprised that this turtles just showed up in your pond, just magically. Turtles, they just show up and yeah, they’re wonderful. They’re wonderful little critters. Yeah, I mean, that’s, and that’s the thing, like, you know, Peterson talked about this, introverts need to go outside to recharge. And I’m like, hell yeah, why do you think I have 12 acres of land? That’s, and a pond, that’s why. This isn’t where I wanted to live. I wanted to live outside of Charlotte. Would have been an hour and a half for maybe an hour from mom’s house, right? But I was going to be outside of Charlotte. All the banks are there, right? In Charlotte, the only bank, the only city that has more banks than Charlotte is New York City. So it’s like the mini banking cap of the United States or probably the world. So there’s all this jobs out there. I could get a job in four seconds up there on one of the banks, piece of cake. That’s where I was going to move. But then when I saw this place and my mother found this place, not me, it was like five and a half miles from her house and it’s outside Columbia, which is kind of cool, right? But it wasn’t where I wanted to live. But then I was like, I can own a pond. Because on New England, you can’t own a pond. You’d have a million dollars from a pond and then you have to take care of a pond in the winter and it totally sucks. You don’t own ponds in New England, that doesn’t happen. You have to be wealthy. Down here, you can be a poor person and own a pond. It’s great. I could keep dragging this conversation on, but I feel like you need to sleep. I think we’re at a good point. So yeah, I mean, we’re thinking about, does rote work actually, or the lack of, actually contribute to anxiety in society in general? Because I think it might. I think there might be a connection there. It’s a new theory, but you know, I think it’s important to keep it. No, there’s a lot of things to it. As I said, these things, you know, these phones are all frame breaking devices. It literally is a broken frame. It’s because it’s constantly distracting you. If it’s not a mobile game thing. Because you get a notification and you don’t, it could be for anything. It could be an email, it could be a Discord thing. It could be a YouTube video. I don’t know what it is. And some of the notifications are a little bit different, but I can’t always tell. Sometimes I just know I got a notification and then I gotta go figure out what kind it is and whether or not I need to care about it. Well, like this is the other thing too, right? Like when you pick up the old school phone, you kind of, somewhere in the back of your brain, you go, it could be one of eight things, say. You go like, it could be good news, bad news, and then all the different variants of that. You know, you could get a notification. It would be like, oh, you’re time to play this game, right? Right? Not that I do that, but my partner, Christine has that. I’m like, don’t, don’t listen to the game. It’s just trying to distract you. She loves it, that’s fine. But I’m trying to point out, you could have those game notifications, but it also could be a notification saying, hey, call me, or call me because so-and-so just died. And you just like, that same device that was used for dopamine is now just changed, you know, it’s broken the frame of your own reality. And that’s something scary to that. Well, there’s too many frames in one thing. There’s too many, right? And now we don’t know what it is. This is why neoplatonism is dangerous. It’s actually a dangerous way to think about the world, aside from not really existing. It’s a dangerous, gnostic way to think about the world, because once you over-combine things, now you can’t identify them. This is too symbolic in a way. It represents too many different possible potentials. And so because it has so much potential, it has very little utility, right? Because- Strangely speaking, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It’s that paradox right there that shows you the limits of what you can do. And that is the problem. And- Also, yeah, yeah. Bringing it back to like the phones have been, this is a fake community, right? And it’s also the thing that’s probably damaged communities the most because everything’s externalized. Well, and you can have what you want when you want catered to you. At least that’s the promise. It doesn’t work out that way, right? And then we don’t realize that because we believe the promise rather than the reality because we’ve lost discernment. Also, the root work thing is like, there used to be far more delivery services in some sense. And those, you know, taking the milk around, the milkman was like the postman was another node of the community that kept everyone in together. He might not be delivering your mail, but he might stop in to say hi, or you might see him as he’s on his route. Now he’s on a motorbike. Yeah. He might tell you, oh, so-and-so’s having a hard time, right? All of these subtle signals that you can’t get through electronic communication were happening because of the interaction with people who were just visiting lots of houses, whether it was a salesman or a milkman or a postal man, whatever it was. And we’ve lost all of that intimate connection. It’s all gone. And so the community cohesion, the web of intimacy that holds the community together has been broken and it’s been under assault for years. We actually started watching, maybe we’ll end on this. I’m always gonna talk and bring movies in because movies have been my lifelong passion. Even though I love music, like you couldn’t stop me making music. I probably should have become a film guy, but music’s got me to a T. You can only follow two things at once. You can only do one or two things at once. That’s it. We started watching Assault on Precinct 13 last night with John Carpenter, with the John Carpenter score. Have you seen this? Right, so, okay. It’s basically the most ultra-violent take on Rio Bravo. Do you know of Rio Bravo with John Wayne and Dean Martin? Yeah. So basically they all get holed up in an old police station that the police station’s not meant to exist. And one of the controversies of the film, which I’ve never been able to work out when I watched it five or six years ago, was that at the start, one of the inciting incidences at the start of the film is a, I was gonna ruin it, but whatever, a certain person gets killed of a certain age and it’s really odd that it happens. But if you understand it symbolically, not literally, you’re like, oh, that’s the spirit of the 1950s and the 1960s just got assassinated. They miff off the community, the safe place that you could just go out, get ice cream. In fact, the character’s getting ice cream and that’s where they get killed. That’s all been destroyed now. It’s all been flattened out. They all have to flee to the broken down police station, AKA, yeah, the state of LA at that time, which is where it’s movies in. So, yeah, have a watch if you want a recommendation. But it’s a good film. It’s a little violent, a little bit rough for a B movie, but it’s interesting on a symbolic level. I will check that out. And on that note, I think we’re gonna shut it down or we’ll go forever. But I like this idea of collaboration on a matrix-y thing. That would be fun. Cool. Yeah, so let’s try to make that happen. And then, yeah, we’re working on some stuff. I got new branding coming. I took some photographs, because I’m a photographer too. I just have a real camera Nikon, not one of these crappy cannons. I’m actually super jealous of the cannons because they do the high dynamic range and I always wanted that. Yeah, fine, it’s great. When do you guys do your Mark of Wisdom Discord things, by the way? When do you have that? All the time. I’m on there pretty much all the time. It won’t be true forever. But look, we’ve got a bunch of text channels. We’ve got a bunch of art projects. So if you hop into the Discord Mark of Wisdom, you can ping me or whatever, or Manuel or Sally Jo or whoever. Hi, Ethan. Or Ethan, hey Ethan, good night. They can let you in, not a big deal. But we actually have projects going. We’re actually working on- I’m saying that, I’m in there. Yeah, yeah, including music and all that. So it’s an interactive place to build stuff and to get stuff going, not just talk. And we do have working channel and stuff like that. We do have a meditation hall that we’re not using because I’m lazy. But yeah, we are doing stuff in that Mark of Wisdom community. I’ve got the Mark of Wisdom community doc that I’m trying to work on although I can’t get any feedback from anybody. But I do chew on that every once in a while. So I’m trying to get that rolling because once we have that doc to the point where people can take it and run with it without needing me to explain everything long form, then I think that launches the real thrust, which is to get this community stuff down so that people can build wisdom communities. I think that’s the best way in. And there’s a bunch of theories about why, and I’m not gonna go over that on video for various reasons. But once that happens, I think that’s sort of the key to fixing, we’ll call it the Peterson problem where he’s leaving people off and the church isn’t picking them up or no one’s picking them up at this point. I think the wisdom way, the verveky format that I’ve sort of recapitulated in some sense, right? And revivified, I think that can really fill that gap for people and get them to the next level past the pragmatism of Peterson without falling into the romanticism of somebody like verveky that’s just too abstract. Oh yeah, I wanted to ask, maybe it’s another time. I wanted to ask why you use that romantic, because I love that painting. I love the Fridgick, Casper, no, yeah, the man standing over the, Wondrous standing over the cloud of fog, thinking the sea of fog. Yeah, that was the Gnostic thing. Why did you use that? Oh, that’s not Gnostic, it’s verveky. It is, no, it’s super Gnostic. Mystic. It depends how you wanna cut the Gnostic. Individual above everybody else. Oh, okay, yes, okay, yes. You mean the world clearly, and everyone else is hidden by the fog. He’s got the forbidden knowledge. What’s not Gnostic about that, Jesse? Okay, okay, yeah. If you explain it that way. It took me years to figure that out. And then one day I just looked at it and I went, what the hell? And I was pissed. I’m like, how did I not see this all along that this was John’s project was Gnostic? It’s right there in the image he chose. And I was just blown away by my stupidity. I’m like, man, that’s like next level Muppet right there. Yeah, Muppet confirmed. How did I not see it? It was right there the whole time. Man standing above the obscuring clouds that obscure everyone else’s vision, seeing the world clearly, objective material reality. I see it clearly now. I’m a scientist. I can see it. Let me tell you how it works. If you could be up here with me and see this world, you would agree with me and then I would be right. And I would be validated. And I would be in charge de facto. But I don’t have to claim that. I don’t have to make a claim because it’s objective material reality. So it’s not me. I’m not making that claim. Objective material reality is making it. And I’m just seeing it clearly. Oh yeah, it’s very, very sneaky, the objective material reality. Sorry. Yeah, passed me, but that’s for sure. Seven hours, Mark. Seven hours. Seven hours. I actually thought I was gonna leave out early. I was like, oh, probably need to get on with some other stuff today. On one Saturday. Now you’ve trapped me in. I really appreciate it. I ruined your morning, you ruined my evening and my night. It’s great. It’s perfect. Take care of yourself. I hope you’re super productive. I’m always grateful for your participation. I hope we get more participants in the community because it’s really important. And we’ll collaborate more and get more stuff done because somebody’s gotta do it. What’s the document that you need to put back on? Come on the server and I’ll add you to it. I’m on the server. Yeah, okay. Just ping me your email address on the server and I’ll just add you in and you can look at it and get some comments. I can spin you up a comment. It might not be helpful, but it might be something that leads you to a thought. It’s better than nothing. No, your comments are super helpful on my videos. All your feedback is really useful. So yeah, let’s do that. And anybody else who wants to join the Discord project or whatever, let me know. And then we’ll get more stuff running because I really do wanna get physical communities built with people meeting in person. And it’s only not winning the lottery that’s preventing me from flying to Australia and visiting, for example, and jumping around and visiting a bunch of other people. I wanna get out and see Ethan in his home territory there someday. And I’d still like to get out and see Vander Klown, even though he’s out of my favor at this point. I’d still like to get to Sacramento and visit Vander Klown and Joey. Of course, yeah. Yeah. So yeah, thanks everybody for joining. And we’ll do it again next week, probably, almost certainly. I’ll come up with another topic. We’ll see how close we can stick to it, but that’s not necessary. And have a great time. Ciao. Take care.