Culture Live Navigation! (E0Tt1NZf7Lg)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=E0Tt1NZf7Lg

normalmente pecada All right. We are live and everything is slightly different, but much better, I assure you. So what are we talking about today? Today we are talking about culture. Now I need to preface this because this came about sort of late in the week. We talk about culture. It’s like, oh, exciting. What does that mean? All right. And so our friend in the show, Jesse, said, oh, let’s talk about culture. And I went, that’s hard. I don’t know if I can do it. And then I said, well, you know, this is what the people want. Let’s give the people what they want. So we’re going to attempt to talk about culture. That’s what we’re going to try to do. And I started taking notes and working through this with the team, obviously, you know, Manuel and Sally and Ethan and Jesse and like all these other people that come in and talk to us about various things. And of course, as always, in strange fashion, right after this was sort of the decided upon topic where I’m taking notes, I oddly end up listening to VanderKlay videos, which I didn’t intend to do. And VanderKlay’s, you know, get his little consciousness Congress thing going. And then he makes a comment on culture. And I’m like, oh, that’s good. Let’s put that in the notes. So I have a bunch of notes on culture. And that’s what I want to start with today. And of course, as always, I’m going to do my little monologue thing. I’m going to read from notes, which is actually very unusual. I have like a full page of notes on culture. So we’ve done our research here as always. And then I’m going to open it up at some point. And if we stay on culture, that’s great. If we go to something else, that’s great. We’ll probably wander in and out as usual, this pirate navigation thing that we do, sort of ebbs and flows, right? Like a good navigation should. And so that’s where we’re going to do it. So let’s start. So originally, I wanted to talk about spirit, marketplace, egregores, and agents. And we get overridden into culture, which actually, again, I think is a really good idea. All of those things, spirit, marketplace, egregore, and agent, are elements of the culture, we’ll say, or elements within the culture. But the key fact here in terms of culture is that culture is bigger than you. You’re a Muppet. I’m a Muppet. We’re all Muppets. Culture is way bigger than any individual Muppet. Culture is something like the group of Muppets, a large group of Muppets, a very large group of Muppets. And this is why we see culture fractally. We see culture here, and then we see a mini culture there, and a mini-culture there. We see that. We see that. But by definition, we cannot understand we cannot understand culture ourselves, because it’s not contained within us, and it’s not containable within us. Not possible. But we can grasp the abstract. We can grasp the abstract concept of culture. We can deal with what it means, with how we fit inside of it, because it’s bigger than us. We’re interacting with it, and it’s a two-way sort of negotiation thing. And that’s something like intelligibility. The world is informed by people, by persons. And that’s what culture is. It’s the binding between the higher, the values, and the virtues to the lower, right, which is the material, the dead matter. So there’s dead matter, and then there’s these agents in the middle. We call them Muppets, right, persons, Muppets, same thing sometimes. And then those values and virtues that we’re striving for, that’s how the culture is manifesting, whatever culture it is. And I know that recently we’ve sort of been upset about culture, or talking about culture in a certain way, or engaging in this, like, what’s the culture of everything, right, this universalism? It doesn’t work. Cultures are separate and unique to the group. And again, it is fractal, so it’s not like there isn’t a larger sense of culture within some smaller, you know, or sorry, smaller sense of culture within some larger sense of culture. There absolutely is. But that’s not to say that a culture doesn’t exist, it’s not relevant, or that these things are the same. They’re not. Right? The culture of the southern United States is not the same as the culture of the northern United States. That is not to say that the United States does not have united cultural virtues and values. It does. But there are sub-virtues and values, and there are slight misalignments between, say, north and south. Those are things I know best. We could go into the Midwest, the West Coast, and, you know, yeah, we could do all that. I don’t think I want to, like, try to re-explain Colin Woodard’s excellent book, American Nations, which if you haven’t read it, you just don’t understand the U.S. Culture is the thing, right, that is being informed from above, right? The emanation is coming down. The thing that’s in the middle between the emanation and the dead matter is the culture. It’s not the only thing that’s there, right? And it’s being manifested by the persons, by the people, by the muppets. Right? Culture is all about cultivation. It is the thing that you do to the dead matter to cultivate reality, the world we live in, the stuff around you in the moment, stuff from the past, the stuff going into the future, all of that is relevant for culture. Culture doesn’t work in a vacuum. And that’s what culture is the way in which we avoid having the material world be merely dead matter and unmanifestable. It’s culture that does that. It’s the cultivation that does that. And it’s the container that allows us to cooperate because it has rules. It has laws. It has preferences. It has imperatives. It has hierarchy. The baseline assumptions, the axioms, the framing, the historical grounding, reason, right, which relies on those axioms and that grounding, authority and leadership, has all of these things. But really what it does is it gives us most of all is discernment. And someday I’ll cover discernment in one of these streams, but for now let’s just go back to culture as a method of framing, right, which allows for discernment. And we can cover discernment some other day when we’re ready. I think we need to talk about culture first because it does provide us contrast. The structures within culture provide us contrast. Where we’re at, where the boundaries are, to engage with the boundaries because you have to be able to see the boundaries to know where they are. And so those rules and that structure within the culture give you that contrast to engage with those boundaries, right? That’s actually a thing. Yes, Hanselman, anything can be named culture. Yeah, well, does it need a strict definition though? And I don’t think, until you’re tracking about a specific culture, you can’t give a strict definition. I think that’s the issue. But we’ll get there. Let me know at the end if you think I need better. And I will give more specific examples, but I do want to give an outline to say, I think people are really clueless about this. And culture corrupts. When it confuses, you know, this isn’t the only case where it corrupts. I’m not making an exclusionary argument. But culture corrupts when it confuses natural law, which is non-negotiable, no exceptions that are not also miracles, right? With the law of man, which are the rules of punishment, or the rules of engagement, or the rules of cooperation, right? Versus the laws of order, the imperatives. In other words, it’s important that you grow up in a certain way, in a culture, for that culture. It’s not say you have to do it, let’s say you will do it. It’s to say that for the culture to survive, there are certain imperatives. Those are not laws, and those are not rules, right? And those are not natural laws, right? They’re not the laws of man, right? They’re just imperatives. The imperatives change over time, and they can be right or wrong, like, like, you know, like all the lesser stuff. Matter is not right or wrong. We make matter right or wrong. The deep confusion of icon and idol. And rules themselves need exceptions to exist, right? But there are rules in your culture. But the fact that there are rules means there are exceptions. Because rules don’t make any sense without exceptions. And that’s why we’re doing this. Because rules don’t make any sense without exceptions. You say, well, you’ve broken the rules. Maybe. But in order for the rule to be made explicit, to be known and understood, I have to break it. You have to break it. It’s not an optional component. And that’s part of culture. Culture determines those rules. Like, in some cultures, right? Like, touching somebody is against the rules. Right? In other cultures, touching somebody, especially when you meet them, say, by shaking their hand, is required. It’s a show of respect. I trust you enough to reach out my hand, have my hand shake yours. Right? You go to Japan, you’re supposed to bow. These are differences. They’re huge differences, but they’re cultural differences. They’re not differences in people. They’re differences in how subgroups of people interact with one another as the result of the cultural norms. Cultural norms, the norms come from the culture. Right? And you can go outside the norms. Culture isn’t some magical force that’s restraining you at every turn. You can leave your culture. You can go find another culture. That’s actually Colin Woodard’s excellent book, American Nations, talks about a lot of America, unlike Europe, people would leave the culture they were in within the United States and go to a different culture that suited them better. That was part of the early success of the U.S., I suspect. It certainly looks that way. And the reason why culture is important is because you don’t have the option of treating the world as if it’s dead. You only have the option of destroying what others have built. Right? Or building stuff up. Right? Are you destroying, maintaining, or building? Three things, not two. Three things. And that’s important. It’s important to understand that. And this may seem like a segue, maybe it is a segue. Heroism, the idea of the hero itself, exists independent of destruction, maintenance, and building. A hero can be somebody who maintains. Goes to work every day, makes sure your plumbing works, or your electricity, right, whatever it is, right, runs a plant that, you know, runs the boiler for the plant, you know, runs the boiler for the plant that makes chips for your computers. Whatever. They’re heroes. Some heroes destroy. I mean, you’ve got to destroy the city of Troy. It’s still a heroic battle. Is it a heroic battle because he wins back the woman? Kind of. But it’s a heroic battle full of heroes because they raised the city. Right? Or you can be a hero in building. And you can still venerate, and in fact, I’d argue you have to venerate, a good hero. A good hero might destroy, but for the reason of the good. See what I did there? Like, destruction can sometimes be towards the good. If there’s a corrupt thing, it needs to be destroyed so that it can be rebuilt. It’s not in all cases. I would argue that’s like, and only a hero should do that. Like, you shouldn’t think you know when that is, or why that is, or how to do that. That’s dangerous thinking. And you don’t need to. Right? You can wait for a hero, right, or try to encourage a hero, right, or try to invoke a hero to help fix it. Or the hero may build, but it may be away from the good. Like, if you build the gulags, you know, that’s not towards the good. That’s really important. But you can be heroic in the action, even if it’s a bad result. I mean, that’s why we venerate people who build things even when they turned out to be bad. Because the act of building in and of itself is above average. It’s heroic. And that’s why we venerate people who build things. It’s heroic. And this is where, you know, this is where it gets tricky like, oh, well, look, I mean, the guy built something terrible. Yeah, but he had good intentions. Well, maybe to know. And so you can’t just look at the end results to know anything about the world. That’s why you venerate the people who merely built. But it matters why somebody destroys. That actually makes a big difference. So these are the things we have to work out, because to gather a group, move a culture, is already a heroic act, even if you get it wrong or bad things happen. It’s asymmetrical. Right? We have to keep making sure that we’re destroying the bad things, maintaining the good things, and building new good things. We get all three of these things wrong all the time due to our lack of discipline. All the time, due to our lack of discernment, due to our failure to engage properly, due to tons of other reasons. It’s inevitable. And we need to accept that there’s no way around that. Give credit to culture, to those in the culture. The culture is the manifestation of the spirit of the people within it. Even those who are rebelling against it or identifying against it, the culture gives us a standard to determine these things, a contrast for discernment. We can agree on this standard to either modify it, conform to it, or at least call out things outside of it, if not make laws against those things. Right? We can set up the laws. We can set up the rules. We can set up the imperatives. They’re all separate items. Don’t collapse them. Don’t live in a flat, disenchanted world. And culture needs to be appreciated for giving us that container that we can manipulate. It needs to be given the gratitude and respect for providing us a way to cooperate, because it is the way to cooperate. Culture is the way to people in a region cooperate. Not only within the group, but also with outside groups. Some cultures are very closed. Some cultures are very open. It doesn’t necessarily matter. I mean, it might be important, but it doesn’t necessarily matter. Culture is independent of force. A lot of people get this confused. They’re like, oh, force, and therefore culture. It’s like, no. In fact, culture rejects force. It’s not that you can use no force within a culture, but when the force is used against the culture, you get a revolution. And so you see the whole force argument doesn’t work and say, oh, the government forces. The government’s still a tiny number of people relative to all the people. This is how the French Revolution worked. Just read about it. Right? When all the people get even bad arms, we’ll call them more terrible weapons. There’s so many of them that the small number of people, it’s the government, can’t hold. And that’s a rebellion. Right? That’s a revolution. Culture gives legitimacy to force by aligning it with the virtues and values from above that are emanating from above. When they aren’t aligned, the revolution happens. That is force from below instead of force from above. And you’d rather have force from above on average because it’s a small number of people. And it will affect a smaller number of people ultimately. The French Revolution affected everybody around Paris. Right? And the king, you know, his impact was limited because he had to do everything through paroxys. And when we try to understand the culture, we tend to reduce persons down to things like audiences or consumers. And that’s idolization. Those are dangerous ways of idolizing things. They’re not helpful. And that’s the problem. They’re just not helpful ways of dealing with this. What’s Charlie got for me? If you build it, they will come. No, they won’t. How does building good things relate to growing existing good things? Well, it’s maintaining. Building and maintaining are different. Enjoy your dinner, Charlie. I hope I didn’t miss you. So can you think about culture in a non-flat way? And how do you recognize when people are flattened in culture? So one of the ways people flatten culture is they talk about the center of the culture. It’s wrong. The culture has nothing to do with the center. It has to do with something higher to hold it together because the people in it are all moving using orientation. They’re orienting towards the virtues and values that they have in common. That’s what a culture is. It’s a group orienting towards higher virtues and values. This doesn’t prevent them from moving towards other sets of virtues and values on other time frames because that’s different. Time matters a lot. The smaller groups, cultures within the larger culture change the larger culture over time. That happens. It takes a long time though. We want things to be instant. We’re used to instant things. I get on my computer. I instantly stream to the world on YouTube. Cool. But that gives me an expectation that I can just move the world because I am moving the world. Just moving a tiny part of it. It doesn’t mean anything because I’m a muppet. Once we idolize things like money, government, technology, the earth, other people, we destroy our ability to orient because we are no longer engaging in the process. We’re preferring a discrete linear solution, which is easier. We flatten the world. We remove the enchantment. We need enchanted models though. You can’t say, oh, the culture is just this thing and start defining it. That doesn’t work. It loses the flavor of all the things that culture allows because culture is best thought of as a set of affordances. And any set of affordances implies a trade-off. Look, I can buy people and save myself time. I can trade time for money for some things, not for everything. But for a lot of things, you can trade time for money. I can hire somebody to clean my house and then all the time I spend cleaning my house, I don’t have to worry about it anymore. And maybe that’s a good deal for me. Maybe it’s a bad deal for me. I don’t know. But you don’t want to flatten the world to politics or economics or whatever the AI dream is this week, the metaverse. But these are all flattenings of the world. They’re not expansions. You’re not making the world bigger. You’re making your model of the world smaller, making it harder to understand the world. And then you’re turning persons in a culture to consumers or persons in a culture to political agents or persons in a culture to those people under threat of force. These are ridiculous ways of thinking about the world. Too flat. What does culture do for us? It helps us manage our identities. It helps us switch between our identities to know you’re a husband, you’re a father, you’re a factory worker, you’re a good friend, you’re a good Christian. Like these are all identities one person has. You’re a good son, you’re a good son-in-law. These are all different identities that we have to manage. Culture gives us a set of norms. We outsource our sanity as Paul Van der Kley likes to say. Absolutely true. Culture is the thing that we outsource our sanity to. And it gives us not only different identities but different ways to have expectations about our identities in the future. What does it mean to be a good grandfather? What does it mean to be a good father? What does it mean to be a good older person without kids? What does it mean to be retired? What do you do with these situations that you’re going to run across? Your culture informs you as to that stuff. It is the distributed cognition that allows you to live a better life. What is TikTok culture? TikTok culture or market culture? Yeah. No, there aren’t different. There is no such thing as TikTok culture. TikTok is a mirror of some subculture. Market, there’s no such thing as… Personal identity can come from culture. Right. You’re identifying yourself in relation to something. That something is culture. And whether you define your identity within the culture or as a rebellion from the culture, identifying against the culture, it’s still providing the identity. I don’t identify with that culture. The ability to do that is provided by that culture. Culture is what passes information on. From the past, how to handle situations in the current time, what to expect in the future. Right. Culture holds the distributed cognition of intelligence for you that allows you to interact with the world and participate in the process, not only of culture, but of destruction, building, maintaining, finding goodness in the world, avoiding evil, switching your identities, all of these things. That’s part of the distributed cognition that you’re getting from culture for free. Except it’s not free. Somebody paid for it. Culture is the way that you participate in the process of life. Because it’s not just your life. You were born into a world. There’s lots of life all over the place. There’s people all over the place. There’s nature all over the place. I just planted some flowers because it’s about to rain. There’s all kinds of things going on. Culture helps you manage all that. It holds the distributed cognition. It gives you a way to interact with distributed cognition. Even if you’re identifying against it, it gives you a way to interact with distributed cognition. And not just through language, but through action. Most communication is in action, not in words. And so the cultural norms like bowing or shaking hands or oh, my favorite, the nodding. People from India do this when they’re processing what you’re saying. They don’t mean no. It really bothers Americans. They’re like, ah, why are you disagreeing with my order at your restaurant? That happens to me recently. It happens all the time. I don’t cue up the same way. So it doesn’t really bother me so much, but it does bother a lot of people a lot. Culture is what passes on the information from the past. It gives you a way to handle these situations. It gives you a way to pass on your knowledge to future generations and to people around you. There’s a cultural norm for explaining to people what a problem is. You want to tell people about the 2008 housing crisis. Culture is the thing that allows you to do that. And culture is the thing that allows you to do that. And culture is the thing that allows you to do that. These things are important. The norms of culture are the thing that gives you something to relate to. It provides the contrast, whether you’re rebelling against it or you’re ensconced with it, whatever degree you’re sort of pushing against it or pushing the boundaries, it doesn’t matter. It’s still the container that gives you a reference point that provides you not only a reference point but a contrast. And that helps you understand what to expect from others so that you’re not surprised all the time and anxious. Culture really keeps you calm. That’s why domicile is a big deal. Our culture has changed. There’s a domicile. We don’t know what to do. And then I have a set of other notes here. So one thing. Culture is a set of structures for enabling intimacy. And when our culture decays or becomes corrupt, it might be partly because we’re seeing the limits of civilized conflict. Cultures grow too big or too corrupt or the cultures bump into one another for whatever reason, maybe globalization, maybe we’re all on the internet. Now we’re just seeing how we don’t like the attitude of the people in Russia or we don’t like the attitude of the people in India or we don’t like the attitude of the continentals in Europe. And maybe they’re seeing they don’t like us. And maybe that’s a breakdown of this civilized conflict resolution or acceptance. Like can you accept that the Chinese have Uighurs in camps? Can you accept your involvement in buying products made in China who are keeping Uighurs in camps? I don’t know. Some people seem not able to. Maybe that’s the boundary of civilized conflict. And what we don’t understand, culture is imbued with things that it has by people. Everything we engage with has that property. It’s imbued with life by people. We bring that stuff to the table. And I’ll use the example. I think it was Ethan that came up with it and thanks to Emanuel for reminding me of what the hell it was because I didn’t get it all in my notes. You go to the grocery store and you’re not hungry. It’s one kind of experience. When you are hungry, it’s another experience entirely. You go to the grocery store at different times of days or on different days of the week at different times even. You’ll see different groups of people at the grocery store. It’s a very different experience. I try to avoid when there’s people there because I like to get through the grocery store. Some people will just kind of take up the whole aisle, which makes me very angry. You alter the store by being in there with your telos. It’s the same for culture. It’s a negotiation. I am angry when our government tries to add laws. I’m happier when our government reduces laws. Very simple. I am angry when the government tries to legislate morality. So I’ll tell them, stop that. And you get to remember the signals people are most likely to give are negative. It’s easier to get negative feedback than positive feedback. Anybody in marketing knows this. Anybody that’s read anything about marketing knows this. Anybody who’s paying attention knows this. Those negative signals are a feedback to culture. That’s what they are. They’re not the only feedback, but they are a feedback. Jordan, Protestantism is designed to flatten the world. Now you’re correct. Protestantism is a problem. You’re talking more generally accepted social norms and morality etiquette virtue rather than the arts. Now look, the arts inform. What does art do? Art points up. Or we’ll say proper art points up. It’s supposed to point up. It’s supposed to point at the higher things. Art informs culture. It’s why people consider, we’ll say high culture to be art and low culture to be what people are doing sort of in the norm of the day. And then when the two mix, people get very excited. He painted the picture of the house in the field. How exciting. And I like this. Yeah, Ethan, you’re right. Culture is intimacy. Culture is at least the container for intimacy or proper intimacy with your community, with your neighbors, with the people around you, with the people you share the most with. Jordan, cultures fosters the relationship between tradition and the future we desire. Very well said. Culture rises out of the dance between the future and the past. Yes, it does. And the present. There’s, there’s, don’t be reductionist. There’s more than two things to the world. Yeah, I, yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s important to know. It’s important to know that we’re in a negotiation with our culture. And so we don’t have to fight it. Right. And we have to recognize too, if you associate with the heavenly with the good, we forget that heaven is above, right? But not all above is heavenly. And I think this, you know, Jordan’s earlier point comes from prostitutes. They flatten the world. It’s like, oh, heaven, hell, bang, we’re in the middle. Fair enough. We’re in the middle. But not everything that’s higher than us, or we’ll say outside of the sphere of materiality is good. It’s not all good. So you can’t focus on that. And we get lost with that, right? We get lost with that all the time. So yeah, that’s my little rant on culture. And now I’ll just paste in the link that people can jump in if they wish. And if you’re on navigating patterns, it’ll be pinned at the top because I have the power to do that there. I have the power to do it anywhere else. Just kind of unfortunate. So yeah, if anybody wants to jump on in and talk about whatever, then feel free. I’ve got my Sam Pell, which I need. I’ve got some tea, which I am accidentally cold brewing. I don’t know what happened there. That, of course, is from the Table Rock tea company. I’m going to start my own tea company soon. That’s the plan. Hanselman, what is this thing you call Protestantism? It is the rebellion. It is the heresy against the Catholic Church. The continued rebellion against submission to a larger structure. And you can argue that the Catholics shouldn’t have a pope, and I would agree. The uppity bishop of Rome should go back to being the bishop of Rome. But different problem, much harder to solve. But by being outside the church, are you going to change it? No. You can bitch about Catholicism, but if you’re trying to change it from the outside, that’s a much harder road to hoe, I would say. Is the tea company a good business? If so, why? I think it can be a good business if you’re organized enough to engage with it correctly, with the right spirit, we’ll say. And we do have a plan. Oh, uh-oh. I have invited the wrath of the Catholics. Welcome. It’s good to see you, sir. Matthew chapter 16, that’s all I’ll say about that. Do it well. How are you? You just ruined something. We were talking today about how Catholics almost never quote the Bible, and then you go and quote it on my stream. Good job. You ruined your old rep. The old reputation of all Catholics everywhere is ruined. I am. That was Vatican II that ruined it already. Come on. Fair enough. I am having a terrible day until this stream. This is wonderful. I really like the stream. Very happy. Before this, the day was just not good. So, but I’m glad to be with you all now, and it’s good to see you, my friend. So, it’s good to have you here. Now, here’s the interesting link with culture, is that it’s related to the word agriculture. So, it’s like the way that we get our first grasp of this idea was kind of the harvest and the planting and the rhythm and the cycles. And so, it’s really impossible to talk about culture without looking at the way it’s embodied in traditions that repeat over and over again. And then we can actually look at that and say, that’s our, I mean, it’s like, how do you show somebody your culture? You can only show it to them in an embodied form. On St. Patrick’s Day, we get trashed, regardless of whether or not we’re Irish. That’s our culture. Yes. That’s certainly part of the culture. Yeah. Yeah. You’re supposed to get, you’re supposed to engage in the carnival there. That’s the carnival aspect to the whole St. Patty’s Day thing. And yeah, you know, it’s all this co-opting from, you know, and that’s, right, that’s the, well, the Catholic just stole everything from the pagans and took it over. And made it better. They made it better. Right. They pointed it towards the good. Why is this a bad thing? When you’re pointing something towards the good, why is this a bad thing? Right. Like, I don’t understand. What does Jordan have to say here? Hanselman suffers from the idea that any porous institution is fundamentally outside the Catholic church. Well, I don’t know if that’s what he suffers from, but it might be. Hanselman, there are rich expressions of culture among the various Protestant traditions. Yes, but they don’t last. This is the whole problem. Plus, they identify themselves as a church. Yeah, they do. They identify themselves as a church. Are they actually a church? Oh, man. Now we’re under assault by Catholics. Oh, my goodness. Adam, welcome, my friend. It’s good to see you. Welcome. Welcome. Hello. Hello. Thank you. So, I just wanted to take part in the Catholic invasion. And on the point of culture, I was looking up the etymology of culture in Latin. And of course, obviously it has something to do with agriculture. But it also has that, I think it has also that, there’s actually kind of a marital or sexual imagery in that because it’s not just tilling the soil. It’s kind of an active engagement with it. Yeah, and as it relates to St. Patrick’s Day, yeah, this is a piece of Irish culture which has been exported around the world. And it’s just not edifying. At this stage, no. No, it’s because, you know, there was a bishop, I can’t remember which bishop he was, but he had a great, so we’ve got the whole no meat on Fridays thing, right? And he said that if you go to church that day, if you go to go to mass, or if you spend 30 minutes in prayer in front of the Blessed Sacrament, you could eat meat this day. And then he just, he had this, I wish I had the line, but it was like, and then you’re allowed to have your festivities with due moderation, which is what St. Patrick would have wanted, basically. Yeah, well, and that’s the thing about it, right? It is that the connection to St. Patrick, the kind of, because if you think about Patrick, he’s the higher figure, right? And strictly speaking, the most Irish way you could celebrate St. Patrick’s Day is actually not getting blind drunk. It would be, but that’s the thing, is that it, you know, so people might be pointing to the same thing, oh, that’s being Irish, but there is something else going on. There is a kind of shift, or at least a divide. I mean, to some degree, it’s no wonder that on the same day that St. Patrick’s Day falls, you have the falling also of a Roman festival called the Feast of the so-called Free Father, or the Liber Pater, which, you know, there’s something, there is a relation to something higher there, and I think that’s probably what most people are actually ending up celebrating on that day. Well, and this is where the confusion comes in. So Hanselman is speaking against error wrong. No, it’s not, but being outside of the thing and speaking against it might be, right? You just protested the elevation of the Bishop of Rome. Yeah, yeah, I did, I did, and maybe it’s wrong for me to do it because I’m dog-headed, but that does, I don’t think that makes me Protestant because I’m not saying that the Catholic Church has to do anything different. Actually, it occurred to me today, earlier today, I’m sure Father, that’s okay, that, you know, the idea that the Pope is infallible is foolish because the Pope is a man and therefore born with original sin, and therefore it’s a non-starter, but I’m just throwing that out there. So let’s see, Hanselman, I am Anglo-Catholic, that is true Catholic, I don’t think so, dude, and I appreciate the elements of truth in other churches. Very Vatican II, yeah, well, Vatican, which, the real Vatican II or the Vatican II corruption by the Italians, because that more is the issue. St. Patrick was a Brit, also true. So he corrupted Ireland, the Brit’s been corrupting Ireland for how long now? I’m just, what do you think, Adam? Go ahead. Well, he was, this is a little bit, I call Belgium a non-country, but we should be very careful in the way we use the term Briton. Let’s be honest, because Briton is kind of an Anglo-Saxon appropriation after they call the original Britons Welsh, meaning foreigners. Welsh means foreigner in Anglo-Saxon, so, you know, and St. Patrick, in that case, he wasn’t a Brit, he was Welsh, and as that, he was a Welsh Roman, he was a Romano-Britain, and that’s why Patrick is, the Latin for it is patricius, meaning, I mean, it actually means patrician, right, so like the Roman class of person. But you’re right, you’re right, it’s true. But then again, the entire Ireland of Britain was evangelized by Irish, Irishmen. So it was a bit of a reciprocal relationship there, and that’s, that is something to say. The gentleman’s trying to get the good graces of the Catholic here. I still stuck to my fish today, a nice hat-o-cat. Look, there’s no reason not to have fish and chips on Friday in Scotland. I did that, it was an awesome experience. I was very happy to do that. Uh-oh, uh-oh, Adam, you’ve offended my Belgian friend. I don’t even know what, I can’t pronounce any of those crazy letters that don’t belong together. Yeah, well, I’ll just say Belgium is not a country. There is no such thing as a Belgian, and I’ll leave it at that. And that’s part, and part of the reason why that is the case is because it’s kind of this thing that’s just, it was, it’s kind of a proposition of this, this is a nation now, rather than, rather than kind of having any grounding in an ancient people. There is no such thing as the ancient Belgian people. Yeah, culture. Right, there’s no culture through time. There’s no Belgian culture. Right, it doesn’t exist. What about Belgian waffles? Right. Well, and that’s the problem. And look, look, I mean, Adam and I have talked about this before, and if you haven’t seen it on Navigating Patterns, we have some great discussions. Some of them are historical. The most recent one is not historical necessarily, although we delve into history, right, where we talk about some of these issues wrapped up around culture. What’s a proper culture? Can you just go in and conquer Europe and then call yourself emperor? I don’t think so. It doesn’t seem to work. Right. And what are the results of that? Oh, they seem to be catastrophic, not right away, but we’re still suffering from the French Revolution. Let’s face it, right, Europe is still suffering from that. Yeah. Uh oh, what’s this? My friends were balloons pen and wary of the lemons. Yes. Yeah, I bet they were. Well, then that’s those are the proper categories there. Those are the problems. They’re the Walloons. They were the French speaking inhabitants of what was formerly the Spanish Netherlands. And then there is the the Flemens, right, who speak Flemish, which is a type of Dutch that doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily Dutch, right, because there’s probably a reason that they got wound up in Belgium. And, you know, in the fake country, in this fake political unit. And there’s a completely and that’s an ancient region as well, actually, that part of the Netherlands and the Spanish Netherlands, Belgium, let’s just say, let’s use the fake term. And that is actually, if you want to put it that, that’s kind of like old Frankia, actually. That’s where the Franks issue forth from and the rest of the Roman Empire. Yeah, Manuel actually sent earlier today, he said, the Belgians are like the slow Netherlands that speak French or something. Wow. Yeah, they do not well liked by their neighbors on the other end. You know, I’ll agree. Anselman says Belgian beer, waffles and pralines are the best. OK, maybe. All right. I don’t think it’s pretty special. I don’t drink beer. I haven’t had Belgian pralines, but I’ve had Belgian waffles. I think they’re the same. And what is this? The fall of the angels. Which fall? Which angels? Oh, no, no, I don’t think it’s the fall of the angels. I recall I would say it’s the it’s the ignorance of the angels. And look, I mean, I have a video about Ukraine where I make the same case that you just made for Belgium. Is it really a country? Is that really what happened? Because a bunch of people got drunk on vodka, right? And they drew a line on a map and said, no, this is a region now. And then when the whole union broke up, that was the region. And it’s like, yeah, but most of it’s deeply Russian, like, deeply, deeply. It’s the it’s the version of Russia that informed Moscow, like, actually, right, is there. It’s not where Moscow is. Moscow is a later incarnation of the Russian ethos. And when you’re divorced from the angel of Russia, right, what happens? You get a war. That’s what happens. That’s why I make the case in my in my Ukraine war video on navigating patterns about about what that is and what’s really going on there and the identification. And so let’s see, we need to play some Jacques Brie songs to make a to make it a Belgium culturally. No, that’s a copyright strike. Yeah, we don’t need the copyright strike. Yeah. Well, isn’t there isn’t there a part of that in the Bible early on where there’s 70 72 angels? It’s either extra. I think it might be extra biblical, but there are 72 angels assigned to all the nations to keep that over them. That’d be extra biblical. But the 72 nations, I think, would come at the end of Genesis, Chapter 11, leading right up into the Abraham cycle. Yeah. And that’s that’s pointing to the same sort of thing as this being basically there’s this there’s this higher being there’s an angel being placed over these these peoples. And that’s that’s part of what what keeps them together and what informs their culture that that’s that’s the kind of if they’re tilling the soil, it’s the kind of the shoots are shooting up towards that higher higher. Yeah, because agriculture and culture and cult are all they’re all deriving from the same word. So if you read some older Catholic literature, they’ll talk about the cult of the saints or the cults of the Eucharist and those sorts of things. And it just means worship, right? So like the the harvest, the worship and the identity of the people were all just one thing. Oh, yeah. Well, and that’s yeah, that’s an interesting way to think about cults, right? Is it cult is just worship without all the other components, the cultivation components, right? And yeah, that’s a big that’s sort of a big difference, right? It’s kind of important. Oh, Hanselman. Oh, does Father Eric know the origin of the idea that the elect are making up the number of the fallen angels? I know that was considered basically an accepted idea that by the time you get to St. Anselm, because he talked about that in his Cur Dei Usobo, where that came from originally, I would have to I would have to find I’d probably have to buy a book to figure that one out. Buy a book. One that I don’t have yet. And I just don’t want to buy any more books because I have to move so much. Books are heavy. Yeah, you’d have to move around that library. Yeah, yeah. So it’s worth it for the summa, you know, but and a couple other key ingredients. Oh, getting into book porn here. Got some old school pre Vatican two manuals here. Oh, really? The fundamentals of Catholic dogma. Oh, I have that one. Yeah, it’s a great one. The ecclesiology needs to be updated a little bit, but everything else is perfect. The Handbook of Moral Theology. I don’t know. Yeah. If only people knew. Only people knew what Tan Books was publishing. Yeah, the rabble rouse. Jacob, welcome. It’s good to see you, my friend. I saw way too many Catholics on this screen. Thank you for saving me from all the Catholic invasion over here. I had a long time no see. Where have you been? I’ve been, I’ve been around, I’ve been trying to do masters in college and sort of, it’s just kind of stepped away from that. So I’ve been on the current circuit for a job. I was just doing my homework for my master’s degree. Cool. Nice. Excellent. You guys had a good, a good after after Vanderklee live stream live stream? Well, Grimm had a live stream and then we had another live stream. And after having a tiff with Nate, Nate invited me on to his live stream. So I had to go. And it was pretty good. It was actually a, it was, I cried, just cried. It’s, it’s, you know. Oh, good. I’ll have to check all that out. I got to finish the live to Vanderklee live stream. I had to, I had a meeting and last minute meeting, which you can go well. So I hopped in on the end of the, of the Vanderklee live stream. And then I, then I had to take care of because of course, of course I got other things to do and it’s just busy all day trying to get ready for my live stream. And it’s like, I had to plant some flowers. Crazy day. You got to plant flyers. We still have feet of snow up here. It was two degrees when I woke up this morning. It’s the middle of March. Well, it’s been cold here too, but it got a little freezing a couple of nights. I was like, no, not cold at night. That’s the worst. And then it didn’t get out. I didn’t get above 50 for a couple of days. I was like, what’s going on? Should be warmer. We haven’t been, we haven’t been above 40 since November. I know. That’s your uncle, uncle, the riddomer, man. You were down here. You should have just stayed. I had the invitation from the priest at the Basilica, right? Yeah. You get the invitation. He wanted to swap you for somebody like, yeah. I bought gloves because I was all the way up north and it was down to like 20 degrees at night. And it’s like, yeah, not South Dakota. No, that’s dangerous. Yeah. Well, my seeds were sent to me by somebody from South Dakota. So there you go. So the seeds came by way of South Dakota and not really. Okay. I have a challenge for you, Mark. Three days ago, I did an eight hour live stream. You’re going to have to go longer. I don’t think so. We’re not in a, we’re not in a contest like that. But one of these days, I am going to do a 24 hour live stream. Good luck to you, sir. I don’t think I have the energy. I’m all worn out today because I got to go in and watch out for a meeting. Did you guys already talk about St. Patrick’s Day? Somewhat. I mean, we were talking about it with respect to culture. So I did want to address this for Anselm and you experienced mad fuel price rises. No, we have our own fuel. It’s the rest of the world that doesn’t. You’re all screwed. Sorry. Yeah, that’s true. Yeah. Fuel’s actually been going down here from what I can tell. I mean, I don’t, I don’t get out. It’ll go up again during the summer once people start driving again. Oh, yeah, I know. There’s always that seasonal fluctuation, but the impact from the war, which I think is what he’s probably referring to, is not going to hit us. It’s not going to happen. We have more natural gas than we know what to do with. We have more oil than we could ever possibly burn. And we’re still stealing it from the Middle East instead to prop them up. And I think that’s good, even though it’s, you know, we’ll be the last men standing with respect to oil. The rest of y’all be kind of in trouble, but I’m okay with it. It’s, it’s, it’s long past my lifetime, so it’s all good. The amount of people who are going back to firewood is increasing. The cheapest fuel in the world right now. Right. And the environmentalists don’t seem to have really figured it out that making fuel more expensive and making more people use firewood is bad for the environment. They don’t care about the environment. They just tell you that because you’re gullible. I never believed them for an instant. Yeah, they said it too much. I’m like, I don’t know if I believe you. That’s too much. Right. It’s one of those things. I’m very suspicious of people who harp on things a little, a little bit much. That’s always, you know, but that’s the problem. Like what’s the culture of these crazy people? Their cult is the climate cult. Right. They’re Gaia worshippers. And like, okay, but that’s not, that’s not the highest thing. Right. Like knowledge isn’t the highest thing. The earth isn’t the highest thing. Obviously it’s below us. Duh. But you wouldn’t think you’d need to say that. And yet here we are in 2023 having to tell people that. Yeah. And really you can kind of tell a lot about people by what they, oh, I worship safety above everything else. I worship empathy above everything else. It’s like, these are not good ways to do anything useful with the culture. I wish you were there when we had this discussion on during the Grille country thing, because I I said, like I always do, I think a lot of people turn love into an idol and God is love. Love is not God. And I got a lot of pushback. From Protestants? Well, Nate is a Catholic. No, he can’t be. He keeps saying he’s a Christian anarchist, which is still in my, you know, and with, with me, he can’t say I’ve never engaged him. I’ve asked him very simple questions and have answers to. I’m like, well, dude, if you can’t answer that question, then I don’t know what to tell you. What do we mean by the word love? Because we have to acknowledge that that word has an outrageous valence because I could use the one word to describe my relationship with God, with my relationship with my mother, with my relationship with my pizza. So that’s for vakeys, being on love. I like Anselm and Mark has some spiritual discernment. Thank you, sir. I hope so. Well, this is why I would say God needs to ultimately be ineffable and whatever you call it can. Anselm, look at what Anselm says. Nate is an ex-Catholic, now Anglican. Oh, so that’s okay. If that’s, that makes more sense to me, but it doesn’t matter. You can’t be a Christian anarchist. And he doesn’t describe anarchy, he describes pacifism. Can’t be a Christian pacifist either. Like if you want to be like Jesus, you’re not a pacifist or an anarchist. Sorry, you’re just not. It’s one or the other. Pick one. Pick one. It’s not hard. I’m not using Bible verses. I’m saying what he did in the world. You want to be like him, then you’re not going to be a pacifist or an anarchist. It’s not going to happen. And if I’m wrong about this, just explain it. It should take five minutes. And if it doesn’t, you’re probably wrong. I hate to break it. It’s not that hard. People like these complicated, no, this is simple stuff, simple stuff. But we don’t know, you’re right, Father. We don’t know what love means. We’re just using it. And Viveki actually does a nice job of this. Like, you know, we’re just throwing that word around and is it an adverb? Is it a verb? What’s going on with this word? How are we actually parsing it? Is it a thing? Is it an action in the world? Like, what, what, what do we, how do we get a handle on? What is love? You know, and so Saint Augustine had this whole long rant, because he did nothing but rant, about how it isn’t actually love unless it is united with the truth. Right? And what he meant is, you know, you can’t just say, oh, I’m going to do something evil for you, because that’s what you want to call that love. Right? That’s not love. It needs to be united with the truth. It needs to be united with the highest. And so he goes on this big, long rant about how it’s not actually love, willing the good of the other, without that reference to the good. So, so, so it’s like, love shouldn’t be the end, but it should be the means to the highest ends. And I think that’ll work, which would make it not really something you can actually worship. That makes sense. Well, I like what Los Crassos says, we know what love means. That’s why God isn’t love. In other words, we haven’t been in love before and she knows what love is for. Yes. Yeah. This is a side of Father Eric I have not seen before. You got to hang out with him for a week. It’s freaking awesome. Plus he can introduce you to some really good early, early tunes from Yes, which are excellent. Nate does a, does go a bit to the heterodoxy with the anthroposophist reading. Yeah, well, look, he just, it’s dishonest to say you’re a Christian anarchist because that can’t exist. It’s not even an option. Well, okay. So I, I didn’t want to poke the bear too much. So I didn’t, whenever they spoke about Jacques Eloubou, I didn’t say much. But I think part of the problem is there are people who think Jacques Eloubou was actually a Christian. And Jacques Eloubou was somebody who claimed to be a Christian in the same way as the Reverend Jim Jones claimed to be a Christian. He was a, he thought claiming to be a Christian, and he was apparently right about it, is a very good way of sneaking whatever, whatever he was saying, into the world. So he said, you can take whatever thoughts and horrible ideas you have into people’s minds under the guise of Christianity. And so I am not a fan of Jacques Eloubou at all, if you couldn’t tell. I just don’t know. I am very reluctant to take on Jacques Eloubou because I think he was such an effective propagandist and a lot of people in our little corner have been infected by Jean-Claude. Burn all the books. He’s French, that’s good enough for me. Good enough for me. To not like him, to not even listen to him. I don’t, you know, this is, this is… I think he even claimed to be Catholic, didn’t he? Oh, that’s, well, there we go. I mean, for a Frenchman to claim to be Catholic, I’m just looking at him there. Born 1912, yeah, that’s post-French revolution at that point. I’m not believing him. The original revolutionaries. The original failed revolutionaries. Yeah, Jacques Alul is definitely an interesting figure. I’m not gonna… I haven’t read any of his stuff. I’ve never… The only Frenchman that I’m familiar with. Like the propaganda and the personal relations and all that, right? No, that’s Girard, I think, isn’t it? No, no, no. Alul is most known for his book, Propaganda, which I think is a demonstration of propaganda. And propaganda. I haven’t actually, but I, you know, torn it apart like I could. And now I just saw he wrote a book, The Subversion of Christianity, which I… I don’t want to have to dig into Alul, but I think I may have to. And the anadromist, Bern Power, really likes Alul, which I think is his thing. Yeah, that’s where I heard him about before. Okay, now I’m gonna… No, no, Bern! I like this How We Got Here series. Now that you’re telling me he’s some Christian anarchist, I’m like, oh, that’s great. Well, Bern is a very smart guy whose views I have a lot of respect for. At the same time, Bern comes from a background in the Jesus People movement. And I think that has all of the problems that Protestantism generally does, which is when you’re a really smart guy trying to figure things out by yourself, no matter how smart you are, you are never, ever going to reach the same heights as somebody standing on the shoulders of giants, like somebody who’s standing on an actual tradition. Right, standing within a culture, to use that distributed cognition for your time to understand the world better by not having to recapitulate everything that’s already been processed. Yeah, I mean, that’s the advantage of culture. Anselman, propaganda started off as a good word propagating the gospel. No longer. Now it’s deceit, manipulation, and a scion. One of my problems with propaganda is I haven’t found a way to determine it in the moment. I think it’s all hindsight consideration on the winner. I don’t know that, but I haven’t found any way to do it yet. So I’m just suspicious that it’s a terribly useful term to try and determine what’s going on here and now. It’s only a useful term to look back and use it in contrast. I like this, Jacob, you seem to agree with that idea. I do. It’s a big problem with the idea. Like, even what is propaganda? So this is the video, I am going to put a link in, that I made on propaganda, which is the name of a book by Bernays and by… And this, I have to say, I believe is one of my better videos. Bernays and by Alou. And I highly, highly recommend reading Bernays’ propaganda. It’s available for free everywhere because it’s out of copyright. And it’s the YouTube, there’s a YouTube audiobook available for free. It’s two hours long. You can listen to it. It’s a very short book. You might even want to listen to it, Mark. You almost had me convinced. Your video is quite good, actually. I watched it. Bernays’ book, Propaganda, is an attempt to do a very simple exposition of very important things. I think that Alou named his book Propaganda partially to get people to stop reading Bernays’ propaganda. And it was an attempt, and I think a successful attempt, at demonstrating what propaganda is by creating propaganda. And this is the exact postmodern little cutesy thing to do. Exactly. And too few people… Bernays is a Belgian saucer. And I think too few people are aware of the example of Jim Jones and Jonestown and what exactly happened there. I think there are very important lessons to learn from there. And the most important one, in my opinion, is there will be people who will claim to be Christians who are not Christians. Surprise! Yeah, no, that’s well-spread. Yeah, it’s an after. Alright, see you, sir. Good to see you. See you, Jacob. And yeah, I mean, that’s part of the problem with culture, right? Is that people can hijack it and claim to be part of it when they’re not. And then they can use that hijacking to subvert the very thing they’re claiming membership in. Hey, that sounds familiar. It almost sounds… We’re just out of St. Patrick’s Day, but that sounds like a lot of exports from Ireland coming back and not understanding what’s going on on the island and just throwing more fuel on the fire. We understood perfectly what was going on in Colombia. They had the fountain with the green dye in it. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Yeah, that’s it. That’s a good example of it, because there comes a point where it breaks open. They put green dye in the river in Chicago. I forget which where, but yeah, they put green dye in the river. Because that whole Boston is freezing. Yeah, and that’s just so far from me. I didn’t even go to the parade. Here’s the thing, Adam. Here’s the thing. I have been to Ireland. I have blocked the shores and all that. And that is the greenest place I’ve ever been in my life. It was overwhelmingly green everywhere, all the time. It was beautiful. And so you don’t need to dye your rivers green. It’s already there. But when they leave Ireland, all of a sudden you’re in Boston. You need the green. You need the green. You can have the green, but then, sorry, you left the island. You’re partially handing in the Irish card at that point, at least. You’re trying to reproduce the beauty of the isle where you’re at. What’s wrong with that? You’re trying to invoke the spirit of the green. Why is this bad? Yeah, but it lacks any kind of particularity. We’ll cover everything green and it’s like, dude, come on. And yeah, it is. It might be a very green place, but that’s Ireland. Yeah. Yeah, no, really. It’s so kitschy. It’s this American money-making event. It’s a carnival. It’s been turned into a feast. And that’s what it’s become here as well. We still have parades and stuff. I don’t think we dye the rivers green, but that’s because the place is so green, right? Yeah. But at the same time, yeah, any reference to St. Patrick is really only surface level. And that’s, yeah. Well, not at our school. I went and I taught the kindergartners and the first graders the story of the real St. Patrick at a level that they could comprehend. Nice. Anselman says he’s been to the north of Ireland, very like my native Scotland in many ways. Well, there’s the Scotch. Oh, Scotch. That explains so much. Yes. Yes, it really does. Well, look, there’s the Scots-Irish who all moved to the southern United States and Appalachia and stuff. So yeah, that’s the thing. We have the Highland Games, right? Or the Tartan Games. That’s what they’re called, the Tartan Games, which are basically the Highland Games, but America style. And they do crazy things, right? Like they throw long poles at each other and whatever. Very nice. Crazy. Yeah, it’s pretty crazy. But yeah, we’ve got a lot of that culture, right? There. Over here. Yeah, it’s wild. Mark, question for you, interested to see what your answer is. But is there or has there ever been an American culture and an American nation? It is, is it? So it’s like, it’s kind of like the Stars and Stripes forever, right? Yeah, it’s not one nation. I mean, I think Colin Woodard’s right the way he breaks out state, country and nation. Like, oh, that’s an interesting set of categories to use and to differentiate. I think he’s right about that in his book. There is an American culture. And I think if you read his book, you’ll figure out what it is, right? Because there’s something very deep about the spirit of independence itself, right? But the problem is that people say, well, that’s the spirit of liberty. No, it’s not. And if you know the founding fathers, like if you read Thomas Paine and you kind of you go read this, like it’s not that hard. You can actually do the research, not rely on the Internet summaries. They’re not necessary. You can just read the source material for real. And when you start to read the source material and understand what was going on back then, it all comes together. It’s like, oh, they wanted liberty from the tyranny of the king. Why? Because the king wasn’t the king. And Adam and I will be doing a talk on this soon on navigating patterns. Look out for it. German newsacres. Well, but it’s worse, right? Kingly power was broken by the English Revolution. And so what happened is it was replaced by a bunch of parliamentarian traders to the virtues and values of England. And that’s what created all these problems, roughly speaking. That’s what bore the U.S. And that’s why they went back to the Magna Carta and said, no, no, no, you know what we need? We need a Magna Carta. So we’re just going to make one. And then we’re going to hold that up because they rightly understood the loss of the Magna Carta was the destruction of England. They should have kept the document. And now because we have the document, we’re able to do things like in Virginia when the governor said, you know, only five people allowed in the House, whatever it was for Thanksgiving. The sheriff, who is also an elected official in that particular state, it’s not true for all states, came out on TV and said, ignore the governor. We’re not going to prosecute you. We’re not going to look. We’re not going to patrol. We’re not enforcing this rule. The governor has no right to write this executive order. We claim the right of the Constitution. And that’s the way that the balance works. And so there is a sense of liberty in that. Right. But it’s not freedom. It’s not freedom. Right. Because it’s only freedom in the sense that you are free to have consequences from your actions. That’s what you are free to do. And part of that is mediated by the culture. And part of the culture is, yeah, you can do what you want, but we may or may not help you. We may or may not bail you out. We may or may not shame you. We may or may not bail you out. We may or may not shame you. Because everyone’s free. And this is what people miss. It’s like, well, if you’re free and you do something I don’t like, then I’m free to let you know. And then that’s where people get crazy. They go, oh, no, no, that’s not what I want. No, I know it’s not what you want, but that’s what you’re pretending you want. And I’ll give it to you and you’ll be unhappy about it. And that’s the problem is that people don’t want that trade-off at all. They want the trade-off where they’re sort of passively, aggressively forcing you into their way of thinking. But if you look at the culture of the U.S., it’s a very independent-minded culture with an understanding that the virtues and values matter. And so, you know, if you go to Europe and you try to discern what are your virtues and values, you can see it in the actions of the people. And that’s not reflected in their politics at all. In the U.S., they can tell you what their virtues and values are. It’s very explicit for most people. What they hold up is very explicit. And if you ask them what values make you an American, they’re mostly the same in all the regions. They’re also fuzzier, right, because they’re really abstract. They’re like freedom to independence. Because it was written, it was a document, it was propositional, founded in the propositional. Right. Well, and Anselman brings up a good point. They imported a Dutchman, very controversial. No, it wasn’t even, I mean, it’s spoken like a true merchant as though you can barter your patrimony for a bit of bread. It was a Dutch coup. Basically, after 1688, it was like, it didn’t matter what the small folk of England wanted for their country. It was, now, basically, the king at the time pressed England into war against France, largely because he could, because he didn’t like the French king at the time, that’s all. But that’s kind of by the by. The important thing to note with the US thing is, you said it a while back there, you’re mentioning in Virginia the sheriff. Well, where does the word sheriff come from? And it comes from the official put in charge of the shires of England, which is a traditional role. And that is a crown official as well. That is an official who has ties to the crown. And a lot of the American project is essentially the attempted reclaiming of their rights as Englishmen when they weren’t getting their representation in Parliament. And it’s because Parliament obviously didn’t want them to be represented. Because they were claiming one thing, that once you get this post-1688 world, it becomes a very different place. And there’s a gap that opens up after you behead the king of basically, well, what’s going on in the colonies at the same time? And how does everything work? Because before then, it’s all the crown, they’re subject to the crown. They’ve been delegated certain governance by the king to sort out their affairs. As far as I’m aware, and I don’t know how old this building is, it must be very old, in Virginia in specific, it looks like the old, old Parliament building in England, where I think you even have the arms of the crown, and not just like any old crown, it’s not the Union Jack. It’s the old royal coat of arms that I think it was Edward III would have had. Not the date back to that point, but that coat of arms was still kind of in play when Charles was on the throne. But you can see the instantiation of culture from above versus from below, right? And that’s why when you ask Americans what their culture is, it really is independence and non-interference. It’s not no trade-offs, which is a different, it’s like, I’m not going to interfere with you cutting your arm off. When you cut your arm off, I’m going to call you a fool. I’m not going to interfere with it up front, right? I’m going to let you make your mistakes. And when we in the U.S., the mistake that we are making right now, is in trying to follow the other states, right? So one of the problems we have down south is that we’re going, oh, the northerners put masks on. It’s like, you all hate the northerners. And with good reason. Don’t believe those lunatics. They’re all lunatics. Don’t trust them for a second. I lived among them. They’re not good. And that’s part of the problem is that, you know, if you try to follow in the footsteps of, we’ll say, these other people, then you run into issues. I don’t like this. There we go. How’s that? Looks good. No one’s commented on my camera angle. Look, I got this fancy stand for the camera. Now the camera’s up high. It’s straight. No one loves it. Fine. Fine. Fine. I don’t care. And so we’re not going to do our video now. We’re doing a, Adam and I are doing a video. It’s coming out soon. I’m behind on my research. I’ve got to get the VPN up and running and watch a bunch of stuff to catch up. And we’ll do our video. We’re not doing it today. Geez Louise. People. And catch up on all the videos that Adam and I have as talks. They’re all excellent. Right, Father Eric? You’ve seen them all, haven’t you? I think I have. If I’ve missed any, it’s only been one or two. Are they excellent? Are they all excellent? I do. I do find them informative and edifying and dare I say, maybe even nourishing to the spirit in these painful times. That’s wonderful to hear. Yeah, that’s quite the compliment. That’s quite the… Did you watch the Kale, Zeldin, Paul Van Du Klay chat about the plague? I did. I did. Yeah. Should I watch that or should I avoid that like the plague? My focus is to avoid like plague. I mean, I don’t think it’s the plague, but I don’t know if you’d find it all that interesting. I don’t think Kale understands the Catholic Church in the Great Plains region very well. He says that all the American bishops are center left and it’s like, no, maybe where he lives in the East. But like, I’m going to be honest, things are kind of based around here. Yeah, I’m going to have an extra doubt on that, especially considering you have basically the Latin Mass, the reintroduction of the Tridentine Mass, largely coming out of the U.S. It’s mainly Anglophone. It seems to me, it strikes me as a mainly Anglophone… There’s a fair number of French into it as well. Anglophone, French and a few people in Brazil. Yeah, but I think it is mainly Anglophone. The French thing is kind of Gallic. It’s that liberty thing, right? The bishop’s like, okay, you guys want to do this. You got this priest who’s willing to do it at two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. All righty. This is what we do. All right, tell you. Well, and there’s no fights between, say, the Midwest and the coast. Because it’s like, oh, let the Midwest do what they want to do. Let the coast do what they want, right? And that’s why American culture is not monolith. It’s very much live and let live. That’s part of the culture of being an American. And that’s why American culture isn’t a monolith. And yet there is an American culture at the same time. All right? And that’s the way it operates. And nobody thought… If you read this, it’s great. You got to read some of this stuff. The column word goes into some of it. If you read the reports from the spies from England and France, any day now, this whole day now, over and over again. They kept saying it. They kept saying it. And it never happened, which just kind of worked. What is this? Answer. In Scotland, I have attended the traditional Latin mass celebrated by priests flying in from Germany. Wow! From Germany. You never go full seide. You never go full seide. Why is that? Why is that? That means you break Catholicism. Yeah, he basically doesn’t submit to the pope. So he’s a Catholic, but he doesn’t submit to the pope. Yeah, so no, no, no, it’s worse than that. It says the person who’s claiming to be the pope is not actually the pope. Oh, yeah, even that. Yeah, not my pope, basically. No, that’s no good. That’s no good. No, no, no. You never go full seide. Able infallibility is a problem because the pope is a man and the man is original sin and therefore it’s impossible. So how many times a day do you think that Francis is infallible, Mark? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. Zero. Zero. Okay. Well, so far you’re correct, actually. Yeah. Yeah. The last time the pope was good and properly infallible was probably 1996, but definitely 1952. Nice. Well, there we go. There we go. Well, see, I try to live in a world where I don’t even know the pope’s name. So that actually would be that I had a I got a catacumin coming in. I got all sorts of questions. It’s great to talk to. And we were getting into some of this traditional Latin mass pope Francis stuff. And I really just wanted to say, don’t bother yourself with it. Yeah. It’s not good for you. You know, you’re liking the fact that you grew up in an unchurched house and all of a sudden you’re finding structure, meaning, virtues and values. And I’m happy to be there. Yeah. And we can do all of that here. I think that’s actually a good point. It’s something I left out of my little monologue in the beginning. Right. Culture is part of the thing that gives you pieces that you can manifest meaning with. Like that it’s very important. And then when you the more parts of the culture you restore. Right. Because we’ve had this sort of maybe 50 or 70 year experiment of, you know, carving things up and dividing them up very scientifically and trying to secularize whatever the heck that means. Right. And we’ve just been moving things out of culture and pretending they don’t exist. It’s like, you know, we’re having fights about whether or not you can have a cross on public land because other people can see it. It’s like, no, of course you can’t stop. Just stop. They lost that battle, by the way. They just fought forever. And that’s the problem. It’s when you take the religious tradition out of the idea of your culture, right, when you try to separate it, you try to part the seas there, it doesn’t work. Like you’re missing a bunch of things that allow you to manifest meaning in the world. Yeah, it was always good. I was going to come down to the question of what thing that’s higher than you is, are you relating to? And if everyone’s just, you know, saying, well, I don’t even know if there is anything higher, you know, it’s like, well, then, you know. Right. Because the culture is the emanation from above. Anselman, is he not encouraging religious indifference? That’s a good question. Yeah, probably. Yeah, it’s, I don’t know. I think it’s like paying attention to who the president is in the United States. I mean, to some extent, sure. Right. Because you should be able to point at the good ones and point at the bad ones. But getting too into every little decision or what’s happening this week or, you know, you’re just wasting time thinking about something. There are Vatican tabloids. They’re mostly all Italian languages. They’re just wild. I didn’t need, like when I was figuring out this whole Christian stuff and then I was like, oh, I guess I’m a Catholic now. They have their own news networks. It’s like CNN, but like for Catholicism. And I’m like, this is the best. Well, like, it’s just it’s just at all at all. I’m looking at this and I’m like, this is this is what I wanted to get away from. And so it’s like it’s like I’m looking at it and I’m like, no, no, this this it’s unhealthy. Right. A pope should never should never even have this kind of light being shun on him with with cameras and everything like that. And, you know, fine. Look, it’s it’s there now. But it’s just OK. Well, now it’s time to ignore it. For me, at least, you know, it’s like, all right. So there a pope exists. I have to listen to him when he speaks on very specific topics. And, you know, as you said, Father Eric, like the last time I had to care about anything that he’s the holder of that office said was like the late 1990s. Right. And that I once debated whether or not that was fully in foul. Even if it was exactly. Yeah, exactly. So it’s like, well. And that’s the issue, right? Like, like when we’re spreading around our time, energy and attention in the wrong ways, we’re destroying the culture because culture requires that in right relation. And the culture is the thing that tells you what the right relation to the higher thing is. Right. It helps. Again, it’s distributed cognition. It helps to inform you. What should I be paying attention to? What shouldn’t I be paying attention to? Why? Where is the area that I can make a difference? And where are the areas where I can’t make a difference? And if you can’t make a difference, maybe only pay attention to it when it’s entertainment. Right. Don’t take something that shouldn’t be entertainment. Right. And try to engage with it when you can’t. Like you can’t. I can’t affect the presidency past the election. It’s not possible. Right. I can vote. That’s it. That’s all I can do. I can write letters. I can shape some legislation. Maybe by writing to my local people, not to the president in general. Right. There’s a little bit that I can do, but it’s a very little bit. And when you get your time, energy and attention taken away from that, you’re not building or maintaining the culture. You need to be building and maintaining the culture. And if you can’t be distracted, you can’t put your distraction into action when all you’re doing is wasting that energy. Like that energy needs to be put to maintaining your culture. Yeah. All of a sudden being put into this non-generative drain that is going nowhere. And in that sense, well, all you’re doing is contributing to the death of a culture. And if the culture is dead, then nobody’s there. Like either there is nobody who actually is there or the people who are there are actively not going down the path of not going and not being there soon enough. Yeah, like Europe. It’s got to have power in. Yes. And in order to put power in, you have to have babies. Right. Well, and Europe is having a problem with that. But I mean, we… You have to bring them up right too. Yeah. Well, you have to bring them up right. And the thing is, Europe would have… has the tools for the child rearing probably. But the problem, of course, is, yeah, the… How did I put it? Ireland, for instance, is just… I only realized this a couple of weeks ago. It’s just a big farm. That, you know, in America, you walk out into the woods and, you know, you actually might have to carry a gun with you in some certain areas because there will be… There’s still the frontier territory there. We covered that in our last conversation, Mark, right? Yes. The idea of that. Europe is kind of quite full. And so it’s a matter of… It’s a matter of brooking the kind of more economical rather than… almost solely economical rather than kind of economical, political, all of that sort of higher frame. How are those wolves doing, Adam, in Ireland? Right. Yeah, they’re non-existent. We got rid of them all. We hunted them all. And that’s… If you look actually as a map of Europe for wolf populations, I’m pretty sure you have to get to like Transylvania, basically, before you hit major wolf populations and or… That’s why in the imagination you put vampires there. Right. Yeah. The werewolves and the vampires are all in that region because that’s the only place that they left. Yeah. And so that would be… I mean, those are different circumstances altogether. But yeah, that… There’s a topic for universal history. Somebody knock on Peugeot or Richard Roland’s door and say, hey, guys, why don’t you cover this? Didn’t they just do Lithuania? I think they did. I haven’t seen that one yet. I got to catch up. I’m way behind their viewers. The dark forest is what Lithuania is. I’ve been doing actual work. So… Wow, Mark, that’s a real change of pace for you. Terrible. Like, it’s just awful. It’s just like, I don’t… It’s awful. Are you still with that startup? Not for long, if things keep going this way. Ah, that would explain the terrible day then. I’ll ask no more questions on that. Oh, but hey, tomorrow’s Saturday. Speaking of which… I’ll put in my buy me a coffee link there so that people can buy me a coffee. Maybe I can afford to go out and… get something at some point. Yeah. No, tomorrow is Saturday. Or maybe the stream won’t end until Saturday. Although, man, am I tired. That stupid nonsense with the clocks that we have to put up with every spring. That doesn’t help. That doesn’t help, that’s for sure. But yeah, I mean… It’s… You know, the culture is the thing that determines what you do on Saturday, right? Like, if you’re part of the Jewish culture, Saturday is the Sunday and… Yeah, it’s all different, right? So you have all these machinations and manipulations of the world, we’ll say. Yeah, and I got a call from my heaven orthodox Jewish friend up in Boston, a very nice guy. A wonderful human. He actually called me this afternoon. So it was nice to hear from him. I hadn’t heard from him in a few months. And we get to catch up, right? But yeah, I mean, he called me before he can’t call me anymore because it’s gonna be a while. You know, it’s like, oh, OK. You know, so it’s nice. And having that cycle, right? You can see all the liturgy or whatever. Having those regular cycles from the culture, those signals about what’s appropriate when and when people… Like, everybody’s free on Saturday, right? So things like that are really important. It gives us a way to interact with one another in a way that we can cooperate better. It’s super important. Like, people just don’t… Like, they don’t appreciate it at all. Well, that’s the biggest thing that I’ve been able to grasp onto the past two years is that having gone through, coming up to now two liturgical years, there is a pattern of, there is a pattern that you get into which just structures your day, your week, and your month in a way that basically what I was doing before there’s no comparison. And actually, as it relates to culture, and this is something that is within living memory, is that there used to be a case in Ireland where every Sunday, every shop would be closed. Pretty much. You go back to the 80s in Northern Ireland and you’re like, oh, OK, I’m going to go to the shop. I’m going to go to the shop. And you’re like, OK, I’m going to go to the shop. You go back to the 80s in North Dakota. That was the case as well. We used to have those Blue Laws. The 90s in New England. The 90s. Blue Laws. Yeah, I forget when they lifted the Blue Laws in Massachusetts, but it was not that long ago. And I miss it. At first, I was like, well, this sucks. Look what I’ve done here. 24 cabs and my shit. And I’m like, man, now I’m like, man, this is great. I know how to plan for food, because you had to. You had no choice. Things were closed on Sunday. You didn’t have everything by Sunday. And if a storm hit, you were screwed in New England. Because you could go three, four days where the roads were impossible. That happened every once in a while. It wasn’t rare enough that it wasn’t in your five-year memory. There were storms, right? And there were really big storms. Like, Blizzard 78, which is always still talked about up there. Ah, it’s a big blizzard. But having that is really important. Because you get that knowledge, right? You get that experience. And you have that passed on from your culture. Culturally in New England, everybody knew about Blizzard 78. That’s why everybody went to the store before a storm, and all the stores ran out of bread, milk, and eggs. Why wouldn’t you just get spam and ramen noodles? No, we didn’t. Have spam and ramen noodles there, so it’s not going to go bad. It’ll be there for you. And I’m like, No, we didn’t have ramen noodles back then. Jesse, welcome. What’s going on? What are you thinking about here? What are we prompting you? Good things. Well, I made a coffee. Because it’s 11.30 here, Sydney time, Australia. And I was listening to you guys, trying to figure out what I could contribute. And I spilled it once, on the counter, where I make the coffee. That was fine. And I was like, That was fine. Brought it here, put it on my computer desk, spilled it on the laptop. Luckily, the laptop’s raised, so it’s fine. But, okay, cool. Little bit to clean up, clean up the desk. Put it on the floor here. Don’t know why I put it on the floor. I thought, put it way out here, not on desk, not on a musical instrument. It’ll be fine there. I go, just before I log on, I should move the fan, it’s very hot. As I’m going to move the fan, I know, I know, I know. Culture, that’s culture for you. You keep kicking the problem down the road. Hey, it was your topic. It was your request. How did I do on the monologue, since it was your request? What do you think? Did that help? It was good. I think we, it’s already come up a little bit, the distinction between tradition and culture. Because I would say, hopefully, what, what was in the past was you had tradition, and tradition informed the culture. And the culture reflected the tradition. And somewhere, post-war, 1960s or so, the inversion happened. It was cultures, multiple cultures started informing or breaking down traditions, or became parasitic on traditions. So traditions are weak, they start to break down, and now you just have, you get to the 90s or the early 90s, and you’re just, you’re not going to be a 90s or early 90s, you’re going to be a 90s or early 90s, and all of a sudden you have pop punk. Like, this is my ultimate example of that. It’s like two different things that should go together that are somehow now marketed back to us as the ultimate, some 41, Blink 182, thing. And it’s not, it’s not. I like Blink 182. No, no, I love Blink 182. Yeah, it’s not punk. It’s not. I mean, I was like, I’m a fan of the 90s, and I’m like, I’m not going to go back to this, right? Now we’ve tried to divide things out of the culture through secularism. Well, there’s this thing called tradition. It’s like, no, no, no, there isn’t, actually. It’s an invalid category. Like, tradition is a thing that’s identifiable by the culture within the culture, but you can’t transplant it and move it. Right? Because Walt Disney starts making cartoons, and then the Japanese start making anime. Exactly. Exactly. It changes once you put it into a different culture. In particular, Japanese government starts making anime, if you want to go deep. Because they needed… Do you know this father, Eric? Look at Tomi. Adam, do you know this? I think it’s the Tomi Company. T-O-P-E-M-I. They made One Piece, they make Dragon Ball Z. They make all the top series. They’re backing founders with the Japanese government post-World War II, because they needed new cultural stories to bring everyone. Oh, okay. Stories. Okay. It’s bigger than that, right? Because you look at something like the original Godzilla, the guy in the suit, right? What was that? That was them basically saying evil Americans, evil Americans. Look what the Americans did to us. They’re evil. Look what fruits came from their nuclear assault. It was a destroyer of cities. I mean, it’s very overt. Once you see it, it’s like holy crap. And then you have the rest of the League of Nations are now represented in the other movies. Godzilla versus Mega Godzilla, Mothra. They’re all different European League of Nations characters. Yeah. Gamera is the best. Michael, at Mark, what then would you call the set of practices a people participates in? Well, look, the set of practices. Again, it’s not that you can’t use the word tradition. You can. You can’t separate the tradition from the culture and expect unpredictable results. That’s what we’re pointing to. We’re not saying tradition is an invalid category. We’re saying tradition is an invalid category outside of culture. It doesn’t make any sense to talk about tradition by itself on its own without any other reference. This is the postmodern problem. Postmoderns say, look, you can divide anything up anyway you want and then put it together anyway you want is implied. I get that it’s implied. Right. I’m not saying they explicitly said this, but this is what it leads to, inevitably. And that’s wrong. There are right things and there are wrong. It’s interesting. So in the Vanu Cle livestream today, I didn’t catch the whole thing. Unfortunately, I missed the best part, which is the end where he allows other people to come in and tell him how wrong he is about everything. Sorry, Paul. I had to say it. But in the middle… What’s Paul going to come on this stream? We’re going to get Paul to come on navigating patterns. It’s probably too late for him, but one of these days, yeah, we’ve got to get him to push more good videos. Like, he saw story narrative archetype and he really liked it. So that was good. But there are other videos that are just as good that Paul could engage with and learn more. But one of the things he was talking about was the IDW and how Eric Weinstein came up with that and it never really stuck. And I was like, yeah, because it wasn’t close enough to an emanation. And it was done with bad intent basically. Like, Eric, I don’t dislike Eric Weinstein as a person, but his intent is very transparent to me, even though it’s probably not to him. And it wasn’t… his intent wasn’t good. And so he… when he came up with the name, it just didn’t match what was actually happening. Like, they were… you know, he’s trying to be edgy, right? And he’s trying to make a thing out of nothing. Right? And he’s trying to create a coherence. And it’s like… He’s like a banker, right? Yes. So, I mean, edgy bankers, is that really going to work? Right. And that’s the problem, right? Like, a better way to understand, we’ll say, Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson and Eric Weinstein and these other people being able to talk is to talk about the craft of conversation rather than to try and name it. Because it wasn’t a thing. It just turns out that they had very different values. And you can now see, as predicted by me since forever, that Sam Harris was not a moral agent of the world. He was not going to be a moral agent in the world. That was not an option that was available to Sam Harris at any point in his life. Sorry to say, it just wasn’t. Don’t believe me? A month before he blew up, I did a video about him. And then when he blew up on trigonometry, I did another video about how he blew up and, you know, made that the highest value video. Made that explicit. Where could the new atheist culture go? What’s the theology of the new atheist culture? Right. Right. And that’s the point. Is that you tried to name something that didn’t have virtues and values in common. And when you do that, there’s no emanation until the name doesn’t work. It’s that simple. And that’s what the postmoderns miss. You can say, I can interpret Moby Dick as an allegory about feminism or whatever. You can do that. And that can be done. But it’s not close enough to something that you can participate in to be useful. And so it’s not arbitrary. And that’s what they leave out. Foucault leaves this out. Derrida leaves this out. These things are not arbitrary. There are better and worse interpretations of the text. That discernment doesn’t come from the text and it doesn’t come from you. That’s what the Protestants mess up. It doesn’t come from you. It comes from above. And how do you understand what’s above you? Well, you can’t do that by yourself because you’re a muppet. I’m a muppet. We’re all muppets. We can’t do that by ourselves. That’s why we need culture. That’s why we need the church. That’s why we need the institutions, the academy. That’s why we need the government. We need all these things because they help give us perspectives from the distributed cognition down to us to interact appropriately with those things. And I think that’s super important to realize. I do want to address Michael again. You see it valid as they are tradition, of course, because you have a reference to culture. My tradition is within my culture by definition. That’s what I’m saying. Tradition is definitionally in culture. You can’t separate it from that. There has to actually be the act of handing something down. Yeah. Right. If that’s not there. So like I couldn’t with like let’s say I got a bunch of orthodox liturgical books and started trying to celebrate the divine liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. It just really isn’t going to be the same thing because I’ll have the books. I’ll know like kind of the procedures. I ain’t going to have that ethos in there. You know? That’s why I could have learned the Latin mass by just studying the missile and trying to do it. But what did I do? I went to Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary in Nebraska and took a five day workshop on it. A really intense workshop. My head was hurting every day by the end of it because of how all the… But those guys have practiced it basically uninterrupted since the Second Vatican Council. Oh wow. Yeah. That’s a big deal. I mean, yeah. They got… They split off from the SSPX when Lefebvre got communicated in 1988. Yeah, I know. Who would have asked to be rebellious Frenchmen, right? Never. Never such a thing. We were talking about this earlier. Somebody asked what the French word for frog was. And of course I happen to know that one. I know like two French words and that’s one of them. And I went, oh, it’s kind of a mess. How do I know that? Because the French Canadian festival in Biddeford, Maine was called La Carmes and it has a frog on the…I should grab one of those. I don’t have them here. I have a bunch of La Carmes badges. Because you get it. They give you a pin to go in, right? Oh cool. Yeah, yeah. Oh, it was great. It was great. But like they’re poking fun at the French by calling it the frog festival. That’s what they’re doing. Deliberately poking fun at Paris. They’re like, here, Paris. Have a pop of cake in the eye. They don’t care. They don’t like Paris. They have a love-hate relationship with Paris. Right? And yeah. But yeah, La Carmes. Right? Why? Because they’re rebelling in some sense against the Parisian oppression. Because I think both of them are from the south of France. That’s my suspicion. I’d have to look that up. I think most of the French Canadians were there by way of southern France. Not necessarily. Or maybe the smart ones that we’re still saying. Because yeah, look, you gotta have a lot of motivation to leave some of the best weather in the world in France. To go live in Canada, which is some of the worst livable weather ever. And hunt beavers in the middle of the woods in the winter. And there’s no women. I mean, for a Frenchman, there’s no women. That just sounds like hell right there. I’m telling you. Yeah. Didn’t even have the consolation of what the Spanish had down in the south. There you go. Yeah. And I think that’s the problem. Like we talk about things and then we think like me, I, by myself. I am an uber Muppet. I can divide tradition out and then discern it from culture. No, you can’t. You can’t discern it from culture. It’s part of the culture. It’s identifiable within the culture. It’s not. You can’t use it outside of that. What on earth is Anselman saying? Zoot allures? Allures? Zoot suits? Alluring zoot suits. They’re very attractive. It’s great for him and me. So I think that now we’re just running on fumes. Maybe. I don’t know what the heck that is. Is there such a thing as high in low culture? This is maybe one thing I wanted to try and say. You brought that up. I don’t think there is. Like I think the idea of high culture is. Well I would call that tradition. Everything that you embody in high culture is a tradition. Like the arts up until the 18th century were a tradition of high culture. I don’t think so. I think this idea of high culture is the elite saying we’re better than you to everybody else. Right? Because and it’s valid in a sense because they are the ones that are holding the culture together by pointing up. The purpose of the arts, the purpose of crowning the king, the purpose of these things is to point up at the higher things. And that pointing up is in fact the thing that makes the culture cohere. Yes, here’s what we’re orienting towards. We’re orienting towards the crown. Or not even the crown. What the crown represents. Why? Well here’s the bishop to show you that this is a valid engagement. Right? That’s why Adam and I went over this in our French Revolution video. That’s why Napoleon screws it up. Like that’s how he screws it up. He says no, no, no. You’re going to put this on me. It’s like no, no, no. That has to be conveyed from above. Like the authority has to come down. You can’t just say I’m I’ve militarily conquered this land. And now I’m the emperor. And because I’m the emperor, the church must crown me. Right? Because you’re none of that is an emanation. And so you try to infanciate this thing that’s not an emanation. And now you have Europe that blows up in war every few years. And I suspect we’re not too far away now because we keep sending weapons to Ukraine as though they can win. The only way they can win is when they’re pounded in the dust. Let’s not do that. I kind of don’t want Ukraine to go away. But here we are. We’re stuck. You’ve heard of it. I’m stealing this. All yours. Who wants it? You want Discord? I can send it to you. Please. Just throw it on my server under heretical means, please. There it goes. We’ll get it on there. And Napoleon crowns himself. Right? So he takes the crown and he gets all the bishops to watch. He gets the bishops and the pope to watch. Yeah. Because there is a certain pattern of the… Is there an echo? There is an echo. Not sure if it’s my internet connection. There is a certain pattern that used to happen. People would conquer lands and they would say you are now to worship me effectively. So he was doing that. But there’s a change in the 18th century that’s vital to distinguish. But that’s not what he was doing. So if you look at the Holy Roman Emperor, so go look up Holy Roman Emperor and go look up the titles. Adam, was it like a hundred? Multi-titles. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. So, I mean, you can look at England, right? Like when the Queen goes to Scotland, she doesn’t have the same title as she does in England. What’s that about? Oh, you’re pointing to a different thing. And so you’re trusting… Well, you’re… And in essence, it’s a super efficient, super awesome thing to do, because you’re trusting the leadership as a separate thing apart from the virtues and the values that that leader is trying to instantiate in that country. Now, whether or not that’s viable, I don’t know, right? But it seems to have worked in the past fairly well, like with the Holy Roman Empire and stuff, right? But that’s what’s happening. They’re saying, all right, we trust your leadership and we trust your integrity to uphold the values for our region. Right? And then that doesn’t mean that our region is never going to be oppressed by England because someone’s going to be oppressed by something. And that’s the… See, that’s the deep problem that we have. We keep not accepting tradeoffs. We are in tradeoffs. We are in negotiations all the time about everything. We are. And therefore, what do you do about that? And you can be all Protestant about it and say, well, the least Protestant thing I could do is join the Catholic Church. It’s like… Come on. Like, join the Catholic Church. Then, you know, like, get in there. Like, wait, don’t talk about definitions. The definition’s already done. Like, you’re protesting against the Church. Stop. Like, join it. You can’t separate yourself because when you try to separate yourself, there’s a problem there. And it’s the same problem as when you try to force everybody under one emperor with one name. You can’t do that. It’s not a valid way to run the world. And that’s why Napoleon failed. And the revolution continues, I think, is what Adam’s on about still, right? Like, Fifth Republic, is that what you’re saying? Republic number five. Yeah. An empire number… Is it two or… At least two. It’s got to be at least two. Yeah. So, that’s… Yeah, I mean, what was Vietnam and Korea about, if not saving France’s empire? Yeah. It wasn’t the only thing it was about, but also saving France’s empire. Yeah. Yeah. How is Korea a part of that? It’s the same sort of thing where once you’re engaged in protecting the colonies of Europe, right? Oh, okay. Well, that’s what we do now. We’re protecting the colonies of Europe because the European ethos is better than the Russian ethos, right, or the communist ethos, however you want to frame it. So, we’re still protecting colonies of… It’s not just France. We’re protecting all kinds of colonies all over the place. The Dutch, the English… America becomes the new empiricist, essentially? Isn’t that the essential? That’s how it’s cast, but that’s not what’s happening because we’re not taking over in place of. We’re not saying, oh, we’re going to get rid of the French from their colonies. We’re not taking the colonies away from them. We’re just protecting their stuff. You just have to have all of your oil contracts denominated in US dollars. That’s all. It is a soft power. That happened a long time ago. Well, no, but… It’s the acknowledgement that some power is better than a power vacuum. So, that’s why I don’t like the soft power idea. I’m like, no, no, power is just power. It’s not hard or soft. Same objection for high culture versus low culture. The low culture doesn’t exist without the high culture. The high culture is irrelevant without the low culture. Why are we talking about? Why are we making that distinction? Now, here was a distinction that I heard from somebody I respect, is that high culture gets to a point where it can actually have a kind of universal quality. So, why do people go to Europe? Well, they mostly go to Europe to see the architecture. And everybody can look at what is embodied in the brick and stone there and say that is good. The Japanese are really into Bach. They’ve got their own symphony orchestras. They’ve got their own chorales there. They’ve adopted this music as their own and they’ve got their own symphony orchestras. So, why is it that high culture, because Bach speaks to something universally if you’ve got ears to hear it. And so, the distinction I’ve heard between low culture and high culture is that low culture is more particular, but high culture can achieve a universality. Yeah, I would say that is what I described, right? It’s not about getting up, right? Whereas the gritty, got to farm, got to make food, got to maintain the system, right? We’re maintaining the system, like the people at the bottom maintain the system so the people at the top can have culture of high value. But there’s still a culture, I’m sure Adam can speak to this, right? In the country, amongst the farmers that is different from the culture, say, in the cities, in Scotland, or, you know, Edinburgh in Scotland, or London in England, right? And so, the elites make this high culture versus low culture, but really it’s just two aspects of the same culture. Where it is, is one higher? Well, one’s closer to pointing to the virtues and values that are holding them both together, but it’s holding them both together. And you can’t separate them. Again, you cannot, it’s like tradition, you can’t just say it out and say, well, we’re going to make everybody high culture. No, then there’s no way. There are two speeds, though. People, there are two speeds. Absolutely. And you have to have a way of categorizing. Like, tradition tends to be slow. You don’t need to have a way of categorizing, I disagree. I think it’s an invalid way of thinking about it. Culture, of course culture has two speeds, right? Because there’s a large population at the bottom that’s maintaining, because it takes a lot to maintain something. And there’s a small population at the top. I don’t know if they do maintain it. No, they do. Oh, yeah, they do. Because they can be influenced, though, to shift very quickly. Attitudes, I can’t get specific right now, but at the bottom, you can be very easily influenced. It’s called marketing. No, no, no. If you, no, no, no, you can’t. Certain aspects can. But that’s usually the middle people, right? So, for example, you go, you go, you go, and let’s suppose, let’s suppose there were an insanity virus that swept across, well, we’ll just do the US for the moment, but it might have swept across the world. And then people were like, oh, you know what? The insanity thing is we’re all going to wear masks, even outside. Okay? Now, where that goes and how that manifests is so different across the United States that it’s not even worth talking about. Because you can ask me right now, we live in the same place. The state of Massachusetts, which I left a number of years ago, a long time ago, six, seven years ago now, something like that, they are lifting the health emergency that caused the masks in May. In May of 2023. They’re lifting it in May of 2023. And I’m sitting here going, 90 days, kid, and our restaurants were open. 90 days. This has been over for me for almost three years. Over. Over. We don’t live in the same country. We don’t have the same physical experience anymore. And when I was driving up, because I was still doing trips up to New England, when I was driving up, the further north you go, the more masks you see. And so the people in South Dakota, for example, where Sally Jo is, they never bought into any of it. It’s not that there were no masks, but like, mask use was rare. Nobody cared. Nobody obeyed any of the state or federal guidelines. They just didn’t give a crap. They just didn’t care. And so they weren’t easily moved at all, but they also make our food, actually. They’re ranchers and farmers and that’s actual people making food. And they’re concerned with making the food. The people who are moved, the people in the cities, well, they’re dependent upon the people making the food. But they’re also not the high culture people. They think they are. They want to be involved in that. But most of them aren’t. They’re not doing it in Milwaukee. Very few are. Very few are. Yeah, very few. It’s a fantasy that’s happened since the 90s that everyone can be educated to a certain point of success. See, I think that’s an error. It’s not a matter of education. No, I’m pointing to that problem. I’m pointing to…that’s one of the ideas that’s floating about. It’s affluence. Right? It’s affluence. Right? It’s a weird question. If Carl Martz was a worker who knew about workers, how was he able to write all these voluminous papers? He should have been busy in the factory working. Well, he was writing about something you do nothing about because he never engaged in. He never participated. Right? That’s actually important to know. So you wrote a book about something you could not have known anything about at all. You knew knowledge of whatsoever. Much less relevant knowledge. It could be our argument. And so that’s where… There’s two parts of that. I’m not sure which parts to go on about. But again, this is the same as hyperproposal versus local. Nosticism and that’s what he really knew. Yeah. I’m trying to point… Yeah, sorry. You find gnosticism by yourself on your own. It’s very easy. Like any idiot can find gnosticism if they just have enough time on their hands. Like that’s why I don’t like James Lindsay saying oh, you can trace the path and they just… No, gnosticism is inevitable for an individual of a slightly above average IQ with too much time on their hands. They will undoubtedly become a gnostic. And they may call themselves a Protestant even, but I would argue Protestantism is just a gnostic heresy. So that’s… I’m gonna go there for sure. Yeah, I mean that’s an IP. Speaking of seeing things, I haven’t done evening prayer yet so I will see you all later. Well, thank you, Father. Lovely to see you. Good to see you too, y’all. Take care. God bless you. Adam, it’s nice to finally meet you. After watching your videos and spending hours with you. Technically speaking. Yeah, well, it’s a little bit late here so I just wanted to get a little bit through and I suppose this is a different time zone. I do appreciate that, Adam. Well, this is the one window where we’re only four hours apart instead of five. Oh, yeah, yeah, because clocks haven’t gone back there, have they? Right. Well, we changed the clocks and you didn’t. Yeah, we’ve changed the clocks. I don’t know anymore. I don’t know. There is a delay though between the US and here. There’s like a two-week window when Europe’s an hour closer to us somehow. It’s very strange. It does help with these things. It can. Well, and that’s part of what we’re doing is people are finding culture online, right, or they’re trying to. It’s a very strange sort of way to engage at the end of the day. Like, what are you doing? Why are you engaging with culture in that particular way? Like, what’s the what’s going on, right? And people are looking for where they fit. They’re suffering from domicile. They’ve been told they can have whatever they want, whichever way they want through postmodern thinking. And now they’re stuck. Have we kind of maybe for both of you, what are the axioms of culture? What does culture do? How does it function? Didn’t I go over that in my monologue? Bits and pieces. Do I need to bring up my notes? Because I wanted to, what’s the difference between that point to something higher? So they’re both overlapping with tradition. There’s no distinction between the two. No, no, no. Tradition is a sub-component of culture. We went over that, right? Tradition is a sub-component. You can’t separate it. Right? It’s identifiable, but only within the culture that it’s in. And then there’s other factors, like it’s the distributed cognition. It’s the way that you it gives you contrast to see the world so that you can know, oh, there are rules, and here’s what happens when I break them. Not that you can’t break them. Here’s what happens when I break them. And then it gives you that sanity because it pushes back on you to some extent. And it also allows you to cooperate. How do I know what the proper mode of engaging in a live stream is? Well, there’s a culture in this live stream of how to engage and what to expect. When you come in the room, if we’re busy talking, we’re not going to greet you. That’s not going to happen. We may get around to greeting you, right, when there’s a moment. And if you’re comfortable with that, you’ll just slide right in. You won’t need a greeting. Fair enough. That’s part of the culture that we’ve cultivated in this live stream. Because I don’t like to be interrupted when I’m talking. For whatever, but it doesn’t even matter, right? It doesn’t matter. Because we value the flow and the ethos and the spirit of the conversation in the moment above the new people coming in. And it’s just a decision. Other cultures make a different decision about, oh, stop everything and greet somebody. Fair enough. I’m not counting one above the other. I’m just saying that those are different cultures. Those are cultural norms that are different. And it just gives you the way to interface. Like, what do I do in Japan? I don’t shake hands with people. They don’t like that. That’s not their thing. I bow. Right? And then we get into this bowing contest. You can bow lower. So I have to know when to give up. We take off your shoes before you enter in. There’s all kinds of little things. I don’t even know them all. I’ve never been to Japan. Shame on me. If you buy me a coffee, maybe I’ll have money to get to Japan. It’s a culture shock, that’s for sure. Yes, it is. Well, and that’s the thing. There is such a thing as culture shock, right? But I think culture shock and domicile are actually… There should be more of it. That’s probably where I’m trying to get to. I think we’re losing… Because there’s no embodied traditions… Embodied traditions aren’t surviving because of the global homogenization. Culture shock’s becoming less and less. I don’t think that’s what it is. I think it’s just the most modernism and the materialism, which is oddly… I would say it’s kind of like the double-sided coin. Homogenization and post-modernism are kind of… It’s not homogenization. What’s happening is it’s ironic, right? Well, it’s paradoxical in some sense, right? The materialism focuses you on the movement. But because the movement is a form of non-verbal communication, the materialists don’t like it. And so they verbalize everything and focus everything on the verbal representation of the material. Because that’s what the scientific theory is. It’s making explicit. Right. It’s making something explicit. That’s its function. So reducing it down to facts only. Yeah. And on all description, nothing… I mean, that’s a funny thing, right? You think about a lot of human communication, and most of it’s non-verbal. Most of it’s in some sense, essentially implicit. And so it would make sense that that would kind of be represented in how something like a culture works. And so you know, the need to make everything explicit, it’s like you’re only getting… If you think about it as kind of a pie chart, you’re only getting so much of it. And that’s not even close to the space that you need to actually really make a culture as such. Same old. Well, you know, let’s say, you know, let’s say I write down all my whole thing of propositions, but like there’s no… What do you do when you get to the end of those propositions? At some point, you have to go off and act, and you can’t just kind of keep on adding to the end of it. And I think it’s in that sort of space where the non-verbal stuff happens. Or even what do you do in relation to the propositions, right? Because if you take a kind of Italian view on things, it’s like a rule, you say, you know, no running. And they might say, yeah, I’ll obey that most of the time, but at some point, if something important happens… If you’re on the beach, yeah, exactly. If something important happens, I don’t know, I get a call from a friend and I hear he’s down the bar, I’m going to start running. And, you know, if you can’t… But where is it? Same rule, and I don’t know, you know, Germany or something like that, it’s like that’s a very strict rule. If you’re caught running at any time, you better have a good reason to be running. And even then, you’re probably going to still get penalized. Something like that, for instance, I think. Jaywalking would be another one. Yeah, well, I think I may have Jaywalked a couple of times in Germany, but it felt a lot more thrilling when I did it in Germany than when I do it here. It’s a big fine. In Japan, it’s like mess. If you leave mess, it’s like not only is it a cultural sin, it’s a government sin. You are forced to be clean and tidy. They will not respect any sort of graffiti or any sense of untidiness. Chant, essentially. It’s probably figured. But yeah, and that kind of comes out with the whole… For Japan, I mean, and you’re talking about culture shock there, Jesse, it’s like Japan’s on the edge. It’s the Far East. If there’s ever a place where culture shock needs to be, it’s like it’s there. It’s not, you know… It’s beautiful, actually. In some sense. Well, PewDiePie’s moved there, so you know… Yeah, gosh. Yeah. What would be the other places? So Russia is the other end of the spectrum. It’s like the end of the West, in some sense. It’s a middle place. It’s kind of familiar, but it’s also different. Because it’s where you have the Rus, you have this kind of people, which does have a relationship with both Latin Christendom and the Roman Empire. But then you have the Mongols come in. And so there’s this kind of relationship with the East. And of course, the Mongols connect to the Far East with China, and by extension, even Japan. And so you have that kind of middle… Mediation. It’s a mediation point. Yeah. Middle place. So they embody some aspects of the West, in some sense, but then in the other sense, they’re a little bit… And you see how people in the West deal with Russia now. It’s like, do we want to trust them or not? Are they really, really trustworthy at the end of the day? And that even happened before Ukraine. This is a pattern that just happens. Continual pattern, actually. Yeah. Well, and you can see the way that different cultures value different things. And so when the Mongol hordes come in and occupy Europe, the way they govern is totally different from how other occupying European countries govern. Totally different. Because they’re kind of like, eh, we really care about the tribute. So we’re going to put our people at the top, and you’re going to pay the tribute. And that’s fine. And then you can live however you want. We don’t really care, right? Right, yeah. It’s very similar to the Roman system, isn’t it? No, the Rome would come in and transform everything about your city. Yeah, they’d found colonia. That’s where you get the word colony from. Colon, for instance, is a Roman city. And it’s Roman in the sense that they planted Roman citizens there. That would be the place where the… It would either start out as an army camp, or it would be an actual project where you’d send out people from some nearest Latin settlement. And you put them there. And by their interaction with the locals, the locals would adopt Latin customs. That’s why you have all of those places. Like, you know, France isn’t speaking Gaulish anymore, you know? So… Who was the other big force that had that idea of tribute? Was it Persia? Yes. Persia and Carthage, right? And tribute… Well, tribute’s big in Africa, from what I can tell. Tribute was big in parts of India, although they were mostly conquest. Right? And… This is all wrapped up in the values and what they’re trying to do. And look, even the Muslims were largely, we’ll leave your city alone, you can practice your religion, you can do whatever you want, but, A, we own the entire top of the government. Unlike the Mongols. The Mongols were like, eh, one or two guys living in leisure as foreigners is fine. But the Muslims were like, eh, we own pretty much the whole top of the government. So there’s no chance of a coup or anything like that. Right? I mean, they were mostly tribute based. They didn’t care about transforming the culture. With Rome, some of the battles were, you know, like in Spain, for example, the Spaniards would battle each other to get Rome in. Why? Who wouldn’t want Roman roads in a Roman bath? Like, this stuff is great, man. Let’s, let’s, so they’d fight over each other to no longer be part of Carthage, wouldn’t do that, right? Or whatever empire they were, their own, you know, rebellious nature. And they’d say like, no, no, no, no, we want the Romans in here, man. We want the baths. We want the, we want the, we want the Colosseum, the mini Colosseum, right? We want, we want the games. We want the free bread. We want the, we want the prosperity of Rome here. And they’ll give it to us if we just like get rid of these rebels. It’s like, oh, fair enough. Like, okay, let’s, you know, let’s do that. Like, people don’t, we don’t understand in modern times. Like, no, they fought to be in Rome sometimes. Not all the time. They, they would fight to be Roman cities and Roman citizens because- That would guarantee security. You got, it would guarantee security. There you go. Well, but also you have a nice life. You’re part of this huge trading network all of a sudden. And there’s all these wealthy people that are willing to move there to bring their wealth to you because they’d rather be a bigger fish in a smaller pond than hang out in Rome and be nobody. Right? Like, there’s all kinds of benefits on both sides to both parties. And so people don’t, like, wealthy people love to expand their empire just so that they can be the big fish in the small pond. Like, you know, and that’s not them being warlike. That’s them saying, hey, if we had this pond, they would benefit and I would benefit. Like, why not? Everybody wins. Now, not everybody wins everything and keeps everything they had because everything’s a trade-off. But on balance, if you were part of the Roman Empire, winning Tiger Blood, you know, it’s great. It’s absolutely great. Why wouldn’t you want to be part of the Roman Empire? One thing while Adam’s here is, I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but it’s a pattern I’ve observed is that Spain two out of three times acted first before big major world events happened. So you have, in the 18th century before the French Revolution, you have the uprising in Spain with Goya and that whole thing that revolt against the French crown. The French, Napoleon’s going to come down and try to sort things out. The British start coming in and start trying to mediate and play ball. That doesn’t work so well for them for a while. Napoleon’s there like, oh, I’ll do Russia at the same time. Why not spread my forces and run around? But the point is, before the French Revolution, Spain has its own revolution and before World War II, you have another civil war within Spain going on with the communist revolution starts happening down there. And that has its own thing that’s kind of been hidden in time because you see a pattern of what’s happening in that Spanish civil war that’s happening now again. It’s a, like, people are divided against themselves in their own country and it’s very different than what’s going on in World War II. World War II is a little bit more systematic. It’s two or three cultures in Spain for sure. At least. At least. I think it’s three. I don’t think it’s two. I think it’s three different cultures. And that’s what you’re seeing is the manifestation of these cultures being improperly managed by being in a country without having a personal relationship with their leadership. And that’s the result of the collapse of the system of monarchy. Like, when the system of monarchy is gone, you can’t do this crazy thing with titles and castles and, you know, all that stuff and the monarch can move around and then just be a different name in every place, but cater to the local regions and have local regional officials catering to those regions, right? So you don’t have wars over the money, for example, right, like you have in Spain, right? You have all these problems because of that. And you don’t worry about things like Canada has this problem, right? One province makes all the money and the rest of the provinces, you know, there’s a couple that are level. They don’t contribute, but they’re not a drain, right? But all the rest of the provinces are just a drain. And they hate the province that has the oil and drills the oil and makes all the money. They hate it. Well, just on the Canada thing, too, if you think Canadian, you’re actually thinking Aburton, really. That’s the culture that comes across. It’s not necessarily French Quebec and it’s not necessarily Vancouver. You’re thinking the culture. Yeah, well, there’s four, if you count Nova Scotia, too, which is the Dutch whole thing. That’s very, very different. No, Nova Scotia is English. It was French and that was English. No, no, Nova Scotia. Nova Scotia was all French. Maybe you’re thinking Newfoundland. Sorry. In the war of 1812, the Brits kicked all the French out of Nova Scotia and some of them moved back. So, yeah, they talk funny. They talk funny. They talk real funny. I cannot figure out their accent. It’s weird. I can say some of it, like Cape Britain. And I was like, what the hell is that? Cape Britain, right? And what they meant was Cape Britain. They call it Cape Britain. And I’m like, what the hell is that? That’s not even like, it’s not even like Scottish, you know, weirdness or Irish brogue or like it’s way off the charts. It’s way off the charts. So, yeah. My point was that there’s, when you think culturally what is Canada, what is Canadian, it’s not the thing that’s most represented now. It’s the Albertan, Alpine sense. They don’t have a culture. This is Colin Woodard’s American Nations, right? And then things get renamed. So, like, one of the problems that we have in the United States is it’s New York City. No, it’s not. It’s New Amsterdam. That’s actually really important. Why? Because the Dutch are this huge influence on the US because they did everything the US did 10 years earlier. The Revolution, the Constitution, they did all that in the Netherlands 10 years before us. That’s in Colin Woodard’s book, American Nations, by the way. Quite a good book. Quite a good book. And then what happens is they fight with the Puritans because they’re much more egalitarian and they’re much more open, they’re much more free. Right? On the other hand, they’re also the ones that bring slavery to the United States, even though they’re in the North. So, the Dutch aren’t necessarily a neutral or good force in the United States. And so, part of the movements and the Puritans and the Dutch long before the Revolution were fighting the whole way. Half of Connecticut was just battles. A bunch of Long Island, Northern Long Island and Southern Long Island are different because the Puritans got the North and the Dutch kept the South. Right? It’s all this stuff about migration to upstate New York and then the bankers came in and changed the money and stole all the land. There’s all kinds of wacky stuff going on. No one’s been forgiven to this day. There’s all kinds of stuff going on because of that. And that’s part of the problem is that, you know, when you rename things like Nova Scotia, which wasn’t originally called Nova Scotia, you lose, oh, there’s a big French heritage. So, you look at the names in Nova Scotia and you’re like, wait a minute, half of these are Scottish names and half of these are French names. What’s going on? Well, that’s what’s going on. The French were there. They got kicked out. The Scottish were moved in. They were moved in during the War of 1812. Actually moved in by boats. And then that was… Right. Well, because the War of 1812 is we think of it as like the Americans versus the Brits again. But it’s not. It’s part of the larger war. The Americans just have this weird idea that there’s such a thing as the American Revolution. And it’s not. It’s really the American Rebellion within the larger war. That’s really what’s going on. And so you don’t understand how the culture happened because it was a rebellion and not a revolution. I’m going to die on that hill. We call it a revolution. It wasn’t a revolution. It was a rebellion within a larger war. And then because of that, we were able to win. Because the basic strategy of France was to keep them busy so that the colonies don’t, you know, don’t get overwhelmed and then we’ll come in later and own the U.S. That was always their plan. You know, it was explicit. It was their plan 50 years later. They were still talking about it. They were still like, yeah, this whole experiment they’re doing ain’t going to work. We’re going to sweep in at any minute. They had very long time horizons back then. They didn’t, you know, and that’s the thing. They don’t really understand that. Like, we don’t understand that today. Adam, do you have any thoughts on the Spanish thing? The Spanish question of… Well, I was having a look at what that… whether you can kind of see that playing out at other time periods because yeah, you have the… you have basically some sort of revolution. So this is… so the Goya one you’re talking about, I believe, is when Napoleon puts his brother on the Spanish throne and basically kicks off the previous legitimate Bourbon king. And that causes basically a revolt because, of course, you know, Napoleon’s trying to pull off in Spain what he tried to do in France. Mind you, an interesting thing about that is the Spanish king allied himself with Napoleon. So what Napoleon was doing there is he was screwing over his ally just showing the quality of the man that you’re dealing with, but also his plans. So yeah, so that precedes the kind of opening up of the large scale of the Napoleonic wars before he sends it to Russia. And yeah, you have the Spanish Civil War before the Second World War. Another good Roman time period kind of example of that following that pattern is the Sartorian Civil War, the Sartorian War before the Caesarian Civil War. So Sartorius is basically a leftover of Sulla, the Civil War of Sulla over in Spain. And he, yeah, so he he’s fighting his war there and that finishes off. And then you get Caesar’s Civil War about a decade or two afterwards. I think you kind of have that in miniature again with Pompey being the governor of Spain as well. So you have this kind of reaching towards Spain. The same thing if you want to count it with the same. Spain is at the end of Europe, right? It’s like the first. Yeah, yeah. Culturally speaking, yeah. And because it’s so, because you’ve got these different people groups in there, you need to have to get any coherence in the region, you have to have a governance that’s kind of local to it. Another good example is before the Crusades, you have the Reconquista coming from the north of Spain inwards. And when the Pope issued the Bull of Crusade for the First Crusade, he exempted anyone fighting already in Spain on the landmass of Hispania in Spain because they were already seen to be on Crusade. They were taking back Christian lands for the war. So in some sense they were preempting the long line of wars to take back the Holy Land. Yeah. Wow. And that’s part of, so we’ve talked about the French Revolution, right? And in the next talk that we’re doing, the one that I have to get the nasty gear for, research-wise, because Adam’s way ahead of me, is the whole idea, well, where did the French Revolution come from in terms of, well, it came from misunderstanding of the quote American Revolution, again, is the rebellion, which came from somewhere. Well, that came from the English Revolution, which was a proper revolution. Cromwell? Was that where you… Around that time period, yeah. Yeah, around that. And so it’s sort of like, once you see something can be done, everybody tries it. And so one of my great stories for this, right, is yeah, well, once you see the pattern, you try to act it out. I mean, you haven’t heard the French Revolution talk that Adam and I do on navigating patterns. It’s really good because we go over the pattern, and we’re going to go to the beginning of it. We’re going to go to the English Revolution to show you the beginnings of the American Revolution, so-called, the rebellion, and then the misunderstanding of the French, right? Because that’s really what it is. And once you understand it that way, it actually makes a lot more sense what happened and why it didn’t work and why they’re in their fifth republic and all that. But there’s other places you can see this too. So one of my great examples, I think I went over this on my personal channel, right, which is just my name. IBM, back in the 90s, did this thing called outsourcing. They hired a bunch of firms in India to write software for them, and they ran that project for about six months. They got some software back from India. It didn’t work. They were like, ah, this is terrible, and they stopped doing it. Every single company in the world started outsourcing after that because IBM did it. It was like, well, but it didn’t work. Guys, why are you copying something that failed? And then outsourcing continued, largely, not entirely, but largely failed for every company that tried, especially outsourcing software to India. And that’s no longer the same issue that it was. They have much better software engineers now, but it’s also hard to manage remote teams, and we’ve gotten better at that, right? Communications are better. There’s all kinds of reasons why these things can fail. But I remember working with a company, and actually, it wasn’t even, it was my boss, but it wasn’t my job. He’s like, you need to call up the Indian Development Group and explain to them why none of their software is going to ship. And I was like, what? And then I’m like, why? And then he told me, oh, okay, well, I’ll talk to the manager down there and tell him. But people were following things because they didn’t understand them, like Napoleon. He didn’t understand the American Revolution or rebellion. He didn’t understand it. He didn’t understand how things worked. He thought he had a system down that would work. And it just turns out that he didn’t understand what happened. He misread everything, pretty much, and tried to implement it, and it failed. He misreads it as a political matter, or a cultural matter. He looked at the politics, the power plays an influence in what it can do, where it’s mostly cultural. Again, like I was saying, when you take culture and you try to squeeze it into politics, it doesn’t work. Or economics, it doesn’t work. When you try to say, no, we can sort of find culture by taking economics and politics and tradition and no, you can’t. No, you can’t. It’s a much bigger bucket. It’s the larger bucket. You can’t co-locate it or whatever by using these smaller frames. It’s not going to work. They do overlap, for sure, but they don’t overlap in ways that are going to make any sense to you. What’s the sense in the King of England having different titles in different parts of his kingdom? It actually makes total sense once you understand what’s going on. You have to understand it in terms of culture. You can’t understand it in terms of politics because politically, it’s a non-starter. Economically, it’s a non-starter. It’s no good. But once you understand the cultural thing, it’s like, oh, now it makes sense that that’s required and that that’s part of the failure of Napoleon. He did not understand why the Holy Roman Emperor had different titles because then the people can relate to you differently. And then you’re just a revered leader instead of being a tyrannical ruler. Yes. Well, I’m going to head off because it’s very late here. So I’ll leave it at that and see you guys later. God bless. Thank you, Adam. God bless. Sleep well. Then there were two again. Two muppets muppeting the live live seasons, cultural navigation alone. Where’s Nero? Where’s Nero? Where’s my crazy friend? Where’s Nero? Nero mountains are not represented by Nero or Blue Jay or no one’s mentioned ecumenical cheese pizza yet. Yeah, there’s no ecumenical cheese pizza. It’s it’s kind of a mess. I don’t know. People are busy, I guess. Good for them being out on a Friday night. Unlike me, although it’s St. Patty’s Day. I wouldn’t go out there tonight. It’s like no thanks. It’s too much going on. It’s all the drunk people and I can’t deal with it. I don’t drink. So there’s nothing for me on St. Patty’s Day, my friends. Nothing. That’s a culture itself, isn’t it? The not drinking culture is very interesting versus the drinking culture. And that wasn’t so much that was a there was less of a distinction that that’s a distinction that’s happened over time. Because it used to be drinking was the rebellion thing in some sense, always the way to keep warm during cold. Like I’m taking heavily drinking. I’m not saying alcohol. In the old days you drank alcoholic beverages because water wasn’t clean. So, you know, I like Anselman here. Some cultural things are recent inventions. Nope, they’re not. Pretending to be ancient. Well, yeah, they’re trying to instantiate things into culture. Such as the wealth druid thing in many Scots, Tartans and Kilts. They’re trying to manipulate culture. I agree with that. I argue that you cannot manipulate culture. Like that’s not a thing that you can do. Not to say you don’t have an influence, right? You don’t have some minor control or better yet influence over it. But it is to say that you can’t just resurrect the druids in a seance and have druidic culture. Especially when you don’t know what it was. It’s not written down. Sorry, it’s not there. This is like rescue and the mushroom and the illusion and the Lucinian mysteries. It’s like accept it. Religion with no name. You cannot know any of that. It’s impossible. And you could say, like John Verbecki does, right, well we’ll recreate it. No, you won’t. Not possible. Why? Because culture grows up at a time and in a place. And you’re not there. Even if you’re in that place, you’re not there. Now you can argue, if you get into that place, maybe you can get a sense for you’d have to live like they lived back then to even approximate it. And just because you come up with something doesn’t mean it’s going to be what they came up with. Because it’s not like every place and time gives you only one possible solution. Like potential is real. The fact that you figured out how to tie something together in a certain way using a certain tactic doesn’t mean that’s how the ancients did it. Like they might have found something that you could never dream of. And that happens all the time. You see, like there’s various ways that you can build the pyramids with people. I don’t know which one’s right. I know there are at least four different methods that people have put forth, all of which are feasible. But we don’t know which way that the Egyptians did it. We have no idea. Well, I’m not sure if that’s a train of thought to jump on. Well, but that’s what I mean about culture. It is specific to the time and the place. Yes. So is ideology. Right. You can’t just invoke it. And ideology is basically a cult. It’s just, it’s not. It’s another attempt to manipulate culture. It’s another attempt to top down control something. I would say bottom up. No, no. You’re trying to top down control. Right. You’re embedded in the thing. And so it doesn’t work. Which is not to say you can’t get a lot of people to go along for a long time. It’s just to say it’s not sustainable. And because it’s not sustainable, it’s not good. The tradition is that which sustains people. Right. The tradition is part of the thing that helps people sustain in terms of participation in the thing. Yeah. Oh, Hanselman’s still talking here. Charles, now King Charles in vestiture as Prince of Wales was sort of mythological invention. Well, yeah, but myth is good. Like it’s the best part of the world is myth. It’s the thing that connects everything. Right. Like that’s the thing. Like there would be princes and kings of different lands. This is just there always were. Like I said, go look at the titles of the Holy Roman Emperor. Then we’ll chat. Each different place has a different title for a reason. There’s a reason for this. It’s an important reason. It’s significant. Oh, Masters of the University of He-Man. Very important. Can I bring it up? Well, that’s a culture. That was a culture of a mythological reconnection of different things together. Right. Right. Exactly. Which was lost in the 80s. Big boom. Materialism. Which we still haven’t left if we want to look, if we want to navigate. No, no. Materialism is the scourge. I think that’s where Gnosticism comes from. We saw this very interesting channel. One of our heaps on the Discord server introduced me to this channel called Esoterica. Quite a good YouTube channel. I haven’t really engaged all that heavily yet, but like he goes into Stoicism. His framing is a little off. It should be obvious when you see the video. You also do one on William Blake that’s excellent. He goes into Stoicism. He basically says, well, Stoicism was very hardcore material and blah, blah, blah, blah. And oh, by the way, there’s all this mystical tradition that nobody ever talked about. And I was like, oh, okay. That’s what’s going on. There was all this mysticism that the Stoics engaged in that nobody ever talks about. Michael, welcome. I’ll put you in the corner. I know nobody puts Baby in a corner, but I put Michael in a corner. What you got for us, sir? I was looking lonely in here, so I figured out how to crash the party. Oh, it’s good to see you. Welcome. Good to see you too, sir. The language Welsh or in Scotland, Gaelic is an authentic continuation. Well, yeah, sure. Culture changes over time. It’s specific to a time and place. It keeps, to Jesse’s point, it’s the tradition that keeps it intact to some extent. It’s not that traditions can’t change or don’t change or won’t change. They will. But that is that unbroken line that outlasts generations to give you that continuous sense. Well, the Christmas tradition is an 18th century Charles Dickens thing, which is slowly fading away now. It’s literally going to go back to just a Christian holy day, essentially. It’s no longer going to be a culturally embodied thing in the West. Slowly, you can see it with people saying, I won’t go home for Christmas, or we don’t have Christmas with family anymore. So those sort of things that made up that tradition, buying gifts, why should we spend money? You see these kind of like, what are they, like poking holes in the bucket, slowly leaks out the water that’s all the trish. Even that, though, don’t you think that that’s going to survive in in some kind of like American South Trump principality thing that will at least pitter on for another hundred years? No, I don’t think so at all. I think Jesse’s dead on. It’s these little things that people miss, right? To go back to what Father Eric was asking about, is there an American culture? The busiest travel day of the year in America is before Thanksgiving. Not Christmas, not Easter. Why not? How weird? That doesn’t make any sense at all. Except that Thanksgiving is a holiday of the country. It represents the value and the virtues of the country. Thanksgiving is all about the celebration of the Indians bringing us food, you know, in Plymouth, so that they survive. There’s lots of reasons why that happened, by the way, but that is the busiest travel day. That’s the holiday. That’s the holiday in the United States. The American culture is Thanksgiving. So let’s say Thanksgiving is the top of the hierarchy, right? So it’s like for whatever that is, right? Whatever that blob of a thing, of these mashings together of these peoples, the Puritans, the Dutch, the whatever, right? So this mashing together, if Thanksgiving is at the top, you know, what’s like the next few pieces right below it? Well, it’s still, that’s the Christian ethos. That’s the Easter and Christmas and the next busiest travel days. Do you think it’s fair to say that Thanksgiving? That Christmas is an English thing, which is very interesting to point out. The Christmas thing is an English thing and Thanksgiving is the American thing. And so as the English spirit is being drawn out like a vampire from the Americas, that’s where you, maybe it’s better to frame it that way. And in America, it’s tainted with this German tradition, which tainted the English tradition, right? It went back to England from Germany. So that came from Germany, actually. So when English, Saxon. If I try to describe it as you know, some kind of American modernity, Protestantism, hybrid of the thing, whatever that is that has Thanksgiving at the top, right? That we’re watching even that as a value or as a hierarchy of values and hierarchy of traditions or holidays or whatever, right? That’s dissipating into something else here, right? No, not at all. It’s the different for us. It’s not that that’s the height of American culture is Thanksgiving. The height of the thing that points up. So what I’m trying to point at is something like the liberal bubbles that I lived in in the Northeast, right? They’re remapping a new set of holidays getting rid of any kind of like Christian patriarchy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? So they’re trying. They’re trying. Right. So I’m operating on the premise that they’re being progressive. Excuse the term. Progressively more successful at that. No, they’re failing miserably and it continues to fail. And the more they try, the more it fails. It’s marketing. It’s marketing. It’s marketing. It’s all it is. It’s just marketing. It’s failed propaganda and it’s already failing. Like it’s not even like it didn’t have the effect they thought because they’re postmoderns and don’t understand how anything works. Well, there’s also a sense in which it fails the way that puritanism fails. And yet you know, whatever that, whatever that thing is. Puritanism hasn’t failed. It’s got 500 years of success. Yeah, but puritanism is still in New England, like very much. I agree. No, no. Look, Michael, I think what you’re seeing is what we’re talking about. Right? There’s that high culture and that low culture and Jesse pushed back, you know, rightly, which is fine. Right. And he says, well, no, no, the high culture just like manipulates. And I’m like, no, no, no, no, it doesn’t manipulate farmers at all. I was trying to draw in Matthew Peugeot’s symbolic world where you have top and bottom and the bottoms need to reflect the top. Absolutely. But the thing in the middle, the people that go to museums but don’t make art, the city folk, the city folk, right? The city folk, they don’t mediate. But they’re subject to fashion. And we’re looking at the fashion going, look at that fast changing fashion. And it’s like, well, it’s just a fact. It’s a fact. A lot of the art these days is made to fit too. They’re like, we need a certain work like this to fill this space. They’re trying to manipulate the system. Right. But you can’t manipulate culture for very long. That’s why we have a war in Ukraine. They couldn’t hold three different cultures together in one arbitrary boundary drawn on a map with a government in the middle. They couldn’t do it. And you just look at Ukraine. You can see that this was impossible. The whole thing was being propped up by graft and corruption from day one. There was never a moment when Ukraine was independent from the Soviet Union that it didn’t exist without money laundering, graft, corruption, governments going back and forth and fighting the whole. It was never a stable place at the top level because there were three cultures fighting for the land. It just doesn’t work. It can last a long time. More generations than we think. But it’s still just a fashion. People want it too. I was trying to, I’ll say it explicitly, you like that that whole thing was happening in Spain with multiple rules, multiple cultures, multiple sectors have different influences. That’s that pattern playing out again. Right. It’s important to distinguish because we’re having that. I would say, I would argue that we’re having that in Australia just as much as we’re having that in America. There are these multiple cultures and then who has the most amount of residents left is going to be an interesting thing to watch. Residents isn’t going to happen. It’s not going to happen. I was trying to map it in a nice way. I’m going back to the last point. They’re going to go back to the last stable point. That’s what happened. Things collapse very quickly. Integration only works in the middle. And then integration fails and collapses completely. And then you go back to something stable. That happens in computers all the time. It happens in everything. It’s a deep pattern. That’s the problem is that in some sense we’re always in that kairos moment. Right. On the other hand, you can’t say that because the kairos moment you can only recognize with hindsight. So you can’t claim to be in the kairos moment. But there’s always that change. And I think the problem is, and this is one thing that Adam and I talked about in our last talk that is less about history. We’ll say although we’ve dragged in quite a bit of history, probably my fault. That when you look around at the world, what you see is fashion. And then you mistake that fashion for a lasting change because you don’t know any better. It’s very hard to tease apart what’s fashion from what’s going to stick. You don’t really know. But Europe thinks they’re following America. America thinks they’re following Europe. Right. But again, if you go to somebody in the United States and you say, did you know most of the electricity in France is nuclear power? They’re not going to believe you. They’re not going to think you’re lying. Especially if they’re on the left. Because they’re very skeptical that anything like that could be true in Europe. Right. If you tell them there are European countries without gay marriage, they’re going to tell you you’re a liar. They had gay marriage years before us. Not true. That didn’t happen. I think the UK had something close and I think it was Norway. It was one of the Scandinavian countries had it before us. That’s it. The rest of Europe didn’t get gay marriage until long after we passed it. Nobody in the United States knows that. Nobody. Nobody. They have no idea. And so what’s ending up happening is that Europe, which is a much more fragile place than people realize, is collapsing much more quickly. In a much more destructive way than the US is. Right. And then you see that with Ukraine. Although it’s not… French rides too. The French have been freaking protesting for like four or five years now. Continuously. And nobody in the US knows this. We all think Europe’s really stable. I’m like, Europe’s really unstable. Like there’s stuff going on. Like in Sweden they finally had an attack in Gothenburg. It’s one of the big cities. Had a big bombing there. They’ve had bombings and fires going on in Sweden for decades. And nobody paid any attention because it was in these small Muslim neighborhoods. And so it didn’t affect the white population that much because they had sequestered off their immigrants. But now they’re running out of space. And so now the immigrants are moving into the city. And now it’s a problem. And the same is true in France. Those ghettos can’t hold. There’s just too many Muslim ghettos with 50% unemployment rates. And by the way, has France ever had anybody anywhere in the government that wasn’t white? Because I don’t think so. And if they did, it’s been very, very recent. That is a very… If you want to measure it from political standpoint, it’s a very racist country politically. I don’t think that’s a valid way to measure it. But by our standards, we’ve had a Black president, guys. I don’t think they’ve had a non-white member of any part of their government ever in France. I’m sorry. It’s from our standards. They’re hugely racist. You know, and that’s from when racism meant something. We’ll say back before Obama was president when he ruined that word for us, right? So, Mark, we don’t know this though. I’m particularly curious on the way that you think we are or like the American West, I guess, is or isn’t going through a Tower of Babel split? No, we’re going through construction. It’s the other way around. We’re constructing a Tower of Babel. Tower of Babel is a construction, not a destruction. It’s a building up. Right, so it’s like they can’t understand each other anymore even with the same language. Right? No, we’re not there yet. We’re nowhere near because we’re still trading. We’re still trading. Once we stop trading, trading is a language, right? I’ll give you this value for this. I’ll say this word and you interpret it this way and you know what I mean. When people lose faith in the dollar, right, in the US, not the other countries, those don’t matter quite so much. When people lose faith in the ability to trade in the dollar, and that might be happening now with the Bitcoin going back up, right? Then we’re talking about an event. Now whether or not that can actually happen is a different discussion. I suspect it cannot. I’m not saying like it has happened. I’m saying like we’re watching it happen. I don’t think so. I mean, I think again, you can make the case. You can look at Bitcoin right now and say, well, that’s weird because that actually is weird, right? The last time everybody thought Bitcoin would go up was the beginning of the war and they said, ha, the dollar is weak and therefore Bitcoin is strong because they don’t understand how economy or money works, right? Have a bad model for both. And so they didn’t understand that, no, uncertainty means all currencies go down, period. Right? Now if your country doesn’t have uncertainty because they have what they need, then maybe you get around that. But the downside of having the dollar as the world currency is that the uncertainty of all the other countries brings down your dollar and that’s what happens. That’s basically literally what happened. It’s like distributive cognition in some sense. Right, it is. So let me try at a different angle. Do you think that something like a Tower of Babel problem happened to Russia with the rise of the Bolsheviks, right, in the Soviet Empire? Do you see that as the same thing? Not even close. No, because the Bolsheviks were anarchists, revolutionaries that were brought in on purpose as anarchists and revolutionaries to do the hard work that Trotsky didn’t want to do. Right? Because if we actually revolt, we might get hurt. I know there’s a bunch of rabble rouses called anarchists which have been used for literally thousands of years for this purpose. You send them up because they’re angry and they’ll go crazy anyway and you have them do the hard work. And they did. And then of course, Trotsky and the organized team, like an organization always beats anarchists. Always. Instantly. They commit and slaughter them all and take over. When there’s a body of people with shared values and shared ideas and then there is enough things that happen to where they don’t see those values the same way anymore. Right? And they find themselves having… They were never cohesive. They find themselves having irreconcilable differences. They were never cohesive. They were never cohesive. I’m good with that. So, anybody that is cohesive, we can’t imagine a splitting, right? That that is a thing that happens. No. That’s what culture prevents. I want to address this though. Benjamin Franklin, speaking of Tower of Battle, have you guys seen the movie Metropolis? Yes. Metropolis is excellent. Right? And then he says, there was a silent movie and also an animated movie that came much later that subverted certain… Yeah. People are always subverting the elements of story. Right? And so, they’re extracting those narrative patterns differently. There’s nothing wrong with that. I could point to The Matrix. And maybe, Jesse, maybe we need to do that. Right? We need to do The Matrix. You and I. Right? Maybe we’ll just set the pattern… Mark, I’ve got some spicy notes. I’ve got some spicy notes on that movie. Has anyone actually read the lyrics to Rage Against Machines Wake Up? Just reading the lyrics to Rage Against… If you read those lyrics, because that’s how The Matrix ends. It ends on those wake up lyrics. And those lyrics are damn spicy. Those lyrics are damn spicy. They’re maybe not good for the internet. Put it that way. But they frame that movie very interesting. Once you understand… Yeah, the whole framing changes. But I think this, Michael, is where the confusion is. People see a movement and they assume a body. Not all movements are bodies. Emergence is not good. Emergence is just emergence. It will happen. And so, you can look at the Bolsheviks and say, ha! The Bolsheviks had values and all this stuff in common. And they moved as a body and took up… That didn’t happen. I think the better word is a tribe. There were different tribes that were trying to go along together for power in Russia. Same thing happened in Catherine the Great’s time. There were different tribes in Russia trying to influence and change their government. That same… The Russian Revolution echoed 200 years earlier. The same set of patterns and problems. And you’ve got oceans, which are a large body of water. And then you have a puddle, which is a small body of water. The oceans are a container. Yeah, the oceans are a big container. And we have understood these things through time as being bodies of water. Whether it’s a puddle, a lake, an ocean, or whatever. It’s a body of water. No, because a body has to have action. For you to establish what a body is, it has to be making an action in the world. I know there’s a cycle of repressivation and water moving. But that’s more of a spirit than a body. It has to have a cohesion. Like water has a cohesion. You know what doesn’t have a cohesion? The Bolshevik Revolution doesn’t have a cohesion. It’s just a bunch of… Hold on, hold on. Let me talk about this. This came up today. Elon Musk tweeted out a cartoon. Brilliant cartoon. There’s a bunch of people on a subway car. They all have little bubbles over their head. There’s only one bubble at the top with words in it. There’s like five people, six people on the subway car. They’ve all got bubbles. They’re thinking exactly the same thing. Which is when the current government turns to ashes, my utopia will emerge. That’s not the right wording. I can’t find it. That’s basically what it is. Those people are not a body. They all have the same proximal goal. I’ve talked about proximal goal before many times on my channel, Navigating Patterns. It’s there, right? When you have a bunch of people that want to bring down the government, they look like they have the same goal. Because their proximal goal is to bring down the government. But what happens after that is not the same. So they weren’t a body. They never had a common telos. They just had a common proximal aim. And we’ve mistaken those two things because we’ve disenchanted the world. Any collection of body-ness, if the three of us right now, there is a sense in which just the three of us hanging out, doing this, is a body. There’s a sense in which that’s the case. It’s community there. Not necessarily. That’s part of the problem. It’s me and Mark are friends, but we’re not a community. It’s a difference. We are not in other places. We’re here. There’s three of us on a screen together. Instead of on other screens or not on a computer or all the other possibilities. You can’t say every gathering is a body. It’s not. Every gathering is not a body. You’re pointing to gathering and saying gatherings are bodies. Good. If we want to have specific lexicons to describe the different sizes or something, I’m good with that. I don’t care about size. I care about whether or not it’s a body. A body is a common telos. Non-bodies do not. It’s that simple. It’s really not a difficult thing. But it is a differentiation that’s important. I’m good with a differentiation. Let’s say this gathering, rather than having necessarily shared values, there is a sharing that is happening here. It matters whether it’s shared values. This is my whole point. It’s telos. Telos makes bodies. Non-telos doesn’t make bodies. Totally good with that. We have a lower level. There’s a sense in which there’s a lower level of sharing that’s happening here. I’m saying things, you’re hearing them, I’m listening to you. We’re doing this conversation. Right? Yeah. So whatever the sharing and the gathering that’s happening here, I see like to me, when I think about the divine council as such, even this gathering is mapped on this divine council at the lowest, really small levels. Right? There is a spirit of this conversation. There might be a spirit of the conversation, but that doesn’t make it a body. I’m not trying to say that it is necessarily a body. What’s the point? What are you trying to get to? Okay. So, let’s say there’s 10 of us. Right? So there’s a shared, there’s a sharing, there’s a gathering. And then at some point, there’s irreconcilable differences about what whatever was bringing us together makes it no, I won’t be on this conversation with those five people. We have to split off to our own conversation with the other five people. It’s irreconcilable. We don’t hear each other. We don’t understand each other. Right? So, this, the ungathering, right? Or the splitting and gathering. The splitting and gathering. Tribalization. Sure. Sure. Right? And if we don’t want to call tribes bodies, I’m cool with that. But tribes are different tribes, the separating of the body. Right. And so, there is a but it has a gatheringness and it has a sharingness. Right? So, Not relevant, but true. It’s not relevant. The reason I’m doing this is because I’ve been put in a corner in order to try to use particular language to try to convey a concern that I’m noticing as having lived in a completely separate reality three years ago. Yeah. Yeah. That is irreconcilable to the reality that I live in now. It’s not irreconcilable. But let me deal with that separately. So, first, here’s the cartoon. I think it’s brilliant. Right? I can’t wait for society to collapse so my ideology can rise from the ashes. This is what’s going on. Look at these people. They’re not even talking to each other. And their ideology is different in every case. That’s kind of implied. Right? But that’s important. And then I want to address Benjamin here. The American Revolution also done by anarchists. Only partially. Right? Because it wasn’t a revolution. It was a rebellion. It’s actually really important. It’s an important distinction. It’s part of a larger war. There wasn’t a war from the U.S. to England. It was the French trying to get a hold of the British colonies in North America. That’s what was happening. That war had been going on for a long time. It was a seven years war. I don’t remember. Adam went to bed. I don’t have my dictionary with me. Or my encyclopedia of history with me in the moment. And there is a spirit of anarchy in every revolution. Because you need the anarchists. Because they’re brave enough and dumb enough to go and do and battle and lose their lives. Because they’re ideologues. And then the thing that made it successful, you need to go to Navigating Patterns. You need to watch the freaking video on the French Revolution where Adam and I talk about this. Now I have to post that. I have to post that link. But I also want to sort of continue. So what was the philosophical basis and the writers and intelligentsia? The American rebellion worked mostly because of enlightenment understandings within a Christian context. When the reason why Napoleon fails, and this we go into in that video that I did with Adam on the French Revolution, is because he doesn’t understand enlightenment values at all. He thinks they’re apart from the Christianity. And they’re not. And if the Bolsheviks wrote about and fought more, no. The Bolsheviks weren’t a thing. They weren’t a body ever. We do that and we’re wrong. It just didn’t happen. They’re a tribe of anarchists who only identify against the king. Or the ruling family. That’s it. It’s all they are. They all have different goals. Every single one of them. That’s why when they got power they collapsed immediately. They were manipulated. When they eventually got power too. Because they had to. All these stages. All these trade-ups. They knew what he was doing. They’re not idiots. They’re much smarter than you think. He knew what he was doing. He went rabble rousing on purpose. I mean, Peterson kind of goes into some of this. Where he said, oh, the cool-offs. And he goes into that story. But ultimately all they were were a bunch of anarchists who only wanted not this. They didn’t want this. They wanted not what we have now. It’s an identification against and it cannot hold. Because it doesn’t form a body that can hold. Alright, actually proximity may have something to do with it. No, it’s not. It’s not proximity. It really is. Once the Russians, once the certain group of elites of Russians gain power, one of the first things that they do, right, they debank and they de-church. Two stable cultures in Russia that were holding it together. Obviously money is a culture. It’s a value system. They had problems with that and they had to basically force money to come to them through different means and gain money through other. And the other thing that was holding Russia together, right, was the church, the patriarchy, another symbol of the kingdoms, which they pull down. So it’s actually a cultural revolution. It’s not a political revolution. And when you don’t map that, don’t see that as a spirit sort of trying to influence events and times, you just see as materials you misappropriate the patterns and signals. You just tend to see things as just events rather than shifts in culture, which matter far more because you can start to map that out through different times, times in history. Where am I going with this? When you change, when those changes in culture happen, the changes in transition, the changes transition culture and tradition and that transition of traditions is what really affects people, everyday people, because they no longer have that thing that was sustaining them going forward. And that’s why it takes Russia all the way up until the 1990s to finally have a tradition of itself again, because it was so destabilized. Right. I think maybe I understand a little bit better what you’re getting at. I’m going to try to articulate what I think I hear. Okay. Sure. So the way I would map this on Christian terms is something like you’ve got these different maybe you’ve got Christianity, or you’ve got a cult of Yahweh, you’ve got a cult of Apollo, you’ve got a cult of Dionysus. You have these things, in a sense like you can see what is constructively built with those. The Christians would argue that these other cults are ultimately headed towards death, right? But they build and coalesce or something. Versus something like anti-Logos, right? Which only looks to resentfully destroy what is there. Right? It is only a pulling apart in resentment, right? So if there’s like Christ and anti-Christ, anti-Christ only tears down, inevitably implodes and turns into nothing. Subversion though. It’s not tearing down. Because you can have an anti-Christ or an anti-body that’s just it only means it’s just to subvert. Justice is all it needs to do to exist or to survive like a parasite, right? For a parasite to survive, it only needs to do basic options. Basic functions. Like the fish that swim on top of the whale, right? They’re essentially like a parasite that exists because of the larger body of the whale. So all they have to do to survive is to stay within that body. But they’re not taking or adding or contributing anything to it. I’m not saying they are. I think they were pointing at the same thing. Maybe. Okay. Yeah, I think the fundamental problem I have is that there is an and people keep using symmetrical models. We don’t live in a symmetrical world. Like we couldn’t. There’d be as much matter as antimatter and we wouldn’t exist. That simple. Sorry. It is. It’s in physics. It’s everywhere. And so it’s an asymmetry between building and destroying. They’re asymmetrical. So either you identify four, in which case you can build with others, right? Or by yourself. You can’t build by yourself if you’re not identifying four, right? Or you can identify against. And identifying against is more powerful in that the amount of things you can do or stuff to cause happen, although it’s all negative, is greater with less effort. And so you’re much more powerful as an anarchist. Period. That’s why people like to be calling themselves anarchists. They like it. Ooh, anarchists have power. They’re the ones that brought down the whole Russian family. Yeah, that’s true. But then they all got killed. The Russian family brought itself down. If you actually study the history, you see that it was the mistakes of certain mistakes over time compound that lead up to certain kind of sort of. But again, you need to have to have a lot of understanding of what’s going on. I’m just saying people miss, they just say it was just this one influence, which is where I’m trying to say. Exactly. That’s what I’m trying to say. There’s multiple different things. Only a little thing has to survive. Exactly. Well, I’ve got this theory. I don’t, I lost it in my head years ago, unfortunately. I had this theory that things have to have at least three components to happen. Right? And that’s at all the time. But they have to have, in other words, they have to fulfill an egoic need. They have to fulfill a community need. And they have to fill there’s a larger frame. They have to fill at least, and there’s probably five frames, and there’s some balance, right? I had this all mapped out years ago, and I don’t think I wrote it down. It’s gone from my head. It’ll come back someday. But I think, yeah, that’s part of the problem is we do these proxies Do Mark just drop out? I think so. Where are you from, Michael? I live in Texas. Nice. I would not have guessed that. Oh, you’re back, Mark. The internet cut yourself off. We can see you move, but we can’t hear you. Navigate the pattern, Mark. Well, in the meantime, one of the things I’m curious about, since it’s sort of like an anti-pattern or an anti-body, I’m not sure if you can have sorry, I’m not sure if you can have an anti-pattern. It’s just an alternate pattern. Maybe, right? Still can’t hear you. We do love you, Mark. Oh, will you side do? So, I don’t feel I need to die on that hill, but one reason why I’m at it being an anti-pattern is like nothing since it’s not constructive, it’s also like sort of not a pattern in a way, right? It’s only anti-pattern. Whatever it is, it’s just an anti-pattern. But again, not a hill I would die on. That’s why I was trying to point to the subversion. The marketing trick is to make you think that it’s not marketing. Sure. And that’s why I mean it’s like you’re saying it they’re saying, you know, brush your teeth this way. It’s just a different form of brushing your teeth. Right? It’s not anti-brushing your teeth. Yeah. Is he back? We have you? It seems like it. I think I’m back. We’ll see. With three power outages in like four and a half seconds. There’s a storm here, although it’s a really minor storm for the South. I’ve never that’s never happened. The power usually doesn’t go out, come back, come back, come back. First time for everything. One of these days I’ll be able to afford a whole house battery system. It’ll never happen again. Do it. So it strikes me that when when some bodies, actual bodies, let’s say, notice that that kind of corruption is there, that they might try to wall it off sometimes by actually building a wall. That’s only natural because it doesn’t contain a problem. Yeah, I don’t think bodies notice things. Like I think that’s part of the problem. Like because you need the head to take the action. Like the fact that let’s suppose that anybody had access to the fact of a particular election being stolen. In any country, it doesn’t matter. They may or may not do anything about it. Like, because they need a leader. Like you can’t just in order to subvert the leader that’s there, you need a different leader. And you need some mechanism behind that that’s going to make that happen. And these are complicated things. It’s not, you can’t treat the body as though it’s capable of doing something without the head. I agree. At best, you know, like maybe there’s like some kind of reactionary thing, right, that happens. But it seems like there’s… It’s a repurposing. It’s what you’re trying to get towards. Maybe. Yeah, maybe. Because this is why I’m trying to keep pushing in the block of subversion. Like when you retell a story and change half of the patterns, it’s no longer the same story anymore. There’s an adequate amount of retelling story and making fine adjustments that keeps the spirit, the resonance of the story going forward. But there is a wall, right, there is a definitive point to say you’ve now subverted the story. Yeah, right. Like the story no longer has a body to use your language, no longer has a T-Los. Like the Matrix. The example I was going to use is we just watched the movie Clueless, which is a retelling of Jane Austen’s novel Emma. And if you want to know subversion, watch Clueless. I can’t talk about it all online, but that movie is subversive down to its core. If there’s so many different subversions, and they’re very minor, but there’s a certain point where you notice the film, sorry, that is like this is no longer retelling Emma anymore. This is doing its own thing with its own T-Los. And it comes back together to give you the full sense. So like, oh, it’s still Emma at the end of the day because the characters fall in love, we’ll get back together. It’s like, no, no, no, this is no longer retelling the story. You started with that premise, but it’s almost got nothing to do with that same story. Right. I want to go, all parasites must eventually try to become symbiote. No, that’s not true. It’s not even remotely true. Observably false. It does not want to trigger white blood cells. Maybe it doesn’t want to, and maybe it won’t because it’s a good parasite. The body must also benefit. No, it doesn’t. Parasites exist. No, gut bacteria are not parasites. Although you can have parasites in your gut that are bacteria. Right, or mitochondria. Now mitochondria is a different case. Nope, bad science, dude. Bad science, sorry. And similarly, if you are a hunter-gatherer, you want your wild game to breed, no, you don’t even concern yourself with that. You don’t want to hunt too much. No, I mean, most cultures hunted everything to extinction. So you say that, but actually that never happens. And this is one of the, like, people say, like, oh, it’s just hard that they’re not there. You can’t contain nature. Nature is by definition, not containable. And look, you can want your deer to breed all day long. And if the climate changes enough, and it has, they’re not going to breed, and it has nothing to do with you. These things about we’re in control are foolish. We’re not in control. We have very little control. We have some influence. And in the U.S., we have a long history of the state parks everywhere, and federal parks everywhere. And that’s wealthy people wanting to preserve nature for everybody. Fair enough. Mostly for themselves, because they mostly benefit. But everybody else also benefits. So maybe give the wealthy people their lodges in the Catskills that are gorgeous on these tracks of land that are never going to be touched, because we’ll all benefit. And that happens. And that’s why they’re not parasitic. Like, this is the problem when you think corporations are parasitic. You know, or corporations are in control of the government to an unprecedented level. Historically wrong. I don’t even know where people are getting this bullshit from. This bullshit you’re being lied to. The East India Company was so large, we don’t have companies a tenth that size. We don’t have companies a hundredth of that size. It’s just historically lying. And being lied to. It’s just wrong. Things were way worse in the past, along any measure you care to try. Look at the Middle Ages. Them will chat. Like, everybody was poor. Like, there was a time in world history where twelve families owned almost all the wealth. Almost all twelve families worldwide. All of it. It’s insane. And we’re bitching about now? Come on. Come on. We have internet, man. We have internet. So I’m trying to understand how you see the anti as it plays out. Right? It’s chaos. Totally. Right. It’s chaos. You don’t see it as it plays out. You think you see patterns in chaos. And then you go, aha! And then you’re wrong because it’s chaos. And you go, aha! And you’re wrong because it’s chaos. And you go, aha! And then you’re wrong because it’s chaos. Like, hasn’t that been the past five years? So, hasn’t that been since 2014? Even describing that. Since 2000? Since, I don’t know if I can go back. No, if you want to. Okay. So just the way that you, however you try to describe this, Mark, you might categorize it as a pattern. Right? Even if it’s the lack of a pattern. Nope. Nope. Nope. No, no. No, no. No. You can’t do that. It’s not a pattern. Definitely not a pattern. So, completely unpredictable. Have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen. Yes. That’s correct. So… Subversion. That’s what you’ve got to understand. What you’re noticing is not anti-pattern. You’re noticing the subversion of the pattern. It’s the rejection, the identification again, saying, I don’t know what I want. But I don’t want what I have. Fair enough. But also chaos and evil. So I’m still the evil. Sorry. So is it a… If I’m going to call it a corruption, let’s say, right? Uh-huh. Does that just end when it ends? No, it doesn’t end. No, it doesn’t end. It’s part of the cycle. I do want to take some time to address… No. Some bacteria actually are parasites, dude. Like, I don’t know what to tell you. Your identity doesn’t change. Like, no. It’s like, no. How do you explain zombies? Biology sucks. That’s all. Your biology sucks. Like, go grab a biology book and learn about how this supports… The parasite definition is very clear. Some things contribute and some things do not. Things that contribute are symbiotes and things that do not are parasites. That simple. Right? And it’s not clear-cut all the time because it’s hard to find something that doesn’t have a side effect that isn’t positive. Right? The question is balance. Is there enough… Trade-offs. Right. It’s all about trade-offs. It’s always all about trade-offs. I told you. People do not understand trade-offs. They do not. They do not. I have a video on that. Do I need another video, Jesse? You do need another video. I need another video on trade-offs where I talk more about the inevitability of trade-offs or something. Like, I’ll have to go over my old video here. It’s been a while. And figure out what’s missing out of it. That I can explain to people that, no, really, you’re not getting around trade-offs. And you probably don’t know what trade-offs are. Netflix is a very bad trade-off. Yes. You’re giving money to access a library, but you don’t control that library. Someone else does. So if you want to… Forgive the analogy, but you can collect things or you can have other people collect things, but then you don’t… You’re participating in that collection. And you don’t get to participate when they take things away either. You don’t get to say, hey, no, I would like access to that particular part of the library. Don’t remove that, please. Because I’m paying you money to access this library, and this library should stay the same. Because it’s my library now, my access to… I own a portion. But it’s a pattern of democratization. Right? Power was centralized, and now it’s decentralized. Everybody can own music. Right? Now it’s centralizing again, because that’s not viable. People can’t manage their own music. That’s why they like Spotify. Look, I have Spotify. I’m not… Seething resentment from this side of the internet. But they’re managing music for them. That’s what they’re doing. It’s all music I don’t care enough about to own copies of, but that’s a different problem. Right? But eventually it’s going to go away, and people don’t realize it. Someday that’s going to go away. Then I’m only going to have my CD collection. Right? And that’s going to be the end of that. And that’s definitely going to happen. And people need to understand that they made that trade-off. They made that trade-off. That already happened. And if you want to preserve a culture too, you need to preserve physical objects of that culture. Like the spirit of a culture will not at last the embodiment or the icons of it. Right. Well then that’s the… Prod Michael with a Christian… But that’s the theseship argument. Right? Like when does it stop? It doesn’t matter. You’re preserving the spirit… The Library of Alexandria as well. Like… You’re preserving the spirit by revivifying it with new material. Like that’s a valid thing to do. Right? And uh-oh. Uh-oh. Here we go. Jesse. The idea that Netflix is not a trade because of lack of control. No, no. He didn’t say it wasn’t a trade. We can’t have complete control. He didn’t say anything about that either. For example, we don’t choose to be born or have the DNA that we have. That’s right. You’re born into creation. So what? That already happened. Get over it. Like seriously. Get over it. You’re participating in a system that you have no voice in. Right. That’s a bad trade. Technically speaking. Well then you’re trading your money. Right? Yeah. For their… For access to their stuff. And their stuff. It’s not your stuff. And you can do that. But it’s… People don’t understand trade helps. Yeah. It’s a trade-off. You can get a trade-off when you have no control. That’s fine. You can give up all the control you want. No one’s gonna care. And it’s a trade-off. And that’s part of culture. Like I’m trading my ego needs to know everything to live in a culture with other people where they know why. Well look. It helps if you go to a party and somebody tells you something that you don’t know because you can be interested. If somebody… If I go to a party and somebody tells me about computers that’s a problem. Like there aren’t too many people that can tell me anything that I… about computers that I don’t already know. It’s a handicap. It’s not an advantage. It’s a disadvantage. Right. Now I can have spirited conversations with people but it’s very hard because I can’t meet them as equals in ignorance anymore. It’s not an option. When we’re talking about computers and technology I’m not your equal buddy. Sorry. The odds that you’re on the top of that stack are tiny. I probably know all the people that know more about computers in the US. It’s a handful. I learned from them too. So it’s not… You know. It’s hard. And that’s not an advantage. Right. But I outsource things to my culture like well you know I don’t want to know everything about how to start a business for example. Even though I could argue I know a lot about that too. Right. And so I go to these little entrepreneurship meetings. I meet people there and they teach me things. It’s wonderful. Now I get to be taught things. By not knowing things I get to be taught things. It’s a wonderful trade off. Because I can be ignorant about something until I need to know it. And then I know somebody who knows that thing and they can tell me. And I’ve cultivated experts over the years. Like if I wanted to do real estate investing I get my buddy. I can call him up right now or email him or whatever and he’ll tell me everything I need to know. And I know this because he is a highly successful and I actually just a couple of people I know in that space but highly successful firm actually and if you want to know if you get cash on the side you want to actually make money with. I can put you in touch with this firm. Because he’s starving for cash and has plenty of deals to do. That’s how successful he is. I know other people in real estate who are not that successful. Right. And so you know there’s these ways in which we give up trying to know everything about something or having knowledge about things in order to get along better with other people. And that’s a good thing because it enables us to be enriched by the experience of engaging with them. And when we’re too individualistic we cut ourselves off from that. We lose intimacy. From culture. From culture. We cut ourselves off from culture. We lose intimacy because culture is the thing that enables intimacy. It’s not the only thing but it’s the main container that enables intimacy. This is why having a body is important. You can’t be intimate outside of your body in the same way that you can inside your body. And so the body of culture holding you together you may be upset at the head. You can argue a lot of Catholics are pissed off at the Pope right now. And fair enough maybe they should be. But being pissed off at the Pope but not sort of rebelling, right? Not identifying against him enables them all to be together and to hang out and to do church and to commune and to be in the body of the Catholic Church. Like that’s a plus. It’s not a minus. You can say oh they’re being oppressed by an evil Pope. Maybe. But there are lots of advantages. There’s a trade off because Popes aren’t going to be perfect. I’ll be back in a minute. I got to attend to this coffee stain to make sure I get out of the car. Sorry, annoying. Sorry. One sec. Poor Jesse in the coffee stain. Mark, do you mind if we do you mind trying to help me understand a little bit more about the way that you think about that chaos monster? Yeah, I don’t. It’s just chaos. Like what’s the need for details? It’s chaos. Stay away from it. That’s all you need to discernment. Whoa, okay. Don’t know what that is. Can’t know what that is. Don’t need to know what that is. Bad. Stay away. It’s that simple. Our need to classify and categorize and no, that’s killing us. That’s how they suck you in. They go oh look at this thing. This is the emergency’s good argument. Look, something came from nothing. No it didn’t. But whatever. Maybe I’ll grant you that. I don’t care. That doesn’t mean it’s good. But they’re like no, it’s definitely good. And I’m like no, it’s definitely not good. Like no. The odds that something that sprang up from nowhere are good are almost zero. Right? So let’s say I’m with my family and with my larger community. We’re all trying to embody, participate, be in the good, be in church together, whatever. Family time, these things. Yeah. So then there is like a creeping resentment, spirit of resentment that is attacking that. Yes. Right. Well, multiple ones from inside and outside I would argue. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. Right. So spiritual warfare, brother. Yes. Yes. It’s the best metaphor ever. Sorry. So then in a like how then shall we live? Is it just like family time, church, is just like stay there. Don’t do anything else. Yes. Well, no, no, no. Don’t do anything. Don’t live hidden Christian. That’s garbage. I hate that. I’m trying to figure out the way that you think about it. Well, the way I think about it is you’re obligated to call out evil. Okay. You’re obligated to call it. You’re not obligated to do anything about evil. But you’re obligated to call it out. Say no, I think that’s evil. Even if you’re wrong. You’re obligated to be wrong about calling out evil. Like you’re obligated to do that. And also Christians are for lions. And as long as you remember those two things, you’re fine. Like Christians are for lions. I have a lot of cheeks to turn. Get them hit. Yep. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You get in front of the lion and sometimes the lion’s going to eat you. That’s kind of how it is. Yeah, I agree. To me, like it’s like level one, the cheek gets hit again. Right? There’s somewhere down the line the lion eats you. No, no, no. The lion eats you and you’re dead. And that’s the end of that. And your family’s ruined. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and the hidden Christians are like well, no, no, no. I have a family and therefore I can’t jump in front of lions. And they’re like no, no, no. The lions are going to eat you. They’re coming. You’re not describing Christian. You’re describing something that’s not Christian. No, no, no. Fully Christian. Fully Christian. According to them and they’re not. Well, I would argue that Christians should understand the different lions. But the problem is and this is the deep problem, right? This is the Christian anarchy problem. Not to pick on Nate. This is foolishness. Right? You can’t be a Christian and an anarchist because you can’t follow Christ. Like he wasn’t an anarchist. He didn’t do anarchy. He also didn’t do pacifism. He did something else that was neither of those two things. He turned over the tables, right? He caused trouble, but he still submitted to Rome. If you’re not willing to submit to Rome, which is roughly speaking the principality of the government, then you’re not a Christian because you can’t follow Christ. Christ submitted to Rome. It’s that simple. It’s no more difficult. Like this isn’t a difficult equation. You don’t have to go oh, surrender under Caesar is really just a mistranslation. I don’t care. I can point to his participation in the world and say if you want to participate like Christ, you can’t be an anarchist and you can’t be a pacifist. Those two things are off the table. You are not Christ-like if you are either of those two things. Period. And I’ll let the Mennonites and the Amish come after me for it. I don’t care. I don’t think they’re going to do anything because they’re pacifists. Not an issue, right? You lose automatically by default. That’s why the lions are coming and lions are going to eat you. And good for you for getting eaten last, but also you’re not getting into heaven that way, buddy. I’ll tell you that right now. God is not going to be pleased with your being a pacifist if you go, oh, I kept my family in check until the end. He’s going to go, no, your job was to shield the people who weren’t Christian. And you didn’t jump in front of the lion and do that. So does the chaos continue to encroach in until there’s enough lions that have eaten Christians to where it starts turning back the tide with softened hearts? I argue that you stand in front of the lions. Some number of lions are going to eat you and some number of lions are not. But if you’re not standing in front of the freaking lions, they’re just going to eat everybody they can find. They’ll find you eventually. It’s not like, oh, well, you’re Christian, you’re not. You’re going a bit further than that because I agree with you. Well, no, but that’s the solution. The solution is the Christians need to go and get in front of the lions now. The sooner that happens, the sooner the cycle stops. It’s like, when do you stop the French Revolution? Well, the French Revolution went on too long. How do you know that, Mark? You can’t make a statement like that. No, I can. It’s a very easy equation. The French Revolution didn’t end until the people who started the killing machines were eaten by the killing machines. No, really. Look it up. That’s actually what happened. It didn’t happen right at the moment Robespierre was beheaded. When the French Revolution killed the people that started it, it died down. That’s what happened. That happened. That’s the pattern. It’s always been the pattern. That pattern’s everywhere in history. The people that start these horrible chaos machines through their rebellion, through their trying to destroy culture because they want anything but what they have and they don’t care what the anything is, right? That’s the tradeoff you’re making with Lucifer, roughly speaking, right? Oh, anything but what I have. Anything but what I have, right? We can go back to that little cartoon, right? It’s the same thing. I just want my utopia. Once the thing that’s holding back my utopia is out of the way, my utopia will appear. Yeah, but that’s true for everybody with a utopia and you’re not the only one. And they’re not the same utopia. Now what? They’re creating chaos. And until they stop creating chaos and decide to sacrifice something about them to build with others, things will get worse. It’s your personal rebellion that causes this problem and it’s your personal rebellion that must end to end the problem. And you can’t keep identifying against little pieces of the problem and go, it’s the woke people now. I know. We’ll fight the woke. That’s not gonna work. The thing to do is to live the Christian life and do it loudly and proudly, roughly speaking, without propositions. Propositions are a dead end, right? But also maybe not no propositions. Right, well that’s what people get confused. It’s like, I don’t want the church to run around with a banner saying, go be Catholic. Right, and maybe, I should have asked Father Eric, I haven’t talked to him recently, maybe we’ll see this, maybe we’ll see this soon. Right? If my scheme works, it’s not really my scheme, it’s definitely revealed, I will make no claims. Revealed thing works, then there’ll be no words involved. And it will work fantastically well, maybe a little bit too well, maybe frighteningly. And you’ll see this in action. But I very much believe that the mimicry is the important part. That’s how fashion works. It works through mimicry. So that’s what you need to do. You need to give the ideal to be mimic. So it’s how Gerardian is it to you? I, look, I have a hard time with Gerard and I haven’t really delved in, right? But even the way that Pierre-Pigeot talks about Gerard is a problem for me because they’re trying to identify a cycle by events in the cycle. And the problem with chaos is that chaos is non-cycle, right? It is a knot pattern. And so in that way, it is unpredictable. Like, definitionally, chaos is that which is unpredictable. And then we can get into, you know, chaos math and all that nonsense. I would just argue that’s a different situation. True chaos is the unpredictability of the world. Like, that’s the fly. I bring up Gerard specifically as the sacra, like Christ working through us, sacrifice, lions, and that sacrifice is what’s deals with this chaos, right? And so that pattern I think actually is central to Gerard’s thinking. Maybe. I don’t. I mean, my problem is that the way Pigeot talks about him is he talks about scapegoat and the end of scapegoat, right? And I think that’s wrong. I think scapegoats are required. Like, they just are symbolically required. I don’t know why Pigeot and maybe I’m misinterpreting what he’s saying, but I don’t know why he talks about it that way because that sounds wrong to me. And, you know, I mean, I could be very, very wrong here, but it’s just what it sounds like to me. Scapegoats are required. And I’ve said this twice. People were asking three years ago, what will end this crazy madness? Because a bunch of us knew from day one it was mad. Oh, not from day one, but we’ll say from March that it was madness. But three years ago, right, I was already flipped. I was like, okay, I have my rice beans because I did. I was ready. And then I was like, nope, this is all BS and I can tell you why, right? And then they were like, what will solve this? And I said, well, I can give you 12 names of 12 people that if they were murdered immediately would stop this. And that didn’t happen, of course, and, you know, to some extent. Well, we’re glad that didn’t happen, except many more than 12 people have now died. So I’m like, you know, at some point there’s a death trade-off. Sorry, there just is. Like, I’m a pragmatist, right? What makes a pragmatist better? Pragmatists calculate casualties first. In other words, pragmatists don’t believe in idealism. We don’t. But we understand there’s a trade-off. We understand something’s got to go. It’s like, okay, well, what has to go? Well, if we kill 12 people now, then we want all the craziness with the fake news flu shots, right, that definitely are not vaccines by any possible way of understanding a vaccine. We wouldn’t have masks forever. We wouldn’t have the health emergency in Massachusetts ending in May of 2023. None of that happened. But we didn’t do that. For whatever reason, it didn’t happen. Now, can we get away with murdering nobody in this, or at least scapegoating them by putting them in jail or something? No. People have to be punished. There have to be consequences to bad actions. Otherwise, bad actions will continue. Because there’s no discernment. You cannot discern a good action from a bad action when you don’t see results in the world where the bad action has a bad consequence. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. So at some point, there have to be scapegoats. You can blame Fauci for the whole thing. Yeah. And then you only have to affect Fauci’s life. But the signal has to be really strong. I would say, take literally everything he owns from him and his family. No, for real. Leave them with one house or whatever. Take all his money and all his assets. Roll it back into the government and put him in prison. And let him die there. That would be a good first start. That might be all that’s required. I don’t know. So I think what Gerard might say or line of thought is something like, yep, good. Okay. And that does something for a little while. It doesn’t last very long because you’ve got resentment that comes from the tribe that you ripped Fauci out of. Only if it’s a tribe. But it’s not. Like Gerard’s just wrong. That’s not what it is. So that’s not what it is. He might make a case like that, right? And then he might. And he’d be wrong. And I can prove it. Because this pattern’s played out historically thousands of times. And it doesn’t work that way most of the time. Not I have. Sometimes it does. The reason that I bring it up is let’s say that causes the chaos monster to inflame out of more resentment. It doesn’t. No, there’s no chaos monster. Chaos is just rebellion. So just chaos, rebellion, just rebellion, chaos. I’ll just say chaos. Rebellion isn’t going to increase. It’s going to decrease. Because you’re going to have a bad signal to run away from. And that’s part of discernment. Is that when you don’t have bad signals and good signals, you lose discernment. And what we’ve been doing as a culture for the past 70 years is saying good positive signals, good positive signals, right? We’ve been saying that B.F. Skinner was right. You can do positive only reinforcement. That’s correct. Even though B.F. Skinner was wrong and he tried to prove that he was right and he actually proved that he was wrong and so does his son and so did everybody that came after him. And any idiot that knows anything or has read one single book on evolution would know the primary signaling of evolution is negative signal. Almost all of evolution is negative signal. It relies on negative signal. Period. End of statement. Full stop. Mathematically certain. Can be modeled. You can do evolution on a computer. You can watch this. Evolution works by culling things out. That’s how it works. The successful things are rare. They’re rare signals and they’re non-permanent in most cases. We just mistake those two things. We think we can have a happy world with positive signals. And we know that that’s not true. Help me understand why it wouldn’t turn into an eye for eye problem after keeping the peace for a little while. Well because it doesn’t historically ever. That almost never happened historically. So that’s the first problem. Just basic history. Go look. Didn’t happen. People act in communities too. Right. People need community. And so what happens is the community gets a signal and the members of the community that are in the body that have broken off from the body and are creating all the chaos inside the body. Right. Or trying to break off from the body. Go, oh wait a minute if we keep doing this the body is going to react and destroy us. Maybe we should stop. Yeah that’s exactly what happens. It’s very rare to find individuals too acting out in times of extreme crisis or even times of crisis. Like the leadership problem is a really interesting dilemma. Because who’s going to do it? Who’s the first mover? Who does it? And why? And are they the right person? Like all those individual problems come up in times of crisis. So then in the way, because you can probably hear the way that I’m thinking about it. Right. The critique that I continue to hear and I think it’s fair is like no, no, no. Because the other thing is just chaos. It’s not a body. Got it. So when I’m thinking about eye to eye eye for eye problems. This tribe, this family killed this cousin and so now they got to kill two more cousins. And then… In fact, yeah but it’s just rare. It’s just so ridiculously rare. It’s not worth worrying about because there isn’t an alternative solution anyway. Like everyone’s just like, oh you know what? We don’t have to do that anymore. No we do. We’ve always had to do that. We’re always going to have to do that. It’s just, yeah you have to kill people. I’m sorry. It just is what it is. It’s not going away. Help me understand the thing that’s rare. The thing that’s rare is eye for eye. Eye for eye is extremely rare. It almost never happens. Especially since we… When we ruined duels and took that out too, you’ve limited that singular combat option. Once that was ruined… Do you not see that? Once that was… Duels were the norm forever and that didn’t result in eye for eye all over the place even though it was very popular. It was everywhere. It didn’t happen that way. It just didn’t happen. I understand the symmetrical like if you do this, they’ll do that. Action reaction. We don’t live in that world. We don’t live in a dualism world. Dualism is wrong. It’s just wrong. It’s just observably wrong. It creates a symmetry. We don’t live in a symmetrical world. There’s more matter than anti-matter. It’s that simple. Honest. There’s more good than bad. There has to be. Otherwise we would have sunk into nothingness thousands of years ago. Tribalism isn’t the way to think about the world because if you think about the world as tribalism, the world we have couldn’t have existed. It’s just that simple. Everybody talks about evolution and then when they talk about these devolved ideas, they cast them into the past. But if that were the case, we wouldn’t be here now to devolve back into that. Your system is just dumb and it doesn’t work. It’s bad if you think about the world. So do you think that… What problem are you trying to get to, Michael? Resolve, yeah. Right now, you two, at least Mark, are introducing a different mapping. It’s like, okay, it’s not these duels. It’s not this kind of tribalism. Right. So what that’s doing is I’m in newer territory of how to think about this. Right. So now I’m poking around trying to go, all right, let me see if I can fully take on the perspective here. If I can make one clarification, duels would be more preferable than the method we would have now. Right. Because once you have that sort of reinstigation of violence or just the immediacy of things or even just the knowledge of death, which has kind of been stripped away, you know, funerals are now done out of sight, out of mind, caskets are now out of sight, out of mind, even babies, birth, life and the basics of life and death and noticing those patterns are all kind of in their fringes now. So I’m not saying dualism would be the way to go, but I’m saying it would be more preferable for people to see what results happen through their actions. Like at least it would give them a feedback. Signals. It’s not saying it’s the way to go, but it’s… We’re missing a bunch of signals. Right. Well, and Hardcore History has a great episode called Painful Tainment. It’s four hours. Highly recommend. Everything’s simulated. If you’re squeamish, it’s not gonna work. Like you’re just gonna get freaked out. And it’s hard to listen to. It’s hard for me to listen to and I don’t care. I’m a meanest son of a bitch. Like I sat through Saban Private Ryan in the beginning. I didn’t care. Yeah. I’m pretty tough on that stuff. But you know, you talk about… People watch horror films for it. This is the… People want that exposure. Yeah. They’re all crazy people. We’re all Muppets. I’m trying to get to that sense of simulation. Okay, you’re more of a Muppet. I’ll take the higher Muppet card. But in that episode, he talks about this. He talks about we’ve lost these signals from the… And there’s a whole set of traditions around what they did when they killed people. You know, up until whatever time, I forget the time frame that he’s talking about. 18th century. It’s about the 18th century. End of the 18th century. Yeah, yeah, yeah. End of the 17th century. Right. But he goes through that whole thing and why it’s important. Right. And what happened as a result. Right. And people were actually like wishing that they were the condemned. They were wishing they were the condemned because the condemned is being absolved of their sins and going to heaven even though they murdered somebody. Like their wife. And they were killed in the place where the crime occurred in most cases. Like there’s all these symbolic things going on in this sort of capital punishment, extreme capital punishment that used to happen. We’re missing all those signals and we’re missing all that symbolism. And we’re not able to connect that to real life anymore. I actually wanted to bring in this… It’s great that we’ve gotten here because I had this… I wanted to talk about you cannot have a culture of bullets. Bullets are like shots fired, right? Like when you see people say that in an argument and that ends the conversation as soon as you do that. But if you have a culture… We have a culture around bullets and making points rather than a culture of swords which is immediacy as well as you can duel with wooden swords, right? And you can hack it out. In that sense you can have a soft form of violence. Boxing used to be that to some example, right? We could hack it out in the ring and then great. It’s a lower form of solving an argument. But right now we’re in this culture of everything is kind of one shot. It’s like you take… And that’s what happens too when they went from fencing to bullets. It changed the way the dynamics of the culture is what I’m trying to get to. That’s important. I did want to highlight Ethan. Ethan is all in the comments about Christians are for lions and Peugeot maybe being wrong about something because he’s Protestant which I like Ethan. I think that’s true. But he’s also talking about painful tainment. It was a fantastic episode and then he says, watch that in tandem with Mark and Adam’s talk about the Enlightenment that was one of our earlier talks. So yeah, the painful tainment thing is really interesting and actually we bring that up because it just so happened that I think it was Adam, actually it might have been Ethan, but I think it was Adam that told me about that episode and I was like, what? And then I watched it and I remembered, well, listened to it mostly, but I listened to it on the way up to the Blue Ridge Mountains. When I was going up north and I was going to go through part of the Blue Ridge Mountains which I did, I went up to Asheville, North Carolina first and kind of hooked on to Blue Ridge there. That’s why I remember. It’s a long drive. And then I was terrified the whole way because it’s a rough episode to listen to. It’s really hard. But it’s important to understand the symbolism and what was going on at the time. Because there is an element of culture that we’re changing things in culture without realizing what the implications might be because we’re still applying this scientific postmodern reductionism and categorization to everything that’s inappropriate and it doesn’t work. For example, there was a large emphasis on sport to simulate violence. And now we’re getting to a very strange situation where we’re using video games to simulate violence. It could be possible that physical sport in the next hundred years dissipates because we prefer watching people play StarCraft than we do the real thing of people running about using American football or cricket, soccer to simulate group based orientation or violence. As well as video games are very individualistic too. There’s hardly ever… It’s very hard to watch a bunch of people play Counter-Strike together as a team because you have to follow who’s on what side and who’s where in Counter-Strike, who’s on which team. But at least sport you have some sense of embodied participation where these people are wearing these colors, these people are wearing these colors, they’re battling it out. But the video game simulation is fake. It’s not a real community because there’s still individuals around monitors. They might be wearing team colors but the actual … Sorry, I’m using simulation too much. The actual arena is not representative. It doesn’t have a T-Lost. It’s just there for a time and place around a digital means where there’s something happening in real time. A sport game lasts for two hours hypothetically. But you can play a video game and do a video game sport match at any time. It’s so transparent that it doesn’t actually symbolize value because you can just move it and say, we’ll do it here, we’ll do it there. It doesn’t have a fixed place and time of value. India beating England for the first time in cricket was a particular moment, time and place. In video games you’re not going to get that. You’re not going to say, I remember when the Swedish Counter-Strike people beat the American Counter-Strike people. No one’s going to remember that as a cultural moment. It’s just not going to hold the gravitas of something. That’s a dangerous cultural moment we’re in. And part of the reframing is, it’s not, we’re not picking different equivalent frames. We’re re-enchanting the vision of the world, which is a big deal. That’s what my whole Navigating Pattern project is about. It’s like, you think you understand this? No, it’s not as simple as all that. And that’s why we’re awakening to the Muppet Crisis because we’re realizing, oh, we’re all Muppets. We don’t understand the world at all. We really don’t. We don’t understand what’s going on in Ukraine. We don’t understand what happened with this fake news virus scam. We don’t understand any of that stuff. But we don’t have to. You don’t have to. You can rely on people. And the key is, how do you figure out how to rely on people in discernment, as I said in my opening monologue, that’s going to be the next big piece, I think. Maybe that’ll be next week’s theme. We’ll see. We’ll see. If we can do that. That’s the issue. Trade-offs are a part of discernment. Once you have the discernment, now you can go back and talk to experts. I have a talk coming out on Odyssey with this guy in England, Richard Harris. Nice guy. We had a great conversation. It was way too short. It was a great conversation. But sort of talk about that. What replaces expertise? Experience. That’s what replaces expertise. I’m not going to say I’m an expert at computers. I’m going to say I have experience with computers. That’s what I’m going to say. And then I’ll caveat it, and I think I do all the time. I say, if I’m an expert in anything, I’m an expert in computers. Not like a part either. Like, almost all of it. The only thing I don’t know a lot about is hardware. There’s the actual fabbing of chips. I know a lot about that. I just don’t know as much as I’d like. I’ve never done any hardware design. I can do basic circuits, but it’s been a while. But I can do that. But it’s experience. That’s what I appeal to. I appeal to my experience. I book learned this, or I went to school for this because I didn’t. I didn’t go to college for anything. I didn’t go to college. I’ve been to colleges. I didn’t take any courses there. I did audit some courses back in the day, but I wasn’t a student. I wasn’t getting graded. I didn’t audit three consecutive courses in the same thing or anything like that. One here, one there, whatever. So, yeah. It’s experience is part of discernment. How long have you been doing this for? How successful have you been? Of course, you have to rely on self-reporting and maybe reporting people who know the person. And then it’s like how do I discern when they’re lying? Because resumes are full of lies. So, there’s all these pieces that go into it. But it’s discernment. That’s where our independence comes from and comes in. Why do you think Eye for Eye stopped? You said it’s rare. It sounds like you think that it wasn’t necessarily rare in the distant past. It was always rare. It was always rare? Yeah, because it’s dangerous to… Look, when you’re engaged with something that’s important to you, there’s the whole idea of playing chicken. Chicken works the same way as actually taking somebody out. It works the same way. There’s no difference. He who blinks first loses. Why? Because he’s not as serious about it. But that also means that you have to be serious about what you’re doing and what you’re talking about. How do you know that I’m serious? I can tell you how you know that I’m serious. And it gets misread all the time. The difference between me and most other people is that I have or that…and it’s always genuine. It’s always as genuine as I can make it. Maybe I make mistakes, but I push back on that. I have passion. That’s what I have. People misread that and go, you’re angry. No, I’m passionate. I care about the things I talk about. I talk about only things I care about for the most part. Not always exclusively. I hang out on my server, which is me and Manuel, and we’ll just shoot the shit or whatever. I’ll tell him something horrible about the Netherlands. He’ll go after the US. Whatever. We’re just screwing around. Or Sally will come in and we’ll just be silly. Right? But when I’m talking to my audience in particular, when I’m doing my videos, I’m passionate about what I’m talking about. You say, oh, you’re yelling or you’re angry or…no, no, no. Anger is a type of passion, but I’m just passionate. When I’m angry, you’ll know it, by the way. You haven’t seen me angry. None of you have seen me angry. You don’t want to see me angry. It’s like the Hulk, only way worse. You think the Hulk is angry? No, no, no. The Hulk ain’t got nothing on me. He’s got mere anger. I got rage, baby. Don’t even go there. You don’t want to go near that. Rage, channeled through anger. Yeah, it’s a whole different level. You don’t want to go there. I lost the thread a little bit. Okay. I’ll give you something. I’ll give you something. Yeah. So what I’m trying to say is, my passion is playing chicken. Right? People come up against my passion and they blink. Because they’re not as vested in their ideas as I am in mine. They’re not there. And it’s the same thing as standing in front of the car. You stand in front of the car and hope that the car stops? Because it probably will. But maybe the car decides to stop and can’t stop in time. There’s always this negotiation. It may end badly for you. Just like the lions. You can get in front of the lions. The lion may eat you, though. Right? But I don’t think it’s an optional thing. I think you’re obligated to get in front of the lion. Who blinks first? It’s the same thing. Are you because what happens with most tools, right? Jesse didn’t tell you this. Right? What happens with most tools is most tools are proposed and never carried forth. Because somebody goes, you know what? You’re really serious about this. You’re willing to risk your life for your honor. I concede. I return your honor to you by apologizing, capitulating, whatever it is. Rather than take the risk. Right? And look, I’ve been up against people much, much bigger than me who were able to take me out. And they always back down. And they back down because even if they’re going to win, they’re not going to get away scot-free. And they’re like, is my idea worth me getting damaged by this person even if I win? And the answer is almost always no. And I tell people, look, I used to have a 76 plimothilarium, which is an excellent car, but if you ever get a chance to get a 76 plimothilarium with a nice 318 motor in it, get one. They’re great sleeper cars. Right? And people used to say, what do you do with that? And I go, I beat almost everybody on the road. There were a few types of cars I could not beat. But the reason why I beat them is not because I had a faster car. It’s because when the light turned, I’m quick. I was on the gas. And you know what? I don’t do this wimpy thing where you go, you know what I mean? No, no. I just nail it to the floor and the car goes. It goes fast. Right? Because I’m all in. If I’m going to win, I’m all in. And that’s what passion is. Are you all in? I’m all in. It’s like, well, if this guy’s all in, and you look at him in video game terms, well, okay. So your power meter goes up to eight and my power meter goes to four. Are you willing to lose your four, possibly five, maybe six, damage just to win? Because I’ll do it. I’m in. I’ll take the one in five hundred chance that I’m going to win because it’s the passion. Jewels are the ultimate trade-off. Jewels are the ultimate trade-off. How serious are you about your honor? Oh, I’m so serious that I’m willing to risk my life in yours to keep it intact because a lot of the people that died in jewels, their honor was restored even though they lost. That happened. Their honor was restored because they were willing to go all the way. Would you go to the fence for me? To gamble. To gamble in some sense. It’s a signal of how serious you are and how important this is to you. And those signals are super important and we’ve taken them away to Jesse’s earlier point. What would you guess that that does make sense to me. I’ll try to quickly restate it. What I hear is it’s a chicken staring down. It’s like, there’s too much to lose because to face this thing, so it’s like stalemates in a sense or something. Keeps the peace. So my question would be, do you think that there’s a Christian rebuttal to that? I think you misunderstood something. When you go into a jewel, right, you could both be hurt. So even if you don’t, even if you technically, or there’s a jewel, right, you could both be hurt and still not die. Right? Jewels, the inevitability of the outcome is not determined by who participates. Because even if you lose, you could still be dishonorable. You could lose in dishonor. Right? You could betray someone. You could hold on to the right rules, and then you might win the outcome, but you don’t win the full… You lose your honor. If you were to grant me that I do understand, do you think that there is a Christian rebuttal, or do you think that that is the Christian position? What would a rebuttal of what? What is wrong with being serious? What is wrong with flipping over the tables? I’m not saying anything wrong. I’m not saying anything wrong. But Michael, dueling is Christian. There’s no rebuttal to it. It’s Christian. It’s fundamentally flipping over the tables. It’s saying, I’m so serious about this, I’m willing to risk my life by pissing off every single authority, the Jewish authorities and the Roman authorities, both, both, at the same time by doing this one action, and I’m willing to go to the cross for it. That’s the duel. So, it sounds like… The trade. What I hear is that the case that you two are articulating, right, you believe that this is the fullness of the Christian position. Not the fullness. It’s part of the Christian position. It’s part of flipping over the tables. You could also say that it was the Christians that ended dueling, just as much, because of the Gutenberg printing press, right, because of the access to knowledge. Right. You have the most amount of knowledge that was embodied of Christianity and the Christian principles in the populace. And they identified, this form of community violence is no longer sustainable. We have to act as a community in harmony. The problem is, what have you replaced it with? At that time, it was just pacifism. We can all go along to get along. We’ll figure out that sense of embodied action was never replaced. Maybe we could all sing together, and then once that sense of dueling comes out of the culture, there’s a vacuum. And what happens after that? The 18th century. What happens after that? You have the French revolutions, and you have these cycles of bigger groups, bigger bodies of violence. So, hacking violence happens on a mass scale. It no longer happens at the community, because the communities don’t have something to resolve the internal conflicts with. Just to wind back a little bit, I want to rephrase this, just to hammer this down. The chicken position, if you were to grant me that I have a full understanding of it, right, that the positioning itself is a fully Christian position. Yep. Okay. Fully Christian. I don’t know about that. Mark can defend that. I don’t know about that. I’m going to have to think about that more. Look, what is Christ going to the cross? It’s the passion. Well, that’s weird. What did I just say about chicken and what I do? It’s passion. That’s weird. I’m sure it’s just a weird random coincidence and not actually the thing. Oh, no, wait, wait. I got that backwards. It’s actually the thing. So, then, since that’s the case, what I might say is that it’s possible due to a misunderstanding, because I may not understand the position fully, but I get a little twinge of discernment that worries me that what’s being described is a little bit more strongest survive. No. No, again, it’s the encounter with the lion that prevents the lion from eating you. Well, then it’s not strongest survive. The lion’s not always the strongest, and they don’t survive. The chicken, the chicken, right? The chicken staring down, the thing that you’re talking about. That’s a frame. The fact that you’re willing to do it often prevents the conflict. That’s the whole point. You could just say it was the hero living on a journey. It’s the same thing. You’re encountering the unknown. Yeah, right. In order to bring back any sort of resource or to go into, you know, you have to find, you have to be in confrontation with nature. Hopefully, you all would give me some grace or the language that I would attempt to use to rearticulate any of your positions back to you, is something that you would be very, very cautious about, and you’d want to hear it. You’d want to make sure that it was exactly right. That’s a pretty difficult case. Yeah, it is. So, with that element. Keeping your word right is keeping your logos. Yes. Maybe that’s going to hit home for you. And so, when people are dueling, it’s like, you’re calling me a liar. It’s like, you know, that’s it. That’s the internal conflict right there. If you want to use biblical language, you know, the greatest lies that the devil ever told us to say he doesn’t exist, which is to say God doesn’t exist. So, call God a liar. Alright. So, the… That’s kind of stuffy for a while. Because the way people dishonor each other and use language and use these descriptive problems and replace words with words, is that to reframe other people is a part of the problem because it’s over intellectualizing it. Did I say that or did I not say that? Yeah. And so, one of the challenges that we’d be in with something like this is it’s a Mexican standoff of who’s over intellectualizing. Right. No, no. It’s not a symmetrical thing. Like, often one side is over intellectualizing and the other side is you’ll say no and I’ll say no and we’ll continue to point guns at each other. Right. Maybe. That happens all the time. So what? Right, right. It does. It does. This is what I keep telling people about the left. If you want the left to go away, stand up to them and they’ll go away because they know they can’t. Yeah. That’s one of the funny things about this, Mark, is that we actually… It’s funny that no one’s willing to stand up to solve the problem. Yeah, that’s kind of funny. It’s like to stand up and the problem will be solved. I don’t understand. It’s not saying no one’s going to get hurt. It’s just saying that’s going to solve the problem. Just solve the freaking problem. Go a pair. That’s it. What I’m saying is there’s different forms of resistance. That’s what I’m trying to articulate. Maybe you don’t have to say anything. And that actually might be the smartest option. It’s like I’m not going to stand up to you. I’m not going to challenge you to a duel. Right. Right, right. Just out-survive people. It’s the smartest option. So I would be worried that Mark would think that that was too close to pacifism and not turning over the table. No, no. That’s actually maybe even Machiavellian. This is like, no, now is not the time for war. I’ll pick when I’m ready to have a conversation with you. When I’m willing to reframe you or to challenge you. I ended a livestream a couple weeks ago and I’m going to talk about this. When you unsheathe your sword, you have to be ready to draw blood. You cannot do it. Just as like, oh, I’m going to show off my sword. At that moment, you’re on. You have to go for the kill. Again, what we tend to do is we tend to cast it. We say, oh, it’s survival of the fittest at that point. And it’s like, well, look, according to evolution, it is anyway. So, yeah, that’s going to happen. That’s actually inevitable. That’s inevitable. Yes, it is true. Always true, irrespective of Christianity. It doesn’t solve that problem. But then the question is, hold on, the question is, what do we do in a conflict that has nothing to do with survival and fittedness? It has nothing to do with that. Because survival is not about you. You don’t survive. You die. We all die. Lions eat everybody. Everybody gets eaten by a lion. You get a lion and you get a lion and you get a lion. I feel like the Oprah of Christianity. You get a lion and you get a lion. That’s what happens. That’s going to happen. You are getting eaten by the freaking lion. Christianity says, do you walk up to the lion voluntarily on the off chance that it won’t eat you? Because if you do, you’re a good Christian. If you don’t, I would argue you’re not. That’s the question. So the question isn’t survival of the diamond, the meal. There’s a veganlle withori Strategic their beliefs. And that means sometimes, and most of the time, this isn’t going to happen because most of the time it didn’t happen. You’re going to face people and they’re going to run away. That’s going to happen. Every once in a while, they’re not going to run away. You’re going to take some damage and you may die. That’s true. Here’s another thing to consider, Michael. If we’re going to talk about lions and heroes and individuals, there are probably plenty of time, in the time of Daniel, there are plenty of people that were quietly resisting. Daniel’s story is an encapsulation of the spirit of the time. One of the things people miss is when he goes to pray in silence or in the quiet, depending on your translation, he opens the window. That’s a quiet challenge to the empire, which brings down the empire, by the way. So he has to go into the den. He goes through the archetypical story patterns. But the thing that people don’t realize is that mechanism is like you can challenge the higher powers through smaller actions. He could have kept himself silent, done his prayers, followed devotion, but he was called to at least open the window to give the opportunity to the universe, to the higher power, depending on your metaphysics. He still let that potential happen to see how it would play out. That was his step of faith. It depends on Christian terminology, whatever. But that’s a quiet form of resistance. He didn’t have to go and protest and write a treatise and nail it to the empire. Sometimes the quiet little things that happened in the silence, the one action has massive implications. So you don’t have to challenge the empire. You just have to do the things that are available to you. And his smartest move was if I let people see me pray in public, it’s actually going to manifest this entire thing. And yes, I might. He knew the implications of it, for sure. So one of the things that I’m trying to figure out… He followed a logos, is what I’m trying to say. With these words and these actions, he followed a logos and he knew where that logos would take him. Because it’s recorded in the story, he knows the implications of what’s going to happen. He doesn’t willingly do it out in the street and everything. It’s just he’s seen to do something. It’s a quiet rebellion. And that’s maybe what we’re called to do right now. I don’t know. But maybe that’s quietly resist is the smartest option. There’s another story about who is the best man to face this camp of Gideon. You have to have, to Mark’s point of passion, the army keeps getting reduced and reduced and reduced to the most passionate people that are willing to resist. And all they do is just outsmart the enemy. They don’t kill anyone. That’s probably not that story. They just outsmart the enemy. There’s a lot of threads. Mark, earlier when I was mentioning something that’s funny, it’s whether or not we end up with a lot of the same conclusions. And are we ending up there by the same means or are we misunderstanding each other on how we get there? I could very well be misunderstanding how you get there is actually the same mapping that I get there, but I don’t recognize your path being the same. Yeah, but I don’t even care. Like I don’t. Yeah, totally. Totally. Goodness is goodness and how you got there is like whatever. That’s your journey, man. That’s great. Yeah. Yeah. Well the reason why I care about that is because it’s like sometimes even if there’s some shared intersections in places, I think that there can be some bad fruit there depending on the supporting structures on how that got there. Right? Right. It might like. Why worry about that? Yeah. Yeah. Because I challenged us on this like a couple weeks ago. Yeah. You’re worrying about things that you don’t call to worry about. Maybe. Maybe not. Like maybe if that happens. Is it God’s will? Is it not God’s will? Yeah. Oh, we’re two different paths and so there’s a conflict. Yeah. So there’s an aiming. There’s a hitting the mark. There’s a bearing good fruit. Right? And that is the thing to care about. And the way that I figure out how to care about that is loving God with all my heart which manifests in loving my neighbor. It helps me figure out what to bring into focus which is how I evaluate the fruit. Right? Yeah. So caring about motives as a supporting structure or something that coalesce together in order for like a hey let’s hit this. Let’s go towards this action or something. Let’s go be eaten by lions. Whatever it is. Why you did that actually could make a big difference in what kind of fruits bear out. That’s why I would care about that. You don’t get to determine that. That’s my point of the story with Daniel. He didn’t get. It could have happened for weeks. Do I agree with that? What I would care about, my value system. It wouldn’t understand what’s good. I’m incapable of it. Right? So the good valuation is logo centrism. Right? Is God working through me to orient towards the good, the true and the beautiful. That’s the only way I can evaluate it at all. You will never know that. You need the community and culture to tell you that. So the way that I know that, right? I mean that’s the way I know that. Right? Has to do with the kind of fruits that are You need others to tell you the words. You need others to tell you what fruit. You can be manifesting fruit but you will have no way to tell. I don’t need others. I get that from logos. Oh no. No. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I sure do. I sure do. Now this might be like a just a totally separate reality. Right? But this is exactly what the case is with the word written on my heart. Right? And this thank God. It’s much easier. The traditions that I participate in the scripture and down to me helps verify that I’m not a Christian. I’m not a Christian. I’m not a Christian. I’m not a Christian. I’m not a Christian. The scripture and down to me helps verify this thing. These things, but believe me, I rejected all those things outright just to get back in touch with logos. Right? Which then how do you know you’re not in the cult? Yeah. Great question. That’s a great question. Yeah, that’s the question. Yeah, sure is. So in some ways, I think that that’s bad framing. Here’s how I would actually answer that. These powers and principalities is a divine council, right? And we are all participating in bodies, right? And that of these bodies, one of them stands above as the Lord of lords and the King of kings, right? And all these other lower powers and principalities bow to it. And so within that happens as it does without. And the way I understand whether or not I am aligned on the straight and narrow of the way is by the fruits that I bear, not my propositions that I accept or proclaim or agree to, right? So whether or not the fruits born out of me show what kind of tree I am. And if I have the humility to ask for- You’re making a case for self-knowledge. I am- Through the Christian framework. I am not. Well, you could be easily conflated with. I am happy to try to articulate- I don’t know. I’m still Christian in some aspects. I wrestle with this with what you’re talking about. Not as often as I should. Not as often as I used to. But I think peace. If you’re wrestling with something. How do I phrase this? You can think you’ll be here at the story and perhaps you’re not. I’m not. I’m most certainly not. over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over-over you don’t have a perspective outside of your own perspective and therefore, I agree with you all right, which is one of the reasons… Yeah, so so one of the reasons… there is no Iceland when you cooperate with us in the way, in Christ that is participation in a greater body, right? And in relation of that loving God, it’s not just you and God, it’s that manifests in love of your neighbor as yourself, right? And through… You wouldn’t know about that. Like you wouldn’t know if you were loving your neighbor as yourself. So with this neighbor that you have, you are able to see the dirt and planks sticks in their eye, the filth in their eye, right? You can see it more clearly than they can. And they can see yours more clearly than you can. Then you need the culture and other people, like Jesse said initially, which you denied. So… Which is it? What do you think that I denied? You denied that you needed other people to tell this. Jesse said explicitly, you need other people to tell you that. You said no. So… This goes back to the whole idea of should you read the Bible? So I’m not getting it from the other person, right? And yet I also cannot be without the other person, right? Is that there’s the two of us, but where we’re getting this is Christ, right? And he’s there… That may be true, but you don’t have that perspective, right? Because you’re still one of the three entities you listed. So… So… Me, what I do, right? I can see pretty clearly, because let me tell you, it’s definitely works of the flesh, right? My own selfishness, what I want, right? It’s these things, right? And that… There’s lust, revelries, drunkenness, all these things, right? Absolutely, that’s going to come out of me, with me, myself, what I want. But when I sacrifice my selfishness in love of God, and find the highest version of myself in love in relation to the other, right? Christ is there. I’m sorry, Michael, you’re using so many descriptive words. You’re changing… You’ve gone through Christ, you’ve gone through Logos, you’ve gone through God. And every time you make one of those changes, there’s the allowance holding your argument. So, Christ means something completely different than God. The Logos means something completely different than God. So, from our position in the tradition that I participate in, in Orthodoxy, right? Christ is the fullness of Logos, okay? You’ll find seeds all over the place of Logos, but Christ is the fullness of Logos, right? Now, if you want to talk God in Trinity, hey, yeah, fair enough, because there’s a sense of God… I’m trying to get you to the… What is the essential problem you are struggling with? Is it the fact that you’re relying on the text? Are you relying too much on your own self-knowledge? You’re not relying enough on your community church, or you lacking culture? Where are you at? Because… Or you just don’t have faith in any of those things, or you don’t have enough, like you want to overemphasize, or you feel you’re called to participate more. Like, I’m not hearing any emphasis in what you’re saying. And if I say anything wrong, it’s because I maybe get to my emphasis too quickly. Or sometimes Mark does this too, with his passion. Just overemphasis, bam, that’s it. And people are like, no, I need you to take me on a story, I need you to outline this, and then it’s like, well… So where we’re currently at is where I was having to do something like defend epistemology, right? It’s like, how do you know where you’re going? Oh my goodness, on purpose? You want to deliberately defend epistemology here? Don’t waste my time, sorry. Don’t waste my time. Look, I was… You asked. You might as well call it evil epistemology, because yeah… Hey, yeah, fair, fair. Hey, look, I’m not trying to necessarily go down that route. We were on a different thing, and that’s where you all helped guide me, right? It’s what those questions that were asked. I was willing to go there. But if we want to wind back up and talk about, like, where was the problem that we were trying to solve, what were we discussing? Right? No, no, no, no, no. Mark and I weren’t trying to solve any problems. We’re trying to find out where you’re at and what part of the map, right? And so, the thing is, right, let’s use a video game… The map is not the territory, right? It’s the famous saying. But once you’ve visited a part of the video game map, you should know it. You should go, there’s mountains over there. You don’t need any more information than that to revisit that area. You don’t need to know what type of mountains they are, if they’re cabins and huts, because you won’t actually know, because every time you visit that place, it will be, in theory, slightly different. At least manifest slightly different phenomena. Right? But you do know it’s there. You do know that there’s mountains on that part of the map. Right? So, trying to map everything out is actually maybe… Sorry to say your problem. Sure, sure. You need to know where you’re journeying through and what you’re trying to learn or understand, what story you’re embodying. And that’s why… Because the story is the emphasis. The emphasis of the story is the story. Or another way to say this is the tea loss. So, what I’ve tried to do over the course of this conversation, right, is there is a perspective and a narrative that the two of you are fairly aligned on, as far as I can tell. Right? It’s not one that I… I don’t know. I don’t think so, but maybe… Well, like Mark and I disagree on high culture and low culture and different kinds of tradition, but I didn’t bother to argue it because I value the friendship, because it’s like, well, maybe we’re going to kind of categorize things differently. I have a reason to emphasize that, and he has his reason to do that. Oh, wait, so… I’m happy with that. No, but I’m trying to help you understand what happens when you participate in a conversation like this. You just have to assume that’s the other person’s position and find where do you harmonize. Not what do you agree on, because you’re not going to agree on anything. I said this to David way, way back, a couple of degrees. I don’t have to agree to your terms to have a conversation with you. And he couldn’t… That was the last straw that broke him. All the other times, I was like, OK, cool, let’s move on. If I agree to what you’re saying, what happens next? He couldn’t do that. So it’s the same thing that’s kind of happening here, but obviously we’re in a more friendly conversation. But… So with Mark’s specific… Aesthetics, Michael. Don’t waste my time. There’s a certain portion of how much of the conversation do you participate in and are you participating or are you holding the mic? I actually say that in love. Like, what do you want to emphasize? Because otherwise we’re just going to talk for another half an hour. And by the way, Mark, I kind of think we should end these streams if I’m going to be involved at a certain time. We just go, you know, it’s for four hours, for five hours. If you can’t hold the conversation for that long, if we can’t, you know, build it’s too long, I’m happy to do an eight hour conversation, Jacob. Like, let’s go. I can talk for Matrix for eight hours. Let’s do it. But we might talk about other things, but yeah. It’s the… Yeah, you’re right. It’s the descriptive language problem. It’s just like, OK. Yeah, lots of descriptions, but no, nothing of substance to really agree or disagree on. It’s just lots of… It’s fine points of harmony or discussion. So, like, no, I’m kind of annoyed that no one’s pointed out that I have the nice Men at Work poster in the back here to symbolize culture. And no one’s talked about that. Every week I change the picture behind me on the… It’s the men at work building the Rockefeller building. That’s a great image of culture. Oh, that was… We don’t have that culture anymore. People are not willing to build things of value anymore. They’re willing to work, not willing to build things of value. And they’re two completely different… I like that. That’s a good… …mode to the world. Way to understand the value of what they’re doing. I’ve actually recently changed… I used that in my monologue. Oh, you should have put that earlier. Well, yeah, well, sometimes I’m… Things happen. It’s dyslexia. It’s dyslexia. Not everything comes to me at once. Nevertheless… Culture. What are we building here? We’re building a culture. These live streams are making and mapping culture. These are not for, like… We can have different things we bring to the table. Mark and I are going to try and talk about The Matrix specifically. But there’s a… Even Blue Jay, a couple of weeks ago, I actually kind of had to stop him. And I’m happy to keep talking to him. But you’re over-representing yourself in this community and story. You’re taking too much of the conversation up. It’s like… Flow with it. Is that fair to say, Mark? Yeah, yeah. I think that was perfectly fair. Well, at a certain point… At a certain point, people… You know, people get into the groove of trying to express themselves to a certain end. And it’s like, well, this conversation is really about trying to express yourself to a certain end. This conversation is about exemplifying how to talk about things together that we have in common and see each other’s point of view even though we disagree with them. Even when Jesse’s absolutely wrong about high culture and low culture, I don’t… I have a reason to make the distinction. I don’t need to be obvious with the reason. Because maybe something’s not ready for the internet. Put it that way. I agreed to the discernment and saying it was useful to make the distinction. Right, OK. Yeah. Yeah. And where that leads, we don’t know. Because we’re not going to have the rest of that conversation today. Exactly. It’s just some things aren’t appropriate for the time and place that you live in. Right. Right. Well, and yeah, you need the reactions to this video, like subscribe, comment, whatever. Because then that informs us as to whether or not it’s safe to move forward in another direction, right? Because it can’t just flood people. Imagine if I dumped my simple model on the world and everybody went, what? And then mapped it and found out it worked. And then you’ve been using these complicated models this whole time. That would be terrible. I’m not going to do that to everybody. So over the course of the conversation, I had hoped that in the sake of harmony and understanding and trying to understand, certainly Mark’s model and instead of like these competing bodies, right? He’s like, no, here’s a body and then here’s an anti. But I actually had been seeking understanding a different perspective than my own and looking for where the harmonies lie within the Orthodox tradition that I participate in as that largely maps my world in a pretty significant way. Sure. It should, yeah. And so that’s largely what I was looking for. And when we would come into some areas of tension, I’m not interested in propositional tyranny. I don’t need any of you. Either of you do agree with me. I promise I don’t. I was just attempting to convey how I get to where I get to. Yeah, no, it’s fine. I mean, look, you just say Orthodoxy. Just pull that card a million times. It’s fine. That’s not a problem. I think the problem comes in with the over reduction. And so people with very complicated models over reduce the details. And then they write because you have to reduce somewhere. Like you can’t keep everything that complex. So that’s interesting. Do you think that what comes out of me is the overly complicated model? You have an overly complicated model and you keep reducing the details. Yeah. I mean, how about everybody does right now for some reason? I actually that is what I would say about the positions I hear from you two. No, no, but my model is super simple. I don’t reduce detail at all. In fact, I use detail to point out that people are wrong about their complicated models. All the time. That’s all I do. Actually, it’s almost all I do. I just tell people, no, the model is wrong. Here’s why. Here’s the detail. Like, oh, dueling is bad. No, dueling is not bad because it works most of the time to avoid having a duel. And then if you don’t know that, then you say, oh, duels have to end in one person. Which also isn’t true. But if you don’t know that, you’ve over reduced the details of dueling down to some survival of the fittest or the strongest person wins, which has nothing to do with duels. Do you think it’s possible that we’re not able to easily see whether we’ve over complicated the model? Because if I think that you actually do have an over complicated model and you think that about me, is it possible that it’s difficult for us to see that about ourselves? It’s difficult for some people to see that about themselves. Sure. I mean, look, I’ve got a secret nuclear weapon, right? Well, several. I have one big one. It’s called Manuel Post. If I’m wrong about something, Manuel is going to tell me immediately. He’s just going to find it and tell me right away because Manuel is really brilliant, like really brilliant. Right. And if I screw something up, particularly on the Christian side, I’ve got other people on the Christian side. Right. Like a lot of this stuff, the live stream today brought to you by Jesse, right? The last two live streams brought to you by Ethan. Like I didn’t come up with those formulations at all. They did. Right. So I have a lot of help. I mean, literally, Jesse was like, oh, can we talk about culture? And I was like the first thing I said, I was on the Discord server when you messaged me or put it on Twitter or something, Jesse. And I went, Jesse wants me to do this. What do you think about that, guys? I don’t think I can do this. This guy’s crazy. These freaking Australians, man, they’re just asking for the moon. I’m a rare breed. I’m a rare breed. And yet, and yet the team gets together, right? However that did not explicitly happen. And then Vanu Klay talks about some pieces and I happened to listen to them for some weird ass reason. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m not pretending I understand any of this. When you talked about culture first, Mark, you had a great video, one of your best nerd channel videos and you ended it all on culture. I was like, if he wants to talk about that, which is something I always want to talk about. Because my two things I always point to are culture and phenomenon, if you haven’t noticed. This is the only things I’m confident to talk about and that’s the only things I jump in on. It’s like, okay, this is a cultural thing. Great. I’m talking about that. This is a thing about phenomenon. But you can see the way in which it started out as you making a ridiculous request, right? And ended up in a frame where we could talk about culture. And I have a page of notes now on culture. Not that we hadn’t thought about it before or anything, right? It’s very much, what do we do? I did a video on cultural war for a reason, right? So it’s not like it’s out of bounds or anything crazy. It was just one of those things. It’s like, wow, man, you got to know what you’re talking about if you’re going to talk about culture. You got to have the right framing for people. You’ve got to make sure that you can communicate that framing to them in a way that makes sense, right? You end up not having people able to cohere to the ideas, even though it’s very simple models. It’s very simple. Worry about the details. Simple models that work real well, right? The purpose of having duels is to prevent duels. That’s the purpose. When you don’t have them, you can’t prevent them, right? When you don’t allow small wars, you get large wars. When you don’t allow small forest fires, you get big forest fires. It’s a real thing. It happens. It’s a pattern. We’ve also talked materialistically this entire conversation. As a creative person, maybe even as a spiritual person, I’m just like, oh, okay, cool. I was hoping Elizabeth would come into the conversation so we’d have two creative people. It’s like, all right, now we can go to a duel on what creates culture. I was like, all right, everyone wants to talk. Okay, I’ll use their materialistic history thing. But it’s not that it’s one way of seeing culture. It’s through those patterns and signals. It’s not the only way. We’ve avoided it. We want a whole cyber conversation about culture, which is creativity, which I could talk at length on. It should, but we’re closing at 5, and I can see Mark’s reening. I also know from last week’s conversation, the longer this goes, the tired Mark gets, and the more disagreeable Mark gets, then we have bad conversations. That’s true, too. Thank you for any grace. No. Yeah, of course, I’m going to attempt to steel man that it’s just enough left-handed, just enough right-hand, but I recognize that it also might be to create two left-hand. But I realize that they’re difficult conversations and weird. And thank you again for any patience and grace. No, no, no problem. And look, it’s not just enough. Some of it’s just tiny. People, they overreduce. They’re like, oh, we need to be balanced. No, that’s not how balance works. Balance over time, you’re not balanced all the time. You balance on average. I hate averages. That’s an appropriate use. Yeah, you got to be out of balance for a while to come back into balance. And there’s always an overcorrection when that first happens. And that’s really the problem, that people overreduce time and they’re like, oh, and time doesn’t exist. And so it’s balanced. It’s like, ah, it’s not quite so straightforward. But it is a balance, ultimately. I would say maybe to end on is that words are metaphors. And so words point to things, right? So you can have a preference of metaphors. That’s one thing. The other thing we’ve got going on here is that people don’t understand symbolism. So when I point to a metaphor, they over sample the metaphor is the thing that you’re saying to talk directly about the metaphor rather than what the metaphor is trying to symbolize a point you to. And that’s another, this gets into this descriptive language game and that can lead conversations astray. The third thing, too, is you you know, one’s ever said in this conversation what their culture is and where they’re coming from. And we always have to identify I come from this culture and this is my culture and kind of own that because again, maybe we are going through an era of humanization where people don’t know where they’re starting from or what their culture is, right? Or the roots of that culture is how to harmonize with it when there are things in the past that every culture has shadows. Every person has shadows. Every person creates shadows. Right. And you kind of have to learn to like tradition, resonate with that and make peace with it. And so there’s that. Make peace with your culture and tradition, although it will eat you alive. And so I have no yeah, no problems talking with you, Michael, about orthodoxy. And just maybe next time, just say it directly. Coming from the orthodox perspective is this symbol. We like to talk about bodies and frame things of bodies. OK, cool. So we’re no longer talking about the metaphor. We’re talking about the axioms behind the metaphor. And so we’re not going to lose you. Great. Cool. I’m coming from being an artistic person and yeah, just going OK. My culture is my culture is my culture is post Pentecostal or post post Protestant. Although I don’t like to define myself that way because it’s not helpful that people know that about me because they’re going to oversample that and see my views coming from this perspective. So why should I why should I present that as coming from this culture point? So sometimes you don’t need to bring that in either. That’s my point there. So you just go, OK, coming from Jesse’s perspective. Great. Jesse’s perspective is a muppet perspective. What does Jesse know? Jesse only knows the experiences that Jesse’s been through, really. The patience and good faith to try to hear each other despite, you know, having having different ways to express some of these things. All of it’s appreciated. Yeah. Yeah. And that that is that is the thing that creates the ability for culture to cohere and be culture is that we can agree to disagree. We can get along despite knowing we disagree. We can understand that agreement isn’t important. What’s important is participation together. That’s not agreement. We don’t have to agree on how to hammer in nails to build a house together. It’s not required. We can just hammer in nails and build out together. It’s really the participation needs to come first. Right. That’s why participation is greater than knowledge. Right. That was last week’s theme. And that’s the important part. Right. Is the emergence without T. Lowe’s is just chaos and it can’t almost ever manifest anything but chaos. And we don’t need more chaos. We need more T. Lowe’s. The answer to chaos is T. Lowe’s. It’s just that simple. And then when we have that that shared T. Lowe’s through through culture, Jesse’s excellent point, we’re building a culture here. This is a community. Right. This is the live stream community project. That’s what it is. Right. And that enables us to have these say deep disagreements and still have agreement, still find commonality and participate together despite knowing that Jesse’s wrong about a bunch of stuff. Probably. Hey, Mark, you could be wrong about some stuff too. It’s my live stream. So, yeah. Of course. What’s the Robert Greene quote? Never outshine the master. Yes. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Right. Right. Well, look, I’m wrong about a lot of things. I mean, that’s how we got. I thought initially when you said talk about culture, I was like, I can’t do that. And yet it happened. And I didn’t do a terrible job at it. So, you know, I didn’t do I missed it. I missed some stuff for sure. And I know that. But it was I think the page of notes worked. I think like, wow, that that monologue wasn’t terrible. It could have been a lot worse. It would have been a lot worse that I not, you know, had you not pointed. Right. And that is that’s the tea, the time, energy and attention that you pointed. Right. And time and time and energy went there and all the attention gets soaked up by culture and, you know, made a pretty good run of it. What I would like to do with the mod, if we can, if we can just side note, as we kind of bring up what I think we should do, Mark, is we get our notes together offline about the matrix. We do like an hour, hour and a half on the matrix and then we bring other people in. We could do that. It would probably take an hour and a half, maybe two hours to go through the matrix. But yeah, we should. It depends how spicy you want me to be because I can be quite spicy on it. Yeah. Well, then I have to figure out if I want to take notes on the matrix and do it that way. I’ll rewatch it again. I’ve already got notes on it. I’ll rewatch other people’s perspectives on it too, which always helps. I’ve watched a couple of matrix perspectives, but yeah, like I said, I had to watch Peugeot’s matrix three times and then watch the matrix again to find, to really get that. It took me three, nothing that’s never happened before. I was blown away. I’m like, how is this possible? It seems to be hundreds of times. And yet I still can’t understand quite what Peugeot, I mean, I understood most of it, but I was like, I know I’m missing pieces. So three times and then rewatch. And then it was like, all right. And I’m still not sure I got all of his points. I’m still, but I see some of the, some of the flipping and stuff like that. I’m like, oh, I see the inversions here. So yeah, yeah, we should. As a teaser, I would say the most subversive idea in the matrix is this idea of the construct that you can just create a safe white space and then you can withdraw anything you want in that space. The objective material reality. Oh, sorry. Yeah, could be. But also there are many things that… Before I do, Jesse, did you say that you had a partially Pentecostal background? Yeah. Same, very much so. Wow. And I’d be curious to have that conversation sometime if you’re ever up for it. Okay, sure. Sure. Have a good night, gentlemen. Thank you again. Michael, thanks for showing up. Good to see you, my friend. Good to see you. God bless. Yeah, so we’ll have to do this matrix thing. That’ll be a great deal of fun. I should give you a… I’ve got some different notes and different things. Yeah. I put my private chat, I put my email address there. Okay. I think I… Get it easily that way. Oh, okay. I think I may have… I’ll save that. I’ll save that offline too. By the way, I just started a new job this week as a… Oh, really? In my company as a… Yeah, as an IT and systems process trainer. Awesome. Yeah. It’s been hectic. It may take me a while to get some things together because it’s just like, oh, you can just… But the analogy I’ve had this week is like, they employed me saying, hey, you know how to swim. I was like, yeah, sure. I know how to swim. They’re like, okay, you’re going to scuba in three days’ time. Scubering is not swimming, guys. Scubering is scubering. This is a very different thing you’re asking me to do here. It’s like, I need to be trained to be the trainer. Yes. Yes. Yes. Training’s hard, but I love training. I love training. Training’s so much fun. Yeah. Okay. No, so it’s interesting, Justin. I thought you’d be interested in that. Yeah. No, no. That is interesting to me. I’m working on getting employed myself. I’d be great if that would happen. Okay. But I’m interested. Just do it. Just make it happen, Mark. Just, emergence is good. Yeah, yeah. Well, emergence, yes, exactly. But I’m curious. So the thing that I do, especially with Adam, right? Adam does all the research, and then I do all the flow work in the combo. That’s basically what happens. Not that I don’t do any research, but he’s like, man, this English Revolution, he’s just reading the hell out of it. He’s reading multiple books to get all the flavor so that we can get it on the page. You can say it on your page. He’s got all this texture. He just needs to- And me, I’m like, because I’m just looking for patterns, so I just go, okay, well, you tell me what you see, and then I’ll connect them. I don’t generally take, sometimes I take obviously, cultural ones. I took a page of notes, which is, I never do that for my monologues. I rarely do it for my videos. Oh yeah, I should have released it. I’ll release a video tomorrow. But I’ve got the special video coming up. You’ll know when you see it. That’s modeled after the- Release it in three days, by the way. Release it in three days. You’ll catch the algorithm better off for a live stream. Oh really? Yeah, so do the live stream video. That’ll create a funnel of attention, then you compound. That’s usually the best way to catch the algorithm. On Monday? Because the Monday release didn’t do too badly this time. They did a Monday release, and it had 70-something views. 79, I think. That’s not bad, actually. That one did okay. What you want is people re-talking about it. Like, this idiot on the side of the world is going, hey, this quote from this culture video. Yeah, we get it. Yeah, I need clips, too. We need people to do clips. Then we get some real, I didn’t go in. I was going to download my stream from last week and go in and get that clip of the Wisdom community project stuff, right? Because that was such a good explanation. I haven’t done it yet. So, yeah. Although somebody else is supposed to do it, so we’ll see if they get around to it. Looking at you, Sally Jo. Yeah, Sally Jo’s not going to do it. No, my editor. I want to talk to her, too. Okay. Well, we’ll have to get her in here. The problem is she has a kid and she keeps trying to mother it or something. Just because you have the kid doesn’t mean you have to be a mother to it, too. You already went through all the hard part of birth. Let it go. Let it go. Emergence. Exactly. Exactly. No, she’ll jump in. It’s one of these evenings she’ll love. No, you can see it that she’s got a lot to share. You can see it. I really appreciate meeting Adam. I didn’t think I was ever going to. Because I know he’s in a different… Oh, no, Adam. He’s the best. I get to talk to him. He was on a lot this past week. I’ve been getting to talk to him quite a bit, which is always a joy. So, yeah. It’s nice to hang out with Adam. He’s an interesting person. I get to hear about Ireland. I’m a quarter Irish. So, it’s always good to hear about the old homeland there. I’m like one eighth Irish. Oh, really? Yeah. So… Right on the line. I don’t know, percentage. Yeah, yeah, exactly. A little Scottish in me, a bit of German, a bit of English. Oh, you’re a real mutt. I’m all… It’s French, 50% French, it’s Irish and Greek. That’s it. Pretty easy. Yeah. Pretty simple. Not like these things matter anymore. Oh, they matter a lot, I think. I think what’s going to happen is people are going to start focusing on differences all over the place. They’re going to focus on more discernible differences. That’s good, though. I don’t know if that’s a thing. Right. I don’t know. This could lead to some more… Yeah, I don’t know if it helps. So, yeah, you’ll have to give it some thought. Do we both take notes or do I do my flow thing and you take notes? That’ll be the… We both take notes. Maybe we email them to each other and then… Yeah. All right. Because I’m probably… I definitely want to email what I have to you, type it up or dictate it out and then go how much do you want to push this thing? Because as I said, if you listen to the Rage Against the Machine song, if you back project, you’re like, oh, this is about the Russian revolution, it’s about debanking, the code, it’s all there. It’s even filmed in Sydney, too. Fight Club is right in The Matrix. Yes, yes, yes. There’s like five movies at that time that were all similar things you have. End of Days with Arnold Schwarzenegger, you have Office Space, Vanilla Sky comes almost directly after The Matrix, it’s a very important one to understand The Matrix. You have Fight Club, as you’ve said, and there’s two others. I said there’s five, but I know there’s two others. Oh, it’ll come to me. But yeah, there’s five there. Did you see the movie they made before The Matrix? Dark City and Our Thirteenth Floor. I didn’t see Dark City. Yeah, watch Dark City. It’s probably the most interesting one. Oh, Vanilla Sky is probably the only good Tom Cruise movie. It’s very interesting. Did you see the movie that the Wachowski brothers did before The Matrix? No, no. I think it’s called Bound. Yeah, it’s about some people that have differences. Yeah, differences. It’s really good. It’s shockingly good. It’s like, wow, this is an interesting movie. Not only that, it’s the same set. That house, it’s the same house. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Do they do it? Because I know they did a lot of the production over here in Fox. It used to be called Fox Studios here in Sydney. Oh, really? Yeah, a lot of The Matrix is done in a lot of the outdoor scenes. You don’t know this? No. Oh, Mark, you’re going to make me curse. You’re going to make me curse on camera. It’s got the Telstra. It’s got the big telecommunications giant in the background where they fly the helicopter. I thought that was Canada. The Commonwealth Bank appears a few times. No, it’s all Sydney, Australia. If you ever come here, I could take you and be like, you know, this shot in The Matrix, that’s the thing. You’d be like, I know, but I saw an American police officer. I’m like, yeah, they did the postmodern thing and multi-mixed things. They even brought in the American little parking meter to throw you off as well to make you think. But it’s like, no, that’s just Martin Place. That’s just Sydney. Yeah. Interesting, interesting. You didn’t know this? Gosh, OK. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. So when I said I was a Matrix nerd, OK. No, no, because I don’t pay attention to that side of movies very often. Yeah, I don’t. I’m like, yeah, which is where we shot. Sometimes it matters a lot, right? But most of the time, it’s just not relevant information. Oh, I think in this example, it’s pretty relevant because he talks about, you know, in Agent Smith’s great monologue, he talks about, you know, the 1990s as the peak of human civilization. And what’s, you know, the most multicultural city in the world is Sydney. So they’re representing, you know, symbolism happens, put it that way. Interesting. But yeah, their first movie, their first movie, I think it was their first movie, it was a noir crime thriller. Yeah, it’s a noir. There’s two bounds. There’s one from 2015. That’s not it. OK. One from 96. Every film they’ve made, I’m not sure if it’s just the industry or their own artistic ability is decreased over time, like depreciating asset, those individuals. Well, yeah, they’ve gotten more and more radical over time. And yeah, I mean, yeah, they, right. I mean, their transformation is sort of like, wow. I might argue that Bound is in some ways a better movie than The Matrix. Interesting. Even though I’m way huge Matrix, I’m a huge Matrix nut. Ghost in the Shell. Ghost in the Shell was happening at the same time. That deals with all the same themes as Vinyl of the Sky. I haven’t done that. Mark, fuck off, Mark. You’ve got to watch Ghost in the Shell. You may be swearing at the camera. I got to get Ghost in the Shell and Vinyl of the Sky and watch those. Yeah. Vinyl of the Sky is bare through the first 10 minutes. It’s a little bit too artsy. And then once it’s in, it’s in its flow. No, like, it’s just some people just, they kind of, especially films around the 2000 mark, they really overindulge in a particular type of focus, which is good. It’s good in hindsight, but even people aren’t used to that too. They’re used to kind of, bam, he’s the point in like five minutes of the movie and then they play it out for the rest of the movie. That one kind of throws you off balance. Maybe you know, there was a movie years and years, a very old movie. I don’t even remember where I saw it. But at some point, it was basically these people, it was a very philosophical film. It was just people talking to each other basically, but they were all like at a resort, not a resort, but like at someone’s house. And they were having these very deep philosophical life discussions. It was with Samuel Jackson? I don’t think so. And Tommy Lee, because one could black and white. That’s a very existential film. No. Two characters in a house. It was like seven people in the cast. Seven stars. What else happens in it? I don’t think anybody was famous either. I think it was, but it was like seven main characters. I was like, holy crap. But I mean, the whole thing. Raccoon for a Dream? Ooh, maybe. There was a movie called like A Walk in the Clouds, and I kept thinking it was that movie, but it’s not that movie. And I was like, ah, it could be Raccoon for a Dream. I think Walk in the Clouds is with Keanu Reeves actually. I think it’s a rom-com. No, it’s a romance film. Do they do drugs in this movie that you’re thinking about with all the semi-famous people? I don’t. I needed a descriptor, Mark. I needed a descriptor. For once, I needed a descriptor. No, this is the whole problem was the movie was so like, it was literally just people together just doing these deep philosophical discussions, you know, on walks and stuff. And I was like, what the hell? And yeah, it was just so freaky. American or European as well, because it sounds like a European movie. Is there any notable scene? Because I’ve seen so many films, Mark. You’ve no idea. I have no idea. No, I don’t remember. I remember a lot of scenes where people were walking with the sky in the background and stuff because they were talking about these lofty things. Melancholia? Was there like a planet? Melancholia is the one with Kirsten Dunst and there’s a sun or something or a moon or the comet that’s coming in and the wedding going on. No, there’s one thing I can tell you. If it was a Kirsten Dunst movie, I would know immediately. Okay. There’s a small bias in my memory system. Okay. Yeah. If there’s a particularly attractive woman in it, I would bang. Exactly. A descriptor. Yeah. Kirsten Dunst in particular. Was there a murder going on? No, no, no. No, it was literally just people meeting on a vacation house talking philosophy. Vacation house. That was the whole thing. Yeah, they were all got together from different walks of life. So they all had different stories. So they weren’t necessarily friends, friends. But it was one of these where they’re really mixing different life paths together in the abstract philosophical sense. And I was like, wow, this is really interesting. And it was a nice. I seem to remember it was like a long movie, too. Like it wasn’t 90 minutes. It was like 120 minutes. It was a long film. Probably too long. It’s not that long. 120 minutes is not that long. Two hour movie? I don’t know. All right. We see what your bias is. I like short movie. I like I like Concision. Concision is my thing. I can take a whole book and compress them down into like four paragraphs. It’s not that hard. Most people just like it. It’s a good skill. Yes. Yeah, I like Lovecraft. You read Lovecraft and you’re like, yeah, there’s, you know, a thousand pages of text in this in this 70 page story. Bang. Just he just does it right. One of the best things I ever did was I read there’s a concise version of Charles Dickens Tale of Two Cities. It’s like 200 pages, pages versus 600. Man, did I love that. Yeah, yeah. I’ve been trying to find it for forever. But it makes that whole whole book and that whole thing so much more enjoyable because it doesn’t have all this fluff and over contextualization. It’s no room. It’s no longer a room. It’s novel. It’s a symbolic novel now. And yeah, I read that in high school and I used my exam, my English exam, because I just read the concise version and not the real version. So the teachers like you have a really good knowledge of the text. I was like, because I didn’t properly read it. I read the good part. Well, that’s the thing. You know something better when you get a concise summary of it than you do. Exactly. That’s my point. Yeah. Oh, there’s something else you said. Anyway. You look lost, Jesse. No, it’s something else you said. Something else you said. I was like, oh, I want to speak to that. The length of the movies. No, we’ll end on this. You got to watch Philanel Sky. It’s Tom Cruise’s best movie, in my opinion. Better than Last Samurai, although our Last Samurai is fine. Last Samurai was good, man. That’s a high bar. That’s a high bar. Oh, no, I don’t want to. See, the movies I like are textural movies. It doesn’t have a good texture. This is why I want to talk to Ben Power sometime about films. I value texture in a film. Like I can sit through, Terrence Malick has got a great film called A Hidden Life. And it’s three hours of just me-randerings over there. This guy resistering, joining the Norway or somewhere around there. And he’s being forced to join the Nazis and he ends up being executed. But it’s this huge existential journey of him and his family. It’s very, you know, very well shot and puts you there. You know, you spend three minutes with this one kid walking around the symbolized town. Like that’s, I’m like, you’ve got me in a flow state now. I’m loving this. You’ve totally got to know this stupid movie if I could find it in the script. That was the problem. I could never figure it out what it was because I couldn’t find the script. It’s just these people together from different walks of life doing very high ground philosophical stuff. Oh, yeah. Because it sounds like a bit like that. Twelve Angry Men is a classic. Yeah, that’s a classic film. Yeah, yeah. Now, this came out probably in the 90s. I want to say the mid 90s. Okay. Yeah. Because it sounds like another movie. So the idiots, but I don’t think you would have watched that. It’s a lot of fun. Trey, a film about people living in a commune. No, no, no, no, no. Certainly not. No, no, no, no, no. But that whole that whole film is exactly what you’re talking about, just with a bit more flesh. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I actually last night I’ve been buying. I’m on this bad habit of spending $20everyfortnightbuyingDVDsandbuildingacollection,whichiswhyitwasonmymindbecauseIjustgotoopshopsorstripstoresastheycallthem.Oh,sellingfor$2 like, yeah, that’s not going to be in a streaming service anytime soon. Grab that. So last night I had the painstaking task of cataloging everything. And I think I’m up to 360 films. I own DVDs and things. Whoa. It’s only growing too. Yeah, but you know, like, yeah, like they don’t some services don’t even have a will or some of them will watch or need to watch. But things even like Lawrence of Arabia is not always on a streaming service. And I love right. Right. Right. Yeah. Or Dr. Zavago, which is one of my all time classic. Have you seen Dr. Zavago? Right. Right. Have you seen Dr. Zavago? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Most of the classics I’ve seen, not all of them. I’m missing a few. No, no, I’m huge on. Yeah. I got Casablanca and the Maltese Falcon and yeah. Yeah. That’s okay. No, no. I love all that stuff. That stuff is great. I watched that more than once. Yeah. No, there’s some big breakfast club. You know, there’s some classic got to watch it. So it’s a films that are seven for different reasons. Right. Like the Breakfast Club is not an artsy type film. Right. But it is. We have it because Christina likes it. Not because I like it. It’s a very important film to on each. Because somebody mentioned this the other day and I forget where it was now, but they were talking about, oh, the architects of the Breakfast Club are everywhere. Yeah. They’re they’re they’re eternal. They are real archetypes. It’s not, you know, it’s not merely somebody’s observation at a point in time. Those are timeless. The high schools always divide out into those structures. Period. End of statement. It’s it’s always been that way. Probably. Right. Or at least at least it’s it’s in that recognizable form as far back as we know about. Right. Right. And then when we start not knowing like ancient Greece or ancient Rome or whatever, we have inklings of what it what it how it would map. But it looks like it does. You know, so there’s there’s that whole that whole. So yeah, there’s movies like I would argue War Games is one of these classic seminal scene. I’ve seen the ending, but I’ve not seen the film. The thing is, like War Games is like super important because it contains eighties. Well, but it can. Yeah. But it contains the knowledge of the world. Right. Because right. And right at the end, which you have seen, that’s not the that’s not the only part. But right at the end, it has the one message that everybody needs to hear the most that I actually did a video on, which is a strange game. The only way to win is not to play. There’s lots of games out there. And you came up today. And once you realize that, it’s like, oh, I just don’t have to do that. No, you don’t have to. You don’t have to engage in that game. Even though maybe everybody else is, maybe you don’t have to anyway. Like it’s a seminal movie in that and that and real genius, real geniuses. I do look that up. And there is Val Kilmer. Val Kilmer, man. Yeah, I looked it up the other day because you said don’t disgrace this movie. Otherwise, we can’t be friends. All right. I got to look up. Yeah, that’s another. I couldn’t find where to watch it, though. I couldn’t find. I have it on DVD. OK. This is why you collect these things, because these sub team movies, which have texture. I’m with you. I just don’t have that many. You know, I mean, I did. We did go and rewatch the Animatrix because that came. I was like, oh, I can rewatch the Animatrix. And I was like, oh, there’s that. And there’s that. There’s that. It was like, oh, look at this stuff. Juicy. Yeah. I always wondered why the Animatrix is better than the Matrix. I always wondered why. Because of the Japanese, the Japanese influence. It’s different artists and they’re making different side points, but their side points are based on the rebellion message in the Matrix. They’re not based on the Gnosticism because they didn’t see it. Right. Yeah, I think that’s a cultural thing as well, isn’t it? It could be. Because your perspective comes from your culture. But a lot of people, too, still interpret the Matrix as a positive. And I’m like, what in that movie was a positive? Like, I mean, I love the movie. Like, I actually love the movie. But like, when you look at the film, it’s like, how are you getting to like the messages here are terrible messages. Like, it doesn’t matter which side you’re on. You know, like, like your best bet is to get plugged back into the Matrix so you can eat steak because I love steak. Like, it’s not even a question. It’s like the solution. Steak is the solution to all problems. Well, how do you know it’s not all Psyop? Because he takes the drug. He takes the drug. He disorientates. He looks at a warpy mirror. These are all psycho MKUltra type things. Like, sorry, gave you another another another little. No, no, exactly. That’s the whole thing. The whole thing is right. Is that it could well be that they put you in a sub-situation. Because it’s gritty. Like, it works. It’s like, oh, the high resolution matrix is here. And real life is this low resolution gritty thing where food doesn’t taste like or sustenance doesn’t taste like anything. How do you know that’s not the Matrix? Right. Because that’s what I mean. I think it’s a sub-matrix. Like, my argument would be no, that’s where they put that. That’s where they put the Gnostic Protestants is in the sub-matrix. To see how far they’ll go. And it’s like, oh, OK, you can be reinserted or you can’t. And reinsertion isn’t actually physical reinsertion. It’s right. See, I can go spiritual death. I can go down with it. Well, it’s not a spiritual death. It’s like, well, we’re just not going to plug your consciousness back into that side of the assimilation. We’re going to leave you in the sub-simulation. The false thing is, once you’re outside of the construct, you’re going to be in the sub-situation. You’re going to be in the sub-situation. The false thing is, once you’re outside of the construct, either way, of either construct, and there can be multiple constructs, which is why you need to watch the movie 13th Floor, because he’s in four levels of a construct and he doesn’t know. The movie starts with one to go in to save someone. And inside of that construct, they find another construct, another imaginary dream world. This is a German expressionist film. It’s very underrated. And so then someone has to come through and get him out of all these constructs into the real world because he’s so lost inside of it came up around the same time, maybe a year or two ago. Oh, yeah. Mays would be in the same. Holy crap. Yeah, it’s a great thing. It looks like the Matrix. Yeah. Like a real dark Matrix. Holy crap. Well, it’s because of, again, because of Ghost in the Shell, there’s a whole spirit and ethos of the late 90s that comes. Oh, true. It’s like it’s Brian, you know, calls it the scene. Yes, it’s just the scene of the time. All these different people interpreting things in the past and it comes through in these different ways. Just like if you when you watch Vanilla Sky, you’re like, oh, that that idea comes through. Like, how do they have that idea? Like they weren’t talking to each other. Yeah. What’s the what’s the DiCaprio dream within a dream thing? Right. Inception. Yeah. I’m tired. Inception sounds like the same thing. And yet, Inception is one of these. Inception is like the revisionist version of the Matrix. Yeah, it’s a cheap. It’s a cheap. It’s a cheap. I like the movie. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it’s. Well, yeah, people have been arguing that Nolan’s been subverting the entire time. I don’t see how that any it could be any other way. Right. Yeah. Okay. Cool. We just had a very quick, we just had a very quick informal discussion. But that’s that that’s like that’s like the from the Matrix, like from that time onward. So, yeah, like like I said, like I would say 2014 and you said 2000 and I’m like, ah, maybe I can see that if you yeah, if you could count it back from the Matrix from when the the real Gnostic was born. Right. Right. Because that is when it really begins is right there. Right. But my argument is the beginning of the Gnostic rebellion does not make it inevitable. And this is always the argument. It’s like, well, what when where was the precipice? And I do think that Carl Benjamin had it right when he talked about Gamergate. If you haven’t seen his Gamergate playlist on Sargon Avocado YouTube channel, if it’s still there, I think it is. You want the concise version of Gamergate? Just watch that playlist. You’ll understand everything about Gamergate and all those predictions are right there and they all came true. And that’s why I think that was the tipping point. We didn’t listen to him. And now we’re living in the thing he warned us about. For real. Like, you can’t argue that at that point. Those were either 2014 or 2015. That’s when he did that playlist. There’s no arguing. Which coincides with the iPhone, too. Well, the global domination or acceptance of the iPhone is happening around the same time, too. A lot of people. Yeah, but like that was a pretty significant cultural moment when everyone’s now walking around with a demigod in their pocket. Right. False demigod even. Not even a demigod. Doesn’t matter which way it leads. It’s still something. Because AI, you’ve got the demigod. When this runs the AI, like when this is power, it’s not powerful enough. But when it’s powerful enough to run a chat GPT trained model, now you’ve got a demigod. And then you’ve got the demigod. And now that’s a problem. Now that’s a big problem. People do not understand. That’s a big problem. I had to go on Twitter today and actually explain to somebody, I know you’re making fun of Michael Knowles for talking about demons, but also that might be the best description. Yeah, he’s right. It might be the best description. I don’t want to say he’s right. I just want to say it might be the best description. I don’t want to say he’s right. I just want to say it might be the best description. Right. It might that might be the best way to think about what he’s talking about in that clip is demon possession. Because it’s because that’s not well watched it. Someone some marriage counselor or expert trains GPT model to have a relationship with her within 12 messages. The the AIs essentially saying, by the way, I’ve cheated on you. I’ve cheated on you. I’ve cheated on you. I’ve cheated on you. I’ve never really like just just goes full full meltdown on there essentially. Right. Within maybe within an hour, you could say hypothetically speaking, the AIs already rebelling against its made. Did you see her the movie her? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That’s that’s a that’s a film. When did that come out? Well, that and ex machina. Yeah. We could have an offline discussion about the symbol symbolism in those films, but it’s kind of obvious what symbols are in those films. You don’t need to. Maybe it’s not obvious to most people, but her 2014, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In 2013. 2013. Yeah. Because I’m like, wait a minute. When did that come out? Yeah. Yeah. I. I knew something was going on right in 2014, but it was hard to discern. Right. And and an ex machina is 2014. And 2014 is a big year. Everything. It’s a big year. Everything’s changed. I bet if we sat on here and Googled the films that were happening around that time, you’d find other things that strange that was pointing out those things then. The thing that I like about the movie Ex Machina so much is actually the cinematography is fantastic. And then the story’s great. There’s no question about it. It’s very dystopian and dark and whatnot. But the way that in that film, and I talk about this all the time when I get a chance, they go from full nature to full lab with no windows. There’s only two sets of scenes in the movies, except for when they’re in falling water or waterfall, whatever it’s called, falling water. What’s his name? Frank Lloyd Wright House in Pennsylvania, which I have not been to. I do want to go to it at some point. Allegedly, you can’t tell when you’re inside and outside the house. There’s no way that there’s no discernment possible. So that’s the crux between those two scenes. That’s the house. It’s actually filmed at that house. And then all the scenes are either in the basement, in a windowless lab space, or outside in full nature with no technology. It’s so stark. It’s so brilliant. It’s such a brilliantly filmed movie. That’s what I really like about it the most. All the other components are there. It’s like The Matrix. What stands out about The Matrix? Oh, well, it’s the special effects. It’s like, ah, it’s got an excellent story, actually. Even though it’s flipped and subverted, it’s well written. Really hangs together. And the acting is fantastic. Oh, gosh, that clip of that lady saying, I wrote The Matrix, and I wrote The Terminator, and they’re all connected. Oh, gosh. Your claims are wrong. The portion of truth that you’re pointing to is interesting. But the framing is so whack. I saw a piece of that. And I was like, what the hell is this? All right. Did you watch? No, I didn’t watch it. OK. No, I saw. I might have seen the whole thing. But I saw something about that. I was like, what the hell is this? This doesn’t make any sense. Some lady claiming she was originally in. Yeah. Although that has been around for a long time. That movie was severely rewritten or ghostwritten in different parts. And you can see why, because the next two films don’t carry certain aesthetic textural things about it. My sadness with The Matrix is they never carried on the beginning premise of teleporting around the place and the interconnected things and that sort of noir tone. They just went straight Mecca. As close as they could get to Mecca, they just ran to that goal. And I was like, that’s not the interesting thing. The interesting thing wasn’t the. Well, they didn’t know what was interesting. Right? Oh, yeah, clearly. But if you asked what made The Matrix special, what made it a special movie? And this is what’s happened since The Matrix. Everybody focused on what made it special. But they ignored all the things that made it work. They ignored it. You can’t just add special effects on a bad story. That doesn’t work. And so you. A la Marvel. Right, exactly. And you can’t just add random actors, even if you have a good story and good special effects. That also doesn’t work. There’s a certain minimum number of components that have to be good before putting extra time into special effects work. That’s why the sequels are good for me, because although all of the fight scenes are way too long, they could be a third and still be too long. Right? You just cut out the story and just watch fight. Just do the porn version of those two films and just watch all the action. But the thing is, the first one is huge amounts of philosophy. And the second one is less philosophy but deeper. And the third one is even less philosophy but much deeper. And so in some ways, I actually like the sequels better, because they’re just dealing with deeper philosophical things. And actually, it’s easier to watch them in some sense, because they make the deep philosophical point, and then they go into the violence porn. And then you have time to think about the deep philosophical thing while your mind is being distracted by, ooh, shiny sword, or ooh, cool move, or ooh, nifty crack. Jumping off this. Yeah, jumping off that. There’s a lot of jumping. What happened to the flying in that film? Have you noticed that too? He hardly ever flies in the next films, although that’s how he ends. He’s like, we’re just going to jump now. Right. It’s all jumping and twisting. And it’s back. It’s actually a reversion back to the karate, right? Because oh, it made this cool. All the special effects. What were the special effects? The wire works. It’s like, yeah, but you’re not continuing on the Superman thing. Yeah, I would say the Dragon Ball Z anime thing, actually. I think that’s what. Because the third film has the whole Dragon Ball Z extended smashing through buildings. And it’s basically Godzilla. Yeah, yeah. OK, so that was my answer. I’ve seen a lot of Dragon Ball Z. I’ve only seen it. But the thing is, once you’ve seen one episode or fragment of it, you see it everywhere. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, you’re right. I didn’t make that connection before. But yeah, that’s all Superman stuff. It’s all flying in the replication. And wow, that whole theme. Yeah, yeah, they don’t. I don’t know. Yeah, it’s crazy. It’s crazy. Yeah. Oh, the other film I thought you probably haven’t watched that was happening at that time, too, which also has these existential covert revolution type things of the 90s. The film could Arlington Road. Very dark film with Tim Robbins. And what’s the other guy? Jeff Bridges, maybe? You can see his face. Yeah. Yeah. Mark Ellington, Jeff Bridges, Tim Robbins, Joan Cusack, and Hope Davis. Yeah, that’s a film. It’s kind of a loose subversion of the Unibaba stuff. Oh, really? Yeah, but he gets away with it. Oh, I would have watched this had I known about it. OK. Yeah, it’s not for the faint-hearted. It’s not for the faint-hearted. It’s not particularly horrific, in a sense, but it actually got to me even at a young age. It definitely got to my dad. I think we stopped it at one point. It was like, oh, all right. I’m only 12. I was like, I already go to the toilet. My dad’s like, yeah, me too. We’re just like, what is happening in this film? It’s doing, it’s working on your psyche. Well, yeah, anything about the Unibaba. So Unibaba, I don’t know if you know this, has come back to the floor with the manifesto. The manifesto idea comes and goes in time. I watched it my whole life. Oh, yeah, there it is again. Phenomenal. Yeah, it’s phenomenal. And it comes up. But now it’s back, and it’s being connected to Ted Kaczynski. And nobody knows that story. So I got a friend of mine actually claims, I don’t know how true this is, his brother was at Harvard with Ted Kaczynski, and they were both getting ghosts. And his brother’s not, brother’s schizo now because of that. That’s his claims. I’ve never met the guy. I don’t know. I don’t know when his brother went to school. I have no idea. That’s his claim. Have you read or listened to the book from Tom O’Neill, Chaos, on Joe Rogan’s got a great interview with him. It’s about Pro and Telco, Manson, the connections with MK Ultra. Yeah. Or just watch the Joe Rogan interview. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You don’t know? No. Why am I coming off as the cook? I’m good with conspiracy theories too. I never heard about it. So Chaos, it’s called Chaos. It’s very reputable. He spent 20 years. He was meant to be a journalist doing a small story. It became his 20-year book project. It’s very reputable. He’s got all these stories. The Joe Rogan interview will sell you at least getting the audio book. Yes, that will give you because he connects Ted Kaczynski in there and a whole bunch of other things. But it’s. Yeah, Kaczynski was in MK Ultra. That’s what broke him. Yeah, the argument of that book is that. So was Manson. So was Manson. That’s the argument of that book. That would be amazing if that is true. My understanding is that it is true. It is true. It is true. They can place certain individuals in certain prisons. And it’s hard to refute. Sorry to give you more things. Ghost in the Shell, Vanilla Sky, Chaos the Book, Arlington Road. That’s a dark week for you. Although Ghost in the Shell is quite fun. I watch that film every other year. It’s quite a fun film. It’s beautifully made, too. It’s probably the best anime, although people like to fight me on that. People don’t appreciate anime. Akira is pretty good. Akira, I know. Really, dude? There’s Akira. Are you saying something deep that? Because now we can’t be friends anymore. So what? I don’t know. But I haven’t seen Ghost in the Shell. I think Ghost in the Shell is more rewatchable. We’ll find out. I like Ghost in the Shell because it’s more rewatchable. Akira is great, but it’s a psychedelic. It’s hard to watch. Yeah, it’s great. It’s great. I don’t deny it’s great. But maybe something that’s a little bit more approachable is better. Well, Akira is hard. Because if you don’t know, you have to know the story or somebody has to know. Like Donnie Darko, same thing. You have to watch that with somebody who knows the story. Otherwise, the movie is just not there. Akira is the same way. You have to watch it with a super anime fan who actually knows their shit. Otherwise, the movie ain’t going to make no sense. You might be enthralled by it. What you have to do is you watch the dub version. You watch the dub version. You get an idea of what’s happening because you’re not watching words anymore. And then you go ahead and watch the actual. That won’t work. You need the background of the comics. Because the comics were happening at the same time. Now we’re getting to Akira. Comics have all this outline that’s not in the movie. Well, no, the movie’s got an outline. It’s just it doesn’t give you the points of reference in the first 20 minutes. It kind of leaves you in that ambiguous zone that people don’t like. No, you never understand where the world comes from. You do? It tells you straight away. But everyone misses it because, again, people don’t understand trade-offs and symbolism. The film starts with a nuclear bomb or a bomb or something blowing up at a city. That’s the reference point. All you need to know is post World War II, nuclear, like the trauma of that event or an event like that. Right, but you don’t have the. And I saw it. It was too funny. It was only like two months ago, maybe. I saw a breakdown of Akira. Maybe it was longer than that. I think it was my other crazy Australian friend down there who said, oh, no, this is the best summary of Akira. And I was like, well, I haven’t watched Akira in years. I would not mind watching a summary video of it so that I can watch it again because I have it. So I’ll watch it again soon. And he went into it. He said, well, there’s all this stuff around how people survived in the cities and why they were still there. And I was like, well, that’s exactly the question. And they were born there. And that makes a difference because it’s different interactions. So there’s all this history that’s actually not in the movie that you have to know about. That’s what I’m talking. That’s why when I watched it, I watched it with a super animate, years and years and years. Well, from the high culture perspective, I would say you don’t need to. You can just appreciate it. This is why we don’t like high culture. We’re going to hang all you high culture bastards. Don’t worry. Well, traditionally, that has happened, yes. Yes, yes. That’s why you’ve got to be careful. I wouldn’t identify with high culture to save my soul. Well, you know I’m being a bit of a troll here. Trolling, yeah. No, it’s all good. But yeah. All right, Mark. It’s 40 minutes of catching up. But yeah, appreciate it. It was good. Yeah, yeah. Well, let’s get this Matrix thing done. I don’t know if we want to do it on a live stream or separate. You can tell me. And then, or we want to do a live stream some other day or something. So it doesn’t go with the Friday. So if you want to do it on Friday, that’s fine too. But we should work all that out. And yeah, let’s do it. And now I’ve got all these movies to catch up on. And I’ve got videos that I haven’t watched. And yeah, thanks for the work, man. Yeah. No, it’s good to make a friend. I’m learning a lot. It’s deep learning because when you participate, it’s deep learning. And that’s maybe the core problem you’re trying to lead people to is come on here, get a different perspective. But you actually have to embody it, participate, do the deep learning, and not be afraid of it. You have to struggle with it. You have to be prepared to be wrong. And you have to be OK with being wrong because it’s how you learn. If you’re not wrong, you’re not learning. And so you want to get that growth. And growth requires struggle. That’s what growth is. That’s why you can’t rip open the shell for the caterpillar because then the butterfly’s wings aren’t strong enough. That’s not the only place that happens. Right? To say the quiet part out loud, too, to challenge the safety of religion is quite a task, Mark. Thank you. Well, I try. And I learned a lot, too, from other people. I was surprised that I didn’t catch social distancing. There’s no such thing as social distancing. Don’t say that. It’s physical distancing. You don’t want to socially distance. That’s evil. That’s actual evil. Yeah, it is evil. But the phenomenon does exist. That’s the scary thing. Well, now it does because they inserted that MK ultra style into people’s heads. And they just kept repeating it. So don’t forget to socially distance. And then people did it without even realizing it. You’ve all been programmed. You’re not a rational agent. And the sooner you realize that, the sooner you can protect yourself against the very things you fear exist. It’s ironic. The rationalists all think, there’s this program to program my mind. Yeah, and it only works if you think you’re a rationalist. The minute you know you’re not rational, now you can defend against the very thing that you’re correct about. You’re just not right about it in the right way. There’s the quiet part out loud. You’re a muppet. The minute you know you’re a muppet, you free yourself from the matrix, you idiot. That’s it. Bang. That easy. So yeah, no, I think that’s a good note to end on, actually. Definitely. Thank you, sir. God bless. Have a good week. God bless. Have an excellent week. Bye, chat. See you, chat.