Navigating Live Patterns! (kiJbmBylT7w)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=kiJbmBylT7w

Well, alright. Apparently this is going live. So, other than I couldn’t get my camera to work quite right. Which is too bad, I wanted my camera to look different. Apparently nothing works in technology anymore. It’s very sad. But oh, this is exciting. This is my first livestream. And yeah, we’ve got it streamed on Navigating Patterns, if you want to check it out there. We’ve got it streamed on my personal YouTube channel, if you want to check it out there. And it’s all kinds of fun. And so what I’m going to try to do is basically talk about a pattern or maybe many patterns. And we’ll see where that goes, right? So I’m going to do a little advertising. I think the significant factor in my channel, in what I’m trying to do, is there are patterns out there. Right? Well, not to Jonathan Cajot and his patterns. And we need to understand these patterns. We need to be able to interface and interact with these patterns in a way that helps us to be in the world. And the channel’s really focused on this cultural cognitive grammar idea, where we’re trying to understand there’s some history pieces in there, but most of it’s about words, the usage of words, how people are using words, what it is they’re trying to say, right? What it is they’re actually saying, because maybe we don’t know what we’re trying to say all the time, right? We’re signaling unintentionally something that’s a little bit more accurate than what we’re trying to put out there and how the things are being interpreted. Right? So there’s a way in which there’s three sort of competing meanings going on at the same time. And the channel’s really about, you know, look, what’s the definition of capitalism? Right? What’s a church? Right? And then there’s some stories in there like, you know, the fall of the fourth estate and there’s some history in there like the French Revolution. Right? I’ve got stuff on postmodernism. And the reason why I’m doing this, again, it’s about this cultural cognitive grammar or what do things mean when you’re interfacing with them in the world? Like, where is it that this meaning arises? And I put forth this thesis on my channel already about meanings not in words. Meaning is something that emerges from content plus context. So you have the content, the context, bang, you get the meaning. And I think that’s actually a really important way to think about it. And the reason why I think that’s an important way to think about it is because if you try to, if you try to engage in the world as if the projection of language is an accurate representation of what’s going on, then certain assumptions have already been built in to that approach. So what do I mean by that? What I mean is if somebody is telling you something, they’ll say about themselves, they’ll say, well, I believe that whatever. If you think that’s accurate because you think they know themselves and you think they’re articulate enough to state what their belief is in a way that other people can understand, you might be making two errors already. Because people often don’t know what it is they’re on about. They don’t know what they’re up to, to quote Peterson, right, Jordan Peterson. So we’re assuming that they’re rational and competent to communicate and that that communication is accurate. And I don’t see a lot of evidence for that. I’m not saying never, but it’s kind of rare that people sort of know what they want or know why they did what they did and know how to interface with things and know how to convey that to other people. And part of it is just a function of it’s hard to convey things to other people sometimes. Like people often do not have the same context that you have. And that depending on how much context you need to understand the meaning, that could be a good thing or a bad thing, it could be a factor or not a factor. And this is what we get caught up in. And so what other indicators can we use to sort of navigate the world other than what people are telling us? Because relying on what people are telling us is not it’s not good enough. It may be OK, but I don’t think it’s good enough. And I would argue it’s not OK. It’s actually leaving us astray. So if somebody tells you, you look, the reason why I can’t get a job is because of capitalism, then they put a little thing in your head like, oh, the possibility is capitalism can make somebody not get a job, which is absurd, by the way. And then that becomes part of your field of awareness. And if it also becomes part of your field of attention, then all of a sudden you’re into a conspiracy theory like, man, the reason why I don’t have a job is because capitalism and the people in the capitalism are keeping me down. And it’s like, well, you know, and there’s other problems like half truths. So there’s a way in which wealthy people are stealing from you. Let me tell you which wealthy people are not stealing from you. Anybody with one hundred million dollars or more, almost certainly not stealing from you, almost certainly adding value to the world. So how can you make a blanket statement like that, Mark? Well, look, there’s only two possibilities when you’re making that much money. Either you’re hooked into pretty much everybody at a dollar a year or something crazy, or you stole it from a large institution. Like maybe you crashed a bank of England or something. And you can do that. You can crash the bridge pound and make a billion dollars. That’s been done. I don’t not recommend it. Please don’t do that. Or crash any other currency. That would be bad. So. Those people didn’t steal from you personally, right? But the people that did steal from you are people with millions of dollars and tens of millions of dollars. Not all of them. Some of them are the ones that stole from you, but you probably don’t know who they are. Right. Or maybe you do know who they are, but they only stole from a few thousand people. When we cast that on Elon Musk or on Steve Jobs, whatever you think of Steve Jobs, and I’ve actually never been a fan, but he also didn’t steal from people. So plus one on that one. You know, you say, oh, you know, the real problem is that Jeff Bezos stole, you know, is stealing money from consumers. Jeff Bezos is taking money from investors and good luck to him. And I think he’s like he’s got more than enough money that when Amazon inevitably comes crashing to the ground, which it’s well on its way to doing, he won’t care and good for him. Like he got away with it. He didn’t take money from you, though. You benefited from him stealing money from investors. That actually happened because you got better prices because of Amazon, the storefront, which has almost never made any money. A few quarters, maybe one, maybe two quarters in a row once or something. But very unprofitable business. So if he’s running an unprofitable business, the consumers are the ones benefiting, technically speaking. So Amazon didn’t do that to you either. You’ve benefited from that. But he’s got way more money than is justified by his business model or by a balance sheet. So he got that money from somewhere that he gave to you. You should be grateful. And not that I like Jeff Bezos, but that’s another discussion. So it’s kind of important to know this, because if you get caught up in the it’s the billionaires and trillionaires and zillionaires that are stealing all your money or it’s the giant mind control space dragon of capitalism, then you’re going to continue to get screwed. The people that are taking money from you and everybody else are going to continue to take money from you and everybody else. And that’s not good. I’m not a fan. I think it’s bad. I’m still a hard no. You know, and that’s the problem is that we’re not paying attention to the problem that is there in favor of a problem that is not there. Blaming Elon Musk? No good. First of all, he’s taking most of his money from investors again. And, you know, that’s fine. But second, I think he’s adding real value to the world. And I don’t think he’s you know, I don’t think it’s a bad deal. It’s a bad deal when your house gets stolen. Right. Like 2008 housing, housing crisis, people lost their houses, including me, although not in 2008, took them at least three years just to get to me. And then another five in court. A lot of people. And I was there too many days. Walk in, lose their house. Bank had no paperwork, none, zero. Court wasn’t requiring them to have paperwork. Bigger problem. Not that the bank didn’t have it, but the court didn’t care. You know, the people that benefit from that, you can say, oh, well, the banks benefit from it kind of sort of. The banks get bailout money, though. So really, you know, they stole your money indirectly through the government. Governments stole your money. Maybe, maybe. Right. But not the banks. But you know who stole the houses? The lawyers in the courts. Yeah. Didn’t know that, did you? So what was happening is the scumbag lawyers and everybody knew all the lawyers I talked to knew who the scumbag lawyers were. And, you know, if they weren’t off ambulance chasing, they were off foreclosure milling. And if they were not foreclosure milling or ambulance chasing, they were chasing some other sort of borderline legal thing. So that is to say, the legal community, the brotherhood, these people are all part of a bar association. They know what’s up. They’re not fixing it. OK, problem number one. All right. Those lawyers got the houses, not the banks. They had made arrangements with the banks to give banks cash upfront. But then they got the houses and they had the houses. And they were in court representing the banks, even though they already had the house, which is, you know, it’s just fraud upon fraud upon fraud. And then. They’re the ones ripping you off. And, you know, are they tens of millionaires? Maybe they’re definitely millionaires, right? And they’re definitely the ones playing the game. They’re not the only ones playing the game. The banks are still stealing houses. They don’t know. That all happened. Probably still happens all the time. But when we don’t locate this, we don’t aim at the right problem. And here there’s a bunch of problems. There’s the brotherhood of lawyers who like to be all pally and friendly, like, which I very much disagree with, because I’m a oh, you’re my enemy. Then I’m going to go at you with everything I have. I’m going to, you know, no quarter, no quarter. All right. Like and they don’t have that attitude in the legal profession in general, which is too bad. So, you know, if you can get a shark of a lawyer, get one. They’re rare, but find one much better off. The courts didn’t care. They were following their own rules. The courts were just violating all kinds of legal precedent. They were violating their own terms over which they had authority. They were violating their own charters. They didn’t care. And the. Organizations and institutions built in to look into those things also didn’t care, by the way, and that’s at the state and the federal level. And I know because I I wrote letters all of them. I contacted all of them, all of them, every single one I could find. They all did nothing or supported the bad behavior, you know, admitting it was bad behavior, even in some cases. So courts are not doing you any favors, right? But that’s the politicians, basically. So and that’s the local politicians, too. It’s not the it’s not the guys at the federal level. You know, sure, they’re bad, too. Right. But first, like, let’s fix the courts. Right. Because otherwise you have a bigger problem. So the Bar Association, the courts, no good. These lawyers are stealing from you for sure. Maybe not from you personally, but they stole from me, that’s for sure. Right. And so. That’s where the problem is. The problem isn’t at the federal level, and no amount of changing up the federal game is going to fix the local game. It might make it better, but it’s actually not going to fix it. And we’re aiming at these things that are way up in the air and they’re not going to solve our problem. And so that’s that’s a problem. All right. That’s a big problem. You don’t want that problem. So how do you navigate this? Like, what do you you know, what do you do? Well, again, you have to understand what it is you’re talking about. And one of the things I do or try to do is when I listen to videos, for example, let’s suppose I listen to a all the end of the video. What I’m what I’m actually listening for is the tone. And I’m watching the reactions. So I prefer to watch the videos instead of listening to podcasts because the reactions tell you a lot. Right. So, for example, when Paul Van der Kley is talking to, say, John Verbeke and Paul Van der Kley very cleverly because Paul is one shrewd operator, man, and he’s quick when Paul very cleverly says to John, what if Socrates had risen from the grave instead of Jesus or something to that effect? And John’s eyes get six times larger. I mean, exaggerating. Not that any of you would think that I would exaggerate. Right. John’s eyes get six times larger. That tells you something about what’s going on in John’s head in the moment. And then when that physical reaction stops and he starts speaking and this is something you can’t get from the audio only. Right. And he says, oh, right. You don’t understand that he, for a second, considered that and found it appealing. So there’s some information that is not conveyed rationally through good articulation. It is body language, effectively. Also, when we over focus on the words that people are using. And again, I make the argument all the time on the channel, on navigating patterns that we don’t like people are using these words in ways that are not helpful for communication. People say that. Right. If you’re missing the tone and I’m not saying tone is totally reliable any more than words are totally reliable. But you can get patterns of the tones that people are using and they’re saying certain things or giving you certain phrases, right. When they’re feeding you certain types of excuses or reasoning or whatever. I don’t think excuses are bad. Everyone’s got an excuse for things that they do. That’s fine. I know we tend to misuse excuses as pure negative. Having that information not in your brain means that you fill it in. You do personally. Now, some people are very good at this. It’s not an issue. You’re not one of them. Just assume you’re not one of them. It’s rare. Right. And your whole life will get a lot better if you assume you’re not one of them. So. When these people or when you’re engaging with people and you’re missing information like total information or body language or anything and then maybe a limitation you can’t you can’t get past. Fair enough. Like you’re listening to an audio podcast and it’s only on audio and whatever. You are missing information and filling it in. That’s what you’re doing. You’re doing that. Now, you can you can there are ways to help with that situation, right, by understanding that you’re doing that and then going back and saying, all right, what assumptions do I have to make in order to make sense of this sentence? Right. So one of the common problems that I see is that people give other people the benefit of the doubt to a degree with the sloppiness of their language, we’ll say, to a degree that is unjustifiable. One of the things they do is they’ll say like, oh, he didn’t mean that. Really? Are you sure? So you think he’s lying, right? Or you think he’s mistaken or ignorant or that’s not my first assumption. My first assumption is unconsciously. And I have a video on that, obviously, because. Navigating patterns unconsciously, your unconscious is usually telling you exactly what’s going on. Right. It’s your unconscious is just spewing your words out for you. And you’re not even aware most of the time. You can train to mitigate that. I’ve done that. That’s why I’m able to be precise in my speech to a degree which most people seem to be unable to do. Fair enough. It has its disadvantages because people hear what they want to hear and not what you say. And then they you said this is the same thing like that. These people are most likely telling you something more true than they realize in the way they formulate their language. So one of these common tricks is people will talk about, well, you know, is murder wrong is a valid question. And I’m always like, no, that’s not even remotely close to the question. The question is, is killing wrong? Because wrong killing is what we call murder. Like, that’s kind of the definition of murder. You you you knowingly deliberately did something to somebody that made them cease to exist. And and that’s almost always associated in all cultures with a legal liability and a knowledge of your actions. Whereas the necessity to kill somebody because they’re going to kill you, for example, you know, that’s really the question. The moral question is, is it wrong to kill somebody? Not is it wrong to murder somebody? Sometimes, yes, sometimes no. Maybe most of the time, no. Right. But but not all the time. Right. So this has to be dealt with carefully. Now, when people come up with that formulation, everybody gives them the benefit of the doubt. So it’s a valid question. It’s not it’s not it’s not it’s not right. Because they’re positing an absolute and saying murder is always wrong, for example. It’s not always wrong that they can’t be the case. It’s not possible for that to be the case mathematically. It’s a mathematical certainty. If someone’s going to wipe out your whole family, you’re obligated to kill them first because that’s probably the only thing that you can do in that circumstance. So it can get messy if you say, well, should I preemptively kill them before they break? Whatever. I’m just saying there are situations where something happens in the moment and you have to react and you have to be certain of your actions. And that will result in killing the other person in order to save lives. That is a condition that happens for sure and not an imagination in reality. So we need to understand when people are saying things like, well, you know, murder and killing, you know, that argument. No, it’s it’s the argument. It’s the point. You can’t you can’t get around it. Right. It’s like the Sam Harris’s and the John Vervicki’s of the world. Do that that game all the time. It’s better to say is all killing wrong in any possible circumstance. Right. Now you’re being honest. There’s some intellectual honesty is really framing it because you got to frame it. You can’t just throw a word out there and say, you know, is killing wrong? Yes and no. It’s just not enough information. And a lot of times people use a lack of information to manipulate you. So I got to do this video one of these days. It’s so hard to do. There’s some people like Brene Brown has a TED talk and in her TED talk, she’ll she does crazy things like she’ll say, you know, the secret to a happier world. As though that’s a goal, right. It’s presumed goal is that we all need to have compassion for one another, empathize with each other’s situations and and meet each other with love. And everybody goes, yes, yes, she’d say anything. She literally didn’t say anything like those words in that context of no meaning, have no possible meaning. So what happened? Why is everybody in agreement with her? Well, it’s easy. They filled in the frame to make the words meaningful. That’s all that happened. So each individual person filled in the frame. So if you do that with something like peace on earth, right. Or, or, you know, how do we make the planet greener or how do we stop war? All those formulations fit in all of those goals and all of them. The problem is the way I would implement things like empathy, which by the way, I hate, I think empathy is my enemy. You must destroy all the concept of empathy. Love, what, what does that mean? Compassion. I mean, everybody’s got some compassion for something, right? Like the way I would implement that, the things that I think of with those words is different from the things that you think of with those words. Now we all agree that those are the right words, but we don’t have the common frame. So we think we’re in agreement because it all sounded right to us. Sounded right to me. Sounded right to Brene Brown. Sounded right to guy next to me and the woman next to me. And the whole crowd seems very happy with it. We didn’t agree on anything. We didn’t agree on anything. We didn’t even hear the same thing at some point, right? Because all of the information that’s missing from the definition of compassion, the definition of love, the definition of love, the definition of love, the definition of happiness, like all of this stuff that you need to have meaning in the phrasing, in the words, in the sentence, in the proposition that’s laid out, that’s all missing and it’s filled in by your brain. And so your brain fills it in and it’s like, ah, and that’s why often, you know, I look, I’ve been on lots of projects, lots of projects. You get there and it’s like, okay, well, the business owner said blah, blah, blah. And we need these five things. And the software engineer was in the room and said, oh yeah, I totally understand. And, and they, you mean blah. Yes. I mean, blah. Okay, good. We’re all on the blah page. Fantastic. Software and human rights code doesn’t do any of the things that business owner want it. None of them. They’re all using the same words. All agreed. Agreement accomplished, but different interpretations. This happens. All the time, getting people in a room together and getting them to talk and get on the same page in theory. That sounds wonderful in implementation. It doesn’t work. And not all the time, but like 90% of the time you really need a mediator. So one of the things I used to do in the computer industry consulting in particular was because I speak business and I speak tech and not just software engineering. I speak systems engineering, network, cloud, like all of this stuff, right? I can translate between all those things. And so I can take business requirements and put them, here’s what you need to do. Software engineers to meet this. Here’s what you need to do. Network guy. Here’s what you need to do. Cloud guy, et cetera, et cetera. So that translation, that intermediary step is required. You know how you almost certainly can’t reliably and consistently get that is with a dialectic. Now, the exception to that rule is if your interlocutor is also a translator and a good one and has a frame, a third frame to bring into the equation, maybe. So it’s like, wait a minute, what? Third frame? Yes. This is the problem with dialectic. If you only have two people talking, and I’m not saying that’s not useful. I listen to dialectics all the time. They are very useful. That’s still a relativistic frame. It can go horribly wrong. You’ve got person A, person B, and the interpretation of each individual audience person, whether that’s podcast or video or whatever. But these two are only speaking in relation to a third thing that may or may not be stated. So if I use the word narrative, you probably have no idea what I’m talking about. Unless of course you watch navigating patterns because there I outline my definition of narrative, which isn’t my definition, right? It’s a definition I worked on with Manuel and a bunch of others about the four P’s of information, right? And the knowledge engine, another video on navigating patterns. When I use that word and you don’t have the same standard definition that I do or standard understanding better yet, you will almost certainly just statistically get wrong what I’m saying because you don’t have a proper interpretive frame that we can meet at. So I love what Chad was saying the other day on the live stream that we did with Manuel. He was talking about building frames and you said, yeah, but you know what? Building frames is no good because frames need foundations. That’s right. Chad’s right. It needs foundations. So if the foundation of the two people is not fundamentally the same, the interpretation will be off between them. They can use all the same words. They won’t come. Now, if you’re talking about building frames, you’re talking about building frames, you don’t come now. Oh, we can fix that by just defining our terms. No, you can’t actually. You actually technically cannot. You can make it better maybe. But technically you can’t. And this is the cometoid explosion that John Rovecki talks about. Right. But this is also wrapped up in if you don’t have a common enough frame foundation, right, you can’t have a common enough frame. So your foundation has to be close enough. You have to be standing in the vicinity of the same foundation at the very least. Otherwise any frame you build will be crooked. It’ll be off. It won’t be the same. And so now you’re not building the same house. This is a problem. So while I like dialectic and it’s a huge improvement over being solipsistic and stuck in your head, right, no question about it, it’s not sufficient. It’s not sufficient. It’s not going to work. It’s just not enough. So that’s something that’s important to understand and keep in mind. Because I don’t think people understand it and are keeping it in mind at all. And fair enough, it’s hard. It’s hard to deal with. It’s hard to understand. So when people say like, better conversation is going to save the world. I’m like, no, it’s not. We have lots of conversations all over the internet and it’s not working. It’s that simple. It’s not working. It’s just observably not working. It’s leading to more divisiveness. That’s what it correlates with. Why? Because in a lot of cases, people who are wrong or who have a very strong worldview that they don’t want challenged are not going to debate. They’re not going to get into conversation or they’re going to get in a conversation and not move. And that’s fine. And then you could say, well, dialectic is useless. No, it’s not. Don’t aim dialectic at people. Don’t aim dialectic at the person you’re in the dialectic with entirely. Aim the dialectic at the audience. Aim the dialectic at the audience. So I’ll give you an example. Jacob, love Jacob. Jacob’s awesome. He thinks the conversation between rationality rules and Paul Van der Kley were very poor. And I eventually watched it, mostly because Paul put it posted back up on his channel. And I thought it went spectacularly well. Now, if your standard was you didn’t move the other person in the conversation, one little iota, because rationality rules is a crazy person and his self-contradictory statements are going to sustain him forever, which I think is a fair way of thinking about it. Then yeah, it was a total failure. If, however, you can recognize that the odds that the audience heard the message that Paul Van der Kley was sending are less than zero, then it was a success. And I think Paul being Paul, being articulate, really thinking well on his feet in that particular conversation, like much better than, than I think he does normally, we’ll say. Like he was having a good day that day, I think, or he was especially well-prepared or something. He really, he really have dialed in. I think that’s really important to realize the audience, unknown audience, unauditable, you can’t get information out of most of them, probably. You’ll never see them. You’ll never even know who they are. They sort of saw the failures, right? Or they could have seen, or they will get there. And maybe even rationality rules himself will understand the contradictions in his own arguments in that discussion. And maybe that happens, we’ll say, unconsciously over time. So the fact that you didn’t get, you know, ever slammed up when with the person in the dialectic in the moment, that’s OK. Right. So if you’re aimed at the audience, dialectic is really powerful. If you’re not aimed at the audience, it’s less powerful. But I think it’s worth considering that conversation is not just about the audience. Conversation is not going to save this, save us. It’s not going to fix the problem. It’s not going to save the world as I happened. I’m not saying don’t do it. I’m not saying don’t try. I’m not saying stop talking. I’m saying if that’s the one bet you’re making on the table, you’re not going to win that bet. We need more tools. And one of the tools is to get these, the greater component of cultural cognitive grammar. One of the things I thought was really powerful was the discussion between Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris with people there to mediate the discussion. What’s a mediator doing? Well, a mediator is somebody sitting back in this in between the dialectic. Right. And what they’re doing is they’re saying they’re adding context. Right. So they’re saying things that are curious, we’ll say to the audience. And or things that the audience doesn’t have, we’ll say awareness of. So that is helpful because they’re adding a foundation or at least bringing the two people closer together to a foundation where they can be better understood and better understand each other. And they’re able to add contrast. So this third perspective is important. Now, the problem when you go from two perspectives to three perspectives is the following with two perspectives, near direction is enough. But I just explained two perspectives isn’t enough. Right. You need that third perspective. Now you’re into the land of orientation. That’s why it’s navigation and not just move away from or move towards. That’s actually why it’s navigating patterns because the patterns aren’t things where you can go, I’m going to go north or I’m going to go towards the good or I’m going to go away from the bad. All insufficient. All of it. It’s better to think of it as an ocean. It’s better to think of, you know, constantly changing swells or waves. They’re not waves. It’s better to think that you are moving and the frames of reference around you are also moving, not all of them, not completely, but almost all of them. And that’s the problem. And some days you’ll be on the top of that swell and you’ll hit the conversation with rationality rules out of the park. And some days you’ll be in the trough and you’ll be in the ocean. And you’ll be in the ocean. And you’ll be in the ocean. And you’ll be in the ocean. And some days you’ll be in the trough and you’ll make no sense to your audience whatsoever. That’s going to happen. Right. Because we’re not, we’re not stable creatures. And this sort of loops back to what I was saying initially about, we’ll say the fact that we don’t know ourselves well. We don’t know what we’re up to. We’re not really able to pay, we’ll say very good attention to our own interaction in the world and know what we believe, why we’re doing the things that we’re doing, why things happen to us and what our role in those things was versus the role of others. So that’s a big, it’s a big problem. It’s a big concern. And that’s why orientation is important because you have to track three things at least in order to orient. You can’t just track one. You can’t say, I’m going to look at that person and rebel against that or fight whatever their position is. Right. You don’t want to, as my good friend Manuel says, identify against the thing. Right. Not ever, but if you find yourself nearly identifying against something, don’t do that. You’re, you’ve gone astray. That sort of attitude, sort of the, I like to call it the, the Sam Harris formulation of good and evil. Right. Sam Harris sort of says, well, you know, you can know the worst possible bad. No, you can’t. It’s my video, by the way, I’m navigating that. Um, and therefore you can move away from that and you’ll be going towards the good. Not a snowball’s chance in hell. That’s dualistic. Dualism is obviously observably incorrect. Uh, and no, the world is just, there’s lots of neutral conditions for the world. There’s lots of conditions in the world where you’re not moving towards the good or the bad, right. Or, or evil more importantly. Right. And so the ability to orient, to figure out from two other points where you need to go next from where you are is really important. And that’s the orientation. That’s what orientation is all about. It accounts for the three dimensional nature of the space that we are navigating in. Right. And these patterns are not two dimensional patterns. They’re not squiggly lines on a whiteboard, which is all I can manage. Um, but it’s an ever changing three dimensional landscape and there’s a Z axis and it’s really important because when you don’t recognize that the good is struggle, you have to struggle to get to the good. If you’re not struggling, I don’t think you’re going for the good in the moment. Like getting to the good is hard. And if it’s not hard, you’re probably not doing it right. And that’s part of the issue. And if you’re getting it right every time, you’re probably also not doing it right. Or you’re a saint, one or the other, um, you know, or you’re Buddha, whatever. I’m skeptical. Uh, but I’m happy for you. If that’s true, uh, show me the goods cause I’m a show me, don’t tell me, you know, do the magic trick. Um, and you know, you can ask, well, you know, how is this practical? Well, one of them is do the trick. Right. So Sam Harris makes a statement like, Oh, you can know the worst possible evil thing. Okay. Do the trick. Show me the worst possible evil thing, Sam. Go ahead. I’m going to wait here while you try to do that. I know it can’t be done, but go ahead and give it a shot. Right. Do the trick. Oh, you can’t do the trick. Can you? Ah, well, that’s now we’ve got you. Right. It’s, it’s fair. It’s fair to say, do the trick. It’s fair to say, how is capitalism holding you back from having a job right now? It’s fair to say, you think it’s capitalism? Show me. Or you think it’s Elon Musk? Show me. Right. Show me how. Show me the chain of causality that is causing that. That’s all. It’s not that hard. Right. And if it is hard for them, it’s worth it to say, are you sure? Cause it seems hard and it shouldn’t be hard to explain these things if they’re true. Explaining things that are true is easy. Usually not all the time. And that’s important to know because that’s a tool of navigation. You can go to people and say, tell me how that works. And if they can’t, it’s an indication. So Brett Weinstein did a conversation with Robert Wright recently, and Robert was doing basically that. How does that work? Who are these people? Oh, you know, what about these alternate explanations? And every term, Brett Weinstein, who I used to have a tremendous amount of respect for, but seemed to have fallen just as far as Sam Harris recently. Well, couldn’t do it. And he kept making excuses for why he couldn’t do it. Why can’t tell you who the influence peddlers are or how the whole system works. Well, if you can’t tell me how it works, why is it that you think that’s working? Because there’s a contradiction in there. This is how it works. Is it working? Yes. Good. Then you know, that’s how it works. The inverse is also true. This is how it’s working. Is it? How does that work? And if you can’t explain it, I’m not saying you’re wrong, but the odds that you’re wrong go way up. And look, I’m not, I’m not trying to give you like this foolproof answer. I don’t care about foolproof answers. I am a pragmatist. I only care that I’m right most of the time. That’s it. I know I’m not going to be right all the time. I’m a pragmatist and a realist. Like, no, you’re not going to be right all the time. I don’t have to be right all the time. Bad news. You can’t be right all the time. Good news. You don’t need to be. It’s not necessary. So these little tricks show your work, explain to me how it works. Right. Um, what do you mean by that? Right. When you say this, you know, are you a, what, what, what is that? What is that pointing to? Right. Why are you saying that? Why are you saying that in that way? These are all valid questions and it helps. It, sometimes when you’re trying to help a person, a person with a personal problem that they know is a problem that they have some agency over or some effect on. One-on-one is great. Dialectic all the way. Ra, Ra, Sis, Bumba, go, go, go. When the problem with the person is external to them, according to their own understanding, dialectic may not cut it. Um, it may, it’s still worth a try. Right. But having multiple signals from multiple people saying, no, you’re, you’re off the rails, we outsource our sanity, right. Pastor Paul VanDrukley talks about this. Right. So that’s helpful. More than one person, more than one interlocutor. Dialectic isn’t going to save the world. Right. Um, so it’s important to make the distinction between those two states, right. The one state where the people who are interacting on a personal level are doing great job and that’s great if the person you’re interacting with understands that they have agency in the situation and they’re not just being defeated for nihilistic or blaming everything that isn’t them and pretending as though they have no agency in the world. There’s a lot of people are doing that. Uh, I think that’s one of the strengths of Jordan Peterson. So I think there’s a great deal of confusion about that too. Right. You, we fall into this dualism all the time. And this is another mistake that people make. I see it constantly. They’ll list two things and then say, I’m not a dualist. Okay. But you just listed two things. I’m fairly sure. Definitionally. Now you’re a dualist. Right. And then you put them in opposition to one another. Now you’ve created what is possibly a false dichotomy. Well, that’s not better. That’s dualism on steroids. Bad. We need to get out of that, but we need to call each other out for it too. You know, and you can’t, you can’t build a model based on dualism and say, well, you know, I’m always open to the possibility that there’s within the dualism, there’s a third way. No, your model is wrong and it needs to be rethought out from scratch. Just has to happen. It’s not going to work any other way because your brain’s going to fall back into the dualistic model every time. Our brains are lazy. We’re lazy people using our brain as far rationality costs way more energy than you think, and we don’t want to do it because it costs too much energy. Fair enough. I don’t want to do it. And I got plenty of energy most days. So there you go. Um, it’s no good. Uh, we have to reconceive of our bad conceptions. We have to take it seriously. The idea that when we’re stuck in a binary, stuck in a false dichotomy, stuck with a dualism that will lead to those, uh, previous two, uh, examples, that it takes work to get out of that. We can’t just hand wave our way out of it. Right. And another mistake that you see a lot, uh, that’s worth thinking about. You can engage with people like, uh, you know, John Verveke or Sam Harris, or even Jordan Peterson does this sometimes. Any number of intellectuals, right? They will often feed you a platitude. They will say something like, narrative is really important. Okay. And then they’ll move on or, oh yeah. Emanation very important. And then they’ll move right on. And it’s like, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Now you have to look, are they talking about other things more than those things? So if your model of the world doesn’t account for the importance of narrative, how important is narrative to you? I would say it’s not important to you. If your model of the world doesn’t account for spirit, right. Or for emotions or for, I don’t know. Um, maybe, maybe it doesn’t account for macro economic forces, right? Cause it’s purely political model. Uh, yeah, I don’t know what to tell you. Your model is wrong. It’s too, it’s too small. It’s too contained. And so it’s easy to say, well, there are these boxes and we get busted out of these boxes and then revelation happens or whatever, right? Or insight or whatever you want to phrase it. Um, and yeah, I just created insight and, and, uh, revelation by the way. I did that on purpose. So that’s a hand wave. Cause you have to account for it. What it’s worth asking. What made the box that you’re breaking out of? Right. So I was listening to Grim Grizz talk to John Vervicki today. In fact, his little video, which is an interesting video. Um, one of the things that came out of that particular video, and I’m going to have to watch it again and take close notes because I definitely wasn’t, I was busy doing other things and, and, and being pretty shocked by some of the statements that came out of that. But one of the things that I caught was John Vervicki seems to think that parables break you out of the narrative. That’s what makes them so powerful. But the question is, what are you being broken out of? And where is the space you are breaking out into? Because that doesn’t fit within the models that he’s put forth so far, even the platonic model, it doesn’t account for that in quite the same way. And it’s interesting too, cause Plato, I think he went back and forth on this, but you know, wasn’t a big fan of, of methods we’ll say. Right. Plato and Aristotle were not fans of Homer. Um, I think that, and probably for that reason, I think that if your model is not, we’ll say, uh, well thought out, right. If your definitions are a little on the light side, you don’t understand that narrative is a template, right? Is it a pattern or a set of patterns or that construct a good stories? If you haven’t differentiated story and narrative, Peterson hasn’t, Peugeot hasn’t and Vervicki hasn’t, saw that in their last conversation there that they did at Peterson’s house, they kept swapping the words narrative and story. A parable, like a story, points you to a narrative pattern. Now it may do, it may point you to the same or similar narrative pattern as a story, but in a different way. And I would say music does the same thing, points you at a narrative pattern or narrative template or pattern. If you understand things that way, the world makes more sense. And of course I have a video on that. Uh, I did put the link in yesterday. Uh, I put links to the channel and so you can go to navigating patterns and, and find story narrative and archetype. If it’s not accounted for in your model and you’re just saying, oh yeah, narrative is really important. No, absolutely. And then you’re just moving past it and spending all of your time on something else like normative order or a nomological order, or, you know, in, in Peterson’s case, he talks about narrative and then flips to story. It’s like, those aren’t the same thing. That’s why we have two different words. Um, then you, you know, you’re missing it, right? You’re missing the important part. So the fact that the availability of narrative patterns breaks you out of being stuck in a particular story should not be surprising to anybody. Um, and it is paramount that we understand that. And if you understand it, music and story and parable and maybe a number of other things, all point to narrative patterns and help us illuminate them from, we’ll say different points of view or perspectives or angles, however you want to think of it. That’s a much better model because now you have a way to understand the world. And it explains, uh, normative order at the same time, right? Because if everybody’s telling themselves a certain story about the world, or enough similar people, say 80% of the population, let’s go with Pareto distribution stuff here. If 80% of the population is convinced, and I’m not saying this is true. I’m just using this as an example, that the right frame of the world is political. Then the possibility that they’re going to see a spirit moving that politics is zero. They don’t have a frame to explain spirit because they think everything’s in this story of politics. And they justify the story of politics by saying, here’s this event in history when this politician did this. Maybe, maybe that actually happened. And maybe there were no other factors involved. Theoretically possible, highly unlikely, theoretically possible. And look, if you want to, if you want to pick on certain people, uh, and, and say, can you give me an example? Yeah, JFK go to the moon. Absolutely. Uh, big, John F Kennedy fan. Definitely JFK speech was the thing that drove us to the moon. Was that the only thing? Well, no, of course not. But the fact that he pointed at going to the moon, this, that, and his other things, or whatever the quote is. Um, that’s what caused it. That’s what got it done. That was the driving force. That was the thing that injected the spirit into the people to cause the moon landing to happen. There’s very little way around to that. Um, might it have happened without him doing that? And without him getting assassinated? Um, probably not. It’s always possible. Cause these things are not normally outsized, single action cause result sorts of things that can be thought of scientifically. If you want to say something like, well, look, there’s this politician, I don’t know, we’ll just pick a, we’ll just pick a Clinton, you know, caused a bad trade deal, but look, I’m sure Clinton had advisors and maybe they were idiots. Who knows? But he certainly didn’t, didn’t do a good trade deal. Which is one of the things Donald Trump repeatedly pointed out in the 90s. Cause his political position, Trump’s political position has changed exactly zero since, since he’s been published. That’s for sure. He’s been saying the same freaking entire thing for, for however many decades. Uh, and good for him. I mean, what, A plus for consistency. Um, yeah, it’s almost certain that we would have gotten a bad trade deal with a different president and we would have gotten the same bad trade deal or something very similar, unless it was somebody strong willed enough to say, no, this is dumb. I don’t care what my advisor say. And then the negotiations really begin. Right. So you can spin a narrative in the political frame and say politics runs this because here’s an example and here’s an example and here’s an example. And here’s an example. Here’s an example. It will be partly correct, but it will be mostly wrong in most cases. Right. If it doesn’t account for economic factors, if it doesn’t account for the propaganda factors, cause propaganda is real. See Jacob’s excellent video on propaganda on his channel. Uh, yeah, I mean, this is kind of important. Like these, these factors are factors. You can’t put everything on one factor in most cases. Uh, sometimes it’s high propaganda and low economics and low politics. And sometimes it’s high politics and low propaganda and higher economics. And there’s more frames than that. If your frame is not accounting for these things, then you’re not going to understand them. So whenever you have somebody talking out of a limited frame, you’re not going to understand them. So you have to have limited frame. And most frames are limited, right? Not, not, not getting limited framing and you got to have limited framing or cognition’s limited, look for where they’re brushing things off and setting them aside because that’s what’s important. If they’re saying, oh, emanation is very important, narrative, very important. And then you’re moving on to emergence and talking about normal logical order. you know, color me suspicious. Why? Because you’re spending too much time on one thing and making it important and not giving you framing for the other items that might be factors, right? Are they saying, look, the reason why the election went this way and then giving you a bunch of political skew? Okay, what about people being convinced by propaganda, right? Or maybe that’s their frame. They’re just saying, oh, the reason why the vote didn’t go the way I predicted or I thought it should or whatever is because, and then they go on this propaganda from the media, right? Ignoring all the fact that mainstream media is almost dead in terms of viewership and has been for years. It’s been dying for 25 years. I have a video on that too. It’s all for the state of the video. It’s a problem when you’re ignoring these other factors. It’s a problem when your framing is so tight that it can’t account for these other things that are there, that are important. And that’s who you need to look for. I mean, this is how you navigate these patterns. This is, and I know I had a Q and A with Pastor Paul on Friday and I asked him about tolerance. You had a nice little discussion about tolerance. And at one point he said, dude, do the trick, Mark. And I’m like, okay, I love telling you how I do the trick, it’s great. You can do it too, right? And the example that I gave is, you know, John Ravichy uses opponent processing. I think that’s wrong. Just flat out wrong. Why? Because it’s negative. It’s not opponent processing, it’s cooperative processing. Okay, we’re not in an internal battle with ourselves most of the time, that’s not true. It’s not to say that we can’t be, it’s not to say that it never happens. Most of the time, things inside our head, whether they’re, you know, conflicting emotions or conflicting desires or demons or voices or whatever, are trying to cooperate towards a goal. Most of the time, it’s cooperation, most of the time. And the fact that there’s a trade off feels like an opposition, but the only thing that’s in opposition is limitation. We’re always in opposition to limitation. That’s always the case. So one trick is looking for this positive attitude. Where’s the positivity? Where’s the generative nature? Is the framework that this person’s using to understand something an open framework or a closed framework? If it’s an open framework, are they giving sort of enough airtime to ideas that are within the framework, but are important to be discussed, but are not being discussed? Are they giving those enough room? Are you accounting for the difference between story and narrative? Are you just saying narrative story, narrative story, story, narrative? That’s not helpful. Two different words for a reason, right? Oh, narrative order’s really important, but let me tell you about neurological order. And then 20 minutes. No, that’s not, you’re not giving equal time or fair time, maybe not equal, but fair time. You can’t just brush things off. You’ve got to address them. And when people aren’t addressing things within their framework, it’s usually because their framework doesn’t allow for it and they don’t want a new framework. Fair enough. That’s fair, but it’s important to know. It’s important to watch for that and be aware. And again, if you can get more information, if you’re doing a video, it’s better to watch a video on regular speed so you can get all the tunnel information and watch what they’re doing. And I know Vanu Klaas complained about this a few times with the cuts in some of these videos, especially some of the early daily wire ones, where they weren’t showing the face of the person, because one person’s speaking. It’s like, no, we want to see their faces. We want to see their reactions because it can tell us a lot about what’s going on inside their head. It’s really important to know what’s going on inside someone’s head. And we’ve exacted that ability or developed that ability over time, right? But it’s mostly through sight. The listening is A, relatively new, and B, not very reliable. You’re way better off instead of going with even propositions, going with tone, and way better off going with pure body language. And I know a lot of the people on body language talk about this a lot. The body language of a person can tell you a lot more than the words they say. And so video is important. It’s an important upgrade from Facebook, and it’s an important upgrade where you’re just doing text. It’s an important upgrade from social audio, right? The clubhouse, the Discord without video, things like that, right? And then of course the ultimate upgrade is to be in person with somebody, right? And the reason why your affect changes when you’re around somebody is because physicality is a good signal to your brain that there is limitation and that there is a possibility of consequence because it’s what limitation is, right? It’s not all that limitation is, but part of limitation is consequence. When you realize the person in front of you can physically reach you, that makes a difference. That makes a huge, huge, huge difference. Makes a difference to them, and it makes a difference to you. Your communication changes. That’s why it’s not as rich on Facebook. It’s easier to be a troll, right? Text channels are poisonous. It’s hard to understand people with just text because you’re missing a bunch of context, right? You can’t… Famous example, right? How do you convey sarcasm over the internet? It’s very hard to do. In text, it’s nearly impossible. We’ve had to come up with conventions. And they kind of do some of the work, but not all of it. In audio, it’s total. But if you have audio and video, it’s also facial. And so now you have two signals to validate with. Really important. That’s part of navigation. When you’re reading text, it’s very direction. And this is what we don’t sort of realize. We’re swamped in a world of directional signals, like text. Signal, directional, signal, directional. You can make the argument that you can get multiple signals out of text. Yeah, you made the problem worse, not better. Yeah, you can read people’s information in many different ways. That’s a bigger problem, not a smaller problem. And that’s what’s really important. And that is why I think participation in the world, learning that participation, that navigation through poetics is the way out. That’s why I think the church is important. And so, because the church is important and it knows about participation, because it’s its primary mode, I think it’s appropriate to add a church person to the stream. Good evening, Mark. I got about half an hour. Well, it’s lovely to have you join me, sir. What did you think of my, what we call that? I have the perfect solution to the no sarcasm over text problem. We just make it a universal rule, right? Like a cultural standard that we have anything written in the Comic Sans font, not be taken seriously. That’s your solution. Right, and we’ve got just the man to do it. If Elon Musk’s puts that in as an option as Twitter, it’ll become a cultural standard overnight. Have you ever seen Comic Sans font? It’s awful. I have, yes. I have engaged with Comic Sans font. Anyway, that’s me calling out something good and pointing to it, hoping to get people to navigate towards it. I like it, I like it. I have to call it something bad. The stupid chat system wasn’t updating. So now I see all your chats. That’s okay, I was having fun in my stream of consciousness mode there. Seems like, yeah, Sally Jo’s got a good, sans serif, so heresy. Those serifs are put there for your health and safety. Yeah, it’s, health and safety officers. Serifs are health and safety officers, I agree. Yeah, it’s, you know, it’s interesting to me because really I think the thing that’s missing is participation as such. I was really disappointed listening to John talk about participant observation. I’m like, either you’re participating or you’re observing. You’re actually not doing both at the same time. Most people can’t do that at the same time. But there’s a point to it, which is to say, I am participating and paying attention to what’s going on in a way that I can have a valid critique. Okay, but I think saying things like participant observation is a misrepresentation because really, either you’re outside observing what’s going on or you’re inside actually doing it. And the style and type of observation is then different. So I don’t like constructions like that. It reminds me of social justice. Social justice is an impossible term. There’s no point in saying something like social justice. You cannot mean anything. Sure, I mean, I don’t know. There’s just a little, your behavior changes when you’re aware of being observed by another human being, or at least mine does, I don’t know about you. No, no, it does. So there is a little bit something there. Yeah. Yes, you can ask a question, Nico. You can ask all the questions you’d like. I think I’m done with my rant. I ranted for like an hour. I’m glad Father Eric jumped in to save me from myself. That’s all I have to say. You sounded good. Well, that’s good. I’m glad to hear that. Yeah. Oh no, now we have trolls. No, it’s not a troll. It’s another beautiful bald man. Well, that’s the problem. Now everyone’s gonna accuse us of like running the world as a secret bald cabal, the cabal of bald. What’s that joke people make about roads that are busy roads, don’t grow no moss or something like that? Yeah, yeah, grass doesn’t grow on a busy street. Right. And God created a few perfect heads and covered the rest with hair. Father Eric’s the expert in the bald defense league, which is very important. Yeah, when you’re bald at 25, you just gotta learn quickly. I started balding at 16. Yeah, see, that was sort of my story too. Like my hairline at age 15 was like way the hell up here. Like there was no hope. And I knew it. I was like, yeah, whatever. My grandfather. So I already knew that was gonna go. Back then there was no minoxidil or whatever it’s called. And my mom took me to the doctor to see if there’s anything that could be done. And he said, well, if it was a few years ago we could have castrated him, but it’s too late now. That’s a good Jewish practice, isn’t it? I’m glad it was too late. Jacob, I have a present for you. Okay. And I wanted to show you this present because it’s something that’s near and dear to my heart that you will thoroughly enjoy. I assure you. I didn’t quite get around to it. I’ve been very nice to Paul. But if you need to not be nice to Paul then there is a way to do that now within. I just wanted to make sure that you now knew that if you needed to go after a PDK that there was a way to do that in Screen Yard. That’s just his beard flipped upside down, right? Yes, it is. That was my idea. And then I forget who did it. I think it was Jess and somebody did it for me on VOM. And I was like, this is awesome. This is the best. You should create your own brand though. Just to switch between them. Okay, yeah, I’ll have to figure out how to do that. I didn’t quite. You see the dropdown menu where it says Jacob? Yes. Oh, I see. Gotcha. All right, I will fix all that. Yeah, I did this sort of last minute because reasons. No, it’s all good. But when you have different brands you can actually switch brands easily. Yeah, yeah. That’s why I created some brand stuff for Father Eric. Yeah, I’ve been playing with branding I just didn’t get it real. I didn’t really sit down with it yet, but yeah. The brand tab’s pretty good. The brand tab’s pretty good, yeah. That’s part of what I like about StreamYard is when you first start out, you can just run it without even going to the brands tab. And I think you can start easy and then get more and more complex. Hmm. Build your own media empire. That’s somebody’s goal anyway. Yeah, I think, did you hear it from the beginning, Jacob? What did you think of my hour long rant? I was not. Believe it or not, I actually do work sometimes. That sounds awful. I’m sorry to hear that. Should I send flowers or? Well, this is my busy period at work so I actually have to work. Yeah, soon I won’t have to work as much. That could be good or bad. I don’t know which, but yeah, that’s always. No, well, it’s kind of good. I’m actually going back to school. COVID really affected the way the insurance business works and so I am going to, while maintaining my old clients, pretty much, I also gave up this office so things are going to be changing a bit in January. So yeah. Yeah, we’re still suffering the effects of the disruption and now we have to navigate it because we have new patterns. This is true. Yeah. What did you think, Father Eric? Did you hear most of my rant? I heard some of it. I heard some of it. I heard some of it. I heard some of it, yeah. I had thoughts at the time, but they’re gone. They’re gone. That’s terrible. That happens when you don’t write them down. You shouldn’t write everything down. Uh-oh, now we have another illustrious guest to make up for Jacob. Excellent. Damn, well. I’m just here because there was too little hair in the conversation and someone needed to fix that. That’s also an important navigation tool, is having hair, yes. I can only stay for like five or 10 minutes, but I am disappointed with PVK today in his handling of Servetus. It was subpar. Yeah, I heard that one actually. That was an interesting chat. Why did you think it was subpar? Did you disagree with his thesis that it had nothing to do with Calvin and Calvin almost tried to save him but couldn’t? I think that the Ryan Reeves video is a particularly poor video and treatment of Servetus. And so I will lay more blame on Ryan Reeves than VanderKlay, but I think that VanderKlay was too quick to trust him. I think that Ryan Reeves had too much of an axe to grind and maybe it’s easier for me to say that because as someone else pointed out in the comment section, well, Sam, you have an equal state. You have just as much of an axe to grind in that as anyone else. But I think casting Servetus as like the troll or the contrarian is completely unfair. I think that Michael Servetus was actually older and more mature than John Calvin and had actually a much more well-formed theology at that point. And Calvin, if anything, was somewhat in his shadow and reacting to him, I would say. And I think that Servetus’s main motivation was that he felt that the unprecedented openness that the Reformation had allowed for was being closed prematurely and that Calvin was the main person closing the door prematurely. And that he needed to do something to stop that, including inviting his own self-immolation. And I think that in many ways he succeeded. And that I think he knew full well that the parallels between Servetus and Christ and Calvin and Pontius Pilate would be obvious to everyone involved and that it would show a mirror of hypocrisy on Calvin and keep the Reformation going. Yeah, that’s what gets me. It’s like the video and Paul’s treatment of it is, why would this crazy person do this? Oh, I don’t know, maybe he read the gospel? I would also say that Servetus is probably one of the smartest human beings who has ever lived. And that that would all, like he was quite literally a Renaissance man. He like made enormous contributions to math, astronomy slash astrology. Those were still kind of the same thing back then. And medicine and theology and philosophy. And was put to a premature death before even he could finish his career. So the idea that he was just some sort of lunatic fringe dude, I mean, he was kind of fringe, but anyway, and to compare him to Kanye and Pontius, it was, go ahead. The other idea which really bothers me, which is, oh, well, he was, because everybody agreed about it, he was just being contrarian. And it’s like, no, that’s, it wasn’t just being a contrarian. He was in fact pointing at something which Trinitarians are very sensitive about, which is the fact that it’s not in the Bible anywhere. And it wasn’t just the Trinity that he cared about. Another thing that was probably just as contemptuous with John Calvin and himself, and this is actually something kind of similar. This is a weird way in which he might be more similar to like a classical Thomistic theist really than Calvin, is that Calvin’s theology had had to, started to have a really strong bifurcation between God and creation, between God and the world. And that’s part of why Calvin can have such a negative view of humanity and a negative view. And like, the total depravity thing sort of relies upon creation being very distinct and separate from God. And I think that part of Servetus’ theology was a more neoplatonic cascade from God, right? Where creation, it was kind of maybe panentheist, not pantheist, pantheist would be the wrong word. It wasn’t like Spinoza and pantheism, but more like a classical theistic or panentheistic creation as an emanation out from God, and not quite as divine as God himself, but in some sort of more continuity on a spectrum of divinity, right? Or something like that, in a way that really isn’t that different from say Thomas Aquinas or Max the Confessor or other sort of neoplatonically inclined Christians had been in the past. And so that renders a much more positive view of creation and much more positive view of humanity than Calvinists had. And I think that was equally as important as the Unitarian question for Calvin versus Servetus. He was very, very interested in some sort of unification between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. And he saw the Trinity as the barrier that it is in reconciliation with Islam and Judaism. And it really is. I mean, it is the sticking point. And I think he was going back to the type of tradition, which Avicenna, Maimonides, and Aquinas are neoplatonists considered. I know how much Mark loves the term neoplatonists. But yeah, so I mean, the martyrdom of Calvin of Servetus, I keep on calling him Servetus, Servetus, I think really is a seminal thing in human history. And that’s why I refer to him as a martyr. And I think he was doing something very important there. Very important there. And some things are worth dying for. And you know- Do we have a Messiah complex? Maybe a little bit, but so does anyone who feels like they can accomplish something dramatic in the course of history through martyrdom. And he was very extremely self-aware that he was imitating Christ by doing that. And who looks more like the Christian and who looks like the Pharisees, right? And also Paul of Tarsus going to Jerusalem. That’s actually a very, that might even be a better comparison. So are you basically saying that the impact of say John Calvin on the West and the impact of Servetus on the West are more equal than was portrayed in the video? Because that’s what struck me was, what, you know, I’ve never heard of this guy anyway, but what struck me was that imbalance. Do you believe in that? Mark, do you believe in the freedom of conscience for people to seek after the truth and try and find it for themselves and not to be subject to force and coercion in that process? Well, that’s a- A physical force. That’s a worthy question. Physical force, yeah. I mean, the idea of the liberty of religious conscience is a huge, I would say important idea in the West. And that Servetus did more than anyone really to hammer that idea home. And also I think he was very sort of proto-enlightenment in a lot of his ideas about, you know, the goodness of humanity, the positive impact of reason. In the video, they said he was like peak enlightenment. I mean, I think that’s even what Van der Kley said. He was like a peak enlightenment figure in terms of his adoption of enlightenment values. And I was like, well then why would Calvin be bigger than him? That makes no sense. Right, and the enlightenment, the peak of the enlightenment was like the middle of the 1700s. And this is the middle of the 1500s, right? So he foreshadowed- The peak of the movement, but that doesn’t mean that the- Right, and so I’m saying he’s the- The first income first, right? He’s the forerunner of the enlightenment, is really, I think. And that’s where I would say that you can see that his impact is as big as Calvin’s. Calvin had a much bigger institutional impact, but I think that Servetus had a much larger mimetic ideological impact. But that’s a good pattern to sort of explore, right? Is this idea that what happens is there’s an exemplification in my little land. I used JFK’s, we must go to the moon, sort of speech, right? That happened after his death. It didn’t happen while he was alive, right? So the person who exemplified it was JFK, I don’t even, I bet you couldn’t get anybody to argue the other side of that point who was sane, right? Like I think everybody kind of realizes, no, that one speech had a huge outside effect on us going to the moon. And so it’s often the case that the exemplars happen before the movement peaks, because that’s what they’re reaching for. And so- And especially if they can embody it in a dramatic fashion, right? Exactly, exactly, right. And that automatically also tends to help. Or- Whether you’re JFK or Abraham Lincoln or Michael Servetus, right? Or disembodied, or embody it for a while and then go to the grave and then raise or something. Yep, there’s all kinds of options there, I don’t know. So maybe Father Eric can chime in here, but I think the fact that we no longer kill heretics and haven’t is directly attributable to what happened with Servetus and the reaction to it. And if, I mean, just that as a contribution, I think is a huge contribution to humanity. I mean, this is somebody, I do think of him as a Kaddosh, as a holy martyr. And yeah, the dismissive way Paul VanderKlay treated him is- And I’ll blame Ryan Reeves, I’ll blame Ryan Reeves, but maybe Paul should know better. I think so, I think so. Was I supposed to have a response to that? Yes. Father Eric, what do you think of Servetus? Is he sort of a convenient example of how Protestants can be just as bad? Yeah, that’s the trick, I don’t think of him. Yeah, it’s a complicated thing. You almost wonder, I’m just, I’m coming out on a limb here, so if I fall, somebody catch me. You almost wonder if the second Christendom started to fracture, we really needed to stop burning heretics. But 1300, like it’s a different, it’s an entirely different question. See, this is the thing. I think what Servetus demonstrated is that the killing of heretics was never in the DNA of Christianity in the same way that slavery was never in the DNA of the United States. I think when you look at the fundamental values of Christianity, and I trace it back to Judaism. When the Sanhedrin says it is not lawful for us to kill any man, right? So the Talmud talks about the Sanhedrin putting people to death. And in the Mishnah, there’s a discussion, and I like the fact that there is a discussion there. I think it’s Rabbi Akiva who says, a Sanhedrin that puts one person to death every seven years is called murderous. And then another rabbi, I forget who precisely it was, says once in 70 years is called murderous. And I think a different rabbi says, if I were on the Sanhedrin, nobody would ever, they would never put anybody to death. And Rabbi Meir responds, even this causes more death, right? And I think the Mishnah needs to have this idea there that yes, the death penalty, there’s a reason why the Bible teaches the death penalty, but ultimately that veneration for life that is absolutely biblical, absolutely all over the Bible, right? Says, only if we have to. And the Talmud actually says that before the destruction of the temple, the Sanhedrin stopped meeting in the chamber of Hewnstone, which is where they were allowed to pass death sentences because they were like, no, if God needs to kill this many people, we resign, right? And that’s the biblical value. That’s the thing of like, God, if you wanna kill all these people, and it goes back to David saying to Saul, right? God delivered you in my hands, but I’m not going to do anything to you because me reshah yitze reshah, from evil doers come evil act. And this is such a deeply biblical value of being for life. That I think ultimately that putting heretics to death obviously in Christianity, there is a subtext that the trial of Jesus was completely wrong, right? And even when you put it in terms of like John, right? Where he makes it sound like there was a case for blasphemy and the Jews really wanted him to be killed for blasphemy. Or misunderstood blasphemy, I think it’s sort of more true, but go ahead. Well, I mean, however you wanna interpret John, at least Christianity was always against this type of killing heretics. And it took a while, it took, I think too long for that message to be integrated into the church and revealed in Christianity. But so when people point out the contradiction between the people who are so pro death penalty and pro life, right? And lots of people point to the Catholic church and say, come on, there’s a real anti death penalty there is a real anti death penalty feeling within the church. I mean, now I’m speaking out of my ken, but and I think that’s essentially Christian and essentially Jewish. Yeah, that sounds right. I mean, the pattern is definitely there for sanctity of life, right? Except under extreme circumstances. And that’s a theme that’s definitely present in the biblical texts for sure. And that’s the participation that we need to have. Well, I’m not gonna be advocating for anybody to be burnt at the stake or executed anytime soon. So I was just, I’ll take care of it for you. My papal executioner. Well, and that was it. That’s Paul Vanderfleet’s point, right? Is that the church almost never killed anybody was usually the government officials that did the work. They were using the church to justify it. But then a lot of people point out, man, in the middle of the inquisition, a lot of people committed blasphemies, maybe out of the hands of the government and into the hands of the inquisition because the inquisition would treat them kinder. Like it says some of these, oh no, it’s the Spanish inquisition and wrong. It’s like, no, it’s actually the opposite. You’re just in line. If you were Christian, the Spanish inquisition treated you nicer. Yeah, well, maybe. And maybe on average, they treated everybody nicer. I don’t know, but it’s certainly not. I have to say the Spanish inquisition was partially particularly bad, the Vatican itself was always a moderating force in holding back a lot of the worst things that the individual, there were plenty of priests. And this actually got me like, what’s the name of that cardinal? So today when Grimm Grizz was talking to John Verbecky, he mentioned something of Cuso, like I forget what his name is. There’s some theologian that was like, he required the Jews under his, he was a bishop or something to wear stars in Germany. And it was actually the Vatican that moderated a lot of the really, I think the worst parts that people blame the Catholic Church for. So real quick, I have to go work, but my take is thumbs down. The Catholic Church in Germany, okay. Thumbs down, yeah. If you read about it, Mark, you’d agree with me, I think, probably. Peace out. Peace out, gentlemen. Good to see you. Yeah, I think I heard that too. People have a tendency to, and I ran into this earlier today, actually on the Discord server, people have a tendency to blame institutions instead of individuals as a way of not calling out people for doing bad things. And it’s like, oh, I don’t wanna confront that person. So instead I’m gonna blame the institution they’re part of for making them the way they are. It’s a very materialistic view, and I think a lot of people are stuck in that materialistic view. And I actually tweeted about this earlier today on what I knew was, what about Vandukele’s tweets or something. It’s basically like, we keep confusing the person, right? And the actions of the person with the actions of the institution. And it’s all well and good to blame an institution, but usually it’s a person or people that we need to blame. And you always have to, I mean, if you’re being scientific, you have to look at treatment versus control, right? And people have this idea that like, oh, the institution corrupted the human beings, and this is Rousseau’s completely vacuous idea, which is just backwards. Like, no, the human beings outside of the institutions, it’s not the institutions that have been corrupting human beings, it’s the institutions that have been civilizing human beings and the noble savage, like, sorry, the Aztecs were brutal murderers, and you can’t, not only that, when you look at the militant atheists in Russia, look at the militant atheists. Like when atheists say nobody killed anybody in the name of atheists, it’s like… Yeah, it’s just a complete lie in all kinds of ways, but like, just look at the militant atheists, right? That was their name, and in the name of atheism, they murdered people. So like, it’s just a complete lie. Yeah, it’s a complete lie, but even just in spirit, right? The fact that atheism isn’t a thing you can point to, it’s just an identification against, means that, yeah, you can’t do it in the name of atheism, because you say atheism and I say atheism, they can manifest as different things, so they wouldn’t be the same thing, and therefore it’s ridiculous. The question is, and John Verbicki actually did a video where he said this, did non-religion kill more people than religion? The answer to that is yes, by the way, by numbers. Now you can argue percentage ratios over time, whatever, I don’t care, but by numbers, it’s important to note technology and science has killed more people than religion has. Yeah, and this argument, the institutions attract corruption. Yeah, knives, you know, murderers really like knives, and yeah, it’s the exact same argument, let’s disarm ourselves because people could use things badly. Right, and yeah, and then you can blame like incentives, but the problem is incentives aren’t going away and you can’t do anything about them. So if that’s your source, then you’re screwed, and if you’re screwed, that’s fine, but then shut up, because if you think, because you’re nihilistic, if you’re talking about something you cannot change, then fine, but don’t talk about it, just resign yourself to it, submit and shut up, really, because nobody needs to hear your nihilistic garbage that’s self-referential. If that’s really the case, if it really is, you’re not fixing it anyway, and neither is anybody else. So we can’t be incentive, because what are we drawn to, and what is it that we’re doing when we’re not confronting individuals who are doing bad things? We’re destroying intimacy, because part of intimacy is saying my relationship to you is corrupted, whether that’s through an institution, but not because of, right, or through my personal relationship, or through an unknown relationship, because I don’t know you directly, but you’re having an impact on my life. It doesn’t matter. You are not taking responsibility for the connectedness between you and the thing that is conflicting with you in some way, and that’s why I think intimacy crisis is a better way to think of meaning crisis. Okay, I wanna ask you about the bust up on Facebook, not Facebook, on Twitter, about Jordan Peterson’s proposal to get rid of anonymity. I didn’t read his whole proposal. I read his justifications for getting rid of anonymity. What was his proposal? Well, the thing is, part of the thing is, I don’t think he’s actually making a solid proposal. He’s pointing to a problem, and part of what I don’t like is there’s been a lot of people who are, well, the anons have lost their mind, and so there’s been a lot of people who, including Dr. Rollergater, who is kind of a friend of mine, and he thinks Peterson is very wrong, so the sticks hex an hammer. He is wrong, he is wrong, Jacob. So, I mean, I can comment on that. Look, let’s assume that you believe that material moves the world, right? Is the primary mover of the world. Not that you only believe in material, but that material is the primary mover of the world. Then, in my book, that’s the best definition of materialism you could possibly come up with, right? What you’re gonna do is you’re gonna say, all right, what we have to do is label everything. Pretty sure somebody wrote a book about why that’s bad, but I could be wrong. Anyway, so, and then you’re gonna try to account for everything. That might be in that same book about why that’s bad. All right, and then, right, and then you’ll have control, and the problem will be gone, okay? But again, this is the same problem I was talking about with if the problem is incentives, and you can’t get rid of incentives because you can’t, then what are you talking about? Why are you bitching about this? You can’t fix it anyway, and neither can anybody else. And I think that’s the problem. If you’re stuck in a materialist frame, you are going to meet the end of that frame, and you can say, well, the anons are losing their minds. Yeah, because their argument that justifies their worldview got destroyed because it’s wrong. Like their arguments are dumb, which is not to say there’s no place for anonymity, but you have to admit that on balance, it is bad because it allows the nature of people to come out more easily, and most of your nature tends to be bad rather than good, unless you’re a saint. I just don’t think you’re a saint, but maybe you are. But that’s the problem with these constructions, and Peterson, I love Peterson, but he’s a materialist. This is one of the problems. Senior Saboya says, I like sticks, okay, but he’s not a deep thinker. I don’t know if he’s not a deep thinker. There’s a lot of audience capture and confirmation bias in this following, I would agree with that. Spatch says the place where anonymity needs to be eliminated in our society is academic peer review. Maybe, yeah, that might be good. Well, just reducing the anonymity would be sufficient. And I think that you can’t say zero, because zero is a funny number to quote Peterson, but I think it’s important that we try to minimize it. I think that’s actually important. And if people wanna have anonymous communities and see how they work, go right ahead. I can tell you that trick’s been tried, and I’m not joking, at least a thousand times on the internet. And there aren’t a thousand anonymous communities on the internet anymore. That should tell you something about that, the success level of that strategy, which is roughly zero, by the way. And it can last for a long time. There’s no question about it. But ultimately, anonymity is the statement of zero intimacy. And with zero intimacy, you have zero connectedness. With zero connectedness, you have zero meaning. Actually, anonymity is unbalanced bad. I’m not advocating for trying to make it zero, but I think reducing it and having the goal of reducing it is really important. Anonymity asymmetric information is everywhere in biology as a defense mechanism. That’s really weird framing to me. I think it’s not asymmetric information. Anonymity, again, is a way to attempt to deny your connectedness to the world. And that’s a problem. So is it asymmetrical? Yeah, but lots of things are asymmetrical. So you can’t just use that as a bucket in that case. So that’s the problem that I have with that. I think you’re making a very important point. I don’t think it’s clear the point that you’re making, so I’m gonna try to reiterate it. The people who go online and be an anonymous self are larping and divorcing themselves from their physical body. And I think for me, I think that’s the big problem with how people act online is it’s not embodied. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that’s pretty much all I have to say. Do you think that’s the same point you’re making or no? Yeah, I mean, I think it’s similar anyway, right? Like, yeah, there’s an important way in which you are denying participation by being a person who is, deliberately disconnecting in an important fashion from the people around you. And again, I’m not saying zero, but it’s a dangerous thing to run around and we’ll say enforce anonymity, right? Because the more of it you have, the less connectedness you have in your community and the less connectedness you have in a community, the less able that community is to cohere, to make meaning, to be useful, et cetera, et cetera. And that’s really the problem. Yes, this is an open stream. There is a link pinned at the top and yeah, if people wanna join. Yeah, I forgot to pin links up, but that’s okay. I needed my hour ramped anyway. Well, you can’t pin them on my channel anyway, but I pinned what you put on my channel. Most people are watching on my channel. I noticed. Hello there. Hello there, I need to close some windows so I can open some windows. Yeah, the thing about anonymity and so on is that the public space that we’re getting into now with the internet, it’s like the things that you say are, you can expose yourself with your words to like thousands of people online all at once and you don’t realize it. And sometimes certain ideas can be very controversial to the point of isolating someone from getting a job, from getting. Yeah, that’s possible, but then don’t do it. That’s possible, but then don’t share those ideas. It’s really not that, you don’t have to participate in the large audience. So the rules about I’m in a large audience is already a choice that you make. Are you trying to get rid of all trolls or are you saying trolls are altogether bad? Peterson is trying to get rid of all trolls for sure. And I’m saying that’s bad, which is reasonable, but I’m also saying, look, if I’m thrown into an audience without my approval, yeah, you need an amenity, but that isn’t the world we’re living in. That doesn’t happen. Like you don’t have to engage in the large audience. You don’t have to be online at all. Like that’s just not required. So you’re talking about two things that aren’t equal in some sense. And that’s my argument against is that you don’t need to engage with the large audience and therefore you don’t need to be anonymous. And I’m still not saying zero, right? But I am saying that we have too much anonymity. And when we do that, people will do things which they know have consequences because those consequences can’t come to them. And so that means that on average, more bad behavior will be around on the internet. And that’s the problem. Because I look at something like 4chan where it’s pretty much the wild, wild west. And I understand where you’re coming across. And I think we have these degrees of networks where there’s anonymity and there’s openness. And for me, I think there’s a good reason for all three of these sort of degrees. Like they all have their place. They have, you have, you need to have a place for the trolls. You need to have a place for, yeah. We’re in zero disagreement at this point. Because again, I didn’t say get rid of anonymity, right? I didn’t say that. Like I said, the problem is we have too much of it and reducing it as a goal is a good thing. And I disagree with Peterson’s formulation entirely because he’s a materialist and he doesn’t realize it. And fair enough, a lot of people are materialists and they have no idea that they’re treating the world as though the things around them, the platforms they’re part of, the government or whatever is the thing controlling them rather than them having some control over those things. Well, I’m not certain spiritualists altogether. I mean, I am a spiritualist, by the way. I’m Christian, Protestant. I’m not sure we have the best answers for everything either, so. No, and it’s not about the best answers, right? But it is about allowing for potential and possibility. And I think that, I’ll address this question here, is anonymity a problem on a network that has no authority? Well, it’s especially a problem there. And it’s especially a problem there for very good reason. And that reason is that there are no consequences. And so when you add too much anonymity into a network, what happens is authorities can’t emerge. And so it never grows into anything. It stays a bubbling cauldron of chaos. Now, I’m not saying that that’s bad and should be avoided in all cases forever. There’s a place for 4chan in the world. But it’s not generative, and you can’t use it as a model to build things because it cannot build things. And that’s part of the problem. I would disagree with that point. I think that it can be generative. It just can’t be generative within that context. It has to emerge out of 4chan to higher places where people have less anonymity. The critiques of it, the things that come out of it can have positive effects. But those critiques in and of themselves are not generative. And look, I’m sympathetic to the idea that most people have never had anyone be completely brutally honest with them about anything for their entire life, right, ever. I’m sympathetic to that argument. The problem is that we need to fix that correctly and not through anonymity because then the problem gets worse. And that would be the issue. I would say that nobody actually has had contact with brutally honest, honestness when it comes to themselves. Right. Well, but on average, but on average, when people are anonymous, they lie. On average. So it’s not like anonymity doesn’t lead to honesty. That connection’s not there. On average, people lie. People lie to each other’s faces too. On average, they don’t do that to each other’s faces. This is in the research. It’s much harder to lie to somebody that you have to face because there are consequences. And it’s worse than that. Just putting an image up in your room of somebody looking at you makes you lie less anonymously online. Like it’s a whopping effect. I mean, that effect is a whopping effect. The fact that having an external force, even if it’s not, we’ll say another person or a real person, actually works, which is amazing. And this is something materialists can’t account for very well. Right, it’s not to say that they deny it, but they don’t have an accounting for it in their worldview. And that’s part of the issue. Well, it’s also, I mean, financial incentive too. I mean, many of these networks are structured around financial incentive. So, I mean, obviously people are not investing in 4chan. I don’t think they’re structured around financial incentives. I think those are independent of the goals. Like almost nobody actually ever does anything strictly for monetary reasons. A lot of people have good ideas and they want to try to make them work monetarily. And most of the people that try that actually fail. Right, it just is what it is. And you can see this, like if you watch a show like Kitchen Nightmares, that was a great show. He’s still watching that show, right? Or you watch, there was a show on CNBC called The Profit. That’s a great show to watch. Or Bar Rescue, another good show. You see these guys go to small businesses and they say, look, I’m a top guy in my field. I know what I’m doing. I can tell you how to make your business profitable. You called me because your business is broken. Almost none of these guys adopt that stuff right away. They are always resistant, always. Why? You’re in trouble. You’ve called somebody because you’re in financial trouble and they’re telling you, I can make you money and make this business profitable and you’re resisting. Why? Because people aren’t motivated by money on average. This is not true. It’s all over the place. Well, it’s like the guy’s taking a mirror to the person’s face and showing them the problems. And usually that’s the very first thing that happens when someone puts a mirror in your face and shows you all your flaws as you go. You start denials, like the first realm of it. I don’t think that’s what’s really going on though. I think that when you start a bar or you get into the restaurant business or you try to start a small business, you have an idea in your head about how you want to do that and how you want it to work. And the fact that you can’t make money doing that, but the fact that you can’t make money doing that is hard on you because you thought you understood the world and they’re saying you don’t understand the world and here’s what you have to change. And that’s very hard on people, but it also is the example that says they weren’t motivated by money first or they wouldn’t have gotten into that situation. Yeah, but it’s a mirror showing them their own flawed thinking. That’s what I’m saying. I don’t, I mean, look, again, I don’t think it’s showing them their flawed thinking. I think it’s just, you know, in all these shows, they’re just showing you alternatives. So it’s not like they’re saying you’re a bad person or you’re, right, but those people want things to work the way they want them to work, like we all do. And that’s not a matter of incentive. That’s a matter of being ideologically possessed by our own fantastical ideas in our head instead of looking out at the world and saying, what objects to me? What are the things that are giving me signals that maybe I’m going in the wrong direction? And that’s the solipsism, right, that is causing this problem. We’re just ignoring all of these signals that we really need to pay attention to. And it’s nice to have somebody out there if that’s what you want, but most people don’t want that. Do you ever think you can pay too much attention to- Yeah, it happens all the time. People get focused in on the wrong thing. People focus too much on their flaws, kind of like analysis paralysis. And then they’re paralyzed into inaction. They say, oh, I can’t do that because I haven’t learned this, or I can’t do that because the last time I did it, I failed. I can’t do that because when I started to learn it, I made a lot of mistakes. You’re supposed to make a lot of mistakes. And you’re learning the dumb excuse, right? And that’s the problem. People get paralyzed in focusing on the negative. And this is what I was talking about earlier. Focusing on the negative is dangerous. And there’s no reason to focus on the negative. You can focus on the positive. And that actually helps. It doesn’t solve the problem necessarily, but it makes everything better anyway. And yeah, I’m in no disagreement there. I find that there was something you were mentioning earlier about sort of talking to other people and sort of picking up on clues as to whether people actually mean things when they say them. I just find that we can be over-analytical of others, and we could be over-analytical of ourselves trying to play detective sometimes. And I’ve been victim of this. I’ve been a huge victim of this because I was trying to pick up on social cues. And you can be like Kanye West, who sort of loses touch. He doesn’t understand the social cues anymore because he’s reading too much into them. They’re out of context. I don’t think so. I mean, I think Kanye is not able to pay attention to the person in front of him because he’s not able to pay attention to social cues. He’s paying attention to cultural cues. I’m sorry. I think Kanye is paying attention to cultural cues in the world, not social cues. And those are different. Well, I mean, his world is cultural cues because he’s surrounded by everybody. I mean, he’s kind of in his own hierarchy bubble. Right. Well, then we all are. And yeah, look, I mean, you can over-focus on anything. There’s no like, oh, you can over-focus on the good. And then you’re too tolerant. And then you let corruption happen around you. You do nothing about it. That’s part of the problem that we have now. I mean, my vision, at least my theory of thinking things, is like we need to sort of understand harmony, kind of like the way music is played. Kind of like having an idea. But what is harmony? Harmony is a pattern where things are intelligible. And there’s not one harmony. That’s the real problem is that there isn’t one. And this is where people get wrapped up. They want one answer that solves a bunch of different problems. And that isn’t going to happen. That’s why it’s navigation and not direction. If it were direction, San Maris would be right. But San Maris isn’t right. And so it doesn’t work. You need to be able to navigate. And when you’re navigating, let’s suppose you’re sailing a sailboat, which is something I used to do quite a bit, you have to understand the change in the wind, the effect of the waves, the effect of the current, where you are in the boat based on where the sails are. There’s a bunch of things you have to track. And you can’t give somebody a procedure or a set of propositions to sail a sailboat. You can give them that to start them off learning how to sail. But they cannot learn how to sail using near propositions and procedures. That isn’t going to work. It’s not going to happen. And you can see that. That’s why people who are autistic have a problem navigating the world. Because you cannot give people just propositions and procedures and expect them to be able to navigate the world. Because the world needs poetic navigation in order to be participated in well. Well, I also kind of wonder, is there a place for the autistic people, though? Well, there’s lots of places for them. But that’s not the issue. The issue is you cannot solve that problem by merely engaging in a way where you’re giving them propositions and procedures. And the real problem is that we are privileging propositions and procedures over every other way of relating to the world. That’s because it’s computers. That’s why computers work. Yeah. Because it’s the way computers work. Well, no, I think it’s more fundamental. I mean, I think it’s materialistic, right? Where you want certain structures to cause certain outcomes reliably. And to some extent, they can. But they don’t because people can ignore structures. And if you ignore the structure of a building, you can drive through it and kill people. That happens. That happens. If you ignore the rules of not going to school with a gun, you can shoot people. There are these ways around it. Structures are not the solution to the problem. And the navigation of the world, the participation in the world, is all about actually participating in the world. But not to say throw out propositions and procedures. Nobody is saying that. But they’re insufficient tools to be able to navigate. You need more than that. There are great starting points. And you need starting points. And they’re dogmatic when they’re starting points, for sure. But you need to start there to move past there. You can’t move past something until it exists, until it’s been pointed out, until it’s attended to, until you actually interact and see it. Once you’re able to move into it, then you can move past it. Well, what’s your ideal past of all this? What do you mean? Well, you pointed out that the structures and all these structures are something that people need to see past. Well, they don’t even see past the structures. No, structures allow us to cooperate efficiently. OK. But what direction are you saying needs to, or where do we need to navigate from that point? Well, the ultimate T loss is the good. So if your ultimate T loss is the good, that’s the best you can hope for. Are you going to perfectly navigate to it? No, almost certainly not, because you’re a flawed human, like all the other flawed humans that have ever existed. But if you have the good in mind, if you have a positive attitude, if you’re trying your best in every moment to aim at the good, then when you navigate these structures, things will go better for you on average, which is not to say that you can ignore evil. You still have to call it out. But your aim needs to remain towards the good. And then when you’re navigating all these structures, things will go better for you. Look, years ago I was doing support at a bank. And there was a really annoying guy on the floor. Everybody hated him because he was just a jerk. He was a jerk. He was a jerk to all the support people who were supporting him and making his job possible. And all those poor people knew him, and all those poor people knew he was a jerk, and nobody liked him. But I didn’t care. I’d go up and talk to him. I didn’t care. So one day, he called me over, and he said, I don’t have a work problem, but I’m hoping you can help me with something. And I was like, what? This guy’s never going to ask for help for anything. He just calls us up and says, maybe he’s broken. It’s your fault. No, it’s shit like that. And so what happened was, he said, I have a monitor, and it has a busted pixel dead center in the screen, and I just can’t deal with it. And he said, I called up the company, and they said they will not replace a monitor for a single dead pixel. He said, but I can’t deal with it. I don’t know the expensive monitor. I don’t know what to do. So I said, all right, here’s what you do. First, when you call the person up, you have to be very nice and very polite and ask them how their day is. Because when you call them up, you think you’re the first person that they’re talking to with a problem. Meanwhile, they’ve been dealing with people all day long. And he went, oh, yeah, that kind of makes sense, right? And I said, and then you do what you did with me. I’m hoping you can help me and just explain the issue. I said, and then just be understanding and very calm and polite. So he did that. The tech person said, replace the monitor for him. RMA did for him. And said, if they ever call you on a survey, you have to say whatever it was. You have to say 10 dead pixels or whatever. Doesn’t matter. And he was very thankful. And from that day forward, he was nicer to all the tech people, all of them. And so just having that positive attitude and aiming towards the good, and I mean, he was desperate, and he knew to call me because I was more tolerant of him and less short with him than everybody else, right? But then as a result of that interaction, right? He was not, not only did he get what he wanted, but he was nicer to everybody else too, because he realized that tech support people actually have a lot of power. And they control a lot of things. And they can make your life very easy or they can make your life very hellish. And once you understand that, your life goes better, right? I mean, it doesn’t necessarily fix everything. But it’s important. Yeah, you’re speaking. Yeah. But it doesn’t fix, but people want a universal solution that’s gonna be consistent and reliable. And you’re not gonna get that because it’s not the world we’re in. It’s something like original sin somehow, I don’t know, or fallen world or how do you want to cast it? It’s very mysterious. If only somebody had written that down in a book a couple thousand years ago, maybe that would help us. But we probably wouldn’t read it anyway. You know what? I bet if we did read it, we would totally misunderstand it. And you know what? I bet even if we understood it perfectly, we wouldn’t conform. We wouldn’t do it. That’s what I’m betting. I don’t know, it’s all hypothetical. I don’t think that anybody can understand it perfectly unless they’re perfect, but. I don’t know. We don’t have such a book. It’s okay. Yeah. At least my experience, I divulge this to pretty much everyone. I’m bipolar and I’ve had experience with bipolar syndrome. So talk about in balance and out of harmony. But in one of my, was it not a full manic? It was a hypomania. I noticed this kind of like not judging anybody. And I would kind of, it created an air of acceptance around me when I did it, but I couldn’t maintain it forever. It was impossible. But it was just basically don’t judge anybody and accept them for who they are. And you can find this way in which you can communicate a lot easier. And it actually calms everyone down by calming yourself down too. I couldn’t maintain it though. Well, it’s hard. It’s hard. So there’s a treatment that I have for anxiety. I call it Zen sweeping. I can call it whatever I want. And what you do is you do an action. It can be sweeping. Sweeping is a good one actually. You do an action that’s very regular with your body. And what that does is that, and it can be the dishes, it could be cleaning, it can be anything where you’re physically moving. But what it does is your body sends a signal to your brain saying everything’s fine. And then even though you’re anxious in your brain, the body’s countering that signal with, no, no, no, we know what we’re doing. We’re sweeping. We know how to sweep. The body’s very happy. And then the mind goes, oh, well, the body’s very happy. So that’s good. So you’ve got a counter signal that says, you don’t need to be anxious so much. And then over time, when you do that when you’re anxious, it actually brings down your anxiety. That’s how I treated my anxiety when I was young. That was very helpful. And it’s so easy, right? It’s one of those easy sort of practices if you wanna get into practices in John Breveke. That’s a better practice, I think, than most of the ones that he talks about because it’s a very simple thing to engage in. I think our biggest problem is we just need to get away from our machines. Well, yeah. Talk to people. Or people, yeah, yeah. Interact in the real world. Not just people, nature. Like just savoring nature, like appreciating nature. I mean, where I’m sitting right now, if I look up here, if it weren’t dark out, I could see my garden. Because there’s a window, right? There’s screens here, there’s screens here. There’s no screens here, it’s outdoors. And then if I go out that door, there’s a big picture window under my pot. Like, this is deliberate. This was chosen deliberately with forethought and knowledge. I knew what I was doing. I knew what I needed to have. I had it in my last house, too. Like I had a window over my small yard. But it’s better than, with nature and a tree and the whole nine yards, it’s better than nothing. And then I have 12 acres of land, I can go for a walk anytime I want. So, I can go walk my dam and walk around my pond and stuff. All of that is available to me. And yeah, doing that is important, even if you’re not getting out with other people, which you should also do. But yeah, being able to disconnect from the created world, the created and highly controlled world online is really important. Because if you don’t do that, you won’t know how to navigate the world that you didn’t create that you don’t control. And those skills will atrophy. It’s not a development plateau. You can’t say, oh, I know how to people. And now I can people at any time. And then you go 10 years in your, it’s like riding a bike. In your video game machine. And the next thing you know, you’ve forgotten how to people. And that happens, I’ve seen that happen to people. It happens to old people in particular. If you haven’t been around old people, man, some of them when they get trapped in that, and sometimes it’s entirely their fault, and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes their family abandon them. It’s really tough on people and it’s not good for them. Well, my answer has been going to church quite a few times. And that’s helped for me. And that’s a lot of people bring that. And I play D&D with them at church. Yeah, well, any interaction is better than none, right? And I think hiking and going out, yeah, I’m, if there were a way to get people not focused on, these negative circles that just spin online, because people are trying to, what they’re trying to do is express themselves and make their identities known, because they feel insignificant, because they feel kicked down or whatever it might be. And the reaction is to, is to tell as many people about their plight or whatever it might be. And what they get back is far more negativity. And I think that’s- Well, or it may seem that way to them. I mean, part of the problem is when you’re trying to force yourself onto the world, you’re gonna meet with resistance because you’re using force, right? And sometimes you just need to let the world in. Like you just need to let the world in. You just need to drop your shields and let those interactions happen. Because a lot of times you just reject, we reject bids for connection all the time. And that’s part of it. And you have to to some extent, right? You can’t accept them all, that’s overwhelming, right? And that’s the problem is people don’t understand that. And a lot of that is about interfacing with uncertainty. Like we always have these pulls inside of ourselves. Some of them are intuitive, some of them are just raw emotion, right? Some of them are linked to our physicality, right? So if we have a cold, we don’t feel well, everything has a negative affect, right? Whatever, it doesn’t matter. Recognizing that though is important because, and I’ve got a video on this, I’m navigating patterns versus three frames, right? There’s you with yourself, right? That can be somewhat fixed with meditation and contemplation, right? There’s you with nature, right? Get outside, go for a walk, knock on a tree, right? And then there’s you with others. And you need to cultivate all three of those types of relationships all the time, otherwise they atrophy and die. And that’s part of the problem. Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there. Yeah, well, I like the three frame model. I did not see the movie pie. So I don’t really know anything about it. I mean, I heard a bunch about it, but I didn’t see it. So I can’t offer my interpretation of what went on in that movie. It should be good though. Well, it was a nice chat with you. And I mean, this is a, I feel like I benefited from it. And I hope everyone else did. Take care. See you. Yeah, good times indeed. There’s a, it’s interesting what people find sort of seminal to them, right? Music, different bands, different movies, and what influence does that have on you? Cause sometimes you don’t know. A lot of people like the Matrix. I love the Matrix. The Matrix is a great movie. But there’s a lot of really, really bad signals in the Matrix, really bad impressions, really negative sorts of ways of relating to the world. Right, one of the deep signals in the Matrix is that I’d rather live in squalor in the sewers of a dead city, running away from the world. I’d rather live in the sewers of a dead city, running away constantly from the oppression of the system, than cooperate with the system and live inside it in relative comfort and safety. That’s worth thinking about. Cause maybe people do, and maybe that’s why they’re tearing down the world. Right, because secretly they’d rather be alone as an individual living in squalor than they would having a generative experience. And that’s part of the problem. The movie sounds terrible. A computer to power to try to predict the stock market. That sounds awful. Why would you do that? It’s this obsession with monetary reality. And that’s the materialism sneaking in there. Whenever anybody puts anything in an economic frame, you can be pretty sure that they’re a materialist. And I think a lot of what we’re seeing when people go insane, their worldviews are no longer working for them. They’re no longer providing them safe predictions of the world. And when your worldview is no longer providing you safe predictions of the world, you tend to go literally insane. Like that causes a degree of insanity. And it’s pernicious, cause we don’t necessarily realize at the top that that’s what’s happening. Right, we think the world has gone nuts. Not us, cause our system was predicting things quite nicely until it wasn’t. And then it never happened. Until it wasn’t. And then nothing, like all the predictions fail. And so I think that plays into this question of identity that Sally’s sort of bringing up here, right? That people try to assert their identity, right? You kind of can assert your identity. And I think that’s what the animatity is about, right? The idea that you can force your identity on other people and that you have it for yourself is very resilient, as we were talking about earlier. And it’s wrong. Identity has to be negotiated. I think Peterson talks about this. You negotiate your identity. And when you’re not negotiating your identity or your worldview or your model of life, you’re running into a problem. The problem that you’re running into at that point is the problem of not being able to cooperate, to participate in the world with others in a generative fashion. You can still participate, but you can’t participate in a generative fashion. And that’s the issue. You need to be able to be generative. And you don’t have a single identity, right? You have multiple identities. You need to be able to manage those multiple identities. That I think is what ethics is for, is managing multiple identities, not only your own, but other people’s as well. Like there are other people in the world and ethics doesn’t make any sense if it’s only about you. And so if something’s not only about you, how much can you know about it by just introspection and looking at your own life? I would argue very little, right? Not nothing, but very little. You really need to explore things like ethics and morality in a larger frame. Because that larger frame is the thing that enables you to participate generatively with others. And so whenever you get into these solipsistic, oh, just meditate, you’ll be fine, sorts of things, I don’t think that’s gonna work the way you think it’s gonna work. And you can only negotiate so much of your identity. Like very few people pick their own nickname. Everybody knows this, right? Everybody who’s a kid knows this. You don’t get to pick your own nickname usually. It’s important to realize, right? And I think the big problem is this is what people are doing. They’re asserting their identity to give themselves status and it doesn’t work and then they get confused or it works for a while and then it stops working. Because status isn’t something you can give yourself or others. It’s something that is conveyed through activity participation in the world. Now you can temporarily give people authority and temporary leadership and temporary status, but it doesn’t last. These things are negotiations. They’re negotiations and that’s what we don’t like. We don’t like to negotiate, we don’t like to have a conflict, right? We don’t wanna go through all the trouble, but you don’t have a choice. The world you’re in is the world you’re in. And identity establishes your status within a frame, right? Like if you’re the father, father is your identity when you’re in the family. What does that mean? Well, that’s different. But your status is conveyed not just by your identity, but also by your interaction. So if you don’t respect your father when he’s telling you something about a subject that you know more about than he does, then it’s not a one-to-one relationship. It’s not a one-to-one relationship. And that’s the problem. And we all, I think we all need status. We all need to know where we are because status is a measure of where you are in a hierarchy. Status is a measure of what your influence is on the people and the things around you. It’s inevitable in some sense and it’s fine. Yeah, I think that my problem with pro-conflict resolution is not all conflicts are resolvable. And this is where I’d be confused. I talked about this with Catherine on the intimacy crisis track I did on navigating patterns. And part of intimacy is accepting conflict that cannot be resolved. Like at the end of the day, I love everybody watching. However, I’m disagreeable and we should all go away because you all conflict with me. But in order to get the advantage of being able to interact with you all, I have to accept that we’re gonna have disagreements, that people are gonna say things that I disagree with, that I have a big problem with, right? That I have to address, right? I’m gonna have to accept that not everybody knows what I know, right? Or sees things the way I see them, right? And in order for me to do this and interact with you, I could check comments off and all that stuff. But in order for me to do this the way I’m doing it and comments on letting people into the stream, et cetera, et cetera, I have to accept that there’s going to be a level of conflict that’s unresolvable. Like I’m not gonna change hearts and minds necessarily. Hopefully some I will, right? That would be lovely. But so I can be reliable in a conversation earlier today, did not change hearts and minds. First time I was talking to you, did not understand the concept at all. Could not, did not have the framing to understand the concept. Doesn’t mean you won’t come to realization tomorrow. But in the conversation, it was unresolved. And I had to find a way to resolve that conversation so that he could save face because he was just totally off base. And there was no way for me to get him to knowledge. Nope, you’re missing something important, right? And so I did. I found a way to get it resolved in a way that allowed him to save face. And then we parted on good terms. And that was painful and I’m still sore about it. And I’m upset. I didn’t like it. And I still don’t like it. But conflict resolution, no, conflict acceptance. See you Garth, it’s good to have you here. I’m glad you found value in the chat. And I think, yeah, this is a good point that Nico brings up. It’s far more important than status. Without identity, you can’t exist. Identity comes from your worldview, or your progressive reactionary, a national or a foreigner, et cetera. Well, look, those are all factors in the identities you ultimately assume, right? But as history has shown us, you can overcome those factors. So the fact that you were born in South Africa and you’re not a native to the United States, and maybe you don’t look like the normal average population in the area you live, doesn’t mean you can’t become the world’s wealthiest man in the United States, right? So the physicality of what you are is not something that determines everything about you. And it is not something that can’t be overcome in some cases. Because a myriad of things affect our identity. So if you’re competent, right? Or to Peterson’s point, if you’re articulate, you’re deadly, yeah. An articulate person who’s poor has a really good chance of not staying poor. And an inarticulate person who’s poor has a really poor chance of getting out of the poverty. There are lots of other factors, like I’m just picking one because I can’t go through them all. There are a ton of them. Hard workers, you know, tend to do better. Hard workers who are inarticulate tend to get stuck in debt and jobs, right? Hard workers without vision don’t tend to do as well as hard workers with vision. There are lots of influences that allow you to transcend where you started. And that’s really what life is. It’s a journey from where you’re starting, usually birth, typically. And then you get traumatized by your parents left, right, and center because your parents aren’t perfect because they’re people. And then they make you imperfect, although you were probably born imperfect because of original sin and all. And you have to navigate all that. But you have to recognize it’s hard. It’s hard for you, it’s hard for them. If it’s not hard, you’re not doing it right. And that sucks, things are hard, and that’s terrible. Like, who wants to hear that message? But that is what it is. And that’s what’s important to realize. It is hard, it is what it is. And that, you know, difficult for people to deal with, for sure, because we want things to be easier, but they’re not. And we just have to account for these things and pay attention to different parts of them at different times, because that’s life. And that’s life for everybody. And that’s why, you know, somebody snaps at you, maybe they’re having a bad day. And so maybe it’s not about you, because a lot of people get upset, oh, that, that, Kashir doesn’t like me because she’s a snippy. Kashir probably doesn’t know you or care about you or you probably weren’t even an object in our world. She was just snippy because she was snippy at everybody. Had nothing to do with you whatsoever. And we get wrapped up because we have personal experience, we think all personal experience is about us. All your personal experience is not about you. A lot of people’s personal experience, you’re along for the ride. And it was gonna happen, whether it was you or somebody else. And that’s, you can’t take things so personally. And you also, you gotta be tolerant, but not too tolerant, which is a real problem. Now we’re into a real problem. How tolerant should you be? When should you speak out against evil? When should you raise a fuss? When should you say, no, the courts are corrupt? I don’t know, I don’t have answers to that. But I know it’s not never, I know that. And when things are continually getting worse, maybe it’s time to start speaking up. And not about institutions necessarily. It’s fine to say, look, the academic institutions have become corrupted. Absolutely true. But if you’re not gonna follow that up with, here’s who’s corrupting them and how, or here’s what’s corrupting them and how, then your solution’s probably not gonna be generative. And that’s a big problem. And you have the correct, Ethan, dammit Ethan. The correct amount of tolerance is not zero. That’s only for disagreeable people. Yeah, you have to know what you’re tolerating because tolerance is also acceptance of conflict. And it’s okay to, let’s say, it’s okay to allow people with a different sexual orientation to cohabitate. That’s something we can tolerate. But maybe it’s not okay to allow those people to also do children’s story hour at the local library dressed in an inappropriate way. So some tolerance, for sure. How much? Well, that’s a negotiation. And we don’t like negotiation because negotiation implies conflict is already there. And yeah, Ethan, I think we did identify, we talked about this in the live stream with Manuel too. I thought we did a pretty good job actually. Seemed to go pretty well. We’re mistaking tolerance for mercy. And the problem is if you have too much tolerance, never get to give people mercy ever because you’re already accepting them. So they never get to the point of transgression. And if they don’t get to the point of transgression, how can we have mercy for them? How can there be redemption? That’s the other problem. So if you’re just tolerating everything they do, eventually it’s gonna get worse and worse and worse because on average, we tend towards evil. We don’t tend towards the good, we tend towards evil over time. And so that interaction, right? Where you’re too tolerant, you’re not drawing lines, you’re letting people get worse and worse and worse, right? Leads them into an area where they can’t be redeemed at all. There’s no redemption. There’s no redemption. Because there’s no transgression. So you can’t be redeemed if you didn’t transgress. There’s no transgression if there’s too much tolerance. So it’s not tolerance all the way down. It’s a big problem. It’s a big problem. I don’t think this is fair Ethan. I don’t think tolerance is celebrating the transgression. I think that tolerance is something you have to meter out with wisdom. Tolerance is something that is required, can’t be zero, right? But it has to be understood and known. Doesn’t have to be called out in propositions, but it has to be understood, right? And so for instance, one way that people indicate their tolerance for others is by joking with them. So they’ll say things like, you’re an arrogant son of a bitch. When they’re not being an arrogant son of a bitch, right? Like they’re deliberately metering out that decision in an inappropriate place to signal to the other person, sometimes you’re arrogant and I know this and I’m not gonna call you out for it, but I want you to know that I know, right? Which is good because now it allows it to say face. It’s like, oh, okay, I can be arrogant sometimes and that’s okay. And that’s really important. I think those signals are important. And I think good friends do that. Like good friends, you know, fight and swear at each other occasionally and call each other names and go back and forth, right? And I think that’s important. I think that’s super important. I don’t know if this is actually Ethan cause he’s not on the screen. I don’t know if I can trust you, Ethan. Can I trust you? The camera’s not working. Say something. No, can’t hear you. The heck Ethan, why are you doing this to me? Why? Oh, we’re gonna put Ethan back in the waiting room then. He thinks he wants to say something, but he often has the world’s worst internet connection. I think he does that to me on purpose. In fact, I’m quite convinced of it. It’s a hell of a lag if it’s lag. Could be lag, who knows? My setup’s not perfect. We’re still fiddling with the office restructure here cause I’m a lot closer to the window. I have a standing desk. There’s nothing in the damn room, which I’ve got to change that. I got to go in the back room and move all my stuff back in here. Yeah, I should put my bookcase in here instead of living room. I got lots of work to do. And we need to be tolerant of my inability to motivate myself to clean, to finish cleaning the office. I did half the work. I got everything out of it. The other half of the work is putting everything back in that should be here and removing the stuff that shouldn’t. I think that’s, again, that’s the core issue is how much of your own self were you tolerating? How much of your own bad behavior are you tolerating? Right? Cause it can’t be zero. Right? Your own inabilities and insufficiencies have to be tolerated by you. Cause it’s three frames. You’re with yourself, you’re with nature, you’re with others. You got to account for all of it. There’s tolerance in all of it. There’s values involved in all of it. Right? There’s goodness involved in all of it. Right? You should be good to yourself. And that’s the problem. I did fail Ethan. Why did you fail me? You let me down. So you can have a lovely conversation with Ethan. Cause when Ethan has internet, I can have lovely conversations with Ethan or in the car. But the odds of getting in another car with Ethan anytime sooner, not very high. Someday I’ll win the lottery. If you all want to make me win the lottery, that’d be great. That would solve a few problems that I have for sure. So, all right. On that note, I’ve been going for two and a half hours and I’m tired. I haven’t eaten. So I’m gonna go eat. But it’s been lovely. It’s my first sort of experiment in live stream on my navigating patterns channel, which you should check out. If you’re not subscribed to navigating patterns, you should subscribe to navigating patterns. Check out all my videos. I mentioned a few here tonight. And yeah, I hope everybody aims at the good. And I’m very happy that you gave me your time and attention today. Cause I value that very much. And I hope everybody has a lovely day.