https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=CKvBg8ELlJo
identified consensus appreciably designed to support groups to raise money and build a successful life. Thank you. Young man speaking in the city square, trying to tell somebody that he cares. Can you play the voice of youth, asking what is truth? Yeah, the ones that you’re calling wild are gonna be the leaders in a little while. When will the lonely voice of youth cry, what is truth? This all-world’s wakened to a newborn babe, and I solemnly swear it’ll be their way. You better help that voice of youth find what is truth. And the lonely voice of youth cries, what is truth? This all-world’s wakened to a newborn babe, and I solemnly swear it’ll be their way. Howdy, churchium. Good to see you. And what would else do we have? We have a big bar, right? And, and we’ve upgraded. We have an orienteering compass. Yes, there are several parts to an orienteering compass, because you have to sight this way, right? And calculate things. That’s a special compass. It’s not a really special compass, but it’s a proper compass, we’ll say. Very important. And we have our Table Rock Tea, Marathon Tea today. It’s too hot. We’ll let it cool off. And we’re ready to talk about caring. And a lot of things happened around caring this week, as always, very mysterious. You know, one minute you pick a topic, the next minute you see that topic all over the place in places that you never expected. So let’s jump right in, shall we? We’ve done some notes. Group effort. We’re changing the format up a little bit, because what’s going to happen is I’m going to do specific invites in the beginning, and then we’ll open it up to everybody later. So if you feel the need after the monologue to jump in and do some directed distributed intelligence or distributed cognition, then let me know on Discord or whatever, and I will get you an invite that way so that everybody can’t jump in. This is to sort of mitigate some of the issues we’ve been having with people derailing. We’re giving a more structured and hierarchical approach. Now there’s three. Right. So there’s the distributed cognition that I gather and then capitulate in the monologue. Right. These aren’t just my monologues. They belong to a community of people working on them. And you want to be part of that. If you can get on Discord or contact me on Twitter or whatever, I’m happy to to take requests, as it were, about or pieces of the topic. Catherine’s not going to be able to make it today, unfortunately. I did try to get it, but she did give me some feedback, which was useful on caring. So, so, yeah, we’re going to we’re going to try something a little bit different. You know, there’s always whenever we change stuff, there’s always adjustments, mistakes and et cetera. So hopefully this will work out. And if it doesn’t, we’ll go back to the old way. So let’s jump in. So talking about caring, we want to get to some sort of consensus or shared understanding of what what we’re talking about when we’re talking about caring. Right. And I’ve test driven this a couple of times now. So this this monologue is much more interesting, I think, than 10 formal. But this is a harder topic than most of the others. Right. So we’re talking about caring, which is the quality of your attention. And therefore it is ethereal. Right. It’s not a material thing. You can’t go there. The caring. Oh, look, it ran that way or whatever. I don’t know what caring would do if it were material. But so, you know, how can we how can we frame this? How can we get caring in a box? A set of constraints that we can understand. And I know some people like constraints. That’s too bad. Constraints are necessary. Otherwise, things don’t exist by definition, by the way. Not an argument here. So let’s do some word associations just for some framing. Right. So attending. Right. Accommodation. Attentive versus attention. Right. And then when you don’t care, you don’t judge. It has some good sides to it and some bad sides. You can’t say I care for you, but I’m not going to judge you like that. That doesn’t work. Caring is that which you believe in enough to forgo or sacrifice your own comfort. There’s always better things we could be doing or more comfortable things we could be doing or more self-serving things that we could be doing. And when we’re not doing those things, but we’re doing something for someone else or and that someone else can be our future selves. We’re caring and you can care for your future self. We touch on future self every once in a while in these in these monologues and live streams. Your future self is another person the same way that your best friend is another person. There are important differences, but still another person because you’re not that person yet. So giving up something in the present for a future potential possibility or whatever a sacrifice in the here and now is the same as sacrificing or caring for another person. So that is to say that when you care, you are embodying the values outside of yourself. Right. But if it isn’t embodied, then it isn’t caring because it isn’t manifest in the world in action. Right. Remember, we talked about action previously. Very unpopular opinion on action. I totally get that. Right. We talked about action previous live stream. Everybody screamed that, oh, you know, action, action can be thoughts. It can be meditation. No, it can’t. And the only reason why is because, again, how do you know it? It happened. Like, how do you know you meditated? How do you know that those thoughts that you had were yours? You know, if they’re not translated into into things that other people can observe, independent of you, you have no way to validate or verify or any of that. And so that’s why manifesting things in action is important. Otherwise, it’s all in your head. Right. Unembodied caring is just a proposition. It’s a signal to yourself inside your head or to others spoken aloud and yourself, because that’s always true. Right. Don’t live in the propositional tyranny. John Brevecki tracks with the propositional theory. I think this is part of it. You’re telling yourself you care. You’re telling somebody else you care about them and you’re taking any action. You’re not giving anything up. You’re not making any sacrifice. Do you care? What do you care for? What do you care about? And what do you care to take issue with? These are mere signals from your ego, unless and until they involve embodiment, participation, action. If the ego isn’t being inconvenienced, then what’s going on? It’s just in your head. If you speak your care and you get agreement, but no one takes any action, then no care was given by anyone. It’s an illusion. It’s easy to say, oh, yeah, I care about the whales. Oh, yeah, I care about the whales, too. Oh, yeah, we all care about the whales. Okay. Are the whales going to see the results of that? Or is this just something you guys are all telling yourselves? And my favorite example, you know, I’m big on climate change, man. Do you have a lawn? Oh, you have a lawn, do you? Your lawn does more harm to the climate than your car. Sorry. Good luck. I don’t have a lawn, by the way. Just saying. I just live it out. I don’t sit there and signal that I care about these things in that way. I do things. And we talked about illusion before, right? Hallucination, right? Fantasy, illusion. That’s the stuff in your head. Previous livestream. So something I want to remind you about that needs to be thought about, right, is, you know, where these things fit together, right? Because we’ve been on this quest now to fit more things together, right? Tie more of these concepts together so you can go back and look at livestreams that you missed or monologues of the livestreams or whatever. Someday I might even get those on the channel in non-livestream form. Who knows? It’s the chain of thought, caring, attention, motivation, participation, reflection, ideal, and tell us. There’s a lot there. I get that. But first, Sam Pell. So you have thoughts. The thoughts that will stay, sorry, the thoughts that will say stick are the thoughts you care about. That’s the caring. That’s the thought into caring, right? And the caring drives your attention. And that attention drives your motivation. And that motivation drives your action and participation, right? And then there’s a stage of reflection, measuring against the ideal, and then manifesting the tell us. Oh, Mark, there’s a loop in there. Maybe, hopefully, get it. But also that chain, that hierarchy of thought, caring, attention, motivation, participation, reflection, ideal, tell us. Super important. It’s super important. But I don’t want to dwell on that. But I will go, you know, another frame for you. And we’ll say, geez, man, having this microphone in front of me sucks. We’ll get used to this someday. The great chain of being means that you care about being, right? The fact that you’re a being means that you care about being. Otherwise, you commit suicide. If you’ve committed suicide, you’re not watching. I’m not. It would be sad. I don’t like it. But also, I can’t cater to those people. They’re not watching. You care about intelligibility. Order that which lasts, not merely emerges. Emergence is inevitable. Things are going to emerge. That happens. People do things. Right? People do things. What’s the spirit that they’re doing things in? Well, that’s the important part. What is it when they’re doing something that they care about? Or are they just doing it to see what happens? There are people out there who just do random things to see what happens. They tell me this. I watch them. They do it. It happens. I’m not a fan. Also, nothing I’m going to do about it because I can’t do anything about it. And that’s the issue. That’s the issue. Emergence is not good. Things emerge. You have to determine their goodness. You have to determine your level of participation. You have to determine from what emerges what you should care about because caring is a function of time, energy, and attention. And you have a limited amount of all of those things. Do you know what emergent things are good and what emergent things are not? Are you making that differentiation? Is there discernment there? We talked about discernment, judgment, action, previous live streams, three of them. We talked about boundaries before that. Again. Your caring about an emergence needs to be towards the good, like everything else. So, goodness is this high watermark for me. Call me crazy. So, which emergent things are the most reliable? Which will last? Just because something emerges doesn’t mean it’s going to stay around. We call these fads. Sometimes it’s called fashion. It’s not a fashion cycle, but it doesn’t. It recurs over some time period. Sometimes, seemingly, not the way you expect. Is that good? Is that reliable? Will that last? Maybe the pattern of fashion will last, but the individual fashions won’t. That’s the whole point of fashion. So, what about the other fads? Tamagotchi toys. Pokemon was a fad for a while. Magic the Gathering was a fad. But the adoption has changed. Which things have both qualities of reliability and lasting? That happens. And look, some things emerge and they turn bad. Not everything that emerges stays good, because things change over time. Entropy is real. Entropy is real. And you have to care and put more time, energy, and attention into something to keep it good. You can’t just say, oh, there’s the good, and I don’t have to do anything about it. And that’s where emergence is dangerous. Just because something’s there doesn’t mean it’s going to stay good. Even if it’s good in the moment, it might be good by accident. Good to see you, Pastor Paul. And I do see you. And I appreciate and care about you, sir. I was talking about you the other day. But look, when you stop caring about things that have proven to be reliable and seem to be lasting, when do you give up on them? Because it’s a question worth asking. When is the time for caring over? Or when should your caring change? And that’s the thing. Maybe someday I don’t care about Paul Van der Kley anymore. Heaven for Van, sir. Heaven for Van. And that’s the problem is like, maybe you can’t care about Plato’s Republic forever. Maybe you shouldn’t. And look, I’m not trying to answer a question here. I’m just trying to show you limits and get you thinking. Are you drawing these boundaries? Do you understand that caring has limits, that it should have limits, that your caring has limits? You have limits. You only have so much caring, however you want to define it. I define it as time, energy, and attention, among other things. But we’ll say those are the three active components. And that’s also power, by the way. But yes, give the power to care. You get to think about these limits. You’ve got to draw these boundaries. Again, previous livestream, boundaries. Good livestream. Good livestream. Good monologue there. No, apparently Pastor Paul hasn’t been up on the time, energy, and attention thing. Yeah, I’ve been on that for years. Super important. Because look, our attention can be moved. It can be pointed. It can be usurped. It can be taken away from us and redirected away from the things we care about, to things that we shouldn’t care about, maybe. Or things that are dangerous to give our time, energy, and attention to, because that’s power. If you haven’t seen my video on power, that’s the summary. There’s more there, obviously. That’s why it’s like a 25 or 28 minute video, I forget. But the fact that our attention can be moved impacts what we care about and how we manifest that caring, not merely how we act in the world. And the thing is, I’m so glad Pastor Paul is here, because I’m going to steal from him mercilessly. We always care about what other people think. Why? Because we outsource our sanity, as Pastor Paul often says. However, we cannot know what other people think. So we project. We have to project. I’m not like, oh, all projection is dead. No, we have to project. Peterson talks about this. We project our future state to have something to go after, for what John Breveke would talk about with inspiration, I believe. I could be wrong about that, because John’s not real clear on what he means by inspiration or aspiration for that matter. But he uses those terms, and I think they’re important. And look, in the projection of what other people might be thinking or how they might be viewing us, we try to act accordingly. I’m not saying that even in that we can be perfect, because it turns out we’re not perfect people. I’m a muppet. You’re a muppet. We’re all muppets. We’re not perfect. We’re muppets. We’re moved by things we don’t even understand. Our attention is moved. That changes what we care about and how we care about things. Right? And again, we care what other people think, and we have to, because we outsource our sanity. We also want approval. We need agreement to be able to do things bigger than us, longer lasting than we can do ourselves. We’re limited by our own everything. Right? Some of us don’t run fast. Some of us don’t talk real well. Right? Some of us don’t think real well. Some of us have no problem thinking, but can’t articulate correctly. Some people can’t think correctly, but articulate just fine. Some people can jump. Some people are tall. Usually they’re Dutch. Can’t think of much worse, but you know, it happens. Oh, being French. That’s the problem, is that we’re all limited. The way we break out of our own limits is in communion with others, is participating in our own limits. Is in communion with others, is participating with others, and that requires sacrifice. You have to care about the thing you’re doing more than you care about yourself, your ego, your way of getting it done. You have to. Otherwise, you’re not going to be able to do that. Caring is important and inevitable. Given all that, there could be a link to the 1990s, we’ll say the late 90s, and or the materialistic nihilism of being a character that cares for nothing. Jesse talks about this in the movies and in the late 90s in particular, right, with the Matrix. Not going to go into the Matrix. Someday we’ll do that video. I’m going to get a lot, a lot more energetic to do that, but it’s on the list. It’s on the list. That sense of nihilism, that sense of deep lack of meaning, it’s a problem. And you see it reflected in the art. And again, I’m not trying to solve a problem. You want your critical thinking? There you go. You can critically think your way to a solution if you’d like. Not recommended, but look, fair enough. I’m not giving you the answer. I’m trying to give you a framework that will lead you to an answer, entirely different things. If you are a character that cares, then you are a person. You can see art moving people through the pointing. And that’s an indication of what it is you should care about. Is it a perfect indication? No. It’s not. We see the world differently. I look at a piece of art, I see one thing. You look at the same piece of art, you see something else. Fair enough. Maybe we can do the distributed cognition thing and get together and both enrich our understanding of the art piece, or art in general. Yeah, that’s how distributed cognition works, man. And maybe we can do that with three people or four people. Maybe it breaks down when it’s ten people. I don’t know. And maybe it depends on the ten people. Ooh, doesn’t that suck. And look, we cannot just care at a whim with rationality. It’s not that rationality doesn’t help you, but maybe rationality is the thing that tells you, hey, look, there’s a line when you have to stop caring about something because it’s corrupt or because it’s a problem or whatever. I don’t know. Just saying, something to think about. You know, does it help? Yeah, rationality helps. We need it. It’s part of what’s finding the intelligibility with us, for us. That’s our process. Intelligibility is order. Order is within being. Being is good. I don’t know what else to tell you. And look, we can go the other way around with it. We can say caring can also be seen as a part of sacrifice. There is no caring without the sacrifice of time, energy and attention. In action, in participation, in embodiment. Otherwise, you are feigning emotional comfort. You’re faking an emotional comfort, either for yourself or for others or for perceived others, because we don’t know what’s in people’s heads. Sometimes we think this will calm them down and it doesn’t. This will comfort them and it doesn’t. So what is what sorts of emotional comforts are we faking or feigning? What are we doing? What are we talking about? Validation, approval, soothing. Right? Or maybe soothsaying. See that live stream on soothsayers? Watching it now may give you a better perspective on what I was saying then. Or maybe not. Maybe I’m totally failing. I have no idea. And the other thing you have to be careful of is this action without time, energy and attention. Of caring, where it’s not really an action. You think, oh, I thought about that person, so I cared. I was like, really? That’s your bar. I thought about this person, so I cared. You could be pointing back, pointing that person back at themself. You could say, I ended up caring about you. You could go down that road and you could tell them that. And that could get them in a state where they’re like, oh, OK, this person cares about me. But there’s no action attached. There’s no participation. There’s no embodiment. I’m not saying thoughts are useless, obviously, but they’re not followed through with actions. What’s going on? Can you prove that anything’s happening? Because that was the action live stream. Thoughts aren’t actions. You think about lots of things all the time. All the time. But you don’t care equally about them. The ones you care about, you take action on. That’s different. That’s important. You have to care a lot about something before you’ll take an action. Did you do your research? That is an action. Or did you just think about something? Did you come up with some explanation, rationalization in your head? Do you really care about a topic if you aren’t even willing to Google it? And how much effort are you willing to put in? And especially now. I’ve been trying to dig up some research. I know it was out there. Research papers, et cetera, et cetera. I’ve been in a sea of information. But it’s not even a sea, it’s a flood. Places where this information was rare enough that it was right there lying on the beach, flooded over. Flooded over. You can’t see it anymore. Even if it’s there. I can’t find it. So let’s take a look. Proper caring is qualitative, embodied action. It’s about quality. Not quantity. Not how many times you did something or how hard you tried while doing it or any of that stuff. It’s a quality of your embodied action. If you clumsily tried to help me, you still tried to help me. And that shows that you care. And that is what it means to be a person. To have this caring embodied. I’ve told this story before, I’ll tell it again. It’s a good story. What is this? Four years ago, something like that. Three, four years ago. My car blew up. My beautiful blue convertible. Yes, I have another blue convertible. That’s how that works, by the way. I had to go get another car. So I flew up north where I had a car. I’d get cars up in New England all day long, at least for the moment. Hopefully that lasts. I know people. People have cars. I know people that have cars. It’s good. So I’m only doing a one-way trip. Obviously not going to park at the airport. I don’t have a car. Have somebody drive me to the place, pick up place with the airport van. So getting up to the airport van, there’s a woman in the van. She starts telling this story about when she was 12 years old. And she uses the word service. And my brain says, This person is using the word service in a way that you don’t understand, that you’ve never heard before. And then I listened to her story. And, you know, I’ve got to paraphrase it, obviously. It was a long and beautiful, honestly, story. Her parents lived on the panhandle of Florida. Apparently they owned more than one house. Storm comes in. I forget which hurricane it was. It was one of the hurricanes. Wipes everything out. Bunch of devastation. They go and they fix the house of their renters first. I don’t know if that was one house or two houses. Little, little slim on details. I don’t think she told me. Doesn’t matter. Then they go and they fix the neighbor’s house. That service. She’s 12 years old. She’s got to do this with her parents. Her parents are telling her to help. Then they fix their house. That’s care. You’re caring for the community, for the people that you’re around, for the people that you’re responsible for. You’re renting to them. You’re responsible for them. There’s slum landlords. Yeah, okay. There’s slum landlords. But there are a tiny number of them. Otherwise, more people would be living under slum landlords. And we actually know those numbers. It’s not secret. You go look at them up. As a percentage, it’s not that big. It’s too big. I agree. Bigger than zero. Bad. Sure. Granted. But it’s not that big. It’s not like a huge problem that everybody makes it out to be. They don’t care. I get that. They should care. I get that. Can’t make people care. Sorry. If you can, it’s fantastic. Go do that. That’d be wonderful. I’m going to hold my breath on that one or not hold my breath on that one rather because I don’t believe you. Sorry. But if you can do it, go do it. Like, what’s the problem? And if you can’t do it, accept it. You care about all the things you can’t change. I can’t fix starving children in Africa. I wish I could. I’m not saying there’s nothing I could ever do, but like, I’m not going over there for lots of reasons. I’m sick enough. I don’t need to travel that much and get sicker. No, thanks. Can’t help people if you’re dead. I’m sick enough. I don’t need to travel that much and get sicker. No, thanks. Can’t help people if you’re dead, if you kill yourself by trying to help other people like that. Everybody loses. And look, the caring of the zeitgeist, if there is such a thing. And I think it’s a useful frame, even though, nah, not too hot on zeitgeist. But it’s expressed in art. It’s the art that shows us where the zeitgeist is in terms of what it cares about. And we’re part of the zeitgeist. That is the unity or the whole that is made up of us. And you can’t cross that barrier, right? Like, look, you’re either a part or you’re a whole with parts. And you can’t be both at the same time. That doesn’t help you. Like, you can try, but trust me, you’re not going to get anywhere with that. I’m not saying you can’t switch between them. Of course you can. You can realize at once that you are a whole agent that is able to manipulate the world and make it a better place, hopefully, or also make it a worse place, especially out of ignorance, not just out of malice. All motivation isn’t knowing and intending either good or bad. That’s ridiculous. And being competent enough. You can know the good and be incompetent and not be able to manifest it. There’s lots of possibilities. It’s not this crazy binary. Moral agents care about ideals, virtues, and values. Ethics are those ideals. I’ve talked about this before in various places. There’s a great video that I have on navigating patterns with Manuel on morals. Ethics are the ideals, morals the implementation. We are moral agents when we care about the ideals, the virtues, and the values. And so the question is, what are you paying attention to? That is an indicator of care. Attention is not necessarily care. They’re related. Which of the things you care about, because we don’t care about only one thing, would you act on? And which of the things you care about, would you prioritize? Because you do. Because you have to. What is a prioritization? A prioritization is quite simply the statement that hierarchy exists. Hierarchy exists in your head. It exists with your thoughts. It exists with what you care about. It exists with your attention. It exists with what you attend to. Hierarchy is real. You can see what you care about. Because you do care. You can see what you care about more and what you care about less by what you’re putting your time into. And your care is not totally under your control. Your attention can be pointed, can be usurped, can be drawn away. It’s the sin of assiduia. Jonathan Pichot’s lovely video on this. Absolutely blew my mind. Learned so much from it. This sloth sin is the sin of assiduia, the sin of attention. That’s what it is. And it pulls your caring away. Because it’s time. We don’t have much control over that. It’s energy. We have a little bit more control over that. And it’s attention. Time, energy, and attention. Which is also tea. It’s a good reminder to take a sip of now cool enough tea. So it’s time, energy, and attention. One way to figure out what you care about is which stories, which media you are paying attention to. It’s not in the platform. It’s not like, oh, OnlyFans has got me. It’s a demon that has a hold. No. It’s in the story that you’re embedding yourself in, that you’re participating in, that you’re paying attention to. Do you believe the E-girl is your friend? Does she care about you because she’s broadcasting attention or maybe broadcasting sexual availability? And that could be as simple to Jordan Peterson’s sort of hinting and point to. I think it was Vice. His Vice interview years ago. That could just be makeup. Or clothing. Could be. I don’t know. I’m not here to give you answers. I’m saying that’s one way to broadcast attention. But is it personal or is it broadcast? Is it for everyone? Then the nature of the story that you’re engaged in, that you’re participating in, that you’re putting your time, energy, and attention into tells you what spirit you are attending to. What you are caring about. This isn’t one thing. We care about lots of things and at different times. At night I care about going to sleep. In the morning I care about eating breakfast and I can’t eat breakfast and it bothers me. Sometimes you care about what you were working on. Sometimes you care about your video games. Sometimes you care about your addiction. Could be cocaine. Could be alcohol. Could be porn. Could be video games. Whatever. And then hopefully your addiction wears off and then you care about something else. Very confusing for people, right? It’s like split personality sometimes. In fact it looks a lot like that. Your caring changes. What are you caring about? You have to look at your actions to find out. Because your attention can be hijacked. It can be stolen from you, usurped, taken away, and moved. It’s not gone. It’s just moved. Now look. This is the intimacy crisis. Which I think precedes the meaning crisis. You want to know what causes the meaning crisis? The intimacy crisis. The meaning crisis is what it looks like to men. Not just men. The intimacy crisis is what it looks like to women. Although I think it is the intimacy crisis. Ultimately. I think it’s a better frame. We don’t know what we care about and why. We don’t understand what stories were embedded in and why. If you keep telling yourself over and over and over again, and that can become truth in your head. We’re funny creatures. That’s how Muppets work. Sorry. You’re a Muppet. I’m a Muppet. We’re all Muppets. It’s not my fault. Telling ourselves over and over again, it’s capitalism’s fault. Then we’ll start to act like capitalism is our enemy. Capitalism doesn’t have agency. It’s not doing anything to you. It’s affording you your own destruction. It’s also affording you your own success. That’s on you. What are you embodying? Random embodiment is not good. But it might tell you what you’re caring about that you don’t see. That you don’t know. That other people might see, by the way. Sometimes people know us better than we know ourselves in some aspect. That’s a real thing. That’s a real thing. That’s scary. That’s why we have such a shame. Because sometimes people know something about us that we can’t see about ourselves. And by sometimes I mean all the time for every single person. There’s a universal. I don’t use universals very often. That’s one of them. How’s that? You want your universals? There’s one. Suck on that universal for a while. Go ahead. Ruminate on it. It’s a good thing to realize. It’s a good thing to realize. We care about the signals that are broadcast. Rather than the signals that are sent exclusively to us. That’s the intimacy crisis. We have so many signals to choose from. We can’t choose. It’s not possible. Recently, I was on Twitter. I saw a post by Katherine Brodsky. I love Katherine Brodsky. She’s great. Sign up for her sub stack. She’s a really good journalist. She writes absolutely beautifully. She wanted to have the Twitter feed wholesale to use for herself. And I was like, you don’t even have an inkling of what you’re asking for. There is so much data on Twitter. I’ve seen the raw feed only a couple times. It’s massive. It’s insane. You can’t filter that as a human. You’re filtering the thoughts of thousands or hundreds of thousands of humans every second. You can’t do that. Oh no, it’s censorship. Yes, censorship is inevitable. Because we can’t be intimate with everything. That doesn’t even make any sense. Our level of intimacy is based on how much time, energy, and attention. We’re not caring. We’re doing in that relationship. Not to the person, not to the object, to the relationship. That third thing. It’s me, it’s you, and there’s a relationship. It sucks. This relationship sucks. But it’s better than Facebook. And it’s better than just YouTube because it’s a live stream. It’s better than no video. It’s better than me just spewing at a camera with a script or a semi-script or whatever the hell it is I do. I don’t even know what to call this. Still sucks. It has a limited affordance or potential for intimacy. That vacation that you see on Instagram that you weren’t on, it’s not personal to you. You weren’t there. If you care that your friend had a good time, that’s awesome. That’s great. That’s fine. That’s good. If you care about the vacation, the intimacy is broken. It’s broken. It’s done. It’s finished. You’ve destroyed it. It’s over. Trying to be intimate. You’re trying to have, having mode, right? We’re bringing all the verveci stuff here, right? A relationship with something you didn’t relate to. You weren’t on that vacation. Oh, I’ve been to Hawaii before. I know how it, you weren’t on that vacation. You weren’t there with those people in that time. I’ve been to Hawaii twice on two different occasions. Years apart. Beautiful both times. They’re not the same vacation. Forget about we didn’t stay at the same place. It wouldn’t have mattered. The sunsets are different. Sunrises are different. The weather is different. Sometimes the mix of people is different. Things we do are different, even when we do the same thing we did last time. It’s different. Time has passed. Entropy is real. Change happens. What is it that you’re caring about? Are you caring about the relationship? Are you caring about the thing? Are you reducing a person to a thing and caring about the thing? That’s worse. The intimacy is broken by the lack of participation or improper participation. Your attention needs to be higher. Not apart from. But you need to be aware of the things that are happening. You need to be aware of the things that you’re not just caring about. But in service to. In communion with persons. That is proper caring when it’s embodied. Participating with action. External to yourself. To your brain. To your mind. To your crazy head. If you hear a quote and you repeat it, do you care about the quote? Or are you just signaling? Do you enact, embody, take action based on the quote? Virtue signal much? True virtue is in the proper confirmation of your action. Your actions must conform to the virtue. That’s a struggle. It’s hard. It’s hard. Are you reading the struggle? Are you reading the heroic texts? Are you struggling with them? Because if you’re not, I’m a little suspicious. And you should be too. Caring is in action. In participation. Embody or fail. But it matters what you embody. You don’t just embody something randomly. That’s subject to all kinds of hijack and hijinks. There is a having mode aspect to the language. To propositions. Where you aren’t struggling to participate. You are trying to have status by not working. I’m not going to do any research. I’m just going to tell you that I don’t think it’s that way. I’m going to tell you the research you’re quoting is wrong. I’m going to, knowing that you researched, tell you you’re wrong when I’ve never even looked. Happens to me all the time. I had a good friend years ago on Facebook. I basically pointed to him, pointed out on Facebook, not to him, sorry. Pointed out on Facebook that, you know, the Affordable Care Act had no no effect on the things it pretended to be affecting. And he got very upset about that. And like, fair enough, that’s something to get upset about for sure. Right? But also, also, he knew who I was. He knew what I do. I researched that. I don’t just blather out the first thing that comes into my head about how I think the world works. I actually research things. I put a lot of time into my research. He knew that. He’s known me for years, decades. And he said in his post, I know you do your research, Mark, but I’m going to find, you know, I’m going to go out and research this and find out that you’re wrong. He never got back to me. It’s a public post. Is that because he did the research and found what I found? Which is, there is no research that is wrong. Which is, there is no research supporting a positive outcome in anything that was talked about as a positive outcome for the passage of that bill. It just didn’t manifest. Fair enough. People try things that don’t work. People make mistakes, problems, whatever. However you want to, you know, it’s Teddy Kennedy in the 80s. Right? Like, oh, HMOs. And then Teddy Kennedy in the 2000s. Oh, yeah, HMOs were a mistake. They were my mistake. I made a mistake. They didn’t work out the way I thought. We shouldn’t have done it. Of course, we doubled down, but whatever. Are you actually participating? Or are you just being a rebel and saying, no, it can’t be T. I read a Wikipedia article on and it told me something nice that I wanted to hear. So then the question arises. Can you care about something you cannot experience? How about my purple talking unicorn? Do you care about my purple talking unicorn? I cannot give you that perspective. You cannot give you that perspective. Sorry. What about the things we cannot care about? What are the limits of caring? I’m not here to answer that. Just to make you consider something that I see most people have never thought of. Caring as a salve, as some solution, a way to fix the world, might not be an option. That isn’t to say we shouldn’t all care about the same things at some level, but that level might be being. And what we care for matters. Our caring at different levels matters. What we care for that’s below us, we have to care for it differently. What we care for that’s above us, we have to care for it differently. And how we care at those levels has to be unique to us in some sense, because we’re unique creatures. I’m not an individualist, but I am a uniqueist. Because different people have different abilities. Evolution theory set, because it’s a set of theories, hypotheses, ideas, and inferences. It’s not a theory, sorry. It’s real. I’m there. Totally, I’m on board. But what that means is we’re different. It means we have different abilities, different superpowers, different handicaps, different capacities, different affordances in the same situation. Look, you don’t want a person who hates animals to care for a pet. There’s nothing wrong with that. But what if they care deeply about bridges? And let’s assume you can’t make them not be mean to animals. But what if they care deeply about bridges? And let’s assume you can’t make them not be mean to animals. But they’re great at building bridges. That doesn’t seem bad to me. And maybe they don’t care about pets. Not a fan already, but maybe they care so much about bridges, they make the most beautiful, long-glass bridges in the world. And I’m not a fan of bridges. And I’m not a fan of them. And I’m not a fan of them. Maybe they care so much about bridges, they make the most beautiful, long-lasting bridges in the world. I need bridges. I use bridges. I go over bridges. Bridges are good. I drive to West Columbia. I gotta go over the rivers. Bridges. Lots of bridges. Lots of bridges. The nature of caring, like so many things, varies with the human population. It’s all over the map. How we care for the same things is different. And that’s not bad. This is what creates a diverse world. Not just where you were born, or how you grew up, but those things as well. Things in the ethereal realm. Qualities which don’t exactly map to material. Or the quantitative measures. That’s a good thing. That we have that dividing line. That is off. That’s good. That separation is required. It gives a level of diversity that actually is strength. The diversity to jump into the ethereal or do things in the material. You need both. Paul Van der Kley, I’ll just steal from him more. I’ve got his permission now. Eyes up versus eyes down. That is a great video. I wish I could remember the title off the top of my head. It’s a great video. That’s what I’m talking about here. The ethereal eyes up. The material eyes down. Don’t fall in that pit again. But also, you can’t be eyes down all the time. Then you’re a materialist. You might be a materialist if you’re eyes down most of the time. Or if you’re a materialist if you’re a materialist. You know, you might be a mystic if your eyes up all the time. No answers here, guy. Sorry. The nature of caring. It’s varied. It’s varied. That’s good. We’re varied. That’s good. But it’s frustrating. Because we can’t just use science, the material, the quantities, the measures to help us. Because if that’s all we have, that’s all we use, it corrupts. It corrupts immediately. There was a tweet from Michael Shermer. I used to love Michael Shermer. But, you know, look, everybody has their limits. And he’s way out on his skis. Way past his limits. Totally transgressed. Oh, look, the Enlightenment did this, that. The Enlightenment was embedded in the Christian ethos. Explicitly. Read their writings. Seriously. Like, you didn’t read something, kid. You missed it. It’s right there. You know, it’s like these lunatics who say, oh, it’s holding the US together. I don’t know. The founding fathers said, this experiment? Huh. Wow, weren’t they smart? They knew they were doing science. Or at least experimentation. Doesn’t work. What? Wait, there are limits? There are limits to the United States and its outline? Really? Oh, and it’s explicit. In the Federalist Papers. Right? Without God. Fair enough. You can say what you want about God or the nature of God. Any of that. They didn’t get into it, so far as I can tell. Maybe I missed something in the Federalist Papers. I miss things. It happens. That’s what they said. They grounded, if you want to call it, their Enlightenment philosophy in the religion. Explicitly. Couldn’t be more clear, guy. Couldn’t be more clear. The caring that is required for the United States government in its form, as you see, to exist correctly as an experiment, is that belief. That common belief. You want common sense? You want commonality? You want common ground? Is that what you want? You better get the common up high. I’m going to torture Jesse. Jonathan, my good friend Jonathan from Texas. Oh, Jesse vanished. What a bastard. Knowledge without action is mental masturbation. Can confirm. Have to put action to the things you care about. Can confirm. Yes. Jonathan knows can confirm, too. I gave away my best work. Good to see you, Jonathan. Thank you for your blessings. I do appreciate that, sir. Jonathan’s been to my house. Lovely, lovely human being. Jesse claims to be here, but of course he left me. All alone. Mills. I think the biggest thing I am taking from this is that you cannot know what you care about without investing time, energy, attention, and action. Yes. You don’t actually know if you care otherwise. Yeah. And also self-reflection, rumination, if you want to use Mitzchor Peugeot’s outline, which I think you should. This is quite the brilliant person. Genuinely brilliant. Not one of these freaking MIT, UGRA, IQ people. Actual brilliance. Mills. Do you have a video that expands on the idea of the intimacy crisis? I have two. One of them is on the channel with Andrea with the bangs. You can go on her channel, look up my video. It’s actually one of her. If you do proper data science, you will recognize that that video that I did with Andrea with the bangs is an outlier for the type of video it is. I’m not a celebrity. Certainly wasn’t a celebrity back then. My channel was much smaller. That video had over 900 views last I checked. It was the only one-off that she had with 900 plus views. And then I have a video on the intimacy crisis with Catherine, who we saw last week, on my channel, on navigating patterns. Those are two videos on intimacy crisis. Ask questions, do comments on those videos. I’ll see you next time. Bye. I’ll try to make them better. Churchium Comparison, whatever. Damn Australians. Sadists aren’t good for maintaining bridges unless they’re a toll bridge. Yes, well, maybe. That is possible. I didn’t use sadists. See? That’s what happens when you count on me to follow my notes exactly. Jesse! Welcome. Good to see you. Hi. I’m good. Good. I’m trying out this fancy new camera. I’ll see if it’s any good. You look fancy. The white balance is off, but other than that, the light is off. Either way you want to cut it. I know. I might fix that in a second. Oops, we’re in photography. I know something about photography. Oops. Mark knows something about something already. What? The Windows device that I’m using on a Mac. So it’s like pulling hairs. Oh, yeah. Mills, thanks. I’ll look them up. Oh, good, Mills. Yeah, please look up those videos. They’re wonderful videos. And if you’ve got thoughts on more ways that I should or could or things you want to expand it on, the inter-music crisis, let me know in the comments on the one on navigating patterns or shoot me a DM in Discord or an email somewhere or a comment. Whatever. There are ways to get in touch with me. Website coming to themarkofwisdom.org.com website is coming along. A wonderful volunteer finally helping. So that’s great. You can go visit it. There’s nothing there yet. But I mean, it’s up. So that’s good. But we’re still working on it. It’s coming along. Jesse vanished again. He’s torturing me now. Okay, that’s I see how this works. I’m still here. I’m just trying to get this damn camera to work. I was watching Justin Wells, right? He’s like super camera like actual professional camera person. And he was on Grim Grizz. And he’s like, hold on, I got to adjust my camera. And he clicks something on the camera or changes the setting real quick. And then bang, the light gets better. And I’m like, oh, I want one of those. I want one of those. It’s like immediately like, oh, a Marky Marky one. You know what, I’m just gonna go back to old school. This is just so frustrating. Things can’t work. Mark, why do they make things so hard? Nothing works. Oh, dude, you have no idea. Nothing works. Nothing works. No one can do anything and nothing works. It’s just terrible. Absolutely terrible. Someone needs to teach me OBS too. I have OBS, but I never use it. OBS is nice, but it is a bear. I’m not putting that up. I am amused by it, but I am not putting that comment up. I don’t want to encourage. I want to follow the Father Eric model on the on the this little corner. And I will be talking to Justin Wells. So I don’t know. I don’t know. Great. It’s going to be televised. He’s only naturalist as well. I haven’t watched that one yet. I do want to catch up on all this stuff because I’m fascinated by his point of view and how nobody’s listening to what he’s saying. I find that utterly fascinating. I’m listening to what he’s saying though. So, yeah, I hear exactly what he’s saying. Nobody likes that answer. Oh, fricking Jesse. What are you doing? How can I eat if I have to host? So, you know, look, the caring thing is a big deal. And I’d love to hear more more comments and get some more feedback. And look, Jesse and I will discuss it and then we’ll kind of open it up. And if somebody else wants to come in, you know, get in touch with me and we can send you the link earlier, whatever. Because this is part of this is an experiment. We’ll see if it works. Yeah, I want to do. I care about the stream and I care about the people on the stream. So I want to give them more room to do the distributed cognition before we get rogue actors roaming in and out and derailing and things like that. So we sort of worked out this new format where monologue select group of distributed cognitioners, if you want to call them that. Why not? I just made it up. It sounded good in my head. And then and then we open it up to everybody. But everyone’s welcome to contribute the comments as always. As always, and I try to get to as many of the comments as I can. When I can. What what what the hell happened to Jesse? Oh, he’s apologizing to me. Lovely. I don’t want your apology. I want you here. Like, what the hell? I can’t I can’t eat my snacks if I’m the only one on the stream. That’s just rude. So yeah. So look, thoughts on the new on this new idea where, you know, we’re going to sort of taper into opening it up to everybody are also helpful. Do you like the idea? Do you think it sucks? Is hierarchy the most evil thing in the world? Or are you all in on the hierarchy? Because it’s greatest force for goodness that planet is made up of? I don’t want to be a feminist that planet is ever seen. Whatever. Not, you know, I don’t want to be hyperbolic about. Oh, no. Yes, I do. I always want to be hyperbolic. Never mind. Yeah, hyperbole is fun. Sam Pell is fun. And my marathon tea is fun. It’s all good stuff. Although I have to get my my drugs back because I stopped taking something that, you know. Sally Joe, how much a person yells about how much they care, maybe in inverse proportion to how much they actually care. Well, look, I would say, Sally, the yelling is, is there caring. But what they’re yelling about may have nothing to do with what they care about. Right. So some people, when you say something to them, start yelling because they don’t like your message. And they may not be yelling about your message. They may be saying, you’re a terrible person. You always do this to me. It’s like, always do what to you. Right. And you’ve seen people do this to me, Sally. Right. And to Manuel. And right. And on and on and on. And that’s the problem is that when you take people at their word, since they don’t know what they’re talking about, and they’re most often projecting, you’re going to misapprehend what’s going on with them. Right. And it’s like that that whole thing. I know this was mentioned earlier. I sort of apologize for not bringing it up earlier, but I it wasn’t a good place to fit it in. But Sally has given us a space. That’s what women do. They create the space. Right. A woman will tell you and I have friends that do this because every once in a while, I see problems. I solve problems. That’s right. You see a problem. Solve problem. That’s smart. Problem. Oh, a problem. Let me solve that. Right. I have been told by women, I don’t want you to solve this. You should listen. Fair enough. Because the minute I hear about a problem, it’s like, yes, I will solve this. No, shut the hell up. Because women in Peterson talks about this. Right. Women talk to think. Not all of them, but like almost all of them. Like, let’s be real. Like, let’s not, you know, let’s not downplay the 90% of them. Right. Because it is like 90% for real. Right. And men do that less often, although we don’t never do it. We tend to act out instead in various ways, various ways to various degrees. So that’s a that’s a difference. And I like And I like. I like. Oh, well, first of all, Benjamin Franklin, I care about pineapple pizza. All right. Pineapple pizza heretics. No good. Ecumenical cheese pizza or nothing. Mills. I think that if people tried putting time, energy and attention plus action into things they think about, they think they care about, they may be disabused of their delusions. Thank you, Mills. I am glad that message came through clearly. I’m always a little worried. I’m not. I am super articulate, but at the wrong layer often. So I’m glad that that you got that out of there because that was that was that was good. I’m glad that you made it more explicit. I appreciate that. It’s good when you guys make it explicit because then I know. Okay. It’s the point got proved. Sally Jo. Still thinking about people who say they are representing other people’s emotional comfort. Yeah. And are actually being detrimental because actual health is messy. Yes. And they don’t want to see it right because they’re seeing their failure. So they can get into this mode where they’re like, oh, I want to help the homeless. And then they go and give the homeless person, you know, 10 bucks and he goes and buy some heroin and they see it. I want to see that because then they realize they have no way to help. And who wants to be helpless? Because that’s helplessness. Your ability to help others or yourself is helplessness. That’s what helplessness means. That is the definition. You don’t want to see that. You don’t want to know how helpless you are. That’s a limitation. We don’t like facing our own. I mean, some of us don’t have so much of a problem with it. What? All right. Jesse. I don’t know what to do about this girl here. This is ridiculous. Sally Jo. I like pineapple pizza with the fancy thin ham. Listen, been over this before. I’m glad Neeram isn’t here to see this. That’s all I have to say. OK, it’s ecumenical cheese pizza, guys. Ecumenical cheese pizza or nothing or death. Give me ecumenical cheese pizza or give me death. Fairly sure. George Washington. Almost positive. Or Samuel Francis or something like that. Yeah, it’s one of those things. You can put other things on top of your ecumenical cheese pizza. That’s the idea of it. You can’t splinter the pizza into parts by adding parts to it. This is not Neoplatonism, which doesn’t work, by the way. Just plot twist. I think it’s Canadian, too. Pineapple and ham pizza. All bad things are Canadian. Actually, I like pineapple ham pizza, to be honest. But on this stream, it’s all about the ecumenical cheese pizza. I can’t stand it. I thought the monologue was great. I liked my notes in particular, just being selfish. Well, the question is, did you like how I mangled them and incorporated them into my rambles? That’s the more important part. Your notes are always excellent. I broke Manuel. I pretty much took Manuel and broke him in half before Guy. Because I read the notes. He’s like, well, that’s way too fast. I’m like, duh, I don’t just read the notes in 10 minutes. That’s not the stream. You’ve seen the stream. You know I don’t do that. That’s part of the reason, because the notes are an amalgamation of really good formulations that either I’m given or I come up with. And then all this framework, I put around them almost entirely in the moment. And it’s confusing because it’s like, wait a minute, you’re just not going to read this? Some of it I read because some of it’s really good. And I want to remember the exact formulation. But then I also want to add examples. And I got great feedback from Manuel today, actually. And Adam. And I think Ethan pitched in there, too. So yeah, no, it was good. And that was just before the stream. I think we’re headed towards Fridays or half days at work. Yeah, I think this was going to…I think just like every Friday I’m just going to have to leave really early. You and every other corporate person, but yes. Well, no, because I’m going to make my slave workers work till five. Like a true boss. That’s how it works. I have a pack with my best friend. We have decided that we are going to eventually…we decided this decades ago. It hasn’t happened. But eventually when we’re C-suite executives, basically what we’re going to do is we’re running our companies, whatever companies they are, right? Maybe the same company. And every like three months, we’re just not going to be there. Right? And then every three months, we’re going to fly in, change every single goal and plan on the board, and then fly out. And then you won’t see us again for three more months till we do it all again. And the reasoning is because that’s what was done to us. So yes, they’re…we’re not panicking. There’s project management things. There’s no such thing as project management. No, there is. We just change it every three months because that’s what we do. Yeah, it’s great. It’s great. Beehive terrorism. That sounds nasty. Well, of course, the irony in this is that we’re both guys who like come up with a plan and stick to it. We also implement it very quickly. Three months is nothing for us. Yeah, that’s important. Like we could find a way to boil the ocean, architect it, build it in three months. No problem. We’re just the type of people that just go. We just build. Very generative stuff. Well, you need that. You have to have a qualitative embodied action. Right. If you don’t embody your sense of caring or duty or principle, it’s unclear what you actually care about and why you’re focused on something or what you’re trying to achieve or what’s the motive behind it. The motive. It’s the motive. Or the spirit. Yeah, the spirit that matters. Right. So you might say you can’t care without an action. You can only attend. Right. Proper caring is always embodied. It’s always participatory. It’s always in communion. Yeah, like last night, I actually had a great conversation with Andre. Good. Yeah, we talked about we just instantly got in the flow about music, which is really, really great because I’m hoping to talk to Karen Wong about music and kind of my model of consciousness being rhythm, being both feeling a pattern. So, yeah, it was great to get some notes on that. There is that sense though if you both if two people care about something enough, it’s not just information anymore. Like you’re trying to intuit the insight and intuition of the other person that cares about the subject enough to be in that moment with you. Otherwise, otherwise, it’s just two computers talking to each other, like hypothetically speaking, like he’s like, I’ve got this explanation. I’ve got this explanation. And it’s just which information is better? Like how do we manually process this? Like that’s just that’s not a conversation. That’s just it’s just pong at the end of the day. It’s just competitive. Yes. So the way you should process, the way you should care about how you communicate to other people is you have to be clear enough to get at your abstract thought, but detailed enough to care about their response. Right. So I’m trying to elicit a communication, a message to you to bring your insight, your spirit, your intuition back to me in a spirit of community, relationship, bringing two things together. That’s kind of what I’m trying to play with there. Well, I would be more meeting in the middle than bringing it to you or giving it to you or whatever. Yeah, gets into the whole intelligibility thing, which is you can never really know how someone’s going to take. You know, in a way you want the manifestation in a way the manifestation that you want is ethereal. Yes. And so you’re aiming at the same thing. It isn’t you or the other person or the other person conception or your conception of the other person. Right. It’s like, oh, it’s that thing outside of both of you. Sally Joe says she’s super glad you’re working on the meaning crisis and not boiling the ocean. You know, fun, Sally. Luckily, the butterflies flew that. Yes, indeed, they did. So what do you think, Jesse, you do you want to do more on caring or do you want to open it up so that every whomever can come and floodgate like how much distributed cognition here, you know, in private before we open it up to any any crazy people? Indeed. No pressure. I’m just trying to get a new new thing we’re trying. Yes. While you’re thinking about that, I’m disappointed. Going back to that sort of sense of character, like the character that cares for nothing, that has… Oh, the character. How did I know you were going in on that part? I know, it’s my part. I maybe in a sense of proposition here, I don’t believe it is possible to care for nothing. Even the Goths care about how they dress and how they’re seen represented, right? Even in the most nihilistic form of fashion and embodiment, they still have a value set. Okay, it’s not that they care about nothing. It’s that the thing they’re attending to is nothing. And the caring that they project is dark. Yes. And so you can tell that what they care about is the nihilism. Is the self destruction, the self mutilation, the self changing, right? But let’s think of this out, right? Let’s say, we’ll just use hypotheticals, which I nearly never do. Let’s suppose you can’t make yourself and you can’t form yourself within limits, right? So to some extent you can, right? And let’s suppose you thought there were no limits to that or there were very few limits to that. And so you were like, all right, well, look, I want to be a different sex. And so we have the physical means to give you the affectation or the aesthetic of being a different sex, right? And there’s a very high cost for that, by the way. But what if that doesn’t work? And so in trying to manifest it, trying to care about it, you make yourself lesser. You destroy yourself. You don’t get the goal of being something greater than you were by switching sex or greater than you were by having a change in your relationship with your skin by getting a tattoo or piercing, right? Or you’re not greater just because you opened your mind or whatever through psychedelics, right? What if that always kind of corrupts because you’re not able to do the thing that you’re trying to do? Just hypothetically. I’m just throwing out some random hypotheticals here. So what if you what if you try to emerge the good and you can’t? What if it’s not up to you? What if the goodness of your being in manifestation is not entirely under your control? What if there are spirits that can possess you, spirits of anger or resentment, spirits of nihilism? What if those things can have can move your attention to them? That relationship. Yeah, and caring is the quality of that attention. It is the means by which you propose your values on the world or want to see your values manifested. So the I guess my idea that I play with in my sort of my sense of a story model is that to be a character is to be one of grounding. You have to be grounded in the situation that you in and you have in order to be properly oriented in a story. You have to believe that you have good intentions that you’re trying to see the story through. Your values. Gosh, this microphone is killing me. It’s just streaming out. I just want to. You. When you do not care about things, you are not grounded. Right. You’re what you care about what you’re a tend to grounds you in the moment and it affords you. It affords you proper orientation towards the truth, the good, the beautiful. Right. And when you care for nothing, you are you’re you’re absent of the spirit for which manifests the good. Right. You can’t you’re you’re out of sync, out of relationship with people, events, time, place, purpose. Reality reality. Right. That’s what makes up reality. What you know, Manuel’s new things. Right. Reality is that which says no, which is which is a good compression of my reality is that which objects to your subjective experience. Yes. Yes. OK. This is yeah. And I do. I want to read this. This is good. Tachewa and Soho, my dear friend who’s been on and off with us for years at this point. I am completely self created. At least the delusional parts are anyway. Knowing you, you understand how how that turns in on itself and becomes much more funny. Yeah. And then the thing I knew here doesn’t Plato say prayer should be carried out in service of the good. Where is that in the Republic? I don’t know. Or is it not in the Republic? I’m only reading Republic Club tomorrow on the Texas wisdom community. Specifically, he says the good over other virtues. I use the good even a virtue. I think there’s three transcendentals. I’m not sure they’re actually thought of the same way. And the lesser gods are appealed to for everything else. Sure. Everything under the true, the good and the beautiful. I think that’s what we can do. Can I could just pitch and hop on that? The idea of prayer that how how a prayer forwards your sense of caring to this was most most religions, if you want to say like this, have sort of senses four or five basic forms of prayer. Prayer blessing or admiration, petition, intercession, Thanksgiving. But they’re all qualitative embodiments or orientations of caring of or of. Yeah. Allowing yourself the affordance of presence of spirit. Right. So when you petition things, it’s in that moment. And then you move on. You can’t say you can’t embody petition 24 7. Otherwise, you’re always asking for others need right. I’m never giving out. So you have to navigate that. That’s right. But what is prayer to one of the things necessary, but insufficient definition. One of the things prayer is, is you training your attention by giving it time and energy. So you’re saying I’m going to train my attention by a with my tea, my time, my energy. Right. And how do you do that? You pray. That’s what prayer is like. Okay. And then I’m going to put that in a liturgy, which is going to help me because it’s external to me. It’s a liturgy. Right. So that I can turn that into a habit. Now you have a habit of training your attention. Of you pointing yourself. So, yeah, you know, we’ll we’ll go back to it. Why not? Oh, my cell phone. It’s got me. It’s it’s a check. Okay. I don’t know what to tell you other than people that I know Catholic and otherwise and Orthodox and otherwise that pray. They don’t have this problem. They have the phone. Hmm. They don’t have the problem. That’s weird. Unless the problem has nothing to do with the phone and they’re busy training their time, energy and attention so that it can’t be hijacked as easily. Not to say some of them don’t become addicts or have problems or fail or sin or however you want to frame that. It is to say that there is a tool to help you not have your attention constantly hijacked. And I would argue that tool and it does other things as well is prayer. Right. And liturgy and those two things together can make you less prone to having your attention misdirected, redirected, usurp, stolen, guided by forces that you do not understand. Once it’s done, you’ll be able to attend to the words, actions or the environment around you that affords you that moment of participation. So you might know like if you’re properly if you’re properly in that sense of caring when someone says something and then you have that sense of prayer, you’re like, oh, that word is a seed there that I can or spirit that I can into it in order to draw out that person. Like the maybe the trauma that they’re going on or even just be able to attend. Oh, like this subject might afford of a reason that’s risen now is, you know, I need to pay attention to that. I need to care in this moment about how I present myself and how I talk to this person or even just be able to walk down the street and see someone that’s not doing well. It give them a smile. Right. In a body is a rightful spirit, you could say, or maybe even reach out to that person. And you can see that as we’ve gone outside of this sense of caring and quality and embodiment, tunnel vision started to happen with only me going from A to B, not me present in the greater sense of community or the body of the city. Yeah. Yeah. When there’s also this thing that I’m not sure if anyone else has noticed this, but it’s something I’ve noticed is this phrase, take care is like a prayer. A lot of people say and it’s not just because we have this sort of safety religion going on, although it’s definitely that some people do abuse it. But it’s a reminder that you were every moment you were afforded an opportunity to participate in the greater good, you could say, or to be to be to be a good actor, to be in good faith. You’re not taking anything from anyone. You’re, you’re taking the moment to, to, to respond to that which calls forth your adventure or your, your character or get proper qualitative embodiment action. Sorry, I’m missing my words. No, that’s fine. I think, I think as we navigate, I’m going to use my orienteering compass to orient and navigate. Soon to be your thumbnail. Soon to be, well, maybe part of it in my thumbnail or something that looks like it, we have powers. Yeah, I haven’t gotten around to whipping out the camera here. The orientation matters. Navigation is all about right is orientation. Core component. And the way we manifest that is through second order effects. So again, you can’t just walk north, get to the mountain that’s north of you. Because there’s a valley in the way there are rivers there are obstacles. So you can’t take a straight line, it’s not directional direction will not serve you in the same way. If the thing you care about is the end result. You are screwed. The screw. Caring is is the thing that manifests as the second order effect. And that’s why you have to look at the actions you’re taking, figure out what you care about. You can’t say, I care about you and then just yell at somebody all the time. Because you’re not caring about them at that point. I’m not saying you never yell at somebody you care about. Of course you do. If your kid’s about to run across the street, you yell at them not to because that’s caring. So it’s not in the yelling. Right. But it is the caring is evident in the effect. And look, I want to I want to jump into comments for a sec here. Ethan, like the sun that effects are seen in the garden plants, but is not itself in the garden. Right. Caring is not in the person. It’s not in me and it’s not in the object of my caring. Right. Caring is the quality of the relationship. Right. That intimacy. Right. There intimacy holds the caring. Right. It’s a quality inside that relationship, inside that intimacy. That’s actually Book Six of the Republic. We will be discussing it tomorrow. Hopefully. And then Nathaniel is good a virtue? No, it’s a transcendental. Can you go a little further than transcendental? I can’t go any further than transcendental. I can go past virtue by saying three transcendental, the two, the good, the beautiful. Right. Yeah. I mean, virtues and values are hard, but that’s why we did caring first. And there was argument about this for sure. Somebody named Jesse might even tried to argue that case. But we settled on this. Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know what else to say about not a virtue. But what do you think, Jesse? Are we ready to open this up and see if anybody else wants to join? Yeah, we definitely can open this up. All right. Let’s let’s anybody who wants to jump in and chat. I can pin this on navigating patterns, but I can’t pin it on anything else. Where? Why can’t I pin it on my channel? What is going on? Oh, there we go. Pin that message. I think that worked. Yes, it did. All right. I feel like a genius. So, yeah, if you want to jump in. And Nathaniel claims he just started Foundation and he thanks you for the recommendation. And I know back here, another question specifically for you, Jesse. I got to find it. Oh, our buddy, Benjamin Franklin. I mean, Jeffrey. I mean, Benjamin Franklin. Have you seen the recent film Sanctuary? I watched it yesterday. It’s really good. I’ve been thinking about it all morning. Why do you care about the film Sanctuary? Is it a film? Apparently. I don’t know. I’m not a movie guy. It’s a sci-fi series. You know what I did try to watch last night and it’s horrible. Everyone’s got to it as soon as I tell you what it is. So I’m going to describe it for you and I piss off a bunch of people. So the film, it’s in the late, late 70s, early 80s. It’s about a group of people traveling on a vessel to this unknown cloud in space. At least 60 percent of the film is people reacting to what they see. This person’s in the room now. Oh, the alien spacecraft is even bigger than I thought. We’re going further and further into we’re probing into the cosmic consciousness. Star Trek the motion picture. And it’s gone. Oh, yeah. The first one. Yes. This one is just horrible. Why do people care about this so much? It’s so boring. And there’s all these little men just floating everywhere for no apparent reason. Like one tiny man just bulbing around the screen. I’ve never been. I mean, classic Star Trek was a phenomenon. So we and we have this whole thing. Is it Damien, your buddy, Damien Walters? All right. You’re a good friend of mine. We both know Damien from different places. I’m preparing to do a response to the Viveki video. I think I’m going to start there. So he’s he’s doing a video on he just released part one. He did a video on why he thinks Star Trek is the modern mythos that we need now. And I’m like, it’s Viveki. It’s Viveki. Right. He’s doing it for Viveki. Right. Yeah. And I’m just like, well, first of all, I think you’re talking about next gen. It already came out and people are already using it. And that’s how we got here. That’s my first like, you know, it’s not the only way we got here. That’s a big component. There’s a group of people that got to that through Star Trek next. Right. So I am kind of a fan of next gen, but not really. I’m a classic Star Trek. The moral plays. Michelle Nichols talks about this. Right. Then look up her interview. Very explicit. She bursts into Roddenberry’s office and says, I know what you’re doing. You’re writing moral plays. She’s like, I caught you. And he’s like, no, you can catch me. You know, but of course she did. Right. Everybody knows it. But next gen, totally different. I like next. Well, probably next gen is season one. You come out with this pilot, the pilot. So fantastic. And then you can’t even get close ever again. In the rest of the series, almost. It’s a couple of episodes that are up there. That pilot even is poorly acted and poorly implemented as it was, because it’s a mess in some spot. But the theme and the queue and like, so good. So good. Just absolutely enthralling. And I love watching episodes for you. I’ll watch the episode for you. But I’m going to be savage. I’m going to be savage on the whole. The whole thing. I’m going to be savage on the whole idea that’s on. No, no. The far point station, the pilot for next gen. Oh, dude. No, it’s. It’s. Oh, look, like I said, you can, you know, it’s like Dr. Who, right? Look at this terrible camera work. I mean, terrible effects and look at this. Right. And this horrible acting because they were all new. Right. It was the first time. But yeah, there’s, there’s a bunch of. There’s a bunch of kids in there, but yeah. That talk with Vickie was awesome with Damien. I haven’t seen it. So I’ll have to, I’ll have to take a look. Here we go, guys, too. Like when people care about things, you’re also getting very close to their idols. Right. And you have to, you have to pay proper attention to how you are going to navigate that space. If you’ve detected an idol because helping people not worship their idols, that’s a. That used to be a profession called being a minister. Oops. Sally Joe, when do you open the gates? We already did the Muppets and Muppets. The gates are open for Muppets. Look, the link has been posted. You know, I’ve talked about this a little bit before. So Rob was on last week. Love Rob. You know, whatever disagreements like like there are humans I don’t have disagreements with. Let’s let’s count down. I disagree with everybody. But on principle, like it’s just it is what I do. It is my my essence, my existence, my I does my form, whatever. You know, I’m still swayed because Damien has his theory, right? Oh, we need now is more Star Trek as the modern mythos. And that will save us. Right. And like, whatever. I love Damien. But come on, dude, really? But but Rob’s thesis is no, no, no. New England always had it right. If we go back and like I’m always tempted by the go back when you know you’re in a bad place, the first thing you need to do is go back to the last place that wasn’t bad. Like, you know, there’s no verveky. We can’t go back. That’s that’s about the silliest statement that verveky ever made that. And we can’t live in a two world mythology. Two silly statements by verveky. Love, John. But like, really, John, come on. Really? So so he’s like, oh, look, we just need you know, we need what New England ethos provided. And like, this is hard for me because I grew up in New England and I’m not sure that that’s wrong. But also, I’m too close at the same time. Way too close. Way too tempting to just jump in and go, yeah, you’re right, Rob. Like, this is true. And I don’t know that he’s wrong. I don’t think I’m still struggling with it. You know, I have been for months. Probably going to be for more months. Just because it’s it’s hard. Like, yeah, there’s a there there. Is it the right there? Can we even distill it enough to articulate it? Because I’m not sure that I can. I can tell you some of the properties, the measures, the quantities of New England that made it work. Like, nobody discussed church. And yet the South is just as cohesive, if not more so. And there are big questions. What church do you go to? Polar opposite. Right. And the Puritans see everybody else as Puritans. And, you know, when in fact they’re the they’re you know, it’s all projection. Right. Like I’ve talked about this before. So you you’re in New England. Right. I lived in Marlboro, Massachusetts for a long time. They open a porn shop downtown next to the gun shop, which is next to the town hall. No, no, really. Or next to the sorry next to the next to the city, city hall, the city. Really next physically next to like couldn’t get any closer unless it was in the same building. Those buildings are right along Main Street. So protests, trying to close it down. You can’t advertise. You’re not allowed to advertise strip clubs. You’re not allowed to advertise like porn shops. You can’t. It’s just illegal in Massachusetts. And I think in most of New England states, it’s just illegal. Drive down the highway down down 95. Get out of the northeast. Right. Away from the crazy Puritans. Right. Start to drive down south. Two hundred and fifty miles. You know, you know, Lara’s luxury shop. You know, porn shop or whatever. No, really. Right. Truck stops with, you know, don’t go past south of the border. Just be careful. South of the border is a place on the highway, a well-known place that people stop on their way to Florida from New England. Don’t don’t go too. Don’t don’t go too far there. I did. There’s a little shop down there. I don’t know what’s in it. I didn’t want to know. I turned around real quick and said, oh, I’m not even sure I’m in the parking lot of this place. This place looks like bad news. And it’s, you know, a video store. A video store of a certain type, we’ll say. And that’s the problem is that down here they advertise adult bookstores. They advertise strip clubs on billboards on the highway right next to the Jesus Saves billboards. Which model is better? No advertisement one way or the other or very few advertisements. And all the advertisements in New England are businesses, you know, or whatever. And almost all the advertisements down south are liquor, barbecue, adult bookstores, Jesus, lawyers. That’s it. That’s it. Almost none of that gets advertised in New England. It’s a different. It’s just different. I’m not I’m not making a claim. One’s better than the other. I’m saying there’s a big difference here. I don’t know why. I don’t know why. I mean, I do know why. Read American Nations, Colin Woodard. Bang! Tells you everything. Private versus public Protestantism. Oh, OK. Problem solved. Understand the last piece of North-South divide that I never understood despite years of trying to figure it out. That’s the issue is that it’s hard to know what works and why. It’s hard to say it’s not Star Trek or Star Trek TNG or whatever. It’s it’s easy to come up with a description that fits the past. That’s called overfitting. If you’re a data scientist, right, that seems to work and that therefore you should project into the future. That’s too easy to do. Everyone’s doing it right. Like this is Curtis Yarvin. He does this all the time. I find his models to be among the least informed models that I have seen that are coherent, articulate and well followed. Too well followed in my opinion, obviously, at the Blue Church. The whole thing. Trying to frame everything in the highest possible religious frame is not a good strategy. Nathaniel. I’m in North Central Florida. Can confirm the I-95 signage. Yes. And the difference as you drive north is just so amazing. Jonathan. Good. Glad you’re still here, Jonathan. Roll on the floor laughing. You aren’t wrong about the billboards in the South. Certainly true in Texas. You forgot the tax attorneys, although technically they’re attorneys. Yeah. Well, yeah, it’s it’s ambulance chaser attorneys in Florida and in South Carolina. And I think parts of Georgia haven’t been to Georgia too much. But yeah, it’s attorneys of all types. So, yeah, yeah. Advertising will manipulate your sense of what you value and what you find is quality. But they’ll change what you care about essentially to get you to. Well, but at the same time, there are also reflections of caring. So here’s a weird thing that I haven’t figured out. When you come down south. Everywhere you go in most of the southern states, what you’re going to see, you know, I haven’t been everywhere in the South, right. But but certainly down in Florida and South Carolina and North Carolina and a good portion of Maryland and Virginia, you will see on the side streets a ton of title loan companies, title loan companies, loan you money based on the title of your car. That’s what they do. You don’t see that up north. I’m not saying they’re not there, but because they are, you don’t see them in that number. That is not a thing that is done. Down here, it’s done. It’s advertised. It’s all over the place. So some of it is just reflecting values. And if you want to get along with the values of the people that you’re with, you have a wide range to choose from because you can always go with the Jesus saves, right. A billboard instead of the tax billboard or instead of the Lyons den billboard or whatever it is or Jessica’s secret thing or whatever, whatever. There’s a there’s a bunch of them and mills. It’s all dispensary billboards here in Oklahoma anymore. Yeah. Well, different in different places and different waves come and go. And yeah, there’s the people who own those billboards is only a handful of them. They’re all wealthy, by the way. They’re all billionaires, just to let you know. But they work. They do draw attention. Now, again, that’s not a bad thing, right. But it is a thing to be a what’s drawing your attention is a video games is the ease of completing the level or the ease of being on a team of good people that can thrash you or whatever. And, you know, like you hear the tales of the of the people on on the you know, the first person shooter games that are popular, you know, being black ops people or whatever. Right. And and then they you know, they do something and then they come across a team that, you know, they find out later is an actual military team that plays from the base and they get their fricking asses handed to them because it turns out there is something military training after all. All your you know, wildest playing of black ops five or whatever the fricking stupid games are in the world is not going to make up for a good West Point education. Look, it’s just not right. There’s a limit to what you can learn on your own. What is the difference? There’s no difference between the digital reality and the real reality. Like that training of how to enter a room, how to enter a room, how to break is like that’s that doesn’t come from nowhere. Well, and and it’s this a self-made idea. You can play that stupid game Call of Duty or whatever all day long. Okay. And and some people vastly small number though 1% will become good enough to be as good at some of those things as the military people. Sure. But that’s not you, dude. It ain’t happening to you. You’re not the 1%. So the fact that it can happen and it can happen to some people doesn’t mean it’s going to happen to you because you followed their pattern. We are different. And you have to be aware of that. You can’t get sucked in by this programming course and be a world class programmer. And I’m not saying you’re not going to take a programming course and get a really good paying job. Yeah, the industry is not anymore maybe, but industry was starving for programmers. Now that Elon Musk has encouraged everybody else to lay everybody off, which is a good thing in my opinion, that changes everything. So that’s the issue is that you can sacrifice your time, energy and attention to Call of Duty all day long, but that you’re not necessarily going to be a better black ops operative for the military or in real life. Like that’s not necessarily going to happen. And the odds of it happening are tiny. And by the way, you could just go to West Point and learn more there than you can in several hundred hours of Call of Duty play. And that’s kind of important to know. And Ethan, caring implies suffering. Yeah, I agree. Or sacrifice and struggle. Right. Hard pill to swallow and swallow a redeemed world, Christian frame or just a world platonic frame. Suffering is integral. Right. Well, because. Oh, Ethan, suck on that Protestants. Yeah. Well, okay. Fair enough. Drama is inevitable, though. There’s always going to be drama. Like you’re in. I keep telling you. Well, we’re not we’re not objecting to the drama. We might be objecting to what people are attending to. The miscode suffering is the worst, the worst aspect of life rather than just seeing that it’s a drama. It’s a play. It’s a story. It’s playing out in your life. And right now it’s just it’s one that appears to be sad. All dramas have some sense of revolution. Whether you agree with that resolution or not, that’s up to you and your character. But that’s right. You’re right. You’re don’t negatively encode suffering with the ultimate evil. Like you just it’s a drama. It will play itself out. Right. There’s no drama without struggle without without that. You know, I don’t I don’t like the term. I don’t like suffering so much. Struggling has nothing to do with us, but struggle is something that we have some control over. So I like that terminology better. We we wrestle with God. Isn’t that the whole Peterson framing? Yep. That’s his next book, apparently. Well, look, I’m I’m yeah, you know, I’m not going to hear my Peterson grievance on that issue. Yeah, it’s well, look, I he might have the best message. Who am I? Like, no, I don’t have his subscribers for a reason. My messaging sucks on a bunch of things. I know that. I just watch you guys like catch up. And I’m like, I told you that six months ago, you muffets. Like why you you you actually quoted me from six months ago. So you didn’t get it when I said it. You know, I’m like fine. Fair enough. Like I suck. Fine. Whatever. Yeah. So it’s good to know that. And then Mills muscle memory and infantry squad tactics can’t be transmitted in the game. Maybe some of them can, but not well enough. Right. Paintball for Jesus, however, a little better. I don’t think so, because the ethos of Paintball for Jesus is get the church to pay me to pay to play paintball competitively because that’s better than video games. And I don’t think that’s right. Ethos. But and Grim keeps making this clearer and clearer every time he talks about it. Fair enough. It’s his thing. He should have it the way he wants it. I’m not I’m not in I did enjoy paintball in Thunder Bay for various reasons. I do wish John were there, but he can’t he can’t participate in paintball for for reasons. Good reasons. Sally Joe video games are actually destroy competence can confirm they are accomplishment porn porn can confirm they are accomplishment porn. And sometimes you need accomplishment. Sometimes you got to start slowly. Right. And then you regress back to four years old. And now you have to build back up again. Fair enough. Talked about this before. That’s definitely a thing. Right. Ethan when you care for somebody you you’re definitely sacrificing something else for that caring. Yes. And it may not be you. It may be the caring that you have to give to somebody else. Dun dun dun. So it may be yourself or it may be yourself and somebody else. Right. Or maybe other things. Right. It may be money that you shouldn’t rely on that as an indicator. But yeah. Well said. Very important. Important to realize. Oops. I am out of Marathon Tea from Table Rock Tea Company which you should order because they’re great. South Carolina grown in South. Well the Marathon Tea is not Kenyan tea but all their other teas I think are grown here. So not necessarily their tea song. Tisan is what we call herbal tea. Herbal tea is not tea technically. You need to know more. You need to go on the tour at Table Rock Tea up in Pickens, South Carolina. Wonderful tour and free. Nathaniel. Some Buddhist monasteries allow some retro gaming which requires a great level of skill against your own last run and have a rebirth motif. Some entertainment is okay. Look, entertainment is not optional. You can’t just keep running all the time. That doesn’t work. So yeah. The question is how much? And yeah, the purpose of entertainment is to reduce your competence to some extent because sometimes you need to reduce your competence to become better. Because you get too specialized. Right? I had a boss a few years ago and what happened was we had a foosball table in the office. It was part of this Boston development office garbage that they did. You know, the fun workplace environments. Everybody is emulating what they think Google is doing and doing it a little bit better in some cases. And sometimes it was lunchtime. Four people get together. Foosball. Let’s do this. I happen to be a foosball and air hockey fan. I do not lose air hockey ever to date. No, really. Fluky happens. Also never lost poker for money but happy to play for money. Yeah, I know. So tempting. Challenge accepted. Someday. Someday. What my boss was talking about is when you get worse at something like foosball in particular, and there was a paper out there that backed all this up, what that means is that you’re breaking down your way of doing things to change it and get better. And that is true. That is something that has been embodied. So yeah, it’s worth knowing. So that entertainment, that thing that breaks down your competence is required. It’s not optional. Yeah, there’s a line there. But it’s only when we don’t pay attention to boundaries that we have problems with that. We’re paying attention to boundaries. We don’t have problems with boundaries. What do you think, Jesse? Not to do the whole. Studies have shown that when particular aspects of masculinity are embodied by watching and participating in teams, so particularly with sports, so that they can measure or they have measured, whatever, particularly the academics. So but what’s important to note is that a pattern has arisen where they can see that when your team is doing well, even if you’re watching on the television screen, the masculine or the male testosterone levels increase. When the team doesn’t do so well, decreases. That’s why you are my team lost. I’m sad. Walk out of the arena. Oh, this is all sucks. Oh, you know, all ready to fight now because my team lost and someone called me a bad name and tensions are raising. It go from low to high very quickly. And that causes a reaction. So you have to pay attention to what you care about. It will be manipulated. It will be shifted on you. Not sure if that’s true for the female experience, but definitely there’s there’s a sense of social media hijacking both the masculine and the feminine realities of what to care about. Right. And this is one of my notes that I submitted was that the Internet influencer doesn’t know you exist. Even if you send them $200, even if you jump onto the whatever podcast, they don’t know you exist. They don’t care about it. It is that black and white. There is there is no quality of relationship between you and that Internet influence. Even if they grant you 20 minutes, half an hour, an hour of their time, it is not properly embodied. So until it’s properly embodied, it’s not the aspect of the quality of their caring is subjective. And you see that particularly with online chat rooms. They’re parasitic. And it is very, very easy in the modern age to fall to parasitic storytelling. But I come in. Yes. Well, and I want to sort of emphasize this point. Like, how do you know what you care about? Are you sure you actually understand? Well, one thing you can do and should do is look back on your actions. So one of the practices or maybe it’s more than one practice, but it’s one practice pattern, we’ll say, is this idea of reflection. So the end of the day, you write down what you did. Right. And you reflect on it. And Vervicki talks about this in the meditation series, I believe, and also in the Cultivating Wisdom series. Right. So this idea of reflecting on your day, reflecting on your week, reflecting on your month, keeping journals on those time frames. This is important. Because reflection, contemplation, rumination about your own actions. It’s not the only thing you should reflect on, contemplate and ruminate about. But doing that on your actions at different time scales tells you something about where your caring might have been hijacked. Where your attention may have been moved. So it’s easy to say, I care about the environment. Totally. I don’t disbelieve you. But if your attention is hijacked, then your caring will be oriented incorrectly. And now all of a sudden, you’re trying to make your neighbor not drive their SUV. Instead of doing something that you can do in your yard or with your garbage or with your car that will make a difference. People are doing that to you right now. I’m not a fan, but it’s happening. And you need to know that. The only way you’re going to know that is with reflection. I mean, maybe you’ll get lucky and you’ll listen to somebody who’s saying, ha, your climate caring is not correct because these numbers are wrong or these people are lying to you. And then you’ll suddenly believe them. Now, it’s more likely that if you do the work, you do the research, you know, and the only research you need to do is in your own actions that you’ll figure out real quick that your caring is not incorrect, but it’s aimed incorrectly because your attention has been hijacked or moved or usurped. Sally Jo. This is a true story. The Internet on a whole cannot love you. Yes, the Internet cannot love you. The people on the Internet cannot love you properly. They can love you, but they can’t love you properly. Can’t participate with you properly. As I said in the monologue, this sucks, but it’s as good as I can do. Right. Mills family time. Thank you. Watch the rest later. Enjoy your family, though. Much better. Much better caring and participation. Hope it was helpful. Yeah, I mean, I think that’s. That’s right. What? What? What? Dude, really? Benjamin Franklin. We evolved under conditions where aggression and the ability to kill had utility. No, we did not. That’s just a false and a lie. I think that we are in a peculiar conditions where adaptations are misaligned with the environment. Well, necessarily because evolution and entropy are real, but you can’t make any conclusions from that fact, even if it is a fact. Hey, here’s Chad. How are you doing, Chad? Good. I strangest thing just happened to me or one of many strange things. So I go and I go to pick up dinner at this order for dinner or out for us and and I’m paying and I see this flyer on the on the thing. I’m like, what’s what’s that? I thought it’s like a band or something. It’s got to be a band called Death Cafe. So I asked the lady, I’m like, what is that? And she says, well, every second Saturday here, it’s a supper club. We do coffee and cake and we talk about death and we talk about like, you know, insurance policies and stuff or whatever. But I was like, that’s the weirdest thing. I’ve never even heard of such a thing. Have you guys heard about that? I was thinking about that as it relates to care. And like, it’s just another one of these interesting things that like the church would have dealt with. But oh, whoops. Okay. Yeah. Look, so Verveke talks about this and Ben Aang on the Awakening from the Meeting Crisis Discord Service talk about this all the time. Right. There are practices in the East in particular. Japan springs to mind immediately, but also in China and in India, there are practices around thinking about death. So there’s this whole meditation thing where you’re supposed to meditate in a cemetery being completely still and you’re supposed to meditate on death. Like that’s, you know, and of course, I can go too far really easily. So I’m not a fan. I don’t recommend. But it is in some of the practices. And that’s really important to know. Like, oh, yeah, there are these practices out there and oh, you know, they’re a little weird. But but also, you know, in Verveke talks about this a very healthy way. You got to remember you’re not going to be around forever. And so that’s that’s one way to engender humility and open you up to gratitude. So it’s like, well, yeah, I mean, those are humility and gratitude are good. Yeah, it’s just such a trip to me that a supper club would host this thing in their community where it’s like where they serve coffee and cake and talk about that. Oh, so so there’s an interesting thing, Chad, that I saw. Shoot. Is it. Outer limits or is it Twilight Zone or maybe it’s something earlier that than that. Boy, I can’t remember the guy’s name. Did Twilight Zone. Anyway, Rod Sterling. I think it was Rod Sterling was either involved in this or did this. It might have been outer limits. I forget. It might have been Twilight Zone. Yeah, there’s a thing. And a lot of that stuff was just based on cultural tropes or fairy tales or whatever from different cultures. So the thing from I think it’s the British Isles or the United Kingdom area, maybe maybe maybe Ireland. I don’t remember the exact details called a death eater. And so what happens is there’s this whole tradition around people who voluntarily eat a meal at off of the dead person’s coffin or off their body or whatever. Right. As a way of taking in all their sins. But then that death eater is, you know, taking on that burden. And it’s so fascinating to me. And that was a movie with Heath Ledger was in a movie like that. This was a yeah, this was an old episode. Shoot. It’s it’s the actor who played John Boy on the Waltons, actually, I think, is who’s in that particular episode. But it’s a fascinating like I watched it. It’s fascinating stuff. I think it was black and white. It’s really old. But the son of the death eater was tricked by his mother, who was withholding food into into having him eat the meal off of his father and therefore perpetuate the cycle. And it was done by the mother. And now I look back and I go, oh, everywhere. Right. Right. 2003 film called The Order, also known as The Sin Eater. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. It might be that the one with Heath. Is that the one with Heath Ledger? With Heath Ledger. Yeah. Yeah. Look, that’s based on this on this Twilight Zone Sin Eater Death Eater thing. I forget what it was called. Look, if you want to map it recommendation, just don’t watch any movies after 2016. There you go. Problem solved. Anything before 2016, you’ll be fine. That’s all good. Wales, 13th century Wales. OK. We even see this with two stories. So you see this with old Christian, old English settlements of churches. You have you have the town parish. You have the town church and the hall. And you also have graveyards nearby. So as a part of your pilgrimage to the church, to the place of participation and worship, you will walk past your ancestors or you will pass or pass people that have gone before you to lay the ground, literally lay the ground of the place that you’re participating in worshiping. And when Christina and I went to Kyoto, we accidentally did a pilgrimage. We thought we were just walking up to a sacred shrine. However, what we didn’t know is we took the long way. That meant walking up this entire hillside field, field, field, filled with old graves and shrines. And even though it was slightly modernized in the pathway, the pathway was, you know, legit pathway with a guardrail and everything. The very fact that we walked this way and we took the time, we got the full experience of going up the mountain, seeing perspective, then going up to the place of worship. And even at that place of worship, there was another set of stairs and escalated to the highest place. But the very act of seeing, you know, seeing the graveyards, seeing the sites, seeing the shrines and knowing that thousands of people have done this before you and will still continue to do this daily, you know, that’s what’s being lost, that mode of caring and knowing, you know, what’s around you and how it builds up to the highest place. Because, you know, death is always seen as the bottom of the frame, right? And praise and order and restoration is always the top is the heavens. That being said, I have a question for Mark on what he thinks about this. So all of my grandparents that have passed, I have like, there’s like four of them. And then I know it’ll be the same with my the final grandparent. But all of them requested no funerals. In fact, they kind of insisted on it. And I’m wondering, and I know I’m not the only one who’s who’s been dealing with this or who has experienced this. It’s something to do. I don’t know what’s up with them boomers. But what’s up? What do you think that’s about? Like, they don’t want they don’t want a celebration of life. They don’t want a funeral. They want none of it. It’s not because of money either. Yeah, yeah. Well, look, if you said I did it, which video did I do on this? I did a video that dealt with some of this. If you look at time in the way it unfolds, right? Let’s take we’ll take our seminal example, the matrix. In that video, I used Kurt Cobain’s death as my example, right? The way the matrix impacts somebody who’s 15 is different from the way it impacts somebody who’s 30, which is different from the way it impacts somebody who’s 50. If if you buy the idea, and I’m not saying this idea is correct, although I use examples that aren’t actual examples. If you buy the idea that nihilism snuck in through art, or however it snuck in doesn’t really matter, the nihilism signal is there and very strong, and that people are drawn to it for whatever reason, right? Their attention is shaped in that direction, right? Or usurped towards that purpose. The way people in their 40s or 30s respond to that later on is going to be different from how people who are 10 years younger respond, etc, etc. And so what you see, and you see this with everything, that’s why I don’t like terms like modernity, because I have a video on that on navigating patterns, right? Because what you see changes very much on what generation you’re looking at. And Byrne Powers almost goes into this on the anadromist, almost, but he doesn’t he doesn’t go that route with it for whatever reason. I love Byrne, so I loved his How We Got Here series, even though I have my criticisms of it. You can see that the way Kurt Cobain’s death affected people 10 years younger than me and 10 years older than me is totally different from how it affected me. Totally different. Like I just saw the events. It was seminal. It was a seminal death. It was seminal for certain people. It wasn’t seminal for who at all. I think in some ways, in some ways, it was culturally seminal because of it in a way kind of like, you know, kind of like how Vietnam was televised, you know what I mean? In that way, that’s what I mean. Right. But Vietnam being televised affected the different generations differently. Of course. That’s why you get boomers going, no, it’s nihilism at the end. So we might as well just boost the nihilism signal that we’ve been used to since we were 40 or whatever, whatever age. Not making a claim about what age, right? Because again, you can say Kurt Cobain’s death is seminal. I totally get it. Right. I’m sitting there going, yeah, he’s a druggie. What do you think was going to happen? No, really. That was my attitude. And, you know, Robin Callis or Meen or whatever. That’s fine. I’m just telling you that certain people were like, yeah, yeah, I get that. I get that. Yeah. Well, so yeah, but it is seminal for a bunch of people in their 20s who were crying at the funeral of a guy they never met. Well, I always thought that was weird. That’s a great deal. I always thought, I always thought a lot of, I mean, everything from Michael Jackson to Kurt Cobain was always weird. The obsession. Well, and how can you really in some ways it makes sense if, you know, for people who don’t have something, you know, some something enchanting to worship, you know what I mean? Of course you’re going to make it like, yeah. Or intimate to hold them. The object of your relationship is now an image on a screen or a sound on a CD, right? Or an experience at a concert because you’re busy maybe rebelling against your family, right? Or you’re busy trying to be an individual, but you can’t. And so you’re trying to make a different kind of connection because you don’t like the other kind of connection. Right. There’s lots of there’s lots of proximal causes. But that I would say in all cases is part of what what manifests as the intimacy crisis. That’s a matter of right. No, I agree. Attaching to the wrong thing and trying to get a connection, a relationship with something. Right. But that relationship doesn’t hold you the way you say your family relationship does. Right. Right. Yeah. No, it’s interesting, though. Pardon me, I was wondering, you know, so my grandmother had MS for like the last 30 years and she would never like let anybody know when she was struggling, except maybe her husband. But even then it was like there was a lot of pride around that, which tells me something. She’s a wonderful woman. I mean, but they were also atheists. And then my grandfather, I think he was he I think he was not maybe explicitly atheist, but just kind of like, yeah, there’s God, whatever. You know what I mean? So yeah, participating. Yeah. Well, right. Well, I mean, really self-centered to the boom. I just started this frame of the boom is the ones that propagated this idea of atheism. Like, we do have to lay that charge on them. So it is natural. It makes sense though, right? It’s defined itself by something that’s basically a rejection of death to want their legacy or how it’s how they’re seen as their final moments to be a reflection of that legacy, which is to basically remove death from from the sense of reality. Well, they want to validate their atheism. Right. Which means they don’t want to survive in the afterlife. Like they don’t because then they’re wrong about being atheists. And so, right. That’s part of it. But also you have to consider if you have no faith that your struggle is going to be alleviated or people around you, then you’re not going to share it. Chad’s frozen. Who knows if he’s there. But I mean, I but I think that’s a good point. Like, if you’re trying to be an individual, you have no faith that anyone will. Okay. Kind of what those people like achieved to like, as far as, you know, you know. Oh, no, now we now we lost Chad. Shoot. I wanted to hear what he was saying. Chad always has interesting things to say. But I think you can’t overstress the point that the fundamental problem with the individualism is that rejection of intimacy. Right. That has to come. But then it’s not often you can’t live that way. It doesn’t work. And so weird things happen or unexpected things manifest as a result. And that just makes you angry and resentful. And then you act out. You want your atheism to be justified. Well, the only way to do that is to not have people remember you. Well, the funerals are to act the closing of the loop. Right. It’s the end of the story. It’s, you know. And so by not wanting to close that story, I would say that is the ultimate act of selfishness. Right. It’s like they still want their their mark, their legacy to be something you have to carry around now because you didn’t get to say you didn’t literally get to you know, what’s the phrase? Have your piece or leave your piece or be at peace about it. Yeah, they thought that the funerals were for for them, but it wasn’t. It would be for the selfishness. Right. That’s the atheistic individualistic materialistic selfishness. My mother did that. My mother did that. Don’t don’t don’t you know, don’t don’t have a funeral. Don’t have it. Right. And then she was like, you know, we’ll make sure they don’t read my name at the church either. What? I got to go, guys. I wish I could stay with my wife just to home later. All right. See you, Chad. Yeah, I think I think you’re right. Sally Joe. The best church is the one with plaques your family put up in them. Yes, indeed. I agree. The best place is the place where there are plaques from your family, your friends, your neighbors. Right. So like if you’re like Virginia Beach, they’ve got benches all along the beach around the boardwalk, which is all manufactured. And those benches have plaques from families who donated money, have plaques. Right. And then you have these things like, you know, these are the pieces of bricks with names, right. That that that sort of thing is everywhere. We have these monuments that are supposed to be revered. Right. Based on, you know, people sometimes who are still alive, sometimes who have passed. Right. And that’s very important because it gives us grounding. And those people are trying to have it both ways. Right. They’re trying to say. My life didn’t matter. Now they have no responsibility for the harm they may have caused, even if they did. Like, look, you cause harm accidentally all the time. Sorry. You do. You suck. You’re a muppet. I’m a muppet. We’re all muppets. Get over. It’s interesting that this, you know, we’ve kind of we started this with caring. But what we’re what we’re kind of landing on here now is remembrance. And why do you remember things and why are things remembered? Like, why are things are attended or cared for? Why do we preserve the spirit of something? Remembrance is still caring. Yes. Yes. Right. Yes. That’s it. And you couldn’t get a better example of a quality of embodied action that other than leaving a clock like a plaque or putting up a monument that we, you know, we care about what has happened in the past. And I think that I was fortunate enough to still go to a high school that hadn’t modernized yet. And every time we had the sing song was a Christian Bible school. So, yeah, you had to you had to sit through some people playing awful songs. But at least you could look on the sides and you could see all these wooden plaques with people’s names that had gone before you that had started at the school. And I think my when I did my final address is one of the prefix of the last group of my of my era. I said, like, look at this. If you get nothing out of this, get nothing out of this speech, you know, people have gone before you to play the part path. Right. You it is not purely your desires that manifest in the world. You have to like you have to be in community with others as well as trying to point to. Right. Of course, I did that in the teenage. You know, you have to seize the day and all that sort of stuff. And Robert Frost. But what’s not. Yeah. What’s important is the grounding was in and how you are character in that grounding. And that’s what that’s what remembrance is, is recognizing the character, the values of the previous generation and carrying on that tradition. Yeah. Yeah. Sally Jo, the whole no funeral. This is Pete B.S. stuff. I made up my individualism is for cowards was about. Yes. If you if you if you haven’t seen Sally Jo’s excellent video on individualism is for cowards, you should check it out. It’s got quite a few views. It’s getting more Sally Jo plant trees in the last years of your life. Well, plant trees throughout your life. And yeah, let’s grab the individualism is cowardly video and paste the links so that everybody can participate in the wonder that is individualism is for cowards because I think she’s right. I think she made that point excellently. I feel I feel very proud that she was able to make that point so well. And I hope that had something to do with with the years of work put into getting her to talk like a human that other humans can understand. Sally Jo, there is this 90 year old guy I know been married seven seventy seventy years. I assume what he what does he do? He buys trees for new homeowners and plants them. There you go. Old people like that show you how to live. Right. Well, but that gets down to exemplification. Exemplification is what you care about. So you know, one’s going to like this. Sorry. This isn’t the this isn’t the tell you comforting lies channel. Sorry. You are going to exemplify things. You have no choice. Your cognition is so limited and the world is so vast. You’re going to act things out. You aren’t really consciously aware of your unconscious mind is a force and the bigger force than your conscious mind. Sorry. Your unconscious mind wins every every battle, you know, ultimately and any battles you win with your conscious mind, you should be so frickin grateful that it’s yeah, it’s hard to imagine. You should pray to a higher power for sure. Because your unconscious mind is just rolling over you all the time. You have no idea. And that’s why you need to look at your actions. Right. Keep a diary, a journal, whatever, and then review it. Right. Figure out. Oh, I am a journalist. Right. Figure out. Oh, I am addicted to video games. Oh, I am a jerk. Right. Oh, I did this bad thing to a person. Right. Oh, I made somebody cry for three days. You can go to work. I did. You know, like, you know, these things happen. Right. Because that gives you this contrast to find out what it is you’re caring about. Because again, maybe you’re right about what you care about, but your manifestation is not one of caring. That’s why when people say, hey, we all just need to care for one another, it’s like care for one another. How? By hating each other? Because sometimes that’s right. Most of the time, that’s wrong. You’re not saying anything. Like, really, you’re not giving anybody a pragmatic approach to what it is they can and cannot do. And if you don’t point at something, no one knows the qualities, the principles, the values of what you’re describing, what you’re prescribing. You know, we all need to care for one another. What is it that we need? What is this spirit of which you’re trying to signal here? It’s just humanity. Yeah. Wait a minute. It’s one another nothing, Jesse. The individualism leads us down a road of not caring. And the problem with that is that will lead you to nihilism because you won’t care about your future self. Where do you think the nihilism comes from? It comes from not caring about your future self. That’s why you don’t need a funeral. I don’t care about my future self. After I’m dead? Fair enough. Maybe you can’t care about yourself after you’re dead. But maybe you can care about the things you did when you were alive that are going to persist after you’re dead. That might be a good thing to care about. You had an impact on other people whether you like it or not. Well, it’s deterministic. No, it’s not. But it’s inevitable. Inevitable does not mean deterministic. Those are different problems. When you reduce caring or try to reduce caring or try to remove caring, you get nihilistic for sure. Because you won’t care about your future self. You won’t care about your past self and your accomplishments. You won’t care that once upon a time you could do these things and be this person. You won’t care that, whoa, I used to be a better person. And then you’re just going to get worse. The caring affects how you see yourself, how you see your past actions, how you see yourself now, and whether or not you’re going to pursue something in the future and how that’s going to go. So it’s not like caring is optional. But how is it directed? You can deny it. You can rebel against it. You can say, oh, you’re going to care anymore. But you’re caring about something. It’s like judgment. You’re taking action in the world. You’re judging. It’s the same thing. And that can be hijacked right out from under you like that. Happens to everybody. Why? Because you’re a Muppet. I’m a Muppet. We’re all Muppets. There are forces moving us that we do not understand. They are unconscious primarily. Sometimes if we’re good, if we get good at it, maybe not everybody can get good at it. I don’t know. We can see the spirit. It is moving somebody else. We can see, oh, this is anger and resentment. Oh, this is somebody seeking agreement. They don’t care about what I think. They just don’t want me to disagree with them or they don’t want to appear to be disagreeing with me. They don’t actually care about the points being made. That happens all the time. Can you get agreement? I don’t want freaking agreement. I want truth. If truth exists, if you believe in objective material reality or an objective truth, and fair enough, maybe you should, then someone’s right. And it might not be you. That’s the problem. Do you ever consider that maybe you’re the idiot? Maybe we’re the baddies. Yeah, maybe. But that’s not always the other person that you’re projecting on. You have to project that on yourself. Peterson talks about this. If you were in Nazi Germany, you’d be a Nazi. That sucks. I know he’s right. Not everybody. But the not everybody is probably not you. Maybe, maybe you can go and become enlightened and leave your family and abandon your children like the Buddha. Maybe you can. OK, maybe. But I don’t think so. There was one. One. That was a while ago. A few generations back. A few billion people ago. What are the odds? Not good for you, bucko. And yeah, I was using bucko before I heard it from Peterson. This is one of the things that fascinates me. Bucko, devil takes the hindmost, there’s two more. Things that he says that I’m like, those are New England things, I think. I got to find out. One of these days I’ll find out. Sally Jo. Sometimes you need to tell your pre-diabetes friend to put down the Coca-Cola. Yes, you do. Look, you need that conflict. People need that conflict. All right. Who wants to jump in? Come on, guys. Jump in or we’re going to shut this thing down pretty soon. It will go a little longer. But look, the point is that caring is not optional. And that you’re exhibiting caring whether you want to or not. And that it’s important that you know what you care about. And the only way to do that or the best way to do that maybe is to see what you’re doing. And see what impact that those actions have. What is the mode of participation? What is the result of the participation? How is the participation manifesting for yourself and others? You need that contrast to see. You don’t know what you’re up to. Peterson says that. You don’t know what you’re up to. I believe Peterson. He’s right about that. You don’t know what you’re up to. And maybe sometimes I know exactly what I’m up to. Meh. It’s not all the time. Good luck if that’s what you’re relying on. Good luck embodying something random. I don’t understand where the NPCs come from. Where are these people? Because they’re embodying a spirit they don’t understand. Their attention has been hijacked. That’s why. It’s not hard. By what? I don’t know. I don’t care. It’s not interesting. What is interesting is to see what manifests from it. Then you can know what spirit possesses them. That’s where NPCs come from. Random embodiment. You want NPCs? It’s a random embodiment. You’ll get a bunch of them. No problem. Cha-ching. Garbage in, garbage out. You know? Randomness in. Emergence is going to happen. That doesn’t mean it’s good. Lots of things happen and aren’t good. And lots of good things happen randomly. Yup. But you want something reliable that lasts. That’s what you want. What’s going on, Jesse? Why are you still muted? You’re killing me. No, I’m caring to listen. I was going to talk about listening. You’re embodying the listening. To go into my thing about caring for the past. Others cared and they built things. They put things into the world, into architecture that mattered. I’m not sure if people are going to get this. It’s a dark truth that there’s a lot of disharmony in the world. The only way to restore that into a proper sense of harmony is to attend and care for things. To be willing to make the sacrifices. Right. And that sense of leadership and principle, that’s a call to adventure for every single person. That is actually not optional. Right? And that’s continuing to listen to forces in society, in the media, even in your locality that do not challenge you to care, to embody, to participate. That is evil. That is to prolong the disharmony, the darkness in the world. Because the world is beautiful. Miracles do happen. There are good people out there. And you have to believe that you have good intentions. Otherwise you will not be grounded. You have to remember. Remember, put together things. You might not be able to walk backwards, but you can go in a new direction. You might not be able to fully heal, but you can carry yourself in such a way that helps others. That your actions and your embodiment is an example to others. You can reorientate the map, which is not a territory. You cannot not communicate. Everything that you are doing communicates a message to others. Every communication has a content. It has a sense of values and virtues and essentially what you care about. Right. And every action has impacts. Some of which you can understand. And some of which you can never understand. Hubris is a big deal. So I went about a year ago. There was a restaurant, a new chain restaurant opened, unfortunately just before fake news virus scams. So it only lasted a couple of years. And I pulled up and I was just going to go there for lunch. And they couldn’t keep waitresses, which is too bad. So I pull up in my fancy Beamer with the top and you pull up right next to the restaurant. The restaurant’s got windows all around, right? And there’s this little kid there, probably seven, eight years old, whatever. And I hit the button to put the top up because I was parking the car and you never know when it’s going to rain. And who wants the sun beating down on your interior anyway. And the kid is just involved. Oh, wow, that’s cool. You know, he’s just thinking that’s so cool. I don’t know what impact that had on that kid. Maybe when he’s 16 and eight years or whatever, he’ll buy a convertible because he’ll be like, he’ll remember that and go, ha, I really like that. That was I don’t know. Probably not. But like you don’t know. You don’t you hear people’s stories. Like when you listen to Paul Van der Kley, obviously, past Paul does a great job of this. Right. You hear these stories from people and they’re so amazing. They’re just amazing stories. The little things that people glommed onto or whatever, right. Things they learned from things that happened. The people were like, oh, right. And one time, you know, oh, one time I ran into this guy in the subway and this is what happened. Changed my life. You know, like that, that’s real. That happens. You know, I’d say you don’t you can’t predict that. You can’t say, oh, I’m going to take, you know, 42 micrograms of some substance and get a transformative experience. Transformative experience is in watching the bird land on the branch while you’re sitting outside ruminating. That’s what the transformative experience is. Oh, Sally Joe. You guys remember Dr. Peterson’s lecture about the cafe that was heaven and the one that is hell. Yes, the great talk gives because actually how you care for things does make them that way. Sally. This is the problem with Sally. Sometimes she hides her genius from us for a prolonged period of time. And that’s the problem. She didn’t add that to my monologue. If you’re a truck stop bathroom janitor, you can still ward off the darkness. Well, I would say those are the people that warded off. Right. Are the unsung heroes. Right. The micro dirty jobs motif. Right. And that’s the and that’s the problem. Like those are the people doing the hard work of warding off the darkness for you. The thing is, too, I think because the people so isolated from from dialogue, from conversation, from themselves, even for an idea, for at least an idea of themselves, they don’t know how to communicate what they care about. And that leads to further self-oscillation. Right. Right. Right. Well, within your own family, within even your close relationships, if you don’t remind people what you care about, you’re not properly communicating. You’re not right. Right. But that I would say that communication should be strictly inaction and not. So if you if you communicate it well, it isn’t you are enacting it now because you’re saying. But you don’t have to speak. Like I don’t I don’t like the communication frame. I like the signaling frame. Right. You signal it correctly through action, not through word. You don’t say I care about her. You don’t even ever say that. So there’s a great line in Blake seven. And I probably don’t know it exactly, even though I’ve watched out like millions of times at this point where the main character, well, kind of the main character. Boy, that’s complicated. We won’t get in where where Avon, the main character, at least in that in that particular season, he says something to the effect of. Oh, one of the characters says to him, we didn’t know you cared. And and, you know, something the effect of, you know, you’ve never you’ve never told us you cared before. He didn’t say he cared. And he said, I’ve never seen a need to tell people I care. Right. Or why anybody should have to say it at all. It’s like, oh, how interesting. In other words, you should know whether or not I care by my actions, not by what I say. Yes, that’s correct. And I like what Sally says here. Justify careful action. Yes, there’s action. And there’s careful action, which has been thought through, right, which has a telos, which has a rationality to it. Did you act rationally in the moment or did you rationalize your behavior after the fact? Did you? Are you sure? I’m not. Yeah. How you care for things, how you enact them in the world is a signal. And that signal tells literally everything about you and about what you care about. And you need to take the feedback from that action yourself as well. And you need other people’s feedback. It’s the quality of the listening that matters, too. It’s not just that you’re listening or listening to reply, but it’s the quality of the listening and the display of I am listening. I am attentive to what? Attending. Attending. I think that’s the problem. When people say, oh, you’re a good listener, it’s not the listening. It’s the attending. Listening is not an action. Listening is something that happens to you. Like, I listen to all things all the time because my ears hear things. What is this listening of which you speak? The action is in attention. What people want, what women want when they’re talking through their stupid problems, because all women’s problems are stupid, by the way, is to think. They don’t want you interjecting yourself into their story. They’re trying to work it through. And they need you as a foil to do that. They need you as support. They need that intimacy of your attention. You never listen. No, you never attend to what I’m saying. Right. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you need to. Maybe you’re just upset about the fact that you have to listen to this woman babble. Right. So you’re not attending to what is being said, which is what is actually being looked for. And it, you know, look, can be your friend. It’s one of your friend’s one event. What do you think that is? That’s them thinking through something and they want your support in attention because their attention can’t hold it. Because we need other people. We outsource our sanity. Sally Jo. I just want to make a loader level art pendants and carry them around so I can randomly award them to people saving the world by doing basic jobs. That is not a bad idea. I lost the opportunity to do that when I was in Minneapolis. I am deeply regretful. If I ever get back to Minneapolis, I owe somebody a book. If I have one, I’ll have to get some more Sally Jo books printed out. All right. Benjamin Franklin. Suppose that you care about obtaining X. Well, then you’re a fool. You should probably just give up. Having mode is bad. But you don’t care enough to take the steps to obtain X. You don’t care about it. Right. You never cared about it. Did you actually care about X? No, you didn’t. We went over this. No action, no caring. Very easy. No action, no caring. You can tell yourself you cared about it. But if you didn’t take an action, you didn’t care. That’s it. All right. Call for people to jump in. If no one’s jumping in, then I think we’re winding it down. We’ll do our last statements here. But if someone wants to jump in and interact, that would be wonderful. We do love our interaction here. That’s what this portion is all about. Except when Jesse freaking decides to flake out on the end, vanish off a camera, right? Right as we’re trying to make progress with people participating. Good job, Jesse. Way too show your caring for the project. It’s just too, like I can’t help myself. I really can’t. Geez. I’m just awful sometimes. But at least I have fun and amuse myself. If you all aren’t amused, then too bad. That’s why it’s my stream. Benjamin Franklin. Sometimes we care about certain things that we are supposed to care about them or it’s part of an algorithm. No, there’s no algorithm. Maybe if we inspect, we don’t know why we cared. Yeah, well, that’s the problem. You probably don’t know why you did what you did, but what you did was what you cared about in the way you cared about it. So it could be your caring is right. You’re worried about the climate. But the way you care about the climate is not by making the climate better in the way that you can personally. Right. And that’s the problem. Look, we mimic what we see. Again, whether you like it or not, you’re doing that unconsciously. You’re mimicking things that you see around you. Exemplifications. Some of them are wrong. To Peterson’s point, you can always make a bad omelet. His description is fantastic. I love that whole bad diner story. I think it’s fantastic. Probably his best work in terms of stories. Probably his best story. Because you know it’s true. You’ve been there. You’ve been at that diner. And that’s the issue, right? And it’s not just the object of your caring, but it’s the orientation of your caring. Both of those things matter. You can only inspect that quality by inspecting your actions and their results in the world and reflecting on them, contemplating them, ruminating on them. What do you got, Jesse? The reason why Mark did so well to you guys in communicating, and not just communicating, but attending and participating, is that the example of being an example matters. And sharing an example, pointing to an example, signaling an example, signaling a form, a frame, an embodiment. That’s what shows what matters. That’s what shows what is worth something. It’s a value. Caring is qualitative, embodied action. It’s manifest in the world. If you want to display to people what you care about, it has to be obvious. It can’t just be ethereal. It has to have some sort of frame. It has to be embodied in an object, in a time and in place. So when you bless someone, you pray a prayer of blessing. It’s not just nice words. It’s actually attending to that which they need to manifest, saying, I play and I… I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to say this without using too much You aspire to that which they will care for and they will embody. And that’s what the prayer of blessing is. It’s not just here in that moment, but it’s this continual sense of being as good. Being as good. Right. The blessing is not just a materialistic sense of, you know, bless your cat or bless your dog or bless your child. The blessing is this continual motion of that. There is this sense of caring that the proper order of things, or the value of things, remains and holds integrity and intimacy. So we’re still that through proper caring. Wow. Thank you, Jesse. Yeah. Yeah. The thing that hopefully I’m shining a light on are virtues and values. Right. And you do that by aiming at the transcendentals. Right. And people project into that and they go, you’re trying to do this, you’re trying to do that, you’re trying to go to the world, you’re trying to, you know, whatever. And it’s like, well, I know that’s what you think you see, but that’s maybe a small sliver of what’s actually happening. And that may be the way it looks to you because you’re, you is limited. We all have limitations and limited views. Maybe that’s not what’s happening. And look, you know, Benjamin Franklin, Peter Zinon always says that sacrifice is good. And maybe if you sacrifice to obtain something, it’s more pleasurable. Well, I don’t think he says that. But simultaneously, he’s again, sacrificing on behalf of something like the climate. Don’t worship Gaia. Right. Please don’t worship Gaia. Gaia doesn’t care about you. Sorry. Nature does not care about you. Nature doesn’t even know you. Maybe it’s a matter of choosing a path that you can take. Maybe it’s a matter of choosing to sacrifice versus being told to sacrifice. No, those are not dichotomies. Like, no, you have to be told the things you could sacrifice to. You have to. Once you’re told the things you could sacrifice to, now you have a choice. The choice doesn’t exist without the telling. You’re not smart enough to know what you can and can’t sacrifice to. You learn everything from other people. That’s what babies are. They are little learning devices. They get all their learning from their parents and the people around them. That’s what happened to you. It already happened to you. Yeah, oh, Throne-ness. It wasn’t obvious. Yeah, Throne-ness is just the statement that we recreated beings at a certain place and time. Thanks. That’s a real breakthrough from the Bible. I don’t know why people worship these Muppets. I really don’t get it. No kidding, Throne-ness. Really. So you made up a new term for a concept that is literally as old as thought. Thanks. You’re a real genius, Captain Obvious. Really appreciate the help. And that’s the problem, is that any spirit will demand a sacrifice. Do you know what sacrifice you have made to what spirit? I don’t think you do, especially if you don’t think you’ve made one. Errp. Wrong answer. Your actions in the world are prioritizations of your caring, of your judgment, of your discernment. Those reflect something. What is it? I don’t know. Sometimes I do. I can look sometimes and say, oh, that person has the spirit of anger and resentment. I’ve used this example before, Nathan Ormond. Everyone was all unique and the really good critic of their work. He wasn’t paying attention to any of your work ever. If your work was good, you were good. If you watched his damn channel for ten minutes, for ten minutes, Jacob didn’t even need to watch it that long. He just saw the titles of the videos and went, wow, this guy’s just angry and resentful. Yeah, he makes anger and resentment porn. That’s what he does. I’m not knocking it. Like, fine, it’s, you know, great. Be real successful in YouTube doing that. I’m not putting that into the world, thank you very much. I don’t want to put that in the world. If you think I’m putting that into the world, I have to say you’re not seeing something correctly. You’re just broken in some fundamental fashion and you don’t have to be. You could be better and that would be good. The perfect is not the enemy of the good. Perfect is the enemy of the better. That’s what the perfect is. You could be better. It’s one of the things Peterson says. People want to know they can be better. Yeah, otherwise you’re stuck where you’re at. You don’t want to be stuck. No one wants to be stuck. What do you care about? Maybe the things you care about are keeping you stuck. That’s what you need to be aware of. If you feel stuck, look at what you care about. Look at the results of the actions you’re taking. Consider the actions you’re taking. Keep a diary. Go and reflect on that. Ruminate on that. Contemplate that. That will give you some insight into what spirit is ruling you in the moment. Won’t be the same spirit in every moment. That’s sad. Oh, this is complex. Welcome to the world. Ethan, you can’t resurrect the cult of Gaia, so you couldn’t even worship her if you wanted. So it’s just that much more worse. Bad English, Ethan, but yes. Yeah, it’s worse. It’s way worse. But you can waste your worship on Gaia. Or you can actually tend to Gaia in a way that improves Gaia. But that’s not going to be climate change-y. It’s going to be clean your yard. Clean your neighbor’s yard. That’s what it is. Mow your church’s lawn. That’s how you worship Gaia correctly. Sorry, Jesse. Attend a church. How about attend a church? I’m not going to go there. Or get to know your neighbor. Or even very first steps. All of that is implied. I like to back into things because I’m dyslexic. I have little choice most of the time. Yeah. Oh, Ethan hasn’t heard the perfect is not the enemy of the good is the enemy of the better. Okay, well, there you go. That is true. All right, guys, look, nobody wants to jump in. Fair enough. I hope next week people will jump in. I think we have a topic picked. When did Ethan’s child get born? I don’t know the exact date. I can’t contract it. My brain is frost. I got to get my drugs. They weren’t here today. I’m like, oh, no. No, I needed them today. I did. Although I think I did all right without them. But still, I had to leave work early and now I’m freaking exhausted. And yeah. We’ll take care. I don’t know. Maybe Ethan will tell us when his lovely child was born. Take care. Blessings to you, good sir. Yes. Get some rest, Mark. And thank you for your time, energy and attention. It’s my pleasure. Really, really is my pleasure. It really is. Oh, and thanks, Jesse. Yes. Yeah, I do. I do think these are important to do. Otherwise I wouldn’t devote so much time, energy, got you. Just trying to draw on the board stresses me out, guys. Like, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. But when I am, steam punky stuff is cool. So the fact that this just kind of works out, I’ve got the compass finally it was in the shed somewhere. Right. Yeah, we’ve got some new artwork coming. Some of which will be done by me this time. Right? It’ll be good. Although the boat. The boat was done by me. That was my photographs manipulated by Sally. But. Some of the other things that we’re doing. I’m just, I’m just doing it. I’m just trying to figure out. I’m just trying to figure out how to get this right. But Sally Jo, it’s not boiling the sea, but it’s a start. Well, it’s not boiling the sea yet, Sally. However, maybe it is. How do you boil the ocean? Like one cup at a time. So yeah, that’s all I’m gonna say about that. Look, thank you guys. I really appreciate it. Your time, energy, and attention enables me to do this because I don’t, I can’t, I couldn’t do this by myself alone. I couldn’t do it with no viewers. I couldn’t do it without Jesse and Sally and Emanuel and Andre and Ethan and so many other people. And I couldn’t do it without feedback and even if it’s contentious or whatever, this isn’t a one-man show by any means. So look, thank you for your tea, for your time, energy, and attention. And the Market Wisdom website is coming along, so we’ll get some engagement there hopefully soon. Next week is? What’s next week? What is next week? Okay, next week on my list is values. That was the argument, remember? Values first, recurring first, and I made my case and you failed to push back. So I said, aha, I get my way again. Because that’s how that works. Yes, I care about the long game, not the short game. Well, yeah. All right, guys. Put games right on the line. We’re taking off. Take care. Thank you much. Take care, exactly. And know what you took care of. Values next week, we might change it, but I don’t think so.