Muppets R Us - Live Navigation (ADksqrVc_Nk)

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

I’ll already be singing to all of you with the gay man of color. I used to sing to lead the cause of all of you. Sorry. But oh, now you know why. Come on. Get in, we need to be together. I found the perfect guy first. Have you heard of He emo isolating? Young men speaking in the city square, trying to tell somebody that he cares. Can you blame the voice of youth for asking what is true? Yeah, the ones that you’re calling wild are gonna be the leaders in a little while. When will the lonely voice of youth cry what is true? It’s all world’s waking to a newborn babe, and I solemnly swear it’ll be their way. You better help that voice of youth find what is true. And the lonely voice of youth cries what is true. Sam Pell. We’ve got a junkless cinnamon roll bar. We’ve absolutely no candy in the house, which is, you know, we’ve got some Westminster tea from the Table Rock Tea Company. So we’re good to go. I think everything we need we have. So you may have noticed we don’t have a particular specific topic. I know we’ve done that before. And just the way it works out sometimes. We’ve also got a kind of drawing. Didn’t really have time to finish it because it started late. But, you know, we’re getting there. So there’s a number of things that came up. It’s been a super chaotic week for me. So I didn’t have time to do, you know, the usual topic thingy. And just a bunch of stuff came up this week. So I thought, you know, and not just this week, right? There are these themes that are sort of running throughout the culture. If you want to think about it that way, it’s not a bad way to think about it. Maybe not my preferred way, but not invalid. And a lot of people don’t recognize what’s happening, right? They’re confused and they want, you know, they want these answers. They want this way of relating, right? The sense making, the mystical sense making everyone’s talking about. And so I thought I’d cover a bunch of those. And it just so happens that I can do that referencing two videos. So one of the things that sort of occurred was apparently, and I know who did this because I know the person. Apparently somebody sort of reported me to the Ortho Bros. And one of the Ortho Bros went out and watched my content, got a big channel, 20,000 subs. That video had like 15,000 or 1500 views, something like that, a thousand thousand plus views. And it’s a live stream that he does. It’s like two hours and 45 minutes long. I can’t actually recommend it. It’s long and not particularly interesting. But one of the things I wanted to describe that was happening in this video was. He’s not actually disagreeing with me or John Vervecky or Jordan Peterson or Paul Van der Kley. He’s talking about all of them. But he wasn’t, you know, he wasn’t kind or nice. He wasn’t offering solutions. He was not disagreeing, though. He sounded like he was disagreeing, like his tone was disagreeable. But he was actually agreeing with all the points that I made. It was very strange. And their solution was, yeah, bro, the Orthodox Church has been here all along, bro, meaning Christ is solved, bro. And it’s like, oh, OK. Now, the problem is that no one realizes the problem with that thesis, with that idea, with that concept. If the Orthodox Church has been there all along and there’s a meaning crisis, then the Orthodox Church being there all along can’t have been the solution or been the thing that prevented it. Right. And because we’re not recognizing order anymore as such, right, we’re not we’re not sort of recognizing how things unfold. We’re unable to make sense of the world for sure. But in a very specific way, we’re not recognizing sequence as important. And sequence is super important. What comes first actually matters. Not in all cases, but in almost all cases. And then there was another video that was originally tweeted out by Burn Power, the Anadromist, a wonderful channel. Burn has long videos. How we got here is a wonderful series. I didn’t even finish it, but I finished most of it. A little too long for me. He uses he loves music, he puts in long music clips. I do have my disagreements with some of his formulations. But he posted a video from somebody, I don’t even remember who, on everything is dying. You know, it’s kind of like, well, it’s a little morose, it’s cynical and skeptical, maybe a little over the top. And I’ll share that video just because I found it most interesting. These sorts of formulations are not uncommon. And, you know, I took a bunch of notes during this video. That’s actually what I’m going to go from. It took the notes for this stream. There’s some other stuff in there, and these are in order too. So if you happen to watch that video, it’s like 20, 20 something minutes. It’s not that long. But if you happen to watch it in order, you can rewatch the stream and I kind of go through the points. So, yeah, I want to talk about all of that because it’s it’s wrapped up in in sense making. Right. It’s wrapped up in how we make sense to the world and what we’re doing online and all of that stuff. And I think it’s important that we realize that this is happening. That we have this cynical skepticism and the world and doom and all this weirdness around sense making and people doing strange things and they don’t know what they’re doing. But the important thing to focus on here is that despite the chaotic week, despite not being able to do a proper topic and so having to sort of default, if you want to think of it that way, to the Muppet type stream here are us. Muppets are us. There’s a lot of good news in the world. And so I wanted to start out the way I did exemplify good news, which is, look, got a brand new storefront. It’s all up and working. The website at mark of wisdom dot org is coming online. It’s online. You can kind of use it. There’s not much there where we’re getting that ready. The stores got a bunch of cool stuff on it. The store thingy on YouTube is connected and attached and seems to be working. And that’s good. And we need to be able to celebrate the positive, the good, the generative building things. This is not me. It’s a team effort. Right. You could say, oh, Mark, you’re leading the way with your cap on the pirate ship. Maybe. Right, but can’t do it alone. So a lot of help. I didn’t do the thumbnail. You can tell it’s good. Sally jumped in and did the thumbnail for me last minute here. And it was a rough week. But you know what? We’ve got a stream and we’ve got what I think is going to be a good stream. And that’s the thing. I want to exemplify the difference between going through this sort of rote procedure, this doom and gloom. The world is dying. It’s all over. It’s not. There’s good stuff happening. And people are making the good stuff happen. And a lot of people feel overwhelmed. So one of the points that came out in this video, aside from the usual craziness where people use the word to define the word and whenever you see that, watch out. Reality is getting overwhelmed by all these other things. OK, that is backwards thinking. Reality is not overwhelmed by anything by definition. By definition, right? If you’re using a different definition of reality, you’re lost, you’re screwed. Pack it in. It’s all over for you. Honestly, just give it up. What gets overwhelmed is you, obviously. Just work it through in your head. Think about it. You’re the one getting overwhelmed. Not reality. Reality is there. Reality doesn’t even know you. So it’s not getting overwhelmed. You’re getting overwhelmed by the flood of information, probably. Everything is not dying any more than it always has been. Right? Or any more than it always was? And are the things we’re building lasting less long? Maybe. Probably. Technology moves fast. Technology dies young. Oh. Yes, it does. And look, we’re all dying. It just hasn’t changed. Suddenly you may be paying more attention to it. Because you can’t get your favorite drink anymore. Or your restaurant went out of business. Or a relative passed away. Or your favorite YouTube channel changed what they were doing. Whatever. And the problem is a lot of people will make appeals to nostalgia. John Vervecky fights against this. He says, oh, I’m not nostalgic. I don’t want to appeal to nostalgia. Of course, he goes back to neoplatonism. Sounds nostalgic to me, especially when your characterization of neoplatonism is wrong. And I’m like, oh, I’m not nostalgic. I’m not talking about nostalgia. I’m talking about a fantasy there. And a lot of nostalgia is fantasy. It’s fantasy about the past. Fantasy about the past. I’ve had a livestream on fantasy. You might want to check that one out. But the problem with nostalgia is that typically people are not talking about patterns. And so it’s useless. And the problem back then was the way we deal with it now. And I am the last person to say that shouldn’t be the case. Because in many cases, I can prove to you that it should be. Right. But you want to pay attention to the pattern so that you can make it better. Rather than paying attention to, oh, well, this is how we did policing in the 1900s. And one of the things we get lost in is that we allow ourselves to be fooled to some extent or overwhelmed. Really, we’re overwhelmed and not reality. Right. Lots of explanations are correct. I can explain the same thing seven ways to Sunday. It’s easy. I do it all the time, actually. A lot of comedy is based on that. It’s just explaining something normal in a frame you don’t expect. It’s the unexpected frame that breaks you out of it. I’ve said this before. The old Bill Cosby stuff, maybe you can get it online, I don’t know, from the, I think it was the 60s and 70s. But basically he used to treat the story of his children as though they were adults. And man, that is comedy gold. I think every time someone does something like that, they’re like, oh, I’m going to do this. And every time someone does something like that, it’s just hysterical. Children acting like adults is also funny. Right. You see a child dressed up in a suit and tie acting like a businessman for 20 seconds and you’re on the floor. This is funny stuff. Subverts our expectation. So lots of explanations are correct. And we are flooded with explanations. We’re flooded with information. We’re in the flood of information. Maybe we need an arc. Grimm-Grizz sort of alluded to that quite a while back, which I found interesting. I didn’t catch on to it right away because Grimm is hard to follow for me. But we’re flooded with the formation of signals. That’s what we’re flooded with. And we call that information. But we have these form signals and they’re everywhere. And those are also descriptions of the world. And descriptions aren’t even as useful as explanations. Do you know the difference? I bet you never thought about it. We get these descriptions. Oh, Blue Church. Yeah, it’s a description. I think it’s wrong, by the way. But even if it’s not wrong, it’s not an explanation of anything. It may seem that way. It’s actually just a description. An explanation is going to contain the pattern or a pattern. A pattern may or may not be accurate and correct and precise. I don’t know. And look, you can come up with explanations that people do things for money. It’s easy to do. Economic explanation. No one does anything unless they can make money on it. But that obviously isn’t true. Most of the things you do in your life, no one’s paying you to do. What the hell are you doing? And if it’s money, why is anybody ever unhappy with their job? They’re getting paid. What could be politics? Oh, they do that because they vote this way. Really? Politics. And it’s a simple enough confusion, right? We’re looking at the way people act and inferring what drives them to act. It’s obviously backwards. We don’t think about it. And this leads to all sorts of similar confusions like the Internet is a problem. But it can’t be the problem. Most of the humans on the planet are not on the Internet, guys. Maybe you and everybody you know is. But there’s only two billion people on the Internet, if that. And there’s like eight billion people on the planet. There’s a little bit of a discrepancy there. And if you think the Internet’s the problem, go join the Amish. I don’t care. Or the Mennonites or whatever. I don’t care. Of course, you don’t think that’s the problem. It might be a problem. But what is that problem? The problem isn’t its existence. Can’t do existence as a problem. Lots of things exist. And in spite of that, we have the Amish. And lots of other groups. That aren’t participating in the thing that exists. So the link is how complex the world really is. And there’s this idea out there that finality or even excess is new. It just shows you who’s read the highlights of history without understanding the whole of the history. If you didn’t dive into the full context of the Second World War, there’s a bunch of stuff you don’t know. Or the Revolutionary War. In fact, I went over that recently in my latest Frames video. There’s a lot of nuance in there. And in fact, you know, I think that there are ways to, that are in worse ways for sure, but there are ways to understand this. And there are ways to hone your skills. Get better at engaging with the difference between a description and an explanation. A good explanation and a bad explanation. Right? And, you know, I tried to do that in this video. So I’ll post it here. And I’m just using the American Rebellion, as I like to call it, the Revolutionary War, as an example, because there’s lots of ways to view it. And so in there I have descriptions and explanations and sort of re-enchanting the complexity of a historical event. When you recognize that people are people and that we follow these patterns, like religious patterns, I have the pattern of religion in another video on navigating patterns, of course, then you start to get the sense for, oh, this is how the world really is. This is what’s really going on. Now you can re-enchant history for yourself. Instead of falling into that, oh, history was just this and no drama ever happened sort of mode that we’re all stuck in to some extent. And you can blame the schools, but like what are they going to do? Come on. Blame your own lack of curiosity. Fix it yourself. Don’t worry about the fact that other people betrayed you. That’s going to happen. We’re in the age of decay. We live in the material as well as the ethereal and in the material things decay and things are imperfect. And you can recognize bad actors because they fall into patterns. So one pattern is what people would call, although I don’t like this term, the lack of empathy, right? It’s this. Well, this person doesn’t have this thing. Right. So this person doesn’t have a job. And that’s not followed by any sort of sense that that is sad. Even though the person saying it thinks that this is important. So if you think someone’s lacking something important like, oh, they’re not married or they don’t have children or, oh, you know, they’re, you know, they are stuck in a world on the Internet or whatever it is that channel doesn’t have that many viewers. You know, there’s all kinds of ways that people talk about this. They talk about it as though it’s important, but then they don’t have any feelings or any attempt at these feelings that the person that doesn’t have that is at a loss. They’re bad actors. And they often have an answer. Like, oh, here’s what I do. And what if their answer is not accessible to those other person? I mean, because at that point, I have an answer is also I was here first. And if you just say that’s wrong and you don’t say I feel bad for that person or something similar because you’re avoiding pity or whatever. Then it’s an emotional play. On one side. It’s a denial of intimacy, which we’ll get into later. And part of this is wrapped up in the materialism because we’re trying to know the good. Right. We’re pretending like I have an answer. I have something. An answer. And answer is knowledge, by the way. We’re using knowledge as material. This is one of the reasons why I actually like John Verveckis formulation of participatory knowledge, even though I think it’s totally wrong. It’s very useful. You don’t have participation. You engage in participation. You do something in participation. It’s a set of actions. That takes knowledge out of the material. And then it’s not to know is to have. And look, you can say, oh, well, you know, I say I know the good. I’m not claiming I have the good. Or you’re claiming you have part of it. And that’s wrong. Because Verveckis excellent point to know is to relate. So it’s used in the Bible. It doesn’t solve the quality problem. Wisdom might be part of that. I don’t know. But this is the age of gnosis. This is what I’m talking about with the age of gnosis. And part of the problem is when we try to know things and figure out the world and the world is just ridiculously complex, we make the world symmetrical. We assume it’s math. Just this side, that side. And everything’s equal. And that leads us into equality doctrine, which is a problem. And it manifests in many ways. And one of the ways it manifests is you try to redeem everything. You’re either bringing things down or pulling things up so that everything’s sort of on the same level in that flat horizontal plane. And the problem is you’re not supposed to do that. Somebody said something like, the poor will always be with us. I don’t know where that quote comes from. Anyway, yeah, you’re not supposed to do that. Those layers, that hierarchy is there. And when you don’t recognize that, you get things confused on this flat sort of plane of existence. Making money, no matter how you do it at your job, online, whatever, if it doesn’t align with your values, that’s your fault. You’ve tried to make the world equal. Will your values and money, which is a representation of value, are equal? They’re not equal. Virtues and values are above the value of money. That’s your fault. Those are improper tradeoffs. If you think that the way you’re making your money is wrong, or the way somebody else is making their money is wrong, it might be improper tradeoffs. Sometimes you just have to make money because you need it, not optional. And doing some things is not worth all the money in the world because your virtues and values are more valuable than whatever the value of the money is. Money is just efficient bartering. See my videos on money and economy. You have to accept those tradeoffs. Accept the imperfection of yourself, of the world. And if you try to line everything up, things become more understandable. But they’re wrong. The world is not a straight line. It’s not some linear path through reality. It’s not where we’re at. You want understanding? You’re going to miss the nuance of the world. All the magic in the world, all the mystery, all the mysticism will be gone. The ability to predict the world accurately and precisely means there’s no magic. There’s no surprise. There’s no hit of adrenaline. You already know what’s coming. It’s not so exciting. And that makes us cynical. But it’s because of our wrong view of the past. It’s the sanitization of history, even our own history. That’s where the nostalgia comes back. Oh, yeah, the world back then was better. Well, yeah, you understand it because you live through it. Or you’ve got a flat historical view of it. And a lot of people nowadays are saying none of this matters. Whatever they’re referring to, maybe everything. The problem is they’ve got it backwards. Everything matters. Just because what you do doesn’t have the impact that you want, all that means is that you suck. It means you’ve made a mistake. That’s all it means. Because at the end of the day, we have this thing about happiness and we equate happiness with comfort. And the problem is struggle makes the world, not comfort, not happiness. Comfort, by definition, generates nothing. At a great cost. The person being comforted isn’t paying. They’re being comforted. The cost of that comfort in the moment they’re being comforted isn’t being borne by them. It may have been prepaid. It may be paid afterwards. General, don’t care. But life is movement, not comfort. Life is struggle, not some fluffy feel-good mode of winning the video game. Those are blessings in the moment. Those aren’t ways to be in the world. Not that they’re not part of being in the world, but they’re blessings in the moment. They’re not the whole of being in the world. Because life is struggle. And you hear a lot of people talking about wanting to be their true, authentic self. That secret, sacred self that Pastor Paul Van der Kley talks about. This doesn’t exist. They’re not one thing. You are constantly in the process of trading off between your identities, your wants, your needs, your desires, your constraints, things around you, nature, others. Don’t believe me? Drug addicts choose wants over needs all the time. Sure. Muppet Mark. That’s extreme. Those are extreme cases that you’re talking about here. Is it? Are those extreme cases? People put off their needs all the time. In fact, there’s a trend towards fasting. They do it deliberately. What is something like fasting? It’s training for struggle. It’s the training of struggle, right struggle, the right relationship with struggle, with life. And we do this in other ways. We go to the gym. Why go to the gym? Why run a marathon? Why do these things? Why struggle up that mountain? And we do that sort of thing all the time. And it’s a trend. It comes and it goes. Why do yoga? Why do martial arts? Because it’s awesome. You know, why do these things? We’re in this constant trade off. And it’s that trade off that allows us to discover where we’re at, what our identities are, where we need to be. And a lot of people want to get back to their secret, sacred self. They want to break the veneer of what they show people. The problem is the veneer is all you have. It’s all they have. And that’s because the space between you and I or you and nature or you and yourself only has the image. That’s all there is there. There isn’t anything else there. You can’t break the veneer. You put up to become an identity, to embody the identity so that you can interface with the person, yourself, with nature, right? With others. That’s what it’s for. You can’t break that. You don’t want to break that. That would be terrible. And look, I’m sorry for the Mike Druck moment, but that’s the intimacy crisis. Welcome to it. You can get skeptical and cynical and upset, resentful and angry. How did this happen? Who did this to us? What? What or who keeps this going? Is it capitalism? Is it politics? Is it politics? Consumerism? Bad theology? Is it science? Is it the age of gnosis? No. No. You did this. We did this. People do everything. And perhaps only when we stray from our virtues and values, wherever those come from, whatever’s pulling those strings, wherever those exist. Maybe that’s when things go horribly wrong. When we don’t even know what our virtues and values are. Want to know what yours are? Believe what you do, not what you tell yourself. Self-deception is real. And it’s something you need to admit that you do and fight against constantly. Best get help from others for that. You need the world and the world needs you. And if you want a bad guy, freedom did this. Your want, your desire, your pursuit of some twisted, misshapen, misunderstood version of freedom. The sort of recent conception of freedom is the problem. At least so far as people participate in it. This is what causes the individualism. Which causes the intimacy crisis. Which leads into the meaning crisis. There is no loss of intimacy. We’re just spreading it out. We’ve become more intimate, not with ourselves, but with our fantasies, with our desires, with our indulgences. It’s not that the total amount of intimacy we have has gone down. But the thing we’re trying to be intimate with is an illusion. It’s a fantasy. It’s either the version of somebody else in our head. And look, TV makes that easy, right? No one’s full on TV. It’s a flat screen. Nowadays, pretty flat unless you have a curved TV. It has no depth, technically. But what are we intimate with? A fantasy, an illusion, a projection from our heads. And this is why things like fasting and breath work and meditation and disrupting the calendar and regular engagement in things that aren’t fun. Works. That’s why it works. Because that enables us to interact with reality instead of fantasy. It’s not all smooth and comforting. We feel in reality. We feel as though there’s something wrong with the world. Because we are doing this to ourselves. We are disconnecting ourselves from reality in favor of the fantasy. Because we want freedom. We want to be an individual. You can be an individual, but you can’t have intimacy. It’s up to you. It’s a trade-off. And it’s not that we don’t lack conflict in our fantasy world. That too. The thing is that we haven’t gotten intimate with our own inner fantasy world. Not even ourself. Certainly not with nature and not with others. You can’t really be intimate with a fantasy. There’s no depth to your fantasy. Do you ever meet your hero? The whole thing collapses. You’re not supposed to meet your heroes. You need that ideal to look up to. When you bring that ideal down, it all falls apart. You can’t raise up from the bottom and you can’t draw down from the top. At least you have to be careful when you do. You can’t do that stuff incorrectly. You need to be in right relationship. You can’t just say, hey, everyone’s welcome into our club. Then you don’t have a club. Or a church. Or a business. Or a country. If you bring down the boundaries, you destroy the container. Now you can’t hold things in and you can’t orient and you can’t navigate. Welcome to the intimacy crisis. The freedom you can have. The individualism you can have. The trade-off is the intimacy. Without intimacy, you can’t hold meaning. You can’t be connected meaningfully. Connections don’t work. Intimacy is the quality of your relationships in the world. You with yourself, the three frames. You with nature and you with others. Don’t blame the world. Don’t blame the world. Blame the world. Blame the world. Blame the world. You have the money, the politics. Blame yourself. Have a little humility. There are people who don’t have your problems. You have to take some responsibility for those problems. Maybe there are perennial problems as John Ravecki talks about. Maybe those things are worth thinking about. But we have solutions for them. They’re in the wisdom texts. They’re in those traditions. They’re not in the ortho bro stream. They’re not in the, oh, I haven’t been doing my art correctly, stream or video. They’re not there. And I think I’ll end on that note. I hope I was able to tie a bunch of stuff together. Never have any idea how successful these things are until they’re over. But yeah, hopefully you found that useful. I mean, look, there’s so much of that stuff just comes up. I hear it every day. Whether it’s on a video or talking to somebody on the Discord server or in person or hear a story from somebody. It’s just like, these things are everywhere. This cynical skepticism, this, oh, this is the problem. That’s the problem. That’s the problem. That’s the problem. That’s the problem. I mean, we still have to pull. We still have to pull. I mean, we still have to pull. I mean, I’m sure there’s a lot of people the problem, that’s the problem. It’s everywhere. And we resonate with some of this stuff. And I don’t know why. I just have no idea. I have no idea why. Ethan is upset because I am late. I’m sorry, Ethan, that I was late. I was busy trying to draw. Dali claims to have popcorn and fruit juice. Anselman, yes, the Westminster tea is quite fancy. It’s also very aromatic. It smells delicious, fruity sort of flavor. But it’s quite good. I don’t think Dali’s here anymore, but I can certainly talk a little bit about beauty. I think that’s to some extent we need more of that in the world for sure. Beauty kindness and humility, all the positive stuff. Or about arts and artists. Well, we’ll do that as a topic for sure. Good evening, Tom. It’s good to see you. Yes, Spatch, I got orthodoxed. I know who did it too, which is fine. I don’t care. Incense making. Yes, it was quite incense making. Anselman, our capenii. Yes, capenii is here. Yes, Anselman, we’re all dying, so the world is dying. This is a mortal condition. Well, I liked Jonathan Peugeot did a talk at Chino about decay. And I was like, yeah, that’s pretty dead on. It’s all decay, sort of unfortunate, but also decay. Material is decay. And the materialists are stuck with material. So they’re just sort of realizing, right, you run into the end of materialism real quick when things start breaking down. And things are breaking down. As I said, technology makes everything go faster. So things are breaking down faster too. Death is coming quicker. Anselman, we should not seek our immortality in the idea of this world continuing on after us. Yep, true, indeed. Our hope is not in this world. Oh no, I have a lot of hope for this world. You’re right, Anselman, nostalgia is not what it used to be. That is true. Anselman, you have to make your own way on a straight path. That’s the problem. Yeah. And we don’t see the path, really. That’s part of the problem is everybody thinks, oh, there’s a path. That means there’s, yeah, we don’t really see that. The difference between the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of pleasure. Well, I would say the pursuit should be to be content. And contentedness carries with it in general just the sense that if something unexpected happens, you’ll be able to do something about it. Like you have some stored value capability ready to go. Anselman, the Christian religion is about personal intimacy with God, the creator of our individual unique identity. Maybe, I don’t know. You know who you are when you’re in a personal relationship with your creator. I don’t know about that. I don’t know if I’ve met any Christians in that case. Human relationships are always secondary relationships with God. Well, yeah, that’s certainly true. Nathaniel, seems to me orthodoxy contains wisdom literature. Yes. Ortho bro is just a silly meme that I hope dies out soon. No, not at all. Feels mean-spirited to me. Watch the Ortho bros. They’re very mean-spirited people. Yeah, that particular stream. They were not in right relationship. There was nothing generative. It’s just like, oh, this person is doing this, and this person is doing that. I didn’t even like the fact that I was poking fun at the Protestants. I either misread it or just flat out misquoted me. Neutrino, the right path seems to appear in front and rear view mirror, but I guess I might be doing it wrong. Well, that’s the problem. Everything’s clear in hindsight. This is one of the great asymmetries of the world. Everything looks patterned and beautiful, and we see perfect ways around things in the past. Not a problem. It’s easy to do, but rolling forward, that’s not the way it works. We have squished the world into this historic flat view, and then everything’s history. Nothing’s the present, which is very different from the future, both of which are totally different from the past. How we see the past is so different from how we see the present and how we see the future. We’re not accounting for that. Nathaniel, two wrongs make a right. I don’t know about that. Must be in the wisdom literature I haven’t attained in gnosis yet. Well, yeah, I did a tweet about the forbidden knowledge problem. Forbidden knowledge is sacred in the age of gnosis because that’s the thing you’re missing that’s going to solve the problem. Once you have the knowledge, you can solve the problem in your materialistic frame very much the way people are acting. I don’t know why, but I think one of the problems too is the easiest access we have to knowledge is propositions, for sure. And John Vervege talks about propositional tyranny. I think I actually like that framing, but there’s some truth in it. And when we’re preferring propositions to raw observation, we get things wrong. So it’s easy to look at a stream where somebody’s making derisive comments about something, but they’re not actually disagreeing and not notice that they’re not actually disagreeing. It’s hard to understand the target of people’s bad attitudes or tone. It’s hard to miss the fact that a lot of people will say things like, oh, I feel bad that that person doesn’t have a house, but then deride them. That’s probably why they don’t understand the middle class struggle. It’s like, what? And people do that. They do it all the time. And it’s sad, but it happens. And other people don’t notice that’s what happened. They have no idea. Even forbidden knowledge in the age of gnosis is the most valuable because it’s the only thing you don’t have. Yes. That was awesome. Well, thank you. I like awesomeness. Nathaniel, I did see his bit about you in the live stream and I thought you were not understood by him. Well, maybe. He thought you were simply being pedantic, which I find people say a lot when they don’t take the time on a topic. The problem that the ortho bro had, and I know where it came from because I know who started the whole thing and I’ve had conversations with Aidan before. He didn’t disagree with any of my points. I listened to the whole thing. He disagreed with exactly zero of the things that I said. And at one point he said, oh, you want to form communities, form communities and the orthodox will be here and we’ll just catch all the people. I was like, you say that like it’s a bad thing or we’re in disagreement somehow and yet that is exactly correct. We’re not in disagreement. Why are you casting this as though it’s disagreement when you’re agreeing with me? Now you’re assuming that you have the right answer and that everyone’s going to go to your right answer, which is foolish and obviously incorrect. Not that I care, but it’s weird. It’s just weird to do that. And it’s weird to act in that particular pattern. He’s not the only orthodox person acting like that. Obviously the person who sponsored the stream is also acting exactly like that and has made exactly those arguments with exactly that wording multiple times. So you can be upset about the meme, but memes point to patterns. I’m not a particular fan of memes, but memes point to patterns and some of those patterns are real and you need to account for that. If people are acting out that pattern, then they’re acting out that pattern. Nothing I can do about it. People notice the pattern, they make a meme. If the meme fails, it’s not enough. Other people recognize the pattern. That’s how memes work. It’s also why I don’t like memes because very audience dependent. A lot of people put up office memes from the show The Office and the American version of The Office is awful. I don’t know what to tell you. The British version is actually mildly funny, but I didn’t watch The Office because it’s awful. So I don’t get any of those memes mean nothing to me. They just don’t resonate at all. And not to say that I can’t see the pattern or sense the pattern or whatever, but I can sense patterns in all kinds of places. This is not surprising. It’s not a function of the meme. And fair enough, it’s not a function of the meme. But also it’s not the meme. So it’s kind of important to know and I think Dawkins did the world a big disservice by coining that term and forcing a bunch of people who otherwise might not have engaged in that behavior to engage in that behavior. It’s a fun game. It’s pretty easy to play. It really favors people who see patterns over people who don’t, which is unfortunate. It also tells you something about maybe the meme that the left can’t meme tells you something about their level of sophistication and how they’re stuck or lost or unable to engage correctly. That could be. I’m not going to make that claim because I don’t have to. But could be. Very important. And it’s important to recognize that stuff. And what’s the solution to the flood of information? It’s the ability to sort it or the ability to filter it better yet. So you’re not engaged in the flood of information. You’re not being overwhelmed by information. Because with technology, we just do nothing but create information. Anybody can generate a meme in a few minutes. And then you’ve got to sort through the good memes and the bad memes because they’re getting thrown at you. You know, you’re not going to be able to do that. You’ve got to shut the thing off. You just can’t have it on all the time because it’s going to flood you with information. And even just your computer. I did forget when I started the stream, but I usually shut my email off. I don’t want to hear the email go off. I don’t want to hear any of that stuff. I’m in the middle of doing something. And then you’re not engaged in the flood of information. You’re not engaged in the flood of information. I don’t want to hear the email go off. I don’t want to hear any of that stuff. I’m in the middle of doing something. You know? Oh, here’s Jesse. Welcome, Jesse. Hello. How are you doing? I’m good. On the road to Canberra. Sounds like a good song in the making. On the road to Canberra. Isn’t it Willie Nelson? On the road to Canberra. Could be. Excuse me. Could be. So Muppets are Us. Where did we get that title from? Well, I came up with it today. You wouldn’t happen to be trolling me. Yeah, I just didn’t have a topic. Wanted to do a Muppet stream anyway. So, you know, roll up. So that’s where we got it. I’ve been listening to some good stuff. Yeah, sorry to go through the video that you like that Vern Power posted and rip it apart, but it had so many themes in it that I’m like, holy mackerel. This one video has all the themes that people are talking about in one place. Yes. Yes. There’s differences between liking the video, liking its content, and appreciating the content. That’s a thing we’re losing at the internet age. You can like the craft of something, but you might not appreciate the work. Right, exactly. You can like the implementation, but hate the pattern and vice versa. That’s the loss of depth. That’s the flattening, the compression, the reduction of the world. And we’re not even asking the question, right? Because we’ve got a like button, so we know what that means. Even though there’s no possible way you could know what that means. You know, sarcasm itself, you can’t express sarcasm online because it’s too flat. Sarcasm has depth, and that’s the flattening of the world. All these things are problems, and the problems arise from that flattening. Yeah, in some senses comedy is not best rewatched. Comedy is best in the world. Comedy is best in the moment. That’s not the flattening of the world that we’ve all agreed to for some reason. It’s that through things like physical media, films, that we can replay a comedic moment and still enjoy it just as much as the first time we heard the joke or the scene or whatever. It happens to be a funny thing, but it loses its value very quickly once you know what the set up is or what the punchline is or what the boom is. Yeah, it can. I mean, so I remember we used to do these Friday night things where we’d get together on Friday nights and we’d play games or like Pathfinder was a game, we used to play things like Cards Against Humanity or you know, silly Munchkin. Munchkin’s a fun card game. Or we’d go out to the movies or whatever, we’d sit and watch some shows. We watched Itchy, Seto Itchy. That was an interesting old show. But one night we watched Superbad and the movie Superbad, man, when I saw that movie I thought it was the funniest freaking movie that could ever be made. And then one day I was like a few years later, I was like, I’m going to rewatch that movie. I had such fun watching. It was not funny at all. There was not a single line in that movie that was even remotely funny. And I was so puzzled. I was like, I thought this movie was hysterical. I mean, hysterical. And then it just was not funny. You know, it just wasn’t. But then you get something like Robot Chicken. Robot Chicken’s still funny. Right. And what’s the difference really? Superbad is very tropical and it was very time-intensive. I don’t think Superbad, if I had watched it for the first time now, would be funny at all. I think it was just too in the moment. But Robot Chicken is all about these people in their childhood and the patterns in their childhood with their toys. That’s literally what it’s about. That’s what makes it funny is that they’re manifesting patterns using these nostalgic toys in a way they wouldn’t have been used when they had them. And there’s all this context that’s brought in and it’s still funny. It’s still funny. It’s funny every time. We tried to watch an awesome powers movie briefly last night. I think it was the second one. Oh, and man does it fall flat. I remember when it came out, it was the top of the tower. The mini-me and the sort of quotability of the film, but now watching it outside of this context, being 1995, it’s hauntingly bizarre of a premise and topic. Yeah, those films only work, well, the first one will work if you’ve seen the original show, The Avengers from England. Mike Myers is Canadian, right? He was familiar with the show. I happened to be very familiar with British TV, so I was familiar with the show. I made my girlfriend at the time watch it because I knew, like I saw the trailer and I went, oh my goodness, this is going to be hysterical, but she hadn’t ever seen The Avengers. I was like, no, you’re going to watch a few episodes of The Avengers before we go see this movie. We did and we went to the theater. It was a local theater in Marlboro, Massachusetts. There were tons of jokes that we were the only two people laughing at because we knew exactly what the joke was and nobody else in the theater had ever even heard of The Avengers, I’m sure. If you haven’t seen Diana Rigg in The Avengers, man, that’s just the visuals we run out. The whole thing is such a great spoof. Then, yes, that’s exactly 1960s Diana Rigg, indeed. The whole spoof, it was so well done. He’s playing off that in the first one. In the second one, he’s just kind of going with the flow and he’s just going with the pattern he created from the first one, which is a copy of the depth. He’s changing the pattern around and he’s doing a good enough job, but that’s it. I don’t know about that. There’s some pretty dark things in the movie. There’s a lot of these, repeat the same premise or the same joke three times and it has this hypnotic effect. Just not good. The movie is actually about how the 1960s demasculinized men literally stole their mojo. We stopped it. We got about halfway and we’re just like, yeah, we’re done. That’s enough terror. Yeah, I can see that. I haven’t even watched the first one again. I haven’t watched them again. The first one was a genuine joy. I’m sure it still has its magic to some extent. Yeah, I haven’t watched that one. It’s also referenced here. There was a piece that was Casino Royale movie, which is a re-release of James Bond. Right. Well, I think he tried to spoof other things. When you’re spoofing the Avengers, you’re spoofing a spoof already because it’s the trope. They’re doing a spoof on the trope of the spy thing. Probably off of things like Danger Man or Secret Agent Man, I forget which one it is in which country. Yeah, there’s the second order of attraction of the Flat Meagre Ball there where it’s a copy of a copy and every time you reduce the complexity of something, remove the context from the dimensional purpose or value. Right. The real problem is that there’s something too. Intellectualism isn’t bad. They’re the ones with the extra context, but when they remove it from the context, then you have an intellectual class leading your society to some extent or at least pointing the way that’s disconnected from its roots and they lead everything astray. I think that’s a pattern in history that happens. And maybe it gets reflected in art, right, because maybe that’s where the artists come from is that intellectual or more intellectualized tradition in general. Nothing to say about that, Jesse? Are you cutting out? Uh oh, maybe we don’t have Jesse. Maybe he’s gone. Are you back yet? About that? There you go. Now I can hear you. Yeah, there’s a lot to be said about. One of the things I’ve been considering is that the intellectual strands of the West is actually wasn’t. Uh oh, we lost you mid-sentence. There’s a lot of talk though about intellectual strands and history and our loss of the engagement with history. That’s been running around Twitter all week, ironically enough. And uh oh, maybe our other Australian friend. Yes, yes, Andre. Jesse’s in a wind tunnel. He’s in a car going to Cambrai. So we’re going to make a country song out of it. Just because we thought that was appropriate. I wanted to catch up a bit here. Spatch, I am going to try to go to the Arkansas Poetry Gathering. I don’t know if I can make it yet. I hope to know soon, but I don’t. Nathaniel, well, I appreciate you commenting. I didn’t mean to pay too much attention to that guy. Yeah, look, the ortho bro guy is the ortho bro guy. Whatever. I hope he finds his way. I’m very sorry that he didn’t understand what Father Eric was saying in particular. I appreciated his honesty, but I did not appreciate his projection of some sort of disagreement when he actually said several times on my points that he actually agreed with them, which is very strange. Aaron Black, all depths have a surface, but not all surfaces have depth. Well, projection is real, and we have to use projection in the world because the veneer is all we have. Like it or not, that’s all anybody has of you, and that’s all you have of anybody else or anything else. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a reality. It means that there’s a relationship between the veneer you create or the veneer that’s created and presented to you and reality. Those things are connected. Sally says birds are a CIA flattening of the world. That is correct. Birds are not real. I can confirm. I so love birds are not real. It’s just fantastic. Where do birds sleep at night? Exactly. Exactly. Where do birds sleep at night? No one knows because they’re not real. It’s true positive. I think part of beauty or part of the push towards beauty as the solution to the problem is that whole idea that we need to restore the depth to the veneer. While that is true, I don’t think beauty is the way to do it because, and Sally Jo said this before, which I thought was brilliant, a military parade is beautiful. Some military parades are great, but I’ve seen a few on footage from pre-World War II that not so good. It’s still beautiful, still attractive, but not good. If you divorce things from the good or you don’t account for the good, whether it’s truth or beauty, you’re going to have a problem. That problem is called bad. That’s what badness is, things that are divorced from the good. Truth does not fix a problem. Beauty does not fix a problem. They might be necessary, but insufficient. That’s sort of like what’s the importance of art in the world. The importance of art in the world is that it needs to point correctly. If it’s not pointing correctly, we’re in trouble. That scales down to the intellectual class and the divorce of the intellectuals from context. That scales all the way up to beauty and art. All of those things scale down to what we do in the world. That hierarchy, which is older than trees, to Jordan Peterson’s excellent point, is you have to account for it. The fact that things don’t scale the way you expect really sucks, but also get over it. You just have to deal with it. The fact that you have a hierarchy makes it harder to get over it. The fact that you have a hierarchy means that corruption, when it’s in the hierarchy and decay is everywhere, entropy is real, it’s always going to be there in some form, has a bigger effect than you want it to have, but that’s too bad. Aaron Black, unrelated. I was just chatting to Karen Wong about this yesterday. You were? About what in particular? About beauty, about how there should be a terrifying aspect to beauty. There are many ways to appreciate or to participate in the movement of beauty. I’m losing you, Jesse. Let me just round that thought out. Beauty does not solve the goodness problem. Truth does not solve the goodness problem. Truth can be good, but not all truth is good. Beauty can be good, but not all beauty is good. I’ll use that to segue into Aaron Black’s comment. Unrelated. Curious what you might say about this. The negative associations to the feminine qualities such as darkness and chaos is Satan claiming his mother incest to take his father’s body. Where the hell did you get that quote? That is fascinating. Look, there’s negative associations to everything. One of the problems we have is that we have masculinized the world. The divine feminine has been removed from the world. You can blame lots of things for that. Like Protestantism is an obvious go-to. Or you could say it’s not Protestantism, it’s the third-wave feminism or whatever. There’s lots of go-tos on blame for that. The problem is that it doesn’t matter what caused it. When you remove or corrupt the feminine, the divine feminine, because you think it’s a goodness and if you put the feminine at the top, everything will be good. It’s the same problem. Femininity is associated with beauty. Beauty is associated with masculinity, scars, hard work, whatever. Often ugliness. That’s a common trope. The fact that that’s there is important. You can’t remove badness from the world by flattening the good to beauty or to femininity and then saying there you go. It doesn’t work. And that’s what’s happening. That’s what’s happening. You’re seeing that and going, well, this is really an interpretation of whatever. That’s a problem. I like what Sally says here. Big stocking cat slaughtering stuff can be beautiful. Storms rolling in are beautiful. Lots of things are beautiful. Beautiful in goodness, sure, but even if there’s a truth called reality, reality and truth aren’t the same thing. Getting everyone to see the same thing feels utterly impossible. Yeah, and you shouldn’t, even if we had one ring to rule them all. Right. Well, and that’s what everyone’s upset about. They’re trying to get everybody to see the same thing. It’s this universalism, which is an equality doctrine. Universalism is an equality doctrine. We want everything to be the same, smooth. No, we miss the depth of the world because you see things that I don’t and vice versa. And that’s what makes the depth of reality. And that’s the problem. Please say more on truth and reality. Oh man. They had a conversation, I think it was last week, where Sally was like, I don’t know the difference between reality and existence. And I told Sally, don’t try to figure it out. Manuel and I tried that all week and it didn’t work. Speaking of Sally, there she is. And yet she persisted to try and figure out reality is tough. Right. My definition of reality is fairly straightforward. Oh, Jesse’s back. My definition of reality is fairly straightforward in this. Reality is that which gets created through your participation in the present. Reality doesn’t exist in the future. And the only access you have to it in the past is a flattened, pressed version. That’s why hindsight is so intelligible to us. Welcome, Sally. What you got for us? Oh, can’t hear you, Sally. Your mic went out immediately. No, you are totally quiet. Jesse’s back though. What you got, Jesse? Oh, and then immediately he goes to another bad spot. Look, reality is tough. Truth is easier. There’s no truth. It’s what is true. And trueness is your relationship to whatever you’re relating to. There’s Sally. Now she’s back. Now we got Mike. Yes. Now we have Mike. I did the exact same thing. Wonderful. OK. Uh, yeah. Reality is squishy. That’s what we determined. But the beauty of being hella dangerous is just it’s just like power. It’s just not fundamentally good. And so I don’t I don’t know why people don’t don’t immediately pick up on that. It’s boggling because it’s really funny, too, because with power, people are more likely to be like, oh, you’re the powerful one. You must be the predator evil cruel thing. But not so with beauty necessarily, although perhaps between girls, because there is that just hating the hot chick completely unfairly just because she exists. So she’s a judge. Yeah. Well, but no, you did think there’s assumptions just made. Oh, well, yeah, she’s terrible. It’s just and that’s not fair. And that’s based on beauty. So but I don’t see that with guys as much. So that’s no, that’s right. And again, it is this compression like we want easy answers. So we want something like beauty or something like truth to resolve something difficult like goodness or reality. Right. Not which is pure beautiful is the most real. I mean, people say that like all over the place. And I’m just like, wow. And it is we’re all caught up in wanting to know things. And it’s like, but we want to know them as have them. And you just you can’t like that’s the problem. That’s why you need other people. Yeah. Man, I was tracking until my mic dropped. And now I forgot what I was tracking. Oh, well, the beauty in the art thing. I figured you’d be chiming in on that. I was trying to and then I don’t know, got thrown by the mic not working. And now I’m like, hmm, you can’t have her reasons. Sally loses her context on every small distraction. Inconceivable. You must be an artist. The one that’s supposed to have mic problems, not me. I’m supposed to just get on this iPhone and just let it be crappy iPhone mic forever. That’s supposed to happen. Sounds good when it works. I don’t know, Lazarus, did I answer your beauty and truth? I mean, your reality and truth question because tough one. I got I did are hard. So this is one that like I wish I didn’t kind of agree with you. But I don’t know. I don’t have reasons not to. The idea that thoughts aren’t real is boggling because when you’re having them, you feel like they’re real. Yeah. Feel like they’re reality. But just based on the fact that you can have disagreeing thoughts at the same time, it’s probably evidence to them not being that real. At least they’re not as real as everything else. And I don’t know why we don’t think that way. I don’t know why that isn’t the starting point because it’s not. But it really should be. And like the fact that you can be tricking yourself. I had I had a thing today where I was working on a project. I have a huge amount of stuff for the project and I run out of one thing and my brain’s like, you should go get that thing. And came in and I took a break and I realized I don’t really want to go get a thing. I just wanted to take a break and I was just trying to escape needing to use the other stuff. And it’s self deception. Yeah. Yeah. I was just trying to get out of doing the part that’s hard, which is actually using the stuff that you got for the project. And I’m like, how often has this happened? And when you start catching yourself in those, oh man, it can just you can really get you have to not get spun out in the loop of questioning yourself much because that thing too. Well, yeah, that’s the problem. The reason why our thoughts feel real is because they’re an attempt. Your fantasy, your illusion world, the imaginal space that John Vervecki talks about is an attempt to map where you are now to reality. Right. It’s an attempt to do that. And of course, you create reality. So you don’t control it. Right. But you you participate in it. And that’s the problem is that it has to feel real. Otherwise, you won’t test things out correctly. And that’s where that’s part of the self deception. In some sense, you have to self deceive to live. Well, yeah. And if you can’t have some amounts of faith, that’s a really good place. Like, what is faith? Well, faith is like, can I do a push up? Because like for some people, there’s that moment between the elbow bend and that they don’t know. And they just have to like, you know, other people have done push ups. I’m not that out of it. Everything you have that about. Can I drive? You get about like, can I wear these pants? Like, you have to have that faith. And that that was an interesting thing to me, because I went through this big period where I didn’t feel like I had faith. And then one day I was driving, and I realized I had faith in bridges. And I’m like, okay, so it’s not all gone. Because logically, I shouldn’t have faith in this bridge. I didn’t know anybody involved in its construction. I’ve never seen anybody drive over it. It’s Florida, because I was in Florida at the time. Like, why should anything work in Florida? Florida is insane. But I believed in the bridge was going to hold up cars. And that was fascinating to me, because it’s like, okay, so I got multiple things going on in my head at the same time. Because I really don’t initially believe people in conversation well. But I’m believing in this bridge. And I don’t know these people. So what’s up with that? Like, that’s and that’s like, thoughts aren’t real, because you can have conflicting thoughts at the same time. And so some of them can’t be real. And that’s kind of a relief, because there’s a lot of guilt in your sneaky thoughts. Because you got a lot of sneaky thoughts that are like, I wish that person would die, because it’s the DMV. And you just get mad. And like, but unless you’re acting on it, ruminating on it, and trying to bring it into reality, you can just let that go. Like that that wasn’t real. You don’t need to be guilt ridden about it forever. You can kind of be aware of it and be like, maybe you should do something else if you’re having those kind of thoughts. But they’re not that you didn’t actually commit any crimes by having a sneaky thought come in on you. Right. Right. I want to address this, Nathaniel, I feel so close to understanding how this isn’t postmodernism. But my muppetness just creates limits to something. Postmodernism is an overused term, because the problem is, postmodernism tells you that you’re the authority that can interpret things. And so you kind of get the feeling that you know the difference between postmodern and non postmodern. And of course, you don’t. Because you’re just not, you can’t like, to some extent, right. So you have to go with, does this matter? I mean, this is where pragmatism comes in handy. Does this match observation or not? Right. Not not follow the science. Science is supposed to be based on observation. So let’s follow the observation. Like if everybody around you is not dropping dead, maybe there’s no, there’s nothing to worry about. And Lazarus, yes, you answered great. I’m glad that answer helped. Might take some time to unpack. Good. If it takes time to unpack, then my answer worked. Because not really here to give you answers. I’m here to make you think about things. And yeah, it’s hard because we, people will tell you there’s easy answers. Oh, the answer to the meaning crisis is just go to the go to the Orthodox Church. It’s like, that was the answer all along. We’ve had it all along. And no, no reason. It just suddenly worked for you. And doesn’t work for all these other people who are still stuck in it. But that’s still the answer. Like what, what your observational skills are lacking. That’s the, you know, and people do that with all kinds of things. You know, they do it with constantly with all kinds of things. And, you know, I have to constantly point out to people that can’t be true, because look at what happened. And then they get all kinds of upset because they had this nice, fancy, sexy model. And it was predicting all kinds of things. And, you know, you can tell too, because when their predictions don’t come true, they go, well, that was an exception because, and they launch into an equally long explanation, as long as the explanation for how that would have come to be as to why the thing didn’t come to be. And you’re like, you’re kind of creating something twice the size the Ed before, just because you were wrong. Maybe you could just admit you were wrong with a little humility, get a better model and move on. See, and that’s where, especially that particular thing of like people have quit attending church. But the thing is church has quit providing the thing that causes people to attend. And that’s very much a chicken and the egg question, because it’s like the organization failed the people, the people make up the organization. Exactly. Because I get, I get really annoyed with Christian Facebook because I get a lot of Christian Facebook posts because of the people in my life. I’m like, I love them. But it ain’t helping with the Christian. It’s just like the sidewalk people that’s like, you’re going to hell. It ain’t helping. And like, everybody’s left the church. Nobody’s attending. Like shame on everyone who’s not attending church for ruining church. And I’m just like, if they’re not getting what they need from church, is that how that worked? Like, right. Like, there obviously is the bread of life there. Like, it’s supposed to be. That’s what’s advertised. It’s supposed to be the bread of life. And if they’re not finding that there, seems like a more critical issue. And I don’t think shaming them on Facebook will help. But right. Two inches on, I suppose. Oh, Nathaniel, that description of postmodernism actually helps a ton. I’m glad to hear that. Participating in this live stream in reality. Well, that’s good. That’s good. That’s the goal. That’s the dream. Right. And yeah, Sally, you know, the idea that the churches are not doing something that causes people not to go seems to just be like, whoa, to the Christians. Like, they don’t know. No, no, no, we have the church. We have the answer. And therefore, it’s like, you would think that if the most important thing in your world were your religious belief, that I would have some hint as to what that was when I met you. And yet we live in a world where that’s not generally true. And it’s different. We’ll say down south. There’s an old trope about down south. They ask you which church you go to. Up north, you would never ask anybody what church they went to. It would never happen. I get that. That’s certainly true to some extent. But also, where are the Orthodox? I get you don’t evangelize, but nobody even knows you exist except the people who are searching and digging. And that’s why there’s the ortho bro trope, because there’s a certain type of pattern that gets people in and then makes them look like ortho bros. There’s a ton of people at the church and across the river here that I sometimes attend with Kira. But they’re not like that. It will be kind of interesting. It will be fun to see where the ortho bros are in 25 years when they’re ortho dads and grand dads, because five years, five years will change everything. I don’t think I don’t know, maybe because of modernity. But I was just thinking of like, if you slowed the bros down to like orthodox timeframes, it’s like a 20 year span. But maybe they aren’t relating to orthodox timeframes anymore. No, they’re not anywhere near the ortho timeframes. I kind of wonder if they’ll hit a wall like I did if they came from other Christian sects, and they’ll just realize they need to go home and try and fix home, even though that’s impossible. And I don’t see how whatsoever. But that’s been my solution. But I don’t know. We’ll see. You fix it by being there. Yeah. You know, like, like if you subtract, if you’re the good person, there’s 10 people and you’re the good person in the group, you leaving makes the group worse. Well, that’s the big kicker about church. It’s actually like, I really like the regional church that they have in England, which it’s funny because that’s dead too. But the idea that you just go to your parish, like I think that actually is functional Christianity. You just go. Yeah. And I I am. It is amazing how quickly like if you’re living in the place you’re from, you can network it now. I was actually from here, like multi generation from here. And it’s taken me like two and a half years and I’m much more integrated than like the first six months, which that was hugely disappointing to me. I thought I’d be integrated right away because I thought I didn’t know that I was on integrated. I don’t know why I miss things like that. And I’m I’m friends with a woman who married a brother of a girl who wouldn’t be friends with me. And the the little brother of the girl who wouldn’t be friends with me from home. Now I’m good friends with his family and it’s like talk about things that I could have never predicted or understood. And it’s and our kids will probably be friends because of us trying to build community. And we’re intentionally trying to build community with the neighborhood kids so they know each other. And I could have never predicted that. And like if you would have asked me like, who do you want to be friends with? How are you going to whatever? I had to quit that garbage and just allow it to happen where it happened. And it took me I think that was like my first year home was just quitting that garbage, like getting over my own expectations about who I should associate with. I’m running on low back. So I have as long as I have. Oh, hey, Father Eric. Good to see you, sir. You’re not coming in. Why are you muted? Why is everyone muted? Hello, here we are. I’m back. That definitely wasn’t user error. It was a computer glitch 100 percent. See, Ali Joe’s thing was actually Jesse’s fault because the iPhone was picking up the wind tunnel effect and shutting her mic off somehow. Oh, I don’t know. No iPhones in here. Just my goofy dumb phone. That’s all. No, I wanted I did want to address this and then you can talk about it, because I think it’d be interesting. Aaron Black, the church is supposed to be supposed is that the church is supposed to be a place to get wisdom that leads to understanding too much hollow understanding. He corrected it here. And then you said cars are killing us. So yeah, say more about that. Oh, because you don’t walk to church. I get it. Yeah. Yeah. You can drive to a church 30 minutes away that has everything just exactly how I want it. And so, you know, why would you go to the place that’s just down the road where, you know, the singing’s bad and there’s your aunt and you’ve never liked her. Yeah. Well, people are champions. This is why my family’s in all the little churches around here. Like, like just diffuse among all the little churches. Be spread out because when we’re together, it’s just peak Protestantism togetherness. So we are just just in all of them. Alrighty. Yeah. Sounds like fun. That’s what it is. I’m being accused of nostalgia at this point, but 100 years ago, there weren’t cars and now they’re everywhere. They’re the dominant species on the planet. So I blame mics, microphones. Yes, because I think it’s obscene to be using microphones. That’s actually what should qualify you as a pastor. And if you need a microphone, either your pastor is failing you or just how you built the church has failed you. Because I like the little resonant old church buildings for singing. And I like hearing the whole group and not just that one lady who thinks she’s qualified to be the song person. Yeah. So like I wish there were no mics. Also, I think women shouldn’t be leading songs because then it’s too high of a register for most people to participate. No one likes that answer, but that’s where I’m at with it. You know, I’d really be able to shout more if I was allowed to preach without a microphone because I definitely have the the lavoom to do it. It’d be fine. And if you, like worrying about hearing every last word for everybody who’s like the people who are a little deaf, they’re probably okay. If they deal with it in every other facet of their life, it’ll be fine. Like there shouldn’t be microphones. Like no wrong. I don’t know. Marsha McLuhan was on your side in case you care about what he thinks. I know who that is, but that’s okay. He’s pretty sharp, I think. He paid attention to what technology does to people, or should I say inside of people? This is something I was saying. Like it diminishes the sacredness. Well, it flattens. Technology flattens things, right? Microwaves and refrigerators diminished an amount of the sacredness in the communion of the home lunch because it became less precious. Because you could just put some hot pockets in. Ah, no, because whoever’s cooking can cook and then you can heat it up later. And it’s still, like it’s more mediocre, but it’s still like consumable. Whereas it used to be if a person cooked it and it was hot and it was ready, it was going to be cold and the lard was going to solidify and it wasn’t as pleasant to eat. Not that I don’t like fridges because I do, but it is. I do see the point of having no microwaves. I got a couple of friends out here that got like seven plus kids and they all of a sudden they quit having microwaves. And you’re like, what’s up with that? And it’s like, well, if you really need a snack, you can have it cold. But if you don’t want to have it cold, do you really need a snack? And I’m like, that’s some peak logic right there. Well, and you have to eat together because the food’s hot at the same time. So, you know, and it’s that togetherness that scales up from your community to the church when the church is in the community. And it’s the technology of the car that flattens the world because now I can flatly drive across the flat Midwest and get to Sally Jo’s place, which, you know, was wonderful, but also took two days and that was it. And then I was there. No hardship. It’s also kind of insane that you got that drive done in two days, but we’ll pass on from that. That’s something like maybe we just have to take that because I see this where people, they do kind of like a technology fast. They might not call it that. Maybe we just have to mature and learn how to fast in other categories. That might be what we have to do because you can’t just implement your tyrannies, although it sounds fun sometimes. I have several tyrannies I consider implementing, especially when it comes to people littering from their vehicles. Duck onto the tires immediately. Well, robot spiders. Robot spiders. They return the trash to the person and they can defend themselves with microwave lasers. You’ve told me about this like two years ago and now I remember. Yes, robot spiders. She’s got drawings of various sized robot spiders and whole plans. You want beauty? Robot spiders are beautiful. You do not want robot spiders in your world, despite what Sally Jo will try to sell you, but they are beautiful. Several scales of robot spiders because littering is just like, littering is just such an asshole crime. Like I just don’t understand people. You don’t have to litter. It’s not like a, oh I’m poor and so I threw a pot bottle out of my car. No, dick move. Anyway, I can move on from that. Wow. So if the brutal Midwestern wind accidentally takes a piece of paper out of your hand, well the robot spiders return that as well because that could be really useful. It’s not fun to lose a receipt that you need. Well, you could pay them to do that, but. Well, how would the robot spider tell the difference between that and littering? DNA. Yeah, I don’t know. See, this is my tyranny. It’s not a good plan. I shouldn’t have all the power. No, listen, Bill. I believe it. I believe it now. I’m 100 percent, my entire life’s goal is now robot spiders because you said so, Sally. Yeah, we were definitely going to follow along with you. This is the star that I’m hitching my wagon to. Robot spiders. Worst things could happen. I mean. We have the technology. Oh man, there’s some anime where they have a whole thing on Mars and theme, the motto of Mars is it will be beautiful. And like you serve your sentences for your crimes by being a slave that has this thing over your mouth that feeds you and cares for you. And it’s like, it will be beautiful because they can’t have prison because prison’s not beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. And you talk when you’ve got the thing on your mouth. Oh, you don’t talk. You don’t speak during your entire sentence. You’re just a robot slave. You don’t eat. You don’t drink. You don’t think of people that would make the world more beautiful if that was attached to them. Very creepy. But maybe that’s formative on some of my leeriness about beauty because it’s like, oh, that was such a good little sci-fi thing. It was like, it will be beautiful. And like, that’s every utopia, man. That’s that pursuit. It will be spandex jackets. One for everyone. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s like, just that rat. It’s like, everybody’s got to be nice. Everybody’s got to be tolerant. Everybody’s got to be something, something, something, something. And it just becomes like this stranglehold on life. And I mean, that’s even this thing about freaking out about farming. And they’re just, they don’t understand farming is a work with, it’s a team effort with nature. And you can’t just do whatever you feel like, and you’ll just strangle it to death. Like, that’s what you’ll do. If you try and control life too much, you will kill it. Well, here’s Sally, Nathaniel. I think Ghost in the Shell has robot spiders. Yes, well, Ghost in the Shell is an interesting, there’s a lot of stuff in Ghost in the Shell that, yeah, Ghost in the Shell is- We don’t want, we don’t want Ghost in the Shell. Ghost in the Shell is the end of the meaning crisis. It’s Japan seeing its own end. I watched- Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Ghost in the Shell was the first anime I ever watched. Oh, wow. And I watched it when I was eight, no, 17 or 18, no, 18 in AIT. After I got out of basic, you get to the next level. I watched it in AIT secretly because I was not phased to have DVD. So it was sharing TVs that we weren’t supposed to have. No, 11 seconds in, the whole thing came to me. It was like a flash. I was like, oh, wow, there’s the de-sacralization of the feminine. There’s no woman powerful, not precious, powerful in a masculine way. There’s the whole question, the whole movie is just full of the question of what makes us human and when do we stop becoming human when we meld with technology and wow. It’s all there. It was all there. It was all there. It was all there. It was all there. It’s all there. It was all there way back then. 1996, the halcyon days of the late, of the mid 90s. Was it 96? It was a long time ago. I think so. I think so. Actually, YouTube keeps on trying to make me watch it. Oh, no, you’ve got to watch it. I understand. I just, I rarely ever actually watch anything longer than like five minutes. No, no, you, you, well, it doesn’t matter. You can just watch the beginning and the opening right there. The meaning crisis is right there. And then it just goes deeper and deeper into meaning crisis the whole time. It’s, it’s really amazing. I was just like, wow, I don’t, I don’t know why I avoided this so long. And, you know, you see, you know, people go, oh, Akira, and look, Akira’s, Akira’s fantastic. I’ve seen Akira many times. It’s fantastic. Yeah, it’s there. But man, like Ghost in the Shell is just, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is the whole story. Improper balance, masculine and feminine, improper balance in terms of how they’re relating in the, you know, in the movie, like everything’s actually both sides. If it’s just two sides, right, pointed at the thing. And I think that’s where the, that’s where the whole idea of church goes wrong is when you don’t have something judging you that’s pointing, that’s an ideal, that’s when things sort of fail. And when the church fails to hold up ideals, that’s when things go like horribly, horribly wrong. And that is the deep point that the ortho bros have is look, this ortho church has been the ortho church forever. It’s like, okay, kind of sort of maybe, but they’re not out there. That’s the problem. Like sure, the buildings are beautiful, but nobody knows what’s going on inside. And nobody knows why they should go. Like who are these people that are there? And why do I want to emulate them? If you don’t see the exemplification in the world, is it exemplifying? No, it’s not. The ghost in the shell brings that out, right? That’s brought out in there by its absence, I would say. It’s brought out by its absence, but it’s there. That theme is there. And that’s where Sally Jo stole robot spiders from. So now we understand the world. There I was thinking you were original. I mean, if you only remember it, what’s the difference between your idea and somebody else’s? Copyright laws. That’s the difference. Redraw it imperfectly, but okay. I’m not going to report you to the Fed, Sally. I’m better than that. Good luck. I don’t know. The robot spiders didn’t do litter in ghost in the shell. So I think that’s pretty Sally original right there. Repurposing them for their appropriate tasks. Yeah, no, that would be the proper place in the hierarchy for a robot spider. It’d be picking up litter. This is a useful engagement for you. Not murder. Murder is a little too delicate. You got to leave that to a professional. It’s better than my glitter pigs plan, which would solve. Yes, I could solve the urban riot problem with a plan that I call glitter pigs. It’s not related to cops. Actually, it’s related to failure in the system and you just push it the rest of the way. Glitter pigs. They resolve it before they went completely feral or your failed state would be consumed by the glitter pigs. That’s simple. They actually painted with glitter. That’s what I want to know. I think so. I think that’s what makes sense. It’s just, you know, 20 or 30 pigs covered in glitter released. You see, you can’t hate on glitter pigs because they’re protected by all of the pretext that the glitter brigade as if you cover them in glitter, then they’re politically immune. Makes them politically neutral by putting glitter all over them. It can’t be right wing if it’s covered in glitter. That’s actually that’s pretty fair. That’s actually that’s pretty fair. Can’t be. So you just release glitter pigs anywhere where there’s riots and you either have to get pro gun enough to stop the glitter pigs or the glitter pigs eventually. So we’re talking like feral hogs. No, no, they’ll start off not feral. In like 18 months, they will be feral. And you’ve either went pro gun enough and you’ve become pro police enough to get rid of the glitter pigs or the glitter pigs get your town. It’s really it’s a simple plan. Seems fair. I was thinking like, you know, you were talking about how putting the mark of the glitter on you makes you safe from them. And I thought, well, what happens if you put me in glitter? And I’m like, you’re not doing that. It’s like the hand of Sauron, but in rainbow glitter and there and that’s total defense politically. And this is why you will never be in charge of anything ever. This is diplomatic immunity. And then we need we need the Crispin, no, Danny Glover to come in. It’s been revoked. And then he gets to be king because he revoked the glitter pigs diplomatic immunity. Good. Good. Good. Good. We’ll see. Forget forget about the spiders. I’m now on board with glitter pigs now. There’s no way this is bad because first of all, you replace the pigs, which everybody was like, oh, the pigs. I’m like, OK, we’ll give you real pigs. There you go. Now you have glitter pigs. Oh, it’s not working out. Oh, you’d like police back. Well, good luck. Problem solved. Like, you know. Yeah. Wow. Mark, what this actually seems like it introduced consequences for crossing certain boundaries, which I think would be a navigating patterns like plastic right there. It would be. It would be. Nathaniel, family time. Great stream. Have a good night. Good night, Nathan. Thanks for joining. Yeah, I could definitely I could definitely segue into talking about things like boundaries at some point on on a video or two. I’ve got so many videos backed up and I didn’t do any recordings this week. I have videos in the in the can. So but yeah, I wanted to record at least three videos this week and I did zero. It’s like I got to do some this weekend or something. I got to catch up. I got I got to get a bunch of St. Joseph almost continuously for you, Mark, for like two weeks now. Are you telling me nothing’s changed? Oh, no, a bunch of stuff changed. Some things got better and some other things got worse. That’s but I do appreciate. Yeah, no, the the prayers worked almost immediately actually from the first time. But then, of course, life and then a bunch of other stuff cropped up. And I was like, really? You know, so it’s things aren’t looking as dire as they were two weeks ago, that’s for sure. But they do look dire in a different way. So it’s always like that. You know, just, you know. Yeah, I don’t think I could handle the amount of excitement that you have in your life. It. Yeah. And that’s why I’m in a position with outrageous job security. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. Like my employer has been in existence for 2000 years. The only way out of this is for me to misbehave very badly. That’s a that’s a big advantage. Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, they’re doing a bunch of things wrong. So there’s that. And man, I’m now part of the system. I could have influence on the system. Right. Right. You can even see you’re going. There’s a lot of dust up around the pope lately. I don’t know what’s going on, but I see a lot of Twitter stuff. Yeah, I don’t pay attention to that as much as I used to. And I’m a happier person. Yes, that’s the way to do it. I could hear the sad. Yeah. Well, trying to pay attention to too much stuff makes you unhappy. It doesn’t matter if the stuff is good. That is a fun one. The fact that when you pay attention, it gets thinned out and you. I was so I’m still thinking about it when you talk to somebody because like sometimes I end up talking to people who are high, like especially on the Internet, because why not? And when you talk to somebody who’s high and their attention is messed up and then it thins them out and I see it every time now and I never saw it. I just thought it was like fun. But like I do that, like where my attention gets thinned out. But like I’m not doing drugs. And so like it’s just fun when somebody else wants to do that. But then seeing the negative that so strongly, it’s it’s really fascinating. Like when you thin out your attention and you put yourself way, way far out in a theoretical or in a future or in a like academic frame that’s very, very, very disconnected from any fantasy. Yeah. Or fantasy. I know we did a stream on fantasy. I feel like we need to do like four more of like the horror of the horror of fantasy and the function of fantasy and like the fit. Like, of course, we also need to do the tyranny stream. So of like the tyranny stream now, I thought we were just doing three or four videos. Now you want it to be streams. Oh, my goodness, Sally, you’re a mess. It’s either we do the tyranny ones or we do glitter pigs. And why they’re the only solution. What I need to do is I need to get into a groove where I can actually do enough videos so I can release two a week and do at least one stream and then one other every other week. So we’ll have a daytime stream. Used to be my goals when I thought I was going to do the pro stream, but parenthood. So no, I’m not going to do that. So, no, it’s your own fault, Sally. You shouldn’t have had a kid. I like him. He’s probably worth it. I like him too. But think of all the YouTube fame you’re missing out on. I mean, come on priorities. I’m just I’ve just decided you have to deal with that now. It’s easier. I know. Well, I don’t have to deal with it alone because you did most of the work on the store. So there you go. It didn’t get to you yet because that’s going to be awesome. We can be here for the next stream. So, yeah, it should be here like Monday, I think, or Tuesday. Fame makes a man hard to swallow. Let’s let’s laugh. I think that the David Bowie song. I feel like I’m not supposed to like David Bowie, but sometimes I actually do. Like his music can actually have some insight in there. I’m not like canonizing him for Pete’s sake, but that’s the problem, especially with somebody like David Bowie, because, man, he’s a freak. Yeah, but like, yeah. Well, that’s the problem. That’s the problem with like you. Fame makes a man hard to swallow. It’s just and then you’ve got like this image of just a bunch of people carrying the Pope around and it’s going and like, it’s just I’m a bit of an artist myself, Sally, but I never actually draw anything out. But I could I could be a music video director. I think I could do that. Music music is a special kind of enchantment. And it’s weird to me that nobody knows what music is and how it works. And I’m like, really, guys? This is the episode of the music video. I’m like, I’m not sure. I’m not sure. I’m just like stunned that you just don’t time. No, no music. It’s propositions, poetics, music. That’s the that’s the ordering up the stack. So music ties together a bunch of things that are like, you know, like the music is the music is the music is the music is the music is the music is the music is the music. So it’s the three things, right? So when you’re writing about music, you could look up other things either the song or the song, all in one line and you get more like Versace and Tryndamere best chose on your tone type of music comes to matter see how much that matter matters. Because it was sort of dirty to me because I got my grades It adds dimensionality to the connections. So the number of connections you can make and the number of ways to make connections increases exponentially, independently of each other, which means the number of connections is not even exponential, it’s much bigger. It’s something like number of connections, exponential number of connections factorial or something stupid. That’s the combinatorial explosion. Music allows for combinatorial explosion in a constrained way. Yeah. So what you’ve been dealing with people you’ve detected being in a meeting crisis, you’ve mentioned that they don’t like poetry. Have you noticed that they don’t like music either? No, but a lot of them aren’t engaging in music. It’s not that they don’t like it, but the problem is they can’t resonate with it correctly. So here’s a crazy question, and I’m gonna ask the audience too. So I went through a period where I was like looking in minimalism and looking into hoarders to like figure out how to un-hoarder my family and myself and stuff. Anyway, and I have this weird theory that maybe it’s a particularly Protestant virus and or agnostic, but like if you have a certain hierarchy, if you have the hierarchy within the church, maybe you have the hierarchy within everything. And so if anybody knows of like hoarder Catholics, let me know because so far I haven’t found that you do. Okay. Like that- How many? Like four egg cartons. Are they good Catholics or are they terrible Catholics? So I mean, at my grandma’s house, she was a pretty good Catholic. I never saw the walls because they were just absolutely talk full of every piece of art imaginable. Yeah, but was it- My aunt Doris’s house, there was like a miraculous metal and a rosary at every windowsill. Okay, okay. Yeah, but that’s not hoarding. But that’s still categorically accurate. I’m talking about hoarder show level hoarders where they don’t have- Yeah, I’ve met some priests. No discernment between a receipt and a car title because that’s the thing with hoarders is they lose discernment between objects. And I haven’t seen that as much in Catholic. All things are of equal value. That’s the flattening and compressing of the world, right? The receipt, the car title has the same value even though clearly they don’t. You’re correct. Yeah, so I guess I can’t think of any examples that wouldn’t also be caught up with a mental health diagnosis. Oh, Sally’s battery died. I guess that wasn’t the answer she was looking for. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Oh, Aaron had to leave. Well, I’m glad you liked the show. I’m glad things get cleared up for you. That’s great news. This seems like a much more productive show than most. It’s good, at least feedback wise. So that’s been good. Yeah, I think Sally’s theory back then was, look, the Protestants don’t have hierarchy and therefore they’re more likely to be hoarders because hoarding is a function of lack of discernment. Discernment, hierarchy is what gives you discernment or one of the things that gives you discernment. And I was like, oh, that’s kind of an interesting theory because boy, does that match a lot of stuff in the models that we use. I don’t know. I haven’t done any serious things regarding that. I’m not a social scientist. It’ll just be basic observation. Yeah. Oh, well, the thing is, is that at this point in history, a lot of people, like, you know how marriage is becoming like a luxury item for people? It’s like a middle-class, and the more wealthy you are, the more likely you are to be married, to stay married. Church is unfortunately becoming like that too, where it’s like, this is something for successful people who can get out of bed at eight o’clock on a Sunday. Right. Right. And that’s bad because Jesus was poor and he identified himself with the poor. So like, there’s another critical failure for you that just continually thrashed me personally for, Mark. I can take it. I’m kind of used to it at this point. It doesn’t mean you specifically cites, it doesn’t. Well, no, and I think that’s part of the problem is that when I talk about the separation, right, that’s the recession of the church. Yeah, it’s getting higher and higher, but it’s receding from lower and lower. And then that gap is bigger and there’s nothing to fill the gap. Pentecostals fill the gap, whatever you think of that. Well, they try to fill the gap. I don’t think they actually do. I think they push people into, they have an inhale frame. Yeah. Right, instead of keeping them in the material frame. And like, you can’t stay in the material frame, but there’s gotta be a balance there somewhere. And I think that’s the problem when we lose our ability to interface with ideals. And that is the loss of poetics because that’s what knits those things together. And when we can’t knit those things together, right, we stay stuck in the material. And that’s part of the problem is we’re stuck in the material. We’re materially stuck. We’re looking at the world as people do things for money, which is so obviously not true. I don’t know how people get there. And it’s so reliable. People just, oh, they’re doing that for money. It’s like, they don’t even like their job. Like, what are you talking about? And the other thing is too, and I noticed this again, because I was watching that silly ortho bro stream. That Vervecky quote where he does that test in his classroom where he says, who would wanna know if they’re significant other were cheating on them? And he says, see, see, they prefer reality. And I’m like, John, have you met people? They lie all the time. If you actually watch people in relationships, the links they’ll go to to ignore that their significant other is cheating on them are extraordinary. And look, this isn’t abstract for me. I did that. Me, and I’m like way more grounded than most people. I’m like, like, because I’m a pragmatist, I’m light years more grounded. And I remember distinctly my buddy, this was affecting him, his roommate. He goes, Mark, you gotta deal with this. And I’m like, yeah, I know. And then, boy, did I deal with it though. Bang, and tell with it right then and there. But yeah, I mean, we deceive ourselves. We tell ourselves, oh, I’d wanna know the truth. I’d really wanna know if so and so is cheating on me. And like, man, so online in particular, there’s a phenomena or there used to be, I don’t know if it’s still true, but there was a phenomena online years ago on the online systems where unhappy married women have a lot of time, they go online. And then they don’t have to leave the house. It’s efficient for them to be online. A lot of them were unhappy because their husbands weren’t around. And when your husband’s not around, I hate to break this to you, but most of the time it’s because he’s with another woman. I’m just sorry. It is what it is. And there were several times that I was talking to these women, it was abundantly clear that their husband was cheating on them. And they would have none of that explanation. Some of them knew, some of them were like, yeah, that’s why I’m here. Like, okay. And then they of course would cheat as well. But the degree, like it’s just only an academic would make such a ridiculous mistake because they just haven’t met enough people in the real world and talk to enough- They haven’t done marriage prep, you know? People are like, oh, father, father, father, you know? Just talk to people and observe them and you’ll see that people suggest to them, hey, did you ever think your spouse cheated on you? And see the number of times they’ll unconsciously admit to you that they know without ever saying they know and they’ll totally ignore it and do nothing about it on purpose. That happens all the time. And actually, because as I said earlier, reality is something you basically co-manifest, right? You are partly responsible for reality. You prefer to stay in the relationship automatically because that is your reality. That is part of your identity is who you’re with. And so, and maybe you should, like maybe you shouldn’t break that apart. You certainly shouldn’t break your marriage apart over a mistake, you know, even though it’s a terrible thing. Like, as far as I know, I’ve never heard of a Catholic priest saying, yeah, your husband cheated on you, you need to get a divorce. Like, wow. That’s moving awfully fast. Yeah. They need to be, I think, a little more than that. Or I would, before I would advise amputating a limb. So when people are BSing like that, do you think they’re mostly just articulating an ideal? Well, that’s the thing. The problem with propositions, the reason why we self-deceive is because we’re projecting an ideal. Yeah. An ideal version of ourselves to others. Like that’s the veneer. Like a properly integrated and grounded person would want to know reality as it is without any illusions. And so I think we would unconsciously put our hands up to say, that’s what I would want. I would want to be the part of person who would want that. But I might not actually be the sort of person who actually wants that right now. So it’s tricky the way he phrases that question. How many would you want to know? Would I want to be the sort of person who would want that? It gets a little complicated. Right. But also, look, if there’s a reality independent of your actions, that’s true. But I don’t think that’s the proper way to define reality. I don’t think reality exists independent of your actions. I just don’t think so. Yeah, it makes reality squishy as Sally Jo said, but there’s no other way to look at it because you- You don’t have anywhere else to stand to look at it from. Well, that’s right. Right. And also, you are involved in the world, whether you like that or not, it doesn’t matter. It’s very clearly true. And you can’t get around that. And so you have to prefer an ideal. That’s what we’re- The thing you’re striving for is the ideal. Now, I’m not saying your ideal is correct. Right, I’m saying that that is your ideal, like it or not, good or bad. And so you’re trying to manifest that. And that’s where fake it till you make it comes from. It’s like, well, yeah, but fake it till you make it is just to act in faith. That’s the same damn thing. At the end of the day, it’s like, yeah. And because there is a transition, you’re not all you could be, as Jordan Peterson likes to say. And so there’s a point at which you’re not there. And so you have to pretend you can get there, otherwise you definitely can’t get there. Right. So yeah, of course you want to project as though you would want to know, even if you wouldn’t wanna know. And again, we self-deceive because we wanna be that person. And that’s a good thing. We do wanna be the person who’s here. And there’s two biases problems there. One is how the hell did you get into the situation where your significant other is cheating? Like you’ve already failed. So some of that question is answering, would you wanna know if you had already failed? That’s always true. That’s always true. But when it came down to it, if there were consequences to that knowledge, would you get that knowledge and having the knowledge is irrelevant? Again, this is personal for me. I was there. Like I knew something was going on. There was no question about it. There was no point at which I didn’t know and I didn’t know when it went on. Like I knew. I pay very close attention to things for whatever reason. I knew, right? There’s no question. I wasn’t gonna pull the trigger. I preferred the sanctity of the relationship such as it was until I got faced, you know, like, dude, this is bothering me too. Like this is screwing up my life. You need to do something. It’s like, well, yeah, I kind of do. And that need was not based on my knowledge, right? It wasn’t based on convincing. I already had the knowledge. So the real question is, would you pull the trigger and accept the consequences? Not, not do you wanna know who cares what you know? What you know is irrelevant. It’s what you act on that’s important. I think, you know, if you know you should be following Jesus and you don’t do it, who the hell cares that, you know, and that happens to people all the time. Yeah, with that and about two bucks, you can go get a cup of coffee. Exactly. Exactly. Not at Starbucks though. What do we got? No, gas station coffee, but gas station coffee, you go to the right gas station. It’s getting pretty good. It could be. Assuming that you’re the sort of person who thinks coffee is good, which I am. Coffee is terrible. There are a few Catholic thinkers who hold this position in a moral universe, we should strive for a Christian eschaton, something like that. Not sure what position he’s holding. Yeah, I don’t know. Holy macaroni, my editor, Michel, welcome, sir. We are honored. You’re muted. Why are you muted? There we go, got it. Yeah, finally I was able to get my wife some rest. She’s sick. And I had to jump in with this marriage thing because I really find it annoying. People have no idea. Getting involved in situations that they fully don’t understand. And we’re constantly being told from our sanctity, with our union with God, there’s this lack of discernment of how to properly participate in helping others. That the way we wanna help them is by jumping in the pool and trying to save them, not knowing how deep it is, if they know how to swim, the body, like how they got there. They just wanna jump in and save people. And I find that very rude. Even when people do it to me, because I’m wondering, you don’t know me. Why are you saying these things to me? Are you gonna be there when I fall? When I’m on my knees? Like when I’m outside, maybe I left? Or you don’t know, are you gonna be there for me, telling me this information? So I think this topic of marriage fits at all levels. Of how to properly relate with people. And more information is not the answer. Well, yeah, yeah. And I think this is a good segue. Well, first we’ll go with Ethan’s comment. This reminds me of the original Sam Harris versus Jordan B. Peterson, when they were using the same apology to define truth. Yeah, but then I wanted to, Lazarus, that Christianity isn’t simply quote reality, but could be in participation. So one way to look at the problem of the age of gnosis, as I tweet about all the time on my Twitter. I love it. Is that you’re preferring knowledge as reality, or as telling you something about reality. But the bottom line is, what Christianity does, and other religions attempt to do this as well, we can argue about which one’s better later or never. Is it attempts to tell you how to manifest reality in the world. What’s the best pattern? That’s the wizard tradition. What’s the best pattern? And what’s the best implementation for that pattern, given the set of circumstances we find ourselves in, because that creates reality. And I remember not too long ago, somebody I met a while back on Clubhouse, she was basically saying, oh yeah, I went to church today, and we were saying the prayers to basically save the world, or whatever generic sort of prayers they were saying about holding up the world. And she said, I actually think that that works. Like I actually felt as though if we didn’t say that, the world would fall apart. And it’s like, right, that is true. That is exactly correct. If you don’t say the prayers, if you don’t point at unity and commonality, and if you don’t manifest the bigger thing, the marriage, the community, the communion with the creator, then you don’t have anything. Reality doesn’t manifest correctly. And I think in my life, the people who have made a biggest impact on me are the people who are willing to put in the time to help me. They say very little, and then they say, oh, come over after, or meet me over here. They don’t say, read this book. Your answer is in this book. They actually participate in the process of trying to help me solve that problem. I mean, isn’t this a factor in therapy where the single best predictor of therapeutic success is the rapport between the therapist and the client. It’s like, does it matter what school of thought or practices that the therapist is doing? It’s like, are they able to connect with that person with a certain level of empathy and help redirect their attention towards a better goal? Which means it’s the relationship that’s doing the work. And the way to measure the effectiveness of therapy is by measuring the quality of that relationship, intimacy crisis confirmed. It’s right there in front of everybody, and we don’t even see it. And part of the intimacy crisis, part of that quality, you don’t recognize quality unless you recognize the hierarchy. And you probably don’t recognize the scaling problem and how scaling works if you don’t recognize hierarchy. Because as you go up the hierarchy, the scaling changes. And this linear projection on the world just doesn’t work. Like, it causes this universality, this flattening. Right, talking about from this, kids getting diagnosed with ADHD. Okay, fine, you’re getting diagnosed with ADHD. Okay, so how do we participate in solving that problem? It’s what I have found to be more, and again, the right way to have that participation. Because you could do it in a dismissive way. Oh, I’m getting paid, this is what you have to do, here are the pills. Or you could do the proper sacrifice or the right trade off to really show that person that their being is good and that their existence actually has potentiality. And that is hard, and people don’t wanna hear that. That could take years. And people just want, they read something, oh, your brain, your blood, it does this, you take this. Oh, why aren’t you taking that medication? I do it too, believe me, I do it as well. But I always try to remember that I’m not interested in the medication. I’m interested in pointing towards the good. So sometimes I dismiss the medication. Okay, fine, you don’t have to take the medication. And the kid will struggle for the whole day, or the person will struggle with, let’s say I have a list, okay, this is the procedure of how you do the job. And they don’t wanna follow the procedure, or they’re having difficulty following the procedure, but they found a different way to do it. Then there’s a proper reverence, that’s a miracle. That they were able to get to the answer without following the procedure, and I was able to understand it. And then I was able to also grow and improve, but people don’t wanna see that. They wanna follow the procedure, like step one, step two. And that’s not how it is. Yeah, that’s the flattening from the age of gnosis. There’s one right way to do this. Not one right way to do anything that I’ve ever found. I’ve never seen that. I hear people say that. And it’s not universal, there is the right way. And it’s not universal. Right, right, right. That’s what annoys me. Yeah, and marriage is a microcosm. It’s one manifestation of reality at one layer. And there’s layers below it, and there’s layers above it, and they look different, but it follows the same basic fractal pattern. Because reality is a self-similar fractal. I think Jonathan Mujoe was right about that. I wish he’d add self-similar, just more technically correct, but then I’m a technical person, so. Yeah, I had a wedding this evening, and I gave my wedding homily. Oh, good. My wedding homily goes basically like this. What is love? That’s a funny word. Jesus says, love the way I love you. There’s the cross. That’s what love looks like. Go and do likewise. And I always get a very good response, specifically from the people who have been married for a while. Because they watch me point at the cross and say, that’s what love looks like. And they’re like, yup. It doesn’t feel good. Yeah. But there’s a resurrection on the other side, I promise you, there’s a resurrection on the other side. I don’t forget that bit either. That bit’s actually very important. Ha ha ha. Because I’m sure it’s crushing people. Well, that’s the thing. People want a relationship, they want to find their person. It’s like, no, no, no. What you want is not the person that’s great on vacation with you. You want the person that’s great when the chips are down. You want the person that will struggle with you. Right? Because you’re a struggle. You self-deceiving bastard. You’re a struggle. And the other person’s gonna be a struggle too. And that’s what you want. You want somebody that’s gonna deal with that problem. The problem of you. And you need to be able to deal with the problem of them. Yeah. You know, it was actually a really big revelation to me when I was in seminary, when I realized that bureaucracies were actually staffed by people. Because as a kid and a teenager, it’s like you turn the paperwork in and then magically the adults do stuff, right? Right. But then I started getting a little closer to these staffs, to these bureaucracies, and I’m like, oh gosh, yeah, those are human beings in there. It’s not just magic, you know? It’s not just following the procedures. That’s not what people are actually doing when they’re doing anything. Well, it’s the problem of naming. You name it, and then you think it’s a separate thing. But bureaucracy, right, much like politics, is not separate from people. It’s just the bucket of a collection of a certain type of people. It’s like, oh, that changes everything. Because then you have, you know, you have a way to interact with it, which isn’t just at the surface level. And yeah, you know, it’s important to remember when you call tech support, that person does nothing but deal with broken stuff all day. Right? And so to you, boy, they don’t seem too happy to hear from me. Yeah, they don’t seem to. They seem a little disenfranchised. Well, yeah, they’ve been dealing with negativity all day long. You know? And it works differently, you know, different ways. But what you’re dealing with is not merely your interaction with it. It’s also all the stuff behind it, all the context. Like before I met Father Eric, it was a whole life that he led. Some of it in the state in which I live, so. Right? My dad used to say to us, I wasn’t born with a wife and five kids. Yes. Well, and we don’t see that, and we don’t account for it. It’s impossible. It’s the most flat in the world. It’s impossible to see your parents as children. I can look at the photographs. I can hear the stories. Doesn’t really register. That’s like my dad telling a story about somebody else. That wasn’t really him. Well, because you didn’t experience it that way. And your experience is always going to be a stronger signal in some sense. Then the question is, why don’t we prefer experience and observation over fantasy? And yeah, well, because of self-deception. And you know, we’re perfectly happy as an academic asking a stupid question, not realizing the depth of the question we’re asking, and coming to a ridiculous conclusion that any observation would tell you is false. People do not prefer to know the truth over hiding it from themselves so they don’t have to deal with it. And that’s true of everything, not just of their cheating spouses. It’s true of everything. It’s true of the food you’re eating. It’s true of how much you’re saving for retirement. It’s true of that sound that your car is making. It’s true of the direction of the town that you’re living in, or the society that you’re living in. Well, and to some extent, we have to do, again, you have to look at the ideal. And the recession of the church is all about the recession of the ideal, right? To some extent. The church isn’t pointing to the ideal anymore. It’s not beautiful. It’s not, people aren’t saying, oh, I do this because I’m religious, right? Or I act this way, or I behave, or they’re not behaving in the way, right? Like when some ortho bro does some stream and says so-and-so’s not married, and they’re not sad about that, it’s like, what are you pointing to, dude? You’re just better than me at that point. It’s like, are you being a good Christian? I don’t know. Did you watch that whole stream? I did. All two hours and 45 minutes. Did I come up more than the once? I’m pretty narcissistic. I think you came up twice, but the first time was very brief. But yeah, also wasn’t listening to anything you were saying, but it was weird. Like he literally did not disagree with any of my points at all, not one of them. And I was like, why are you pretending like we’re in disagreement when you actually, I mean, he flat out says I agree with Mark. I’m like, okay, cool. But then he acts like I’ve done something wrong. If you agree with me, and then he makes up this fantasy about, you wanna make magical communities and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, what? No, that’s not at all. You get pretty happy when people start going to church, right? I don’t know or care. I just deny any knowledge of what’s going on. It’s like if something like that were to happen, I guess that would be okay. I don’t know. Mark, you just have to with people practicing something pointing towards the good. If people vanish from offline, I’m like, all right. And then I get sad because I’m losing contact with them, but I get happy because good, they’ve gone off and done more productive things and where they are, which is, that’s better. Yes, get people offline. That’s a good goal. And yeah, that was part of his argument was, yeah, the mother, I should be here, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, well, then we’re on the same mission. Why are you pretending? I don’t understand. He just admitted we’re on the same mission. But also why aren’t they drawn to it? Why aren’t people drawn to church? That’s the real question. Why is the church receding for them? We can argue about whether or not in some objective world it’s receding. Although I think you’ll lose that argument if you think it’s not. It’s important that it is at least from some perspective. And that’s what needs to be mended. And if you don’t have an answer to that, then there’s a problem there. And you can criticize Peterson all day long. But if you want more people in church, Peterson certainly has accomplished that more than anyone else. And there’s lots of people that have been trying. And they don’t think he was trying. So that kind of says a lot. It says a real lot. And then the question is, well, what’s going on? And then when you have people analyzing that and criticizing that when they can’t do as good a job, I got to question what their motives are. And I have to question how much longer I can fruitfully participate in this. Well, Father. I woke up tired. I don’t know what I did. Great for you to jump in. So. I didn’t do. So anyway, peace out, gentlemen. Behave yourselves. Say your prayers. Take your vitamins. God bless you and God bless America. Thank you. God bless you, Father. Wow. Yeah, I think that’s, you know, it’s weird to me that people don’t see what people are actually saying. They’re so caught up in participating in the group, they’re not observing what’s happening, what people are saying and doing. They can’t discern good from bad faith. You know, saying one thing one way, but agreeing, you know, that’s ridiculous. You know, if you agree with somebody, give them freaking credit. Give Peterson credit. He’s doing what he’s doing and it’s working. You know, give these people credit. Don’t be mean or mad or derisive or whatever when people are doing good things. Dad, I keep going back to this lack of discernment and especially coming from people that call themselves Christians. So it always baffled me. Like my wife, the way she shows me her faith is more through her actions than her words. You know, like I said, my wife never really sat down to read a Bible verse. You know, she does read them, but it is something that she does religiously. She just lifts out her faith to the best of what she can carry. But then the people who were a bit more, you can say, like educated about certain religious, it doesn’t matter what it is, those were extremely dogmatic. Oh, why don’t you do this? Why don’t you do that? If you wanna be a good person, then you gotta do this. That’s the reason why your job is not the way it is. Right. So they’re not meeting me where I am. They want me to be where they’re at, which I don’t even get, I don’t even understand. Yeah, well, and it is that presumption that people know what you know. That’s the other problem with the age of gnosis. Everybody assumes that other people know what they know. And a lot of times feels they just don’t have any idea. Cause you know, maybe what they can know is a smaller number of things, or maybe they know a bigger number of things, but none of the things you know, cause there’s a lot of things to know in the world. And there just might not be any overlap. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Again, the world is vast and we’re tiny little muppets. So, you know, you have to reconcile that. You have to take that into account. You can’t just be like, oh, everything’s fine. People know what I know. And therefore I can predict how they’re gonna act. Man, the number of times I’ve seen, you know, people do stupid things and it’s just, they had no idea. And absolutely no idea. Oh, drinking milk takes away the sting of peppers in your mouth, yeah. But drinking water spreads it around and makes it worse. Yes. A lot of people don’t know that. Stunning to me. The number of people that don’t know. Some people when they eat cilantro, taste soap. It’s only about 12% of the population. There’s so many things. There’s trivia all over the place, man. You could go on and on and on. And so you don’t really realize. I mean, I watch people do things and I’m like, man, that’s stupid. That’s gonna end poorly. And then it’s just, they didn’t know. They didn’t have any idea, they didn’t have any expectation. And you know, you learn by doing and some people don’t learn. So it’s important to realize that different people are different. And this universality, you know, and the same with everything. Like maybe some people can’t go to your church. Maybe some people can’t understand the Bible the way you understand it. Maybe some people can’t do the job that they’re supposed to do the way you want them to do it. Right? Right. Different people are different and we don’t want that. There’s this universality that we want everybody to be just as smart and we want them all to critically think and critically think as well and know the same things and act the same way and interpret. It’s like, no, that’s not the way of the world. Right. We have a hard time dealing with difference, dealing with change, change in general, but just difference as such. Even if there’s no change, I’m not you and you’re not me and we don’t know the same things and we don’t interpret the same things the same way even when we do and we don’t react to things the same, even when we interpret them the same. It’s just different. You know, you can probably run faster than I can. Like, you know. Right. And that’s where I found the people who, when I wanted to learn something, the people who were willing to meet me where I was, they were the ones that made the biggest difference. So my wife is one of those people. Like, even though my wife is well-educated, she finished college, she gave someone like me an opportunity to be part of this covenant in the family. And I found that weird. I’m not educated, she’s very smart. I’m like, what’s going on there? But she didn’t see me like that. She saw something else. So she was pointing at, you know, she was looking at the telos, like she was, which I didn’t understand when I met her. Right. And that is what we need. We need to keep, not look at the person because of how well they can memorize things, but really, really try to listen to the person. Try to participate with the fact that maybe they cannot tie their shoes, but they can do everything else great. Right, they forget to sip their pans or they like sugar in their coffee, but they don’t put it on. Like one day, like that happens, that there are people who love sugar in their coffee, but they forget to put sugar in their coffee. Right, and that one day you remind them and that makes the whole, it makes a big difference. Right. But it’s hard for people to pay attention to these details because they want, you know, they want the, right, like you said, they want it to be the same. But struggle, like paying attention to details, to other people in particular is struggle. Just noticing people when they’re not well and remembering to tell them because there’s always a risk, you know, you don’t look well and they take the offense. There’s all kinds of problems with that. And people don’t take that into consideration. They want to live in this flat world. It’s a real, it’s a real problem. Jordan Serna, what stream were you guys talking about? Oh, the stream that I was, the Ortho Bro stream. I can paste it. I have it. I don’t suggest anybody watch it. It’s not all that interesting. I know there’s some interesting bits in it, whatever, but yeah, I mean, if you want to see it, I couldn’t watch it. Yeah, there’s a bunch of clips of it on the, on my Discord, Mark of Wisdom Discord server. Yeah, I mean, if you’re going to engage in something, engage in products on my store, that’s much better. You get the store thing up and in YouTube. It’s all shop.markofwisdom.org. It’s all there. Yeah, I mean, the problem with these streams is that if they’re not high in content, I mean, I listened to it because I wanted to know what was going on, I wanted to see the pattern. And boy, the Ortho Bro pattern is so good. And boy, the Ortho Bro pattern is right there. Like we were here first and we have the right answer. That was always what he was saying over and over again. And so it’s a club. There’s quite a few people in the club, like fair enough. It’s much bigger channel than mine, right? It’s this club and you know, he’s, he had the stream was sponsored. So I assume that means someone paid for it. And I know who paid for it. And whatever, like whatever, I don’t care. Like that’s good. Glad they can get away with that. I can’t get away with that. And you know, I might get to that point, we’ll see. But there just wasn’t a lot of content there. So, you know, it was the same thing over and over again. But I watched it for the pattern. I watched a lot of things for the pattern, even though they say low information quality or low detail quality. But you know, if you wanna see somebody trying to act in good faith, but not able to, and I think that’s what he literally was not able to. Because his audience, his telos for existing is to be an ortho bro and support the idea that by being in, by getting into the Orthodox church that he made the right decision. That is the whole thing that he does, probably in all his streams and all his videos. I don’t know, cause I only watched the one stream, but I suspect that’s how it is for all his stuff. And fair enough, he’s got his niche audience and you know, he’s got super chats and he gets way more money in super chats than I do. He has a much larger channel, good for him. Not casting any shade. But also like there was no critique there. Like there was nothing that I could take back and go, you know what, I need to change this. Or you know what, I’m failing here. I got nothing out of it, which was sad. Like if you’re gonna critique somebody and they can’t grow from it, what are you doing? You’re not making the world a better place. Right. And does that make you a good Christian? This is where I got my doubts. I’m starting to go like, why are you critiquing somebody in a way that’s not generative for them? Or for you in that case? I mean, he’s generating money, I guess that’s generative. He’s entertaining his flock. I guess that’s generative in some ways, maybe. Not only that’s great, but again, do what you want, man. Like it’s your thing. But keep up with an aggressive approach to things. Yeah, I couldn’t watch it. It was… Too many contradictions for me. like what I was saying was wrong, but then you admitted you agreed with it, so it wasn’t wrong. So why are you, why do you have this tone and this attitude about it? If you agree, like I don’t, and then again, if that’s supposed to be a critique, it failed, like it didn’t critique. And it wasn’t generative for me. It’s like I took nothing away from it. Other than, boy, you really didn’t understand some of my points, and boy, you heard things that I didn’t say. I didn’t really learn anything. I didn’t learn anything that could help me. I didn’t learn anything that could help him. Like if you’re delusional, you’re delusional. I can’t really help you out of your delusion, and you’re not engaging me at all, which is all the worse. And also, like man, if you’re gonna mention someone in particular, you might wanna at least say, hey, you can find out more here, which he didn’t really do. I was avoiding mentioning him in particular, although I still shared his stream. That to me is just more proper. And I think part of that is just a loss of politeness. If you want universality, that’s what politeness is for. General politeness rules, they don’t even have to be the same in all places, but you have to have them, bowing versus handshakes, whatever, but you need to have that sort of pattern. And because there’s no need for politeness, there is also no need for discernment, because you didn’t do anything wrong. Right, right. Well, and politeness helps you to get started so that you can find intimacy, that you can start relationships. It’s a starting point platform for starting relationships. It’s like Smalltalk. Oh, nobody likes Smalltalk. Well, Smalltalk is how you get to know people. Yep. Yeah, all this stuff is wrapped up together. And hopefully, this is one of those streams where I’m trying to wrap a bunch of things together. Hopefully you can kind of see that pattern all wrapped together. And on that note, I think we’re gonna wrap it up and call it a night. Michal, before we do that, would you like to close anything out? I’d just like to say that we’re all Muppets, and I’m a Muppet. My family is a Muppet. I live in a house. It was built out of Muppets. And I cannot do it by myself. Oh, that’s excellent. I don’t think I can improve on that. So look, on that note, thank you everybody for joining. I appreciate your participation. It’s very valuable. We’ve got more videos ready to go. So those will be coming out. We’re doing a live stream next week, unless something comes up, but I hopefully will be here next week. And yeah, maybe we’ll do art and beauty next week or something, as Dali suggested. And look, have a great week. I hope this was helpful. Leave me comments, whatever. Let me know. And go buy stuff at my store. We got some cool stuff. And yeah, be a Muppet, but be a good Muppet. Thank you.