What is Success？ Live! Navigation (vB0LVdF23ig)

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Young girl dancing to the latest beat, has found new ways to move her feet. And the lonely voice of youth cries, what is truth? Young men speaking in the city square, trying to tell somebody that it is. Can you blame the voice of youth for 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 old 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? Welcome everybody. Hey Josh, good to see you sir. Always a pleasure. Been enjoying your engagement on Father Eric’s Open Mic Sunday live streams. Excellent work, sir. Hopefully small upgrades to sound and light. We’ll see. We’ll see if people like it. I think we’re doing success and then we’re doing failure. I think we’re gonna do failure next week. I think. If you guys like it, let me know. Live chat or the comments, doesn’t matter. I mean if you like the sound, the lighting better, all this stuff. I tweak things from time to time. Big tweaks tonight just because I had time and it worked out. And yeah, success is a big topic. And we’ve got our Sam Pell. So you know, that’s that’s success right there. We’ve got our our Muppet Cup, of course, right? So something to consider. And we’ve got some tea from the Table Rock Tea Company. This is the Masala tea. Very good. Very good. And we also have homemade cookies. Homemade for me in my own house. And today’s topic is success. And I would just say that homemade cookies is success when you’re not when you don’t have to make them and they’re delicious. And I mean, that’s it. That’s the last stream, guys. Thanks. See you next week. No kidding. Sarah came up with that, not me. And I was like, I’m totally going to steal that and use it my last stream tonight. So I did. I feel good. I feel good. That is good. So, yeah, I mean, it was a lot of a lot of notes this week and a lot of engagement. Sally, of course, has always helped me out with this topic. And I had sort of an epiphany earlier today, which was a rush. I was like, this is not time on Friday afternoon to have an epiphany about your live stream in a few hours. But this is the way this thing goes. So. So, yeah, I mean, the question is, what is success? Am I successful? Was I a successful software engineer? DevOps engineer. DevOps architect. YouTuber. I got one hundred dollars from YouTube this month. You know, are these live streams a success? Do my subscribers tell me that the number of subscribers I have, if I get a bump in my subscribers, but no more average views per video, am I a success? So if I had, you know, ten thousand subscribers and I still got, you know, two hundred of you on the on the live streams and one hundred fifty a piece on the recorded, would that be success? Kind of hard to say, right? Ultimately. So. Perhaps a better way to think about success relies on thinking about, say, three aspects. The definition of a goal, right, and its relationship, right? What is the thing that you’re trying to do? Right. And how do you relate to that goal? Right. Some measure. Relative to that goal, which is which is different from the relationship, right? The relationship is kind of has to be acknowledged, right? But the measure is different, different measures for the same thing. Again, do I measure subscribers? Do I measure views? Do I measure new viewers coming into the channel? Do I care about churn like Paul Vanderclay? He cares about churn and he should like that’s part of what he’s doing. I have to hope that the churn is a good thing, but. It’s a hard measure. And then the third aspect would be where are you along that measure with respect to the goal, which hints at something we’re going to cover, which is where are you now? Where are you starting? Which also leads into identity. So what all this means is that you have to measure the success. And then you’re all wrapped up in the theory of measurement. Gauge theory, right? And gauge theory relies on having a standard. You check one thing in relation to another thing. And that actually matters a lot because it matters what the one thing is and what the other thing is, right? And this quite honestly creates more problems than it solves because there are better and worse measures depending upon your goal. It’s relativism all the way down. And then Adam Savage from Mythbusters talked about the sort of wonder of gauge theory. I will post a link to that video just because it was a really good video. Like overall, I mean, I thought at one level for me, it was a little silly because it’s like, yeah, really? This is this is what you’re this is what you didn’t know. But fair. Like, I love Mythbusters. What a great show. I’m glad he had his little epiphany. And that’s what he calls it in the video. So it’s a good video. Don’t watch it now. Watch me instead. But I want to be successful. All this is kind of exhausting, right? This relativism, right? It just it just wiped you out. And. A lot of this definition of the goal and the definition of you, of course, because there’s definition of you wrapped up in this, right, because you have to know what you are and where you are in relation to the thing. Right. And you have to know where you’re starting, as I said earlier. And that’s actually super important because it’s a very, very important thing. And of course, I have a video on that. In fact, we did a live stream on identity, so I should probably share that with you as well. You see, I’m actually fantastically well prepared. The stream around. But again, this is, you know, now we’ve got to deal with gauge theory and identity and starting points and the double. And I think that’s a great way to do that. It’s exhausting. Like I said before, it’s exhausting. So how else can we tackle this idea of success? Success is not stable. Right. What is it like? We can’t agree in some sense. But we don’t need to. Is Donald Trump going to be able to do that? Is Donald Trump successful because he became president? Because he’s a billionaire? Because you feel he’s standing by his principles or some principles or shared principles, shared values? Or is he unsuccessful in spite of those things? These are good questions. And you can ask it of any former president, by the way, or really any person. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, George Soros. Like these are valid questions along along these lines for anybody. Obviously, I’m using a high contrast controversial figure on purpose for lots of reasons. Hopefully it’ll get me more views and clicks and I’ll be successful. And then let me try to use this topic of success more to talk about materialist versus non-materialist framing so you can get some contrast about how to think about this on your own personal success as a person. Connected to other persons. Because that’s what you want. You want to know as a person, how do I connect to other persons and relate that to success? That’s roughly speaking what what we’re after here. I think if not, tell me in the live stream or the comments or whatever. But I think ultimately that’s what matters. Right. Because we’re persons. So what matters to us is our connections with other persons. Being a person. You need to have a personal intuition, a feeling about your success. You do not need to be able to convey your success to others, at least not propositionally. Because if you feel successful, if you have the intuition that what you’re doing is a success, it’ll show up in how you carry yourself, how you approach the world, how other people see you. Right. It shows up as confidence, roughly speaking. That’s that elusive confidence thing. So success or no, you still need to provide others with an identity so that they cooperate with you. In other words, does you no good if you’re successful in a way and you can’t get persons to cooperate on the basis of that success? And I’m not saying there’s a reliable, dependent way to make this happen. Some people will always just see you the way they see you. And that may not be flattering. And that sucks to be you. People see you as contentious. You’re contentious. If people see you as weak, you’re weak. If people see you as ineffective, you’re ineffective. If they see you as incompetent, you’re on and on and on. So I’m not trying to solve that problem because you can’t, by the way. But all the philosophers run into that problem and name it something new and then they write books about it. I don’t know why it’s the same problem everywhere, but whatever. We’ll get into the fractal nature of reality some other day. What people tend to do, though, is they reduce success to a bunch of propositions, to more easily communicate it with others. And that’s the materialism. We’re going to reduce propositions. Propositions are fundamentally material. Not all of them. I get that. But yes, actually. And so it’s good because you can convey material from one person to another. That’s what propositions do. They convey ideas. They package them up in a form that can be easily communicated and in theory universalized, although in practice we know that doesn’t work, and then passed on. Very useful feature. Language is amazing. Everybody loves language. But we use this as a compression. It’s a reduction. It’s a flattening of the world, these propositions. You try to describe something like love in words, you’re flattening it, and people know that it’s not complete. That it’s a poor map or a poor model or low resolution picture, if you want to use some Peterson language here. And apparently I do because I did. What do you do for a living? And that is a sign of success, but not in just one way, right? In many potential ways. So I’m a plumber. I’ve been a plumber for 20 years. I have my own plumbing business. I work at McDonald’s. I’m a manager at a McDonald’s. I manage several McDonald’s franchises. So you can see hopefully how the proposition conveys the type and measure of success to others and allows them to identify you. Now, of course, when I say identify you, do I mean they know the whole of you? No, of course not. But it does help them to identify you nonetheless. So let’s sort of set aside this crazy materialist measurement and instead focus on the non-material aspect. Pardon me for one moment. Frog in my throat. Frog now on the desk. So in order to feel as though you are successful, right? So we’re intuiting this. You need to feel that you are on the proper path to achieving whatever that goal is, that success goal. In other words, it’s not merely the goal, we’ll say, at all costs, which means it’s not just where you’re going that matters, but also how you get there that matters. And the combination of what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and what it is, all three of those things actually matter, right? Or is what makes matter? And things that matter are meaningful. That is the process of manufacturing. That is the process of manifesting meaning in the world. You cannot define success using just one measure or one telos or a single intuition. So all this to say, success is hard. Just to talk about. I’m not talking about achieving it. I’m just saying it’s hard to figure out what it is. It’s one thing to say, I want to write a story. And sure, that’s like a goal, right? That’s a goal. But is it indicative of success? Perhaps you could expand that into something a bit more rich or enchanted, like I want to be an author. Not bad, but we are still kind of left with the telos question, right? Why? What would be the outcome of being an author? Is it merely money or is it your self-image, you know, how you view yourself? Or is it how your friends would see you if you were an offender? Is it your work style and habits? You know, I get all this money up front. I laze around on the beach for a few months. I read a couple of paragraphs and go and rush in and I do all the work at the last minute. I know I’m a procrastinator and I suck and I’m a muppet and whatever. But then I pull it off and the book makes even more money. And then the next book, they give me a forward to and I start the whole cycle over again. Or, you know, perhaps it’s the fame. I’m not going to write under a pseudonym. I’m going to write under my name and then people are going to know who I am. And I’ll be able to use that as profelicity, as Hans-George Mühle talks about. Ridiculous. So that would be personal satisfaction, having accomplished something, maybe. That’s a little bit better. Or notice the material to the ethereal, right? How maybe life is going to be once you’re an offender. What would that do for you? Go from the material to the ethereal. But let’s step back. How would you know if you became an author? At what point would being an author be true? What would make you a success at being an author? Can you measure that? Should you even try? Or maybe it’s some combination of knowing through maybe intuition and measuring. But should it be? Doesn’t it matter how you get there? Because I think that affects the outcome in the immediate term and the long term. Tell us. And I moved from the material to the non-material frame right there for you again. And look, don’t worry if you didn’t get it. It’s okay. We’ll go over it again from a different angle as well. Just let’s sit with that for a bit and consider that I used both types of framing. I went from one to the other. Now, let’s step back to a definition like we did kind of last week, right? Success is that which judges. It is also a standard by which people judge. Now, that is tricky. What I just said is tricky. So let’s go over it again. Success is that which judges. Therefore, it is both value and the standard of value. It’s not all of value. It’s not the only type of value, which is confusing for sure. So let’s go over it again. Success is that which judges. It is also a standard by which people judge. So let’s go over it again. It’s not all of value. It’s not the only type of value, which is confusing for sure. But it is that which judges and the standard that you would use to judge. So I don’t want to make too much hay of this word, but it’s a good word actually. Misunderstood for sure. There’s a reciprocal relationship there indeed. But it’s not symmetrical. And that is key. It’s not a symmetrical relationship. It’s not equal. The way you conceive of judgment from the outside is not equal to how you conceive it inside. What’s outside of you is not equal to what’s inside of you. You can’t swap them. You can’t say, I know how I judge and therefore I know how I’m judged by success. No. That doesn’t work. Being judged from the outside is not the same thing as your ability to judge. It’s just not. And it’s interesting, right? But at the same time, it’s super important. Because we have a bias to preferring our own experience over things outside of us, which maybe objects to our experience, right? Which I argue is a partial definition of reality, right? That which objects to your subjective experience. So it’s fair to say that success is something that should give us a sense of reality. I’d say it’s very much wrapped up in the problem of today. We don’t have good boundaries between where we end and not us begins. And not us is way bigger than us. There’s a lot more things that are not you than the things that are you. And so however well you think you can understand yourself, and I guarantee you, you understand yourself a lot less well than you think, everything else you understand much less well. Probably several orders of magnitude. That’s hard to hear. I get it. But also it’s important that you know that. Or at least that you consider it. Because again, I think that reality, at least in part, is that which objects to our subjective experience, and success is wrapped up in giving us a sense of that reality. So when we use success measures, right? Something that we think measures success, it isn’t wedded to reality. We become depressed. In other words, depression merely isn’t a function of being successful or not being successful. It’s not like, oh, I’m not successful and that’s why I’m depressed. I didn’t meet my goal and that’s why I’m depressed. Depression can also arise as a result of us meeting our goals incorrectly or meeting our goals and realizing our goals don’t match with reality. So depression can be, I didn’t meet my goals, I’m not denying that. I’m saying that’s not all it is. There’s a lot more there. And part of it is being successful, but being hollowed out by that success. This is the wealthy person who commits suicide. Or the famous singer who blows their brains out. Or overdoses on drugs. Or the actor. This happens all the time. Materially, it looks like they were a success. Maybe they’re a famous comedian. They commit suicide at a remarkable rate. And that’s the problem when your success criteria, the things you’re measuring success by, or the success that you’re pursuing does not match reality. Or your relationship to success is wrong. Welcome to your own personal hell. A bad idea of success will leave you empty, hollowed out, gutted, devoid of meaning. Welcome to the meaning crisis. Where do you think domicile comes from? If you knew where you were, you wouldn’t be in domicile. If you knew where you were going, you wouldn’t be depressed. If you were comfortable in knowing that you would know when you got there, everything would be better. The question is, why does this meaning crisis arise? I had a goal. I attained that goal. I achieved the thing, and maybe without even compromising my virtues and values. And yet, the intimacy, that quality of connection, is lost. Any success that doesn’t result in your ability to increase the quality of your relationships is not in accordance with reality. It has no meaning. It cannot manifest meaning. It contains no wisdom. It drains you and others of time, energy, and attention without enchanting the connections around you. Welcome to the intimacy crisis. That’s just one symptom. So, what is our sort of recent problem with success? So, it turns out, and I learned this from Joey, who started the Bridges of Meaning server. It’s something I don’t think I had ever really heard before from anyone else. Joey’s brilliant, that’s why. There are those people out there, and more than you would possibly suspect, I guarantee you, that hate success. It’s like, what? But then when you think about it in that frame, you just notice it everywhere. And it’s not just the success of others that they hate, but they hate their own success as well. And you hear that, right? You definitely get a sense for that from some people. They definitely don’t want to be successful, because the closer they get to their success, in some cases, they’re like, why didn’t I get here sooner? It was harder than they expected. Or they’re just afraid they won’t have anything else to do. Oh, I met my goals, now what? All of these are important and valid. And I know it sounds impossible, but think for a minute. You really will see this everywhere. And Dr. Jordan B. Peterson talks about this as resentment, and that might be so. There’s a lot of resentment-style people out there, but it’s not only that. It’s also the fear of the judgment. If anyone is successful at anything, then it judges you. And that can be harsh. People don’t like to be judged. On the problem of the shame, which we’ve tried to eradicate from, we’ll say, recent existence, especially as a result of the 60s and 70s, oh, we’ll do it with shame. Everything will be fine. Shame exists within yourself. You can’t get rid of it. You don’t rid yourself of shame just because no one external to you is shaming you. There’s something in you shaming you, too. You will self-assign that problem. You’ll feel your own inadequacy, your own lack. And you’ll project it onto others. And you’ll just be like, oh, well, those other people have a lack. They have an inadequacy. And some people just see success as evil, and they signal this all the time to other people. But they don’t talk about it that directly and that way sometimes. I mean, they’re probably lying to themselves, to be fair, although sometimes they do. Sometimes they’re just angry at success. That looks more like resentment, I would think. That guy is rich. Elon didn’t start those companies. He never had a real job. He’s in management. Ah, that guy, he’s a politician. Or he helps politicians. Even worse, anyone can program a computer. These are all sneaky ways of seeing success as evil. Even if it’s not clear to you. Because maybe it’s not clear to you that you’re seeing success as evil. And maybe it comes across as envy, but maybe it just comes across as a really good point. Elon didn’t start those companies. Jeff Bezos, his company’s never made any money. A lot invested in it. But it’s not terribly profitable compared to anything. How it’s still in business, I mean, it might even be illegally in business at this point. I don’t know. And the thing is, they don’t say it directly, but you feel that point. You get that point intuitively from them. And maybe you cast it as envy or resentment or whatever, but maybe not. Maybe you just get the point that success is evil. And that’s the nature of the evil we’re facing daily, our disdain for success. And we’re equating it, rightly, with hierarchy. And we’re reducing success to the material. He’s wealthy. He’s a manager. He’s in politics. These are material things. I want to know the nature of your interactions. I don’t care what you do for a living. And we demonize that material. And fair enough, like money corrupts a lot of people, but doesn’t corrupt everybody, not by far. The greatest philanthropist ever known to humankind was also the wealthiest man, at least in recent times. That’s John D. Rockefeller, by the way. You can look him up. Interesting guy. Also, he saved the planet, saved the whales, cleaned up the climate, actually saved tons of lives. Probably hundreds of thousands of lives. Underappreciated gentleman, for sure. Also, when he ran his charities, they ran better when he ran them than when other people ran them. And of course, Rockefeller still runs charities. Still not better run than when he ran them. Interesting. And again, if you hate the success of others, it’s because you sense a lack in them, you think, right? Well, he cheats on his wife or, well, I bet he never spends time with his kids or, well, he doesn’t really do enough good with his money for charity. Or is that unworthiness or lack not in them, but in yourself? Perhaps that’s what you’re seeing. Can you tell the difference? Can you tell the difference when somebody else does that? Can you tell the difference when you’re doing it? I’ve done it. I’ve caught myself. It happens. Turns out we’re not perfect people. We’re not even perfect at being people, and we are people. It’s terrible. Awful. At the end of the day, you’re a Muppet. I’m a Muppet. We’re all Muppets. But despite all of this, no matter what else happens, success judges. It’s a standard that allows us to rise higher, up the hierarchy. It doesn’t matter which hierarchy. But we get to overcome where we are now, to be more than we were when we were born, to be more than we were yesterday, to be better. Why? Why, my fellow Muppets? Because, quite simply, the world needs you to be better. Therefore, I say to you, success is not evil. Unless, of course, you sense a lack in yourself. Think about that. Think very carefully about that when you’re criticizing people who have things that you do not, who are successful in ways that you are not. Suddenly, the hierarchy, which success is at the top of, no matter which hierarchy we are talking about, no matter which type of success we’re talking about, it’s resting on a hierarchy. Don’t let it become a bad thing. Don’t bring everything down to your level, whatever level you think you’re at. Because then, success becomes the problem, the enemy, the devil himself or herself. I don’t want to be sexist after all. Let’s talk pragmatics for a bit here. Now that I’ve given you some framing and hopefully you’ve had plenty of time to think all this through. How do you obtain success? What are the things you have to do in order to be successful? And that, I argue, is all about limiting your knowledge, your cognitive load to a degree where you can be content and yet expand when needed and contract when needed. I’m not saying that’s easy. But the key here is limiting. What do you have to give up for the success that you want? Those are the questions you need to ask. Not what do I have to do? What do I have to stop doing? What do I have to let go of? If I want to be a successful YouTuber, can I have a full-time job? For how long? If you have a full-time job, are you ever a successful YouTuber? Maybe you don’t have a full-time job. Maybe you’re a lazy pastor or something. You’re not really working full-time anyway. You just got really Saturday prep and Sunday you do a few magic words. Whatever. Sorry, Paul. Had to go there. Since I know you’re watching. And we all need success, but that requires constraint. Self-constraint. And this is something that we lack in the age of gnosis. Where we are told we can have it all, but for the knowing how. Knowing is always propositional, by the way. It’s always a book, a class, a thing someone can tell you. But in order to have success, we need to fit ourselves into a structure and climb that hierarchy. That’s the only way to have deep, intimate connections that create a sense of meaning. We don’t need others to know or understand, at least not in the age of gnosis, that propositional sense. Exactly what we do and why. And what makes us successful. Look, if you’re doing it, they’ll sense it intuitively. And how you act in what you do and what you don’t do, more importantly. You go to the strip club. How do you destroy success? I mean, I’m going to do failure, I think, next week. If everyone’s amenable, please comment or whatever. What would you do to destroy success? Well, look, you could make things equal. You could destroy the hierarchy. You could denigrate that which is above. Or life above you. People that are more successful than you, who are better at you than you, what you’re doing, right? He’s a better programmer, but really, he’s a geek. All he can do is program. Or you could lift up something from below. That helps to destroy the hierarchy, too. Maybe a drug addict, but he’s a good guy when he’s not on drugs, so he’s okay. You could point out the flaws in the highest and everyone that has success and extol the virtues in the lowest. You could flatten the world. You could compress things, compress the whole world. You could reduce it. Reduce the highs and the lows, so everybody seems more equal. You could do that. And sure, you know, that traps you in a binary, a paradox, but you could do that. And sure, you know, that traps you in a binary, a paradox. So funny that came up on Twitter today. You know, in an unresolvable contradiction. But at least you aren’t being judged. Hey, do you see why someone might want to do that? They talk about some people just want to see the world burn. Yeah. Yeah. When we’re all ashes, we’re all equal, guys. And there’s no one there to judge because they’re all ashes, too. I totally understand why people want to see the world burn. When people tell me they don’t understand that, I don’t know what to say to them. I’m like, boy, that should be the clearest thing you could ever think of. But I guess if it’s not, it’s not fair. Horrifying for me. I’m like, how do you not understand why that might not be preferable for them? But I get it. People don’t understand judgment as such, I suppose. One possibility. I try not to think about it too much. It’s terrifying to me. But then, Master Muppet, how do you preserve success? Sally Jo, since that’s her question. So was the last one, by the way. How do you destroy it? Thanks, Sally. Suckers, give me free content. You give grace to the mistakes of those at the top. That’s how you preserve success. That’s how you support the idea of success. You support the structure, even when a bad actor or many actors, looking at you, federal government, are inhabiting that structure, right? You’re running the show, so to speak. You stick to principles, virtues and values, even when you suffer a cost. Christians are for lions. They’re not for hiding. Not for the Benedictine option. You treat the structures as sacred. Even though they’re corrupt. Because the structures aren’t corrupt. The people in them are. And you’re a people too, by the way, just in case you forgot. You point to principles that are good. Praise, virtues and values and actions which exemplify principles. You point to these virtues and values, even when they appear to be failures by some measure. You point out the good for no reason at all. You call out evil when you see it, even if poorly. And you do all of this, no matter what it costs. You personally. You have a reverence for the things that came before. Because everything that came before that you know about was a success in some sense. Because it is something you are aware of. Not all the successful things are you aware of. Or could you ever be? Because stuff outside of you is way bigger than you. It’s good to know. That food you’re eating, somebody had to die eating the wrong thing a long time before we figured out what things we could eat and what things we couldn’t. You need to revivify the things that we had. A lot of people may see that as going back. We can’t go back. I’m not so sure about that and I’m going to do a video on that soon. But even if that’s true, we still have to revivify the things from the past that we stand on, that we’ve been standing on, that we’ve been using to start from. Electricity doesn’t come from a whole cloth. The internet doesn’t spring up out of the mind of one person. We all stand on the shoulders of giants who we’ve never met and aren’t even aware of. We’re standing on the shoulders of people we don’t even know about. We don’t even know we’re standing on their shoulders. We have zero appreciation for that nowadays. So how do you preserve success? Gratitude. I had a live stream on that too. I probably should have had that link ready. But I do not. And that’s okay. That’s all I have to say on success. Now the question is, what do you guys have to say? What’s up, Mark? Live stream? I don’t know. New lighting? Tell me if you like it. Possible sound echo upgrade. Sound is the worst thing in the world. Sound is the most… Lighting is hard. Sound is harder. Lighting is impossible and sound is somehow more impossible. Just to let you know. You don’t see it. There’s sound dampening all over this room. And I haven’t done enough. I know it. But my lawsuit is kind of over. So hopefully I’ll have more time to focus on any other thing than that garbage. I’m going to rewind it to and catch up. Good. I’m going to catch up. That would be most useful. Pastor Paul, I don’t think this is a sermon, sir. I don’t think anybody would identify it as such. We have to talk to Sally Jo about that. You should get Sally Jo on to talk about preaching, sermons, ministry, the difference between those things, and how you can recognize them. She’s the expert there, not me. We talk about that all the time. It’s interesting that we can both identify the same thing, but we use very different methods. Elizabeth, so lovely to see you. Knowing is propositional. Well, it shouldn’t be. But I think that’s one thing that John Vervecky tries to fix rather cleverly. And it follows that knowledge is also propositional. Well, I don’t think so. I think there’s biblical knowing. I recently got into a rousing argument with a lovely non-Protestant, but definitely Reformed person. Lots of respect for my Reformed persons out there. Yeah, I’m going to make a new category just because there’s a functional difference about the knowing thing. And unfortunately, as much as I love him dearly, he kept sliding back into knowing his words. And I’m like, it’s not words. Knowing is so much more than words. But I understand why people are confused. I totally understand the confusion. It’s hard. I mean, in the age of gnosis, we’ve reduced knowing to words. I think that’s a completely fair way to think about it. Completely fair. And that is a problem for sure. That’s definitely an issue. I’m totally down with that. I’m totally down with that as an issue. Age of Gnosis. That’s why I do my Age of Gnosis tweets on Twitter. If you don’t follow me on Twitter, you absolutely should. Oh, also, I forgot the big news is that the damn store is linked to the Navigating Patterns YouTube channel finally. YouTube tells me it’s not, but it is. And I don’t know what bug that is, but I’m okay. That’s a better bug than the bug we had before where it just wouldn’t link and wouldn’t tell us why. So yeah, we’re working on some products that we missed. So that’s happening now as I do this. Other people are working away in the background making me look better than I am. Yay, that’s success right there. So yeah, I don’t have a success cookie. Quite good. The cookies are quite a success. So look, someone’s got to have questions. That can’t have been that clear of a monologue, was it? It’d be great. Tell me about the new format. I did this a little bit differently from… I know I’ve been morphing over time, right? The live streams are getting more refined, hopefully. I don’t know if they’re getting better because I don’t always get good feedback, but let me know. Have you considered? Might be wrapped up in your success or sense of success, whether or not you’re a Muppet. Thinking of doing an online course. And to help with not necessarily success, but anxiety, which will make you more successful. So yeah, I’ve got like three or four modules. I think I could make different little practices and tactics and techniques that I’ve developed over the years for people to be less anxious, and that would make them more of success. Father Eric, success is determined by what you are. Setting as your T-lots and how you’re measuring. Yeah, where you’re starting and your relationship. Three things, never two, never two. Not a believer in binaries. Big dust-up on Twitter about binaries. I’m like, yeah, you’re all wrong. Here’s the proof. They won’t see it. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay. Yeah, this is a good point, Father Eric. I hope I got across. So you could have the right goals, but bad measures. Yes, you can. Money is a bad measure of success, by the way, just in case that wasn’t abundantly clear. Godliness with contentment is great gain. Oh, I like that. That’s good. That sounds suspiciously religious, like it’s in one of them texts I haven’t read or something somewhere. What it sounds like. Father Eric, computer programmer doesn’t believe in binary. No, no, no. He just knows the limits of it better than anybody else, apparently, even other computer programmers. Although I’ve told reliably by my wonderful editor, Michelle, that Jonathan Blow, who’s a relatively, I guess, famous game programmer, has been talking about this very issue of limitations and bad starting points. And it was funny. He’s mentioning stuff. Oh, yeah, I thought everybody knew that. But of course, everybody doesn’t know that. And oops. And I’m not going to speak up about it. No one knows who I am in the programming world, which is fine by me. I don’t want that kind of fame. I do occasionally wish I had taken that job at the GNU Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, what became the Free Software Foundation back in the day. But I didn’t know you could have more than one job. I really didn’t. So I would have done that. Really? Poor Robbins. I’m so flattered that you watch. You have no idea. I so can’t wait to see you next month. I’m so glad that was able to happen because my lawsuit’s over. So that was actually honestly, and thank you for this, a big part of my decision in ending the lawsuit was I’m not going to be able to go to the conference if I keep this stupid thing going. I’m just not going to be able to go. So and then that’s actually a good thing. I mean, there’s bad and good in all of it. Maybe we’ll get into the story, sir. Oh, yeah. Also, I was thinking about, yeah, these VIP tickets. But yeah, I’m going to email you guys about that. You did a really good job of selling that VIP package, man. I got to tell you, that was a hell of a selling point. R. Shane Jenkins. Welcome, sir. Long time, no see. It is good to see you. I hope you are well. Did you see Paul’s video on autism? No. I was thinking of your age of Gnosis slogan the whole time. Thank you. Tell me which video it is and maybe I’ll watch it. Although I’ve been not engaging in Paul’s videos because apparently that puts me in a place I don’t want to be with people I don’t want to be part of anymore. So, yeah, sorry, Paul. No, Gnews are good Gnews with Gary Gnew on the Great Space Rollercoaster. I love your channel and your Twitter. Oh, thank you, sir. Well, I knew you loved my Twitter. My Twitter is great. That age of Gnosis, I was looking the other day because I keep most of the time. I don’t have all of them, but I keep most of them. I got to go back and program something to get the rest of them. I keep most of my tweets and I was like, how many freaking of these ages of Gnosis tweets did I actually make? There’s a lot of them here. And then I was like, oh, yeah, you did them almost every day for several weeks. It’s like, OK, I got to get the sub stack going. I’ve started four times on that stupid age of Gnosis article. But now that everything’s settled down and I’m not constantly in existential financial and legal crisis, hopefully I can sit down and get that done. So I’ll be focusing on that and also getting the YouTube. Oh, also, YouTube, Google sent me one hundred dollars a couple of days ago. So. Victory. I am now a successful YouTuber. That’s it. We’re done. Now I’m going to commit suicide because I only made one hundred bucks. That’s the problem with success. Yeah, I cannot wait for the Symbolic World Summit. If you’re not going, you guys should all sign up. It’s looking like it’s going to be a great time. The selling job they did on it with the latest video that didn’t come out today. I think it came out today. What a salesmanship job. I was like, oh, I’m so glad I booked. I also got two other people to book, by the way. So just saying. It’s going to be fun. I cannot wait. I’m driving down. So, yeah, driving down to Florida day early. Sarah’s going to visit her mom. And then I’m going to drive over to Tarpon Springs. I got this nice cheap, cheap, cheap hotel, which is all I need. I’ll be like, if I get any sleep at all, I’ll be so excited. And oh, yeah. Oh, Father Eric didn’t realize I was going. I am going to make it, dude. It is going to be sick. That is correct. Oh, not only that, in a twist of weirdness, I found out that Father Ignatius, the Orthodox priest down the street, who also knows Monsieur Peugeot, who I still want to talk to more since Thunder Bay, so I didn’t get to talk to him enough there for sure. He is going to be there as well. So my two favorite spiritual advisors in one place at one time. It’ll be super exciting. It’s going to be a blast. They haven’t sold out yet, so there are still tickets left. That’s correct. Oh, my goodness. I could see Neil DeGrade in the desert walking up to Nomads, and they’re buying sand from him. I can totally see that now. I didn’t see that before. Lazarus, are you planning to do a video on Plato’s Cave anytime soon? It is done. The Plato’s Cave video is done. I did it twice. The first one sucked, so I had to do it again. It’s in the hands of my editor. He has to make comments on it, and presuming I didn’t screw it up twice, which I may have, so maybe do a third time, that happens, but I’ll bang that out. I think it’s done, and I think it’s ready. It just has to be edited. There’s some technical stuff we’re doing on our side to do some upgrades. That video is done. I’m sorry, Elizabeth, here. Elizabeth wants to join, of course. Father Ignatius, more pre-sequels, more better? Yes, it is more better. I’d be interested. Father Ignatius is an interesting guy, anyway. He’s always like, I need to talk to you more. I’m like, sure, dude. You’re the one with the schedule. I’m open. You’re 30 minutes down the road. I’m just going to go to the shop in the car and take off on a moment’s notice, but he never thinks of me. It’s okay. I’ll get over it. Salesmanship strikes again. Yes, indeed it does. Lazarus is looking forward to the video. I know, I know, dude. Look, it was a hard video to do, believe me. There are tons of notes that I had to take to do Plato’s Cave, but it is done, and it’ll get out next week, for sure, I think. As long as the technical, we’re upgrading everything. We’re upgrading animations. We’re upgrading the music. We’re working on that today on the Discord server. I’m a Discord server Mark of Wisdom. I’m there all the time, unfortunately, or fortunately. Let’s see if Elizabeth actually closed the YouTube tab this time. We’ll see. We’ll make sure she closed the tab. Usually it’s the tab to the left of the StreamYard tab, so she doesn’t echo. Let’s find out if she’s echoing. Are you echoing, Elizabeth? No. Excellent. Well done. It’s good to see you. How are you doing? I’m great, but I’m thrilled. I know because you’re going to the conference, I know somebody who’s going now. I actually encouraged her to come, and she’s beautiful. Just saying. Is it somebody I met in D.C.? Yeah. Excellent. Excellent. Well, that will be lovely. How cool is that? Yeah. That is very cool. You’re not going to join us in Florida? You’re not going to join? Well, I don’t know. I’m always the oldest person there, so I don’t know. Yeah, but you’re always the smartest and wisest person there, too. Oh, flattery. But it’s expensive, Mark. This is my problem. That’s true. And I’m going to Sicily a week after. Oh, geez. Yeah, but it looks fast, and it looks like it’s going to be amazing. Father Eric, are you going? I am. I am. This is what I do for vacation now is I go meet randos from the internet. Peterson’s Fear vacations. We should have the Peterson’s Fear travel agency. Peterson’s Fear’s cruise, baby. We could do it. Oh, dude. Oh, totally. Totally. We’re done. Done. We’ll get Dirt Poor Robins to play on our cruise. It’ll be fantastic. And then Pidgeot will have to go because it’s his favorite band, so who knew? But yeah, it’ll be great. So what day are people arriving, do you think? Does it start on the Thursday, I think? I’m going to be there Thursday. I’m going to be there nice and early on Thursday. I’m going to be there first. I’m like, I’m all in. I do something, I do a thing. I’m all in once I’m in. I know. I don’t have to ask anything. It’s going to be amazing, for sure. It’s way worse than that, Elizabeth. I have a wedding to go to in Texas just the weekend before that. Oh. So I got to go to Texas. I got to go to a wedding. I got to drive all the way back here. I got to stay a couple days here. And then I got to drive there a day early because it’s like an eight, eight and a half hour drive. And then, of course, I can’t drive there. So yeah, I’m driving, I don’t know, two hours away. It’s great. Oh, yeah. This is totally crazy. So I’m going to be on the road for like a week and a half straight. And you’re going to love it. You love driving in your car. So that’s that. I’m not taking my car. We’re taking the brand new. We’re taking Sarah’s brand new car. She bought a car two days ago. Oh, cool. Okay. It’s a brand new car. Okay. Yeah. It’s a nice little Mazda CX-30. So brand new. No miles on it. Yeah. It’s going to be great. Oh, there, Eric. Where do you come from? North Dakota. North Dakota. Okay. Yeah. So actually, like, I usually like to go down south sometime in January or February. You could not have picked a better venue for me to want to go there because it’s… Where did you go last year down south, Father Eric? I went to South Carolina. We had a blast. We totally had a blast. Oh, it looks like a super cool place, too. I’m just looking it up. I’m just looking it up. It’s the sponge capital of the world. Oh, my God. There we go. We got our band for our cruise. We’re all set now. Peterson Sphere Cruise, man. We’re done. This is done. And we’ve got our pitchman to sell tickets because he’s like the greatest salesman in the Peterson Sphere right now. What if we could actually get Peterson? That’d be… The Peterson Sphere Cruise featuring Jordan Peterson. That would be beyond my wildest dreams, but also done, done and done. We’re done here. You want success? There you go. That’s definition success right there. With Peugeot, of course. It has to be Peterson, Peugeot, right? We have Peugeot. If we have Dirt Poor Robbins, we’ve got Peugeot. He’s already up to a gone conclusion. DPR and JP and JP. It’s looking good. Okay. Looking great. Now you’re tempting me. I even found a really lovely place to stay in that town. Oh dear. I almost came yesterday. Oh, you totally got to be kidding me. He was coming to the conference. He still may, but probably… Oh, come on, dude. I thought he might be actually. I was so looking forward to that. I was like, maybe the special guest is Peterson. That’s what I was thinking because he hangs out in Florida. Then I was like, or maybe it’s mature. Either way, I win. I’m happy either way. Oh yeah, my chip Peugeot would be cool. Super cool. That would be cool too. But yeah, that would be great if that were… That would be phenomenally fantastic. I think it’s going to be Peterson. This is my intuition. Remember I said this Friday evening. I think it’s going to be Peterson. It’s here on the stream. Okay. On the stream. All right. There we go. Done. We can check it. January 20th. We can measure it using the live stream. Yeah. Oh, he’s a great hanging person. Super weird, but completely singular. The closest I got was his book tour in Charlotte. That was amazingly insightful experience for me. First of all, I dragged a friend with me who was like, who is this Peterson person? Then he said, oh, my cousins in India are talking about… He’s from India. My cousins in India are talking about him. I was like, oh, you need to know something about Peterson? You can ask me because if I don’t know it about Peterson, it’s probably not knowable. At that point, I was just totally Petersoned up. I’d probably watch everything you put out on the internet by that point. Yeah. So Dr. Peterson is in Indianapolis on the 28th. That’s a Wednesday, I think. He’s in Columbus on the 3rd. Ouch. That’s tight. That’s real tight. Yeah. That’s why we have him. Yeah, but he likes tight. He’ll be fine. True. It’s true. He loves to be walking around. Priorities. No, seriously, right? I think it might be Peterson. I have a funny feeling. Okay. So that’s that. We’ve got that figured. Now I really want to come. It’s going to be so much fun. But hey, Wade, are you guys doing the VIP tickets? I’d have to go to work for a week or two. When I booked, I couldn’t justify VIP tickets. I know. I have been considering if it were possible to upgrade, maybe Dirk Poor-Robbins can tell us at some point, at least in private, whether or not it would be possible to upgrade me and my friends to VIP as a gift or something. If that were possible, I might consider it. I’m still in a fight over billing. Hopefully I can resolve all that and move on with my freaking life. I’ve already got a photo with me in Peugeot, so I don’t need another one. A photo? Who cares about photos? Oh, come on. It was adorable at Thunder Bay. I have a really great picture. It was awesome at Thunder Bay. Plus I’ve got all these artwork of Peugeot that he never signed. He forgot to sign things. Yeah. I’m still in a fight over billing with my lawyer, but he never signed. He forgot to sign things. He did? Oh, no. I kept reminding him, I need you to sign this book for my friend. This is his art. This is his original artwork. So at Thunder Bay, he’s like, what book? I don’t have a book. I’m a God’s dog. And he’s like, oh. That was so funny. I’m like, that’s your book, dude. I don’t know what to tell you. I’m going to go see him. I’m going to go see him. I’m going to go see him. Hi, Dr. Peterson’s going to be in Fargo on the 21st. So what’s this name? Is he really? Are you going to go see him? I’m going to go see him with my sister and my brother-in-law. Awesome. I just, on a whim, spring for the VIP tickets. So I guess I’m a very important person now. Wait a minute. I guess this summit sold out of the 10 new VIP tickets that they had. What the heck? Wow. That’s amazing. Didn’t you just announce 10 new tickets like this morning or something? When was that video? Is that this morning? I can’t remember. I got blasted today because I had this epiphany in the afternoon about success. I’m going through my notes again, you know, for the 50th time. And I’m like, oh, wait, I got to integrate all this. And that just like completely schlocked my brain. I was like, but then I did, I’ve been doing Castor Oil pack, heating pad. And now I feel better. Although my nose is like running like a banshee. Look at this. This is Jonathan Peugeot. He did it for his Thrive Project. It’s from San Clemente by the Reric Lerone. Oh, that’s awesome. That’s like one of the oldest. Of course he would love that one because it’s super old. And back before East and West lost each other. Well, San Clemente, you can descend into the lower church, which is the older church, right? Yeah. There’s this tiny little Byzantine icon here. You could hardly see it. They actually uncovered it by good luck. And I just thought she was phenomenally beautiful. So he did. And I think this is a I just think it was one of his great pieces. He did a fabulous job on it, but he didn’t sign it, Father Eric. Like, do you see a signature anywhere? Yeah. Well, he probably isn’t a fan of signing artwork in general. So well, some of it he has. So I can’t quite figure out. Like, I don’t I don’t know. Anyway, I’m going to bring it if I get to the conference. Oh, lucky you guys. So what will it be like down there weather wise? I’m not American, so I don’t know these things. It’ll be gorgeous. Will it? Will I be able to go swimming? I would imagine so. Oh, OK. Oh, you’re really tempting me. And I decided last night to save my pennies. Is that a measure of success? It can be. It depends what you’re trying to be successful at. Oh, my gosh. You shouldn’t have come on the live stream tonight. I knew it was going to be a problem, but I didn’t know Father Eric was going to. So I’m outnumbered. You’re outnumbered. Yeah, my lovely friend is going as well. And OK, I’d be good to see her again. She’s she’s too quiet, but she’s beautiful. She’s the essential feminine. Freaking unbelievably gorgeous. OK, that is true. And I’m a matchmaker. Don’t don’t tell her I said that. I won’t. She’ll never find out unless she watches my live streams. There you go. OK, Mark, I need to I need to get this straight in my head because I follow your Twitter. I follow your Twitter, you know, more or less. I’m really curious about what you mean by knowledge, like when you use that word, because I’m I want to I want to understand what you’re saying all the time. And I don’t understand if you use it in the sense of we’re living in an age of Gnosis. And so it’s propositional. Are you using it generally in a different way? Almost always I’m using it whenever I can. Whenever I talk about age of Gnosis, I’m talking about knowledge as propositions. That’s the only caveat to age of Gnosis is knowledge as propositions. OK, OK. And then you you get into this whole thing. So funny. I had another Twitter spat with somebody had Twitter spats with before. They basically end with, oh, I understand you don’t understand what I’m saying. Believe me, the fact that you don’t understand what I’m saying doesn’t mean I don’t understand that about you. Right. People are so weird. And one of the things that came up was he pulled the Wittgenstein’s language doesn’t work trick. And I’m like, Wittgenstein sounds like an idiot, but whatever. Who cares? And then he posted this video on Wittgenstein. It’s about six minutes long. And I listened to the video and I’m like, I have never heard a video about a philosopher that made me less impressed with the philosopher ever, which is hard to do because most of them I’m like, really? That’s what they’re known for. It doesn’t seem too good. But but also the video didn’t prove his point at all. Like in the first part of his career, Wittgenstein was like, oh, we use words and in words, words come as pictures in our mind. And I’m like, well, we know that’s not true. That’s just stupid. And then he later upgraded his thought. Fair enough. People upgrade their thought. That’s good. Like, Taleb likes that. And I think Taleb likes that. You should upgrade. I agree. But what he posted about Wittgenstein had nothing to do with his point about language and context. And I was just like, I don’t think you understand Wittgenstein. And fair enough, the guy was ridiculous. The whole video opened with Wittgenstein was the kind of guy that if you disagree with him, he’d storm out of the room. I’m like, oh, he sounds like a lovely human being. People like that don’t listen to them. If they come to conclusions, just ignore them. I know that sometimes those conclusions will be right and important, but most of the time they won’t and you won’t be missing anything. Don’t worry. I’m just saying, like, little tells and tips for life. Certainly don’t put them on a pedestal and call them a philosopher. That’s way over what they do. So it’s important because when I’m talking about knowledge and talking about propositions, and propositions are prone to the problem that everybody talks about, which, by the way, is a bigger problem. It’s more or less the problem that we’re stuck with our senses, right? Our senses are imperfect. We’re stuck with them. That’s the same argument that, well, language is imperfect and interpretation is a problem. Yes, we interpret what we see. Some people are colorblind. They can’t interpret color. Interpretation is a big problem. It’s a problem with all of our senses, not just language. It’s a huge problem. Right. That’s why it’s important that age of gnosis is based on language as knowledge and not the other types of knowledge. You can use Verveki’s four P’s. Again, even though I totally disagree with it, I really like propositional knowledge for reasons I’ve outlined before. I think it’s a great way to tell people they’re stupid without telling them they’re stupid, roughly speaking. You don’t know knowledge. You don’t know about this whole branch of knowledge you’ve never thought of. Fair. That way you’re not questioning their worldview. I mean, in my model, we have, or not my model, sorry, in our model, in the model that I did the video on with the slides, we have two types of knowledge, not four. The four things, the four P’s are information. And respect is not one of them. Oh, you’re doing the four P’s as information, are you? Yes. You haven’t watched my model video? No, no, I know, I know. I really have to get there. Watch that one, Elizabeth. It’s really good. I need feedback. No one ever tells me like this wasn’t clear or anything. I’m like, is it good? Is it bad? I don’t know. I got another video to do with slides. I had a huge breakthrough, total accidental, right? Total. My editor is showing me this new tool. He goes, I want you to use this new tool. And I’m like, the last thing I want to do is learn another tool, especially if it’s freaking web based. I hate, I hate software. I hate, I’ve been doing it 35 years. I hate it. I hate all of it. I want it all to burn. I’m done with software. I want software to go away. Give me a saw. That would be great. I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, a hand saw. Like, I mean, I can kick you off the Streamy Art account, Mark. That’s true. I’m not an extremist in that way, though. But, but, but I’m sitting there playing with this thing and I was trying to do something specific to make these slides for this particular thing. Can I do a video on this? I don’t know. And it didn’t work and it did something funny. And I went, well, that’s not what I wanted it to do. And then I went, bing, and like all this insight comes, right? And I’m like, oh, oh, wow. This is the difference between simple, complex and complicated and complex. Oh, that’s interesting. You can put it in a slide. Now I have slides, but they’re done. They’re done. I played with them today. So I might do that video next. But like the other one, I don’t know if my slides are any good. I don’t know if people understand my concepts. I have a bunch of early slide videos. My model videos are all in one playlist there. I don’t know if they’re any good because no one ever tells me anything. I was like, come on, guys, comments. Let’s, let’s, let’s do the, contact me. You know, let’s, let’s get it. Let’s get it done. Right. I do want to catch up on. I do want to catch up on this. Let’s see. Oh, yeah. He doesn’t sign icons. Yeah. I know about that. Definitely does not know. I knew that, but I don’t know if this. This, this isn’t an icon per se. Is it? I don’t know. Is it probably close enough? Yeah. Oh, is that what it is? That makes sense. Oh, because it’s a drawing, a drawing of an icon. Yeah. It’s a copy of an icon. I think certainly. But he signed the one that I got, you know, the one with the, the Griffin ascending. That that that’s on his t-shirts. He signed that one. So I was, Hmm. Okay. That’s maybe that’s why. I won’t get another one. Success is like emergency sort of nebulous, subjective feeling. I don’t know. I don’t think it’s very subjective, but. Josh, what does a successful monk look like? Ooh, that’s an excellent question. Josh has been like on fire lately, by the way, guys, if you don’t watch father Eric’s Sunday live streams there, man, he’s, he’s been on the last few. They’re quite good. That’s a good question. Father Eric actually had an answer skinny. I was just about to put that up. He had an answer skinny. Yeah. I mean, I think to some extent, yeah, everybody’s suspicious of a fat monk, right? And I think it’s successful. I think it’s successful. I think it’s successful. I think it’s successful. So, I think that’s all I’m going to say. I don’t think it’s a good thing. I think it’s good for you. I think it’s good for you. I think it’s a good thing. I think it’s a good thing. I think it’s a good thing. So, to some extent, I think everybody’s suspicious of a fat monk, right? And I think a successful monk is one that actually prays eight hours a day or however many hours you’re supposed to pray per day. I think a successful monk is somebody who actually does the good work. And is on appreciated for it. in the monologue, right? It kind of alluded to this. You can’t tie success up in other people’s image of it, right? You have to leave success in that nebulous space where you know you have success and people infer you’re successful by the way you carry yourself in the world, right? By your face in the world, by your aspect. And yeah. Lazarus has a weather comment. I live in Florida and our weather is very up and down this time of year. Well, not in Naples, but maybe up in Tarpen Springs. I don’t know. Yeah, but I’m from Canada. Oh, yeah. It could be in the 50s or 80s or in between. I don’t think who’s going to complain if it’s 50. It was 75 here today. Dirt poor Robbins. The modern world doesn’t really love philosophers unless they disguise themselves as a psychologist. So you’re saying, I don’t like modern world framing as I’m sure you know. But yeah, well, psychology is materialism and original Greek philosophy is the study of ontologies or something or the creation of ontologies, right? Philosophy is the bucket into which you throw all ontologies. The ontologicalization of the world, if I can mangle the language in such a fashion. And so, I mean, I like that point. Psychology is material, materialists, which is how I’d frame it. We’re in the materialist world. It’s the age of gnosis. It’s very materialist. That’s why it’s propositional. Yeah, they prefer the psychologization of it or linking the philosophy. So pure Greek philosophy would have been originally practical, right? It’s very pragmatic by nature. I mean, we talk about pragmatists and non-pragmatists, but actually stoicism is extraordinarily pragmatic. Epicureanism is extraordinarily pragmatic, right? It talks about what to do under what circumstances. That was the purpose of ancient Greek philosophy. I would say all the stuff after Aristotle, none of which is philosophy. Nietzsche, not a philosopher, right? Jung, not a philosopher. These people are not philosophers. There’s no Heidegger, not a philosopher. Like none of them qualify. Yeah. Boethius. He wrote the Consolation of Philosophy, man. I don’t think that saying you’re a philosopher or using the word philosophy does not make you one. I’ll have to bone up on this particular person past Aristotle. I still think Plato and Aristotle put it all to bed, and no one has anything new to say. Even Nietzsche and Heidegger knew that. Nietzsche didn’t admit it, but he clearly knew it. Heidegger knew it, admitted it, and became evil because of it. He became evil because he couldn’t do better. At the point at which you engage in that, why would anybody take your philosophy seriously? If you make that mistake, it says something about you, dude. I’m just saying, heck, if you give that any respect. I can respect certain aspects of things, but the philosophical underpinnings of anybody that would stray into Nazism, I tend to think those are all evil because they strayed into Nazism. I mean, I could be wrong about that, but that’s my system, and I’m sticking to it. I’m going to die with that one for sure. It’s really questionable to me how anybody takes anyone like that seriously at that point. I’m like, you know, or even Nietzsche. Really? Do you want to? One of the impressive things about Peterson is Peterson doesn’t really seem to talk at all about Nietzsche’s philosophy. He talks about his prophecy. I have a video on that, by the way, just in case you didn’t know that. So yeah, he talks about his prophecy. He says, oh, look, he foresaw what was going to happen as the result of the death of God. Yeah, he kind of did. I totally agree. But it’s a good point, really. This idea that philosophers are disguising themselves as psychologists or psychologists are disguising themselves as philosophers is actually how I would say it. There’s an intermixing for sure. Stefan Molyneux, the only philosopher I know about. He’s not a philosopher. That’s for sure. Success. I’ve said before that success is a failure that you’ve learned from. I think there is a type of success in learning from your failure. How’s that? I think that’s how I’d have to split that baby. Class punk is staying off stream tonight. I’m sorry to hear that because my roommate’s cat is in heat and I’m getting sleepy. You don’t need to tell us the reason. You can just say you’re not coming on. But we miss you anyway. But I think, what is that? Nisargadatta Maharaj was a successful monk other than his chain smoking and shouting at students. There’s always, oh, wow, shouting at students. Yes, well, you should always be doing something else other than merely chain smoking. Chain smoking is rife for multitasking. The two kind of go together. Oh, Ethan, Father Eric on Friday Night Stream. Yes, sometimes he graces us literally with his presence and we are grateful for that because we have gratitude. I have a live stream on gratitude. I’m just saying. And he’s got a live stream for everything. No, no. But you highlighted the importance of the fact that the Stoics told you how to behave in different circumstances. Yes. Like you’re doing the exact same thing. Stoicism tells you that. I don’t think the Stoics necessarily tell you that. Stoicism as a discipline, I would call it, tells you that. But Stoicism is a philosophy. I think that’s fair. I don’t really promulgate Stoicism all that much. I mean, I do privately, personally to people. Like, man, if you’re in trouble, like if you’re on the edge of nihilism, let me introduce you to Stoicism right now. Like, I’m going to be a good student. I’m going to be a good student. I’m going to be a good student. I think that’s fair. I think it teaches you Stoicism right now. Like, I’ll just here, have some. Have as much as you can take. Have all of it. Right. Because it’s at least a stopgap measure and it’s a good one. Like, it’s highly effective. I’ve helped a lot of people by shoving them at Stoicism or shoving Stoicism at them and it makes a big difference. It really buys you some time so they don’t continue the downward spiral. Highly recommend. What does it do, Mark? Like, were nihilistic. What is it that brings them out, per se? Stoicism keeps you moving in a neutral way. It gives you that. It re-enchants the world in a sense. The strength of Stoicism is its focus on the easy thing. The downfall of Stoicism, oh, Josh. The downfall of Stoicism, hello, Josh, is that Stoicism does not give you a why. However, it just so happens, it just turns out randomly, we’ll call it, because why not? Why not give the scientists their due? We’ll call it randomly. That the why is the hardest part. It’s the thing that everybody struggles with. The discernment, discernment is the key to everything, by the way, but the discernment of the why is actually the hardest thing ever. You don’t know why you do things. Jordan Peterson talks about this. You don’t know why other people do things. You don’t know why. Sometimes you think you know why, and sometimes you’re right. But generally speaking, almost never do you know why. Why do I put on this silly outfit? For the stream, actually, I don’t know. A whole bunch of things happened that caused this particular outfit. And weird things. There’s weird stuff. So first of all, I’ve been to Hawaii twice. I love Hawaii, by the way. If you get a chance to go, you should go. I took some unbelievable pictures there, both times I was there. I was there about eight years apart. Four years ago, I was in Hawaii. I only know that because of Facebook, by the way. Thank you, Facebook. When I went to Hawaii, each time I bought a bunch of Hawaiian shirts in Hawaii. And other than this shirt, which is a shirt from Dell. Although, to be fair, Dell told me when I worked there that this was purchased as a Hawaiian shirt from Hawaii. Whether or not that’s true, I don’t know. All of my other shirts are from Hawaii. They flew on a plane back here to my house from Hawaii. So I had all these shirts, and I’m like, what do I do with all these shirts? And it’s like, oh, I can use them on the live streams. And I had this hat. And then when this whole thing came up, I happened to like Steampunk and Monocles. And this was 10 bucks on Amazon, and I was like, I could not resist. I don’t have good impulse control for certain things. One of them is cookies. Yeah. I know, I know, I got all these cookies in the house. I’m like, oh no, how am I gonna resist? I’m hoping that somebody will be away from cookies. Maybe she’ll hide them on me and I’ll be safe. But I don’t know why I do the live stream actually. I have no idea. Because there’s not one why, right? Like there’s a bunch of things going on. And the discernment of the why is tough. And stoicism doesn’t try to tackle that problem. Stoicism is like, listen, dude, life is imperfect and it sucks, but you can tackle it. And here’s how. And it just tells you right out of the gate, like, here’s what you do. First of all, don’t get all caught up in the opinions of others. Don’t worry about the angry people because they’re gonna be there. Don’t worry about your own lack of confidence. Just move forward. Like it tells you things like that. And those are really easy things to start with. And so if someone’s in trouble, start there. We’ll tackle the hard why part later. Let’s just get you stop spiraling down. And notice there’s a middle ground. The middle ground of stoicism is, roughly speaking, is one of the things that I actually got out of Maps of Meaning that my, one of my, well, my best friend and I agree on. One of the lessons of Peterson in Maps of Meaning is do the thing. Yep. Do the thing. What’s the thing? It doesn’t matter. Do it. Right, right, action. Yeah, yeah. And stoicism gives you a way to act in the world without having to worry about the combinatorially explosive, even though I don’t necessarily like that term, it’s very useful. Why? Because the why is combinatorially explosive. Like I said, there’s no single why. That’s ridiculous. Why did Jonathan Pigeot decide to do the summit? Was it because his favorite band agreed to play? Or was it because they agreed to debut their new album? Not merely play? Or was it because he wanted to get it together with everybody? Well, he wanted to get together with everybody anyway, but the band aspect came later, right? And there’s a lot of why to that, that one thing. And I don’t know them all. There’s no way I could, I’m not Jonathan Mougeau, but I’m glad he did, because I’m going and it’s gonna be great. So what do you think, Josh? What do you got for us? Well, you were talking about the why, and like you kinda said it before I got to it, but the stoicism, because that’s actually was on my path to Peterson, was coming across stoicism. And the lack of a why is that, you often say we’re in the age of gnosis. Is stoicism a bit of an antidote to the age of gnosis? Because it seeks? Yeah, because it, but Peterson said that like when I, or when I was listening to Peterson, he had two recommendations for books, Victor Frankel’s Man Search for Meaning, and the Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In both, and I don’t know about Gulag Archipelago, but I got most, I think I got most of the way through Man Search for Meaning. That’s a rough book. It was, that was hard to read, or listen to. But he didn’t, it seems that his strength kinda came from stop trying to figuring out the why. Because like, why are these men so cruel? Why are these men so torturous? And then- Yeah, yeah. Stoicism takes you out of that. It says, don’t try to figure out the why of other people. So that’s huge right there. Cause talk about combinatorially explosive, right? I’ve talked about this before. You see actions and you infer their motivations, but you’re almost always wrong. Like you can’t know people well enough to know their freaking motivations, especially when they don’t know their motivation. You can’t know yourself enough to get 100% of your own motivations. Exactly. And there are exceptions to that rule, but yeah, the stoicism Josh, and you’re making this point very well by the way, thank you, is you don’t worry about that man. Cause you got stuff to do and you can do it. Yeah, yeah. No, that was my big takeaway from Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius. Well, and I haven’t even finished the whole book, but he had this part in there about, when I came across him, I don’t know if you guys have ever heard of Cure the Dawn, he puts Marcus Aurelius’ meditations to music. And I used to listen to that when I was like kind of working out and at work and stuff like that. And I love that when like the part where he says, when you wake up in the morning, tell yourself, the people I deal with today will be ungrateful, dishonest, jealous and surly. They’re like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the goodness of, or yeah, the goodness of, or the beauty of goodness and the ugliness of evil and recognize that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own. And like that right there, that line, really like I was like, oh, whoa. Like, yeah, like you just bypass it. Don’t worry about why the bank robber robbed the bank. Don’t worry about why the crack head’s doing crack. Don’t worry about why, you know, all the whys, because you’ll just fall down this rabbit hole, which are eventually like kind of suck you like into this nihilistic framing of your fellow humans. And in my opinion, you end up with like an anti-human, you end up with like an anti-people point of view. Yeah, no, you- It’s looking down to do that, right? What’s that? It’s looking down, right? Into trying to look into people. And the appropriate place for our eyes is to look up towards the stars. Yes, have to be fixed there, have to look up. Which, yeah, so the stoicism and Peterson, how about that? Both tell you to stop worrying about that and start focusing on a meaningful goal that you might be able to achieve. Yeah. Wow. But then we take like, there’s some crazy stuff that happens because like one of them, I mean, I guess our most famous stoic is Aurelius in his book, Meditation. But like, it shocked me when I found out, and I think I mentioned this before that, that Marcus Aurelius was the one that put Justin Martyr to death. And like, it’s just crazy to me that a philosopher killed another philosopher. Like, you know, and he actually, I think he even liked him. Like, I think they may have even exchanged a bit in that. But it’s just, so- Docrates had to die, Josh. No, I know. And you’ve talked about this before. Like, that’s kind of what happens to philosophers is they’re like, they get killed for being outside of the cave, I guess you could say. Like, like you said, nobody ever gets out of the cave. No one ever gets out of the cave. Well, they would be killed. Like if you’ve got, the point of Plato’s cave is, yeah, if you went back and tried to free your fellows, they’d kill you. It’s not even free them. If you just tell them what you’ve seen outside the cave, they’d be like, yeah, we’re gonna kill you now. We don’t wanna hear this. Right, and there is something to that. I think that’s a deeply correct intuition. I think that it is like necessary, right, in some sense that that would happen because they’re upsetting the apple cart to that degree. And you can’t have harmony and that sort of clarity at the same time. And I find it utterly fascinating. And just from a strictly psychological perspective, the fact that certain people and all the same type of people, incidentally, maybe you didn’t notice this, but maybe you will now, talk about how Marcus Aurelius says, it’s possible to be happy even in a palace. It’s like, I get the quote, and I think you misunderstood what he meant. And I think subconsciously you’re revealing something about your own desires that isn’t very flattering for you. But if that’s your focus, like if that’s your favorite Marcus Aurelius quote, good questions about your motivations. What was I saying? You shouldn’t be questioning their motivations, Mark. I know, no, you should. You just shouldn’t assume that you can know them. See, this is the beauty of pragmatism. The beauty of pragmatism is, I assume I can’t actually understand you except through your actions, which is backwards from saying, I can understand your actions because I understand you. It’s like, no, no, no, no, I just assume that you act out what you believe. And then I assume based on your actions, what you believe. And then I basically ignore almost everything you say, except I personally don’t do that because I have a special trick that me and maybe four other people on the planet seem able to do. But I basically ignore all your words. And then the world changes. Like overnight, the world changes, right? Because you go, does this person care about the climate? Oh, well, not only did they take a jet to the climate conference, but they also for the last four blocks, got out of a limo and took a bicycle into the climate conference. So now I know a bunch of stuff about your motivations. You’re motivated to look like a climate conscious person, even though you can’t be. Like your actions have already proven that that’s not the case. And so I already know your motivations. Like I already know that you’re motivated by appearance and not by actually living that way because you’re not actually living. It was the great point that everybody made, like Al Gore had five or seven houses or something. And they calculated how much electricity those houses were using, because they’re all mansions. And they were like, well, clearly. And I agree, like, well, clearly, right? Like that I don’t need to try to infer the why from their actions, because I’m not inferring the why. I’m actually just inferring their motivations. Like, oh, you’re not motivated by the climate if you’re living that way, right? Because if you’re, you know, the person who’s more motivated by climate protection is me. And I can tell you one thing that makes that true. Just one, there’s many, but there’s just one. I mean, aside from other than the ridiculous obsession I have with technology, which is a problem for sure. I’m extremely frugal, right? Like I don’t have a big, I never, my other house wasn’t big either. It was maybe bigger than it needed to be, but I had plans for that house. They just didn’t pan out. Had a nice three bedroom house, it was a good size. But I don’t have a lawn. And having a lawn destroys more of the climate than you can possibly imagine. And I’ve never had a lawn. And I don’t have a lawn on purpose. Like, you know, it’s not I’ve never tried to cultivate a lawn sort of a thing, but kind of is like, I, you know, obsessing over your lawn is more destructive to the climate than most of the other things you do, including driving your car. Now, we’re a little curious about this distinction you’re drawing between motivations and whys. Are whys more like conscious goal oriented behavior and motivations like things that draw you without really knowing? I think your motivations are clear in the results of your action, right? And again- And probably also your response to the results of your actions. So if things go really badly for you, whatever you’re motivated by, you’ll be upset by that. Right, so you know certain things about people who take a private jet to a climate change conference. Now, you know different things about them if they fly first class commercial to a climate change conference. And you know very different things about them if they fly business class to a climate change conference. Okay, but you know something completely different about, I forget who it is, right? I mean, I’m actually using a real example here. You know something completely different about the guy who takes the private jet, takes a limo, gets out of the limo, some number of blocks before the venue and hops on a bicycle, right? Because like that set of actions tells you something extremely clear about what’s motivating him, right? And I don’t need to know, is he driven by his ego or is he driven by the desire to keep his job in politics? Because I think he was a politician, he might not have been, or his job in general, right? Or was he driven by the need to uphold, we’ll say the ideal of the climate activist, right? So because that’s the game that he’s playing, roughly speaking, that’s the K-fabe that he’s in, I kind of hate that for him. Right, that’s what he’s trying to do. And so it could be any or all of those, right? But I know what motivates him, what motivates him is appearance. Yeah, I don’t need to know the why, I just need to know the motivation of the appearance. I don’t know why the appearance is important, and I can’t. And maybe if I knew more about the person, I could infer some of it, and I might even be able to do that with high accuracy. But generally we never have that much information. So assuming we can do that all the time, which is what people do, is just wrong. And that’s where we make mistakes. And as you saw that guy take each action, you could see his moves towards what his goal was, and by that you can infer what game he’s playing. And then you can be… I mean, I would almost say at that point, you can maybe make a judgment, but you can discern what his… That they’re not actually playing the let’s improve the climate game. They’re playing the I want to look good in front of my peers game, or in front of people. And that’s a mistake. Yeah, you don’t know why he’s playing the game, but you can understand what the game that he’s playing is by every move that he makes. Like in chess, I have recently been playing chess. Sometimes you don’t know if somebody’s going after your queen or you’re going after your king. Because if you kill one, depending if you get that queen, game kind of over. I mean, you could still win, but it’s hard. It’d take a lot more work. Are you risking it all in going for check or checkmate? Because you see it, or are you just doing the slow attrition approach? Because in strategy, it’s a big difference. I’m a strategist by the way. So there’s multiple different ways of playing that game, or an infinite number. And I like how you’re framing that. Like look at their actions, because yes, their words, one, I can’t always quickly discern how that their way that they’re using words is the same way I use the word. Yeah. Well, and like words can be used to manipulate. And in fact, I would say words are manipulation, right? The question is, are you doing it for good or for evil? There’s the discernment. The hardest type of discernment, according to Marcus Aurelius too, I think, right? Is discernment of good and evil. And you can’t just say, look, you’re not trying to discern good and evil, therefore you’re a bad actor. I think that’s totally unfair. But in a binary frame, you have to. You have no choice. They can’t be a good actor if they’re not even trying to discern good and evil. And therefore Sam Harris is condemned to hell. I don’t happen to believe Sam Harris is condemned to hell. And we all know I am no fan of Sam Harris. Let me tell you. But he’s in this neutral space. And because you’re in the neutral space, the odds of moving into the good space by accident, without discernment are very low. They’re not zero. I mean that I believe in miracles that can’t be zero. Zeros don’t exist in the enchanted world of miracles, but it is a neutral space. It’s just that that neutral space because of entropy, if you wanna be all scientific about it, has to move towards the evil, towards the bad. Wow. On average. It’s an average game. Like I can, well, that’s the thing. These freaking materialists suck at materialism. I’m really good at. Me and Joey, we’re the two best materialists on the planet. And here’s what I can tell. We’re really good at this game. We can just materialist these materialists out of material existence. It’s not a problem. They just suck at their own logic. Logically, it matters that there’s three things and not two. Like you can’t do anything with two. You have to have the emergent third because that’s where the vertical causality is. Read Flatland. It’s a great book. It’s easy to understand. You don’t even have to understand math. That’s the only reason why I read it. Because if I had to understand math, I can’t read. Like math is too hard for me. When you’re on a flat plane, you can only move left and right, up and down, right? Or north and south really, right? That’s it. That’s all you have. But you end up in opposition, right? Because you’re fighting space. It’s when you move up that things get different. And the example in Flatland that’s so wonderful is, imagine these beings that are stuck to a piece of paper. So they just exist roughly as points or whatever, or circles or dots or whatever on a piece of paper. And then imagine that they’re looking across their world. Now their world’s flat, horizontal. And somebody pokes a pencil into the piece of paper. And now a sharpened pencil, right? And so a cone goes into their world. What do you see from above? Well, you’re above. You see this small hole growing ever larger, this small circle growing ever larger, right? Until it hits the shaft of the pencil. Do you know what they see? They see an ever expanding line. And it doesn’t matter where you are on the paper, you can’t see the circle. You only see an ever expanding line. And that line is a perfect line that is completely perpendicular to you, no matter where you are on the paper. And you know it’s a circle, because you can see from above. So like we were talking about success earlier, and I think we all agree, success is your orientation to the vertical. How far up you’re going. To the vertical, like how far up you’re going, like how far up you’re driving. But for people in the flat world, for people on the paper, for people that have either been born into a flat world and never been able to look up and or have just chosen to exist in the flat plane, is it possible to direct towards the center? No. Meaning that like if we, because if you look at like a mandala, not 3D. Yeah, no, you can’t. There is no center. Okay. In a flat world, you can’t discern a center. The end is why it’s like the equality people I was talking about. You have to have the pencil, or you have to have like an outside. You need an out, you need an up or a down to discern a center. Josh, I’m literally no joke on the Virgiteers. It sounds like you totally understood my monologue. Like you totally got it all and connected it. So I’m thrilled. It shouldn’t be dangerous. Well, like I, like these, like the way, I guess the way that my mind works or whatever, is I think kind of more conceptually. Like, so if you could throw me like, like if we’re playing catcher, like metaphorical catch, like you throw me a concept, I can usually link that to a couple of things and throw it back. And that, but yeah, no, I, because when I was thinking, I was like, I was like, okay, so what, like, like I said, with a monk, like I tried to find something like, like that most, the flat, like most people would find unsuccessful. Like, you know, like he’s poor, you know, he’s usually poor, he doesn’t eat a lot. He’s very, you know, this, but what does a successful monk look like? And that, and because to me, when I was trying to find like, okay, what is the ideal? Like, what do you as a man seek after? And that’s when I came, that’s when I kind of came to the monk is, is like, the monk seems to be, you know, like the model, a bit of the model of success for the Christian. And that’s, you know, when, when I became Catholic, I became Christian. So now I’m, you know, I’m in that frame. So I’m, I’m going to seek after, I’m going to seek after that. And like one thing I told myself before with, with like, it was, I guess the way that I understood Paju was like, like, like you come to, like you walk up to the cross and that’s the foot of the cross is the skull of Adam. So you look down, you find death, and then you look up and you find Christ as a path to, to the, to heaven. And he’s balanced between order and chaos on his left and right. And so like, now you have an orientation. Now you have a path, like you have a, you have a map, I guess you could say. Right. No, no, you have, you have better than a map. You have an orientation and the ability to navigate. Yeah. And you can use maps and navigation, but you can’t use only one map. It’s really hard to navigate on one map. And if all you have is a map, you can’t navigate at all. You need minimally a map, a compass and three points. Stars, stars, stars. Well, early navigation was done through astrolabes. I used to have four by the way, until they all got stolen in this, in my lawsuit was about, and an astrolabe basically matches the night skies. You can tell we are on the ocean. Right. You match multiple points up, obviously. And then you orient that towards something else, right on top of all that. And there’s a lookup. So there’s a, any lookup table is a map. People don’t understand that. Like, if you have a list of like compass points and objects, that’s a map. It’s a very primitive crude map, maybe. Maybe it’s not as rich as a visual drawing of a coastline, but that’s actually a map. And then you use that to do mapping, right? And so the process of mapping is taking that map and correlating it to something that’s not in the map, right? It’s in the world outside of yourself. That’s orientation, right? Yeah. Orient the map to the world, and then you orient yourself between it, basically, right? And it’s all of that orientation. And so the map is a flattening or reduction. And the problem with science is that science only has maps. That’s all it has. Can’t do orientation, because there’s no vertical causality. That’s actually, I think, I don’t wanna criticize the great man, but I think that that’s what Peterson’s missing, is that he doesn’t understand that all maps are necessarily reductions in flattening of the world. And therefore he doesn’t understand orientation, even though he talks about it in maps, oddly of meaning, right? He doesn’t actually talk about it in that rich way. And I’m not criticizing that. That may be the right way to do it. As I said, you don’t try to give somebody a why, you hand them some stoicism. Right, right. Let them get to the stoicism plateau first. I think one of the problems, if I were to be so bold with Father here, one of the problems that Christians in particular, and especially the clergy have, or pastors, like my good friend, Pastor Paul Van der Kleyk, they’re talking, they’re aiming for the fences, and they really need to get people to take one little step. And to be fair, I don’t think they know what one little step is, because they make all kinds of assumptions. Mark, what do you mean aiming for the fences? I missed that. I think the aiming- It’s a baseball term. Yeah, it’s a baseball term. When you’re trying to hit a home run, rather than just getting on base. Rather than just getting on base. It’s usually swinging for the fences, but yeah, I’m taking liberty with playing. Back to my poco a poco thing. Okay, bit by bit. Got it. Got it. Yeah, yeah. And I think you’re- Yeah, really, yeah. Really, yeah. Because otherwise you’re just oriented. I agree about stoicism. I really do, because I see, like that’s a, it’s kind of, I guess it’s almost like Eastern thinking for the Westerner. Like it’s something that a Westerner like me, like I don’t understand, like I tried getting into Buddhism and stuff, it just got too confusing. I’m not from that culture. It was very hard to grasp onto and all that. But the stoicism, that was much easier. Marcus Aurelius, I could chew that. That was mentally metabolizable. It’s all Western framing. It’s all from the Greek and Roman, obviously, tradition. And I like how you said that about, it’s a bench, it’s a plateau, and then you can work up to the next, and then you can work up to the next. But it’s a gauge for the- So Josh, how many pastors, priests, bishops, Christian apologists, or evangelicals, try to bring people to stoicism first? No, I do, like, trust me, I tried to talk to my- No kidding, no kidding, Mark. Yeah, at my previous church, there was a guy who graduated from Cazaga with a philosophy degree. I tried to talk to him about stoicism, because I didn’t know anything about it. I was just excited that the guy that was in one of my favorite movies, The Gladiator, I was like, wait, that was a real guy? Mark Cerreles was the real guy, the emperor that dies in the beginning? I was like, that was a real guy? He wrote all this stuff, and I found out about him, and I was just rapid firing all this stuff, and I was like, what do you think about that? He’s like, yeah, I don’t know much about stoicism. I was like, wait, what? It seems like it’s foundational. That should be something that, because once you kind of give up, like you said, we live in the age of gnosis, we have to know the why, and that’s a misdirect. That’s a, well, I mean, it’s kind of garden of Eden stuff. Did he really say that? Like, have you ever asked yourself why? Like, have you ever asked yourself why you’re not allowed to eat from the apple, or eat from the fruit? And so then you activate this other part of your brain, and it’s a misdirect. You’re not gonna aim up. You’re gonna end up veering off to the side and going in circles around the maze, or something like that. And so I think that, yeah, and stoicism is making a comeback, and it did that, right? I don’t know if Peterson led that as well, or if that just was a… Stoicism makes a comeback every generation. Every generation, they discover stoicism, and then they present it to the young men. And because the young men are young and not old, they’re like, wow, this is what I need. This is what I need. Yeah. Right, right. Well, I wanna address this. Lazarus, evangelicals actually love stoicism. Yeah, absolutely, you’d be surprised. I don’t know that I’d be surprised by that. My Midwest brother-in-law is a pastor, he uses his meditations all the time. I agree that that is true, that they do use it. So I need to clarify, I need to make up a more nuanced point. They need to start there and end there until, right? Until the person’s ready to move on, right? So the big problem with the evangelicals, although I would say now they’re being sneaky and changing tactics, maybe people we know. The big problem is they always try to sneak into Jesus first. Yeah, exactly. And that, or set up to sneak into Jesus, and they get caught, because in the age of gnosis, it’s really easy to catch that, right? Which is ironic, because you don’t catch it going the other way. So when Lawrence Krauss talks to Jordan Peterson, this is not a discussion I recommend, except to see stupid people being stupid. That went around and around, yeah. I couldn’t listen to it. What a little snake, you wanna see a snake? There’s a snake. I kept using non-scientific terms to justify science, and then say, see, science is self-justifying. And I’m like, dude, you just used a ton of, you used like four non-scientific, and granted, a lot of this, thank you, Pastor Paul, for pointing this out too. I’d like to think I would have found it all on my own, but probably not. I do rely heavily on people like Paul Van der Kley to help me see these things. That’s a trick. Now, when a pastor does it, you notice immediately. You know why? I have my theories. Sally Jo has her theories about the difference between, say, preaching, ministering, and just giving like a TED talk, right? Because they’re all different things, clearly, or doing what Peterson does. Peterson’s book tour is not preaching. Even his biblical lecture series, not preaching. I agree with her. We have different ways of sense-making that, by the way, which I find fascinating. I’m still trying to figure out Sally. I don’t think I ever will, but it’s a fun game to play until I die, because I know I’m gonna die not understanding anything. Artists are just impossible. When you notice that there is a difference, because some people don’t, and they all tend to be Christians who have either, are in that milieu, right, or haven’t really engaged with it in any other setting, like, oh, we’re not familiar with how Catholics do preaching, right? They don’t see it, right, because it’s the water they swim in. But other people do, like people outside do. But then when the science people do some of the magic tricks, I would say that the preachers do, the science people don’t notice because it’s the water they swim in. And so the Christians look and go, ah, you’re pulling the same trick I’m pulling. Well, A, not really. It’s slightly different and significantly different. May only be slight, but it’s significant. And B, you can’t tell them that. They can’t see the difference. They won’t know. Like when you talk to people about Lawrence Krauss or Destiny, oh my goodness, you seen this guy Destiny ever? Oh, he’s just the worst debater I’ve ever seen. And people like him. I’m like, why do you not see what he’s doing here? It’s crazy. They don’t see it. They don’t see it. And actually I’m thinking, I’ve got this in progress. We started this path today, actually. I’m gonna try and do Lex Friedman’s video with Ben Shapiro and Destiny just to point out, like the reason why we’re having a problem is because you guys are conducting conversations in this way, not the conversation. It’s what you’re doing in the conversation, or more importantly, what you’re not doing in the conversation that is causing everybody to double down. The problem with that is that I have to approach it very carefully because the point I actually wanna make, I have had a very hard time articulating to anybody. And fair enough, that’s my failure. Clearly my failure. I’m not saying, oh, you should understand this. Not at all. But that’s wrapped up in enchantment because there are so many different types of enchantment. One of the types of enchantment is being reliably used and one side is not pushing back on the other side when they use it because they’re counting on age of gnosis tools like logic, reason, and rationality to break the spell. But the way it works is effectively when you let people put pillars in the water and then build a dock on top of it, and you’re like, patient, you’re like, ah, they’re putting pillars in the water and they’re building a dock on top of it. And I can knock out every single one of those pillars. They do that, their audience stands on the dock with them. You knock out all those pillars and the dock doesn’t fall. That’s enchantment. Right, right. And that’s what people aren’t seeing. And that’s why when people go, you shouldn’t interrupt people, I go, no, no, no, no, no. The most important thing actually for real, and I can prove it, that you have to do, is interrupt somebody the second they make a bad axiomatic statement. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Now, you’ll have to knock it down, no, but you have to force them to clarify immediately. Immediately, you have to. Because if you don’t, the enchantment will be instantiated in all the listeners forever. And there is nothing, once you move past that point that you can do to convince the listeners or that person that they’re wrong. And nobody realizes this, nobody. And it’s just really bothering me. That’s what’s causing the problem, because everyone’s going, more conversation will help us. And that theory is based on the idea that we’re all rational, which is already stupid and absurd, but I can’t convince anybody of that, even though it should be completely obvious. But it’s also based on the idea that even if you’re not rational, if I use rationality to break your rational frame, you’ll see the world my way. You’ll see the world my way. And that is not how it works, because the world is made up of enchantment, technically. And so once you enchant somebody, you can’t go back and break the enchantment in that way. There are ways to break enchantment, but it’s really hard. And I don’t recommend, it’s easier to make the enchantment not happen. And I do that all the time. I get a lot of flack for it. Maybe I do it poorly. I have no idea. But what I do works remarkably well for the people that it’s meant for. Maybe it doesn’t work for everybody. That’s fine, fair, I don’t care. I’m not here to fix everybody. I can barely fix the people that I’m trying to fix now. But that’s the fundamental problem, is that people don’t understand that. And so they’re tolerant or they’re nice, or they’re like, well, it’s okay, I’ll fix it. And it’s like, no, you won’t, because once they build that platform, those people go up a layer in vertical causality, and you didn’t see that trick. And now you go and remove the lower layer and they’re not there anymore, and they don’t care. Don’t like that, that’s nice. We don’t care that we’re standing on nothing. It’s Wile E. Coyote over the cliff. He’s fine until he looks down, except you can’t make them look down. They’re never gonna fall, dude. And granted, someday they’re gonna fall and it’s gonna be bad, but you’re not gonna do that. You’re not able to do that. Yeah, it’s too, I agree with you, yeah. Is it like building a false face? Like, I mean, that you’re gonna build. Hi, fire. Is it like you’re building a false face, like the disciple that walked on the water, you know, he was fine until he looked down, or he took his eyes off of the, off of Christ, but it wasn’t the looking down. Right. No, yeah. Yeah, he broke contact with the highest. Yeah. He lost faith in the highest, right? And that was expressed in looking away, right? And that broke his enchantment. It breaks his magic. It breaks what was, what was, what was coming. Right, and then people use that and go, oh, that’s how you break enchantment. But that’s actually not true. That’s how you break enchantment when A, the enchantment, it comes from above, right? And you’ll notice what the example I used is they build, they plant pillars in the water, and then they build something on top of those pillars. And then you go and remove those pillars and the thing they built doesn’t fall. It would float if you built a dock. Like, yeah, it wouldn’t have a point. It doesn’t move. Yeah, gotcha. That’s where people are confused. It doesn’t move. You picked it in like hyperspace or something, yeah. Well, and the reason why is because people aren’t rational. So you hear destiny build up a rational sounding argument, and maybe it is perfectly rational. Like, I have a hard time listening to him at all. It’s like listening to Sam Harris, only it’s worse for many, many reasons. But it doesn’t matter because the people that are listening to him are not being convinced by his rationality at all. And I can prove that. You can listen to irrational people and it has the same effect. So they’re not using rationality. See, you would think that would be obvious because you just look at the internet, you can look at Digital Gnosis’ channel and figure out people that are listening to him are not rational because he’s not making rational points. He’s partly not mentally there for one thing. But I mean, clearly what he’s saying isn’t rational. I mean, destiny is not rational. In some of the things he says, he may be making very rational arguments, but some of the things he said are not. Like he’s straw man’s and then argues, his straw man argument for the other side and then says, and therefore, which is just a ridiculous, why anybody lets anybody get away with that is beyond me, but they do. And like that means that they’re not getting their enchantment through rationality at all. They’re getting their enchantment some other way. It’s not that the irrationality doesn’t help. I mean, it certainly does. But for you to go in and say, ah, they rationality their way there and I’m gonna rationality them out of it and it never works. But what it does do is both sides dig in. So it actually has the opposite effect. It makes destiny fans dig in cause they heard the argument and then it makes the Ben Shapiro fans or whoever he’s on the other side of dig in because they heard the argument and both arguments were convincing. What does convincing mean, do you think? That’s an interesting word. What do you think convincing mean? I think convincing means you’ve been enchanted. That’s what I think it means. Ah, whoa, hey Mark. Mark, that’s so brilliant. I can’t stand it. Wow. I’ll take the compliment. No, but seriously, and I like the way you’re using the word enchantment. This is really fascinating to me. Keep going. And it’s not bad, right? Like we need to be enchanted to walk on water, right? Like if you’re a Christian, in order to walk on water, you need to be enchanted. Absolutely, absolutely. And that’s a good thing. Absolutely, yes. Right, if you wanna get eaten by lions or resist being eaten by lions like St. Ignatius did, well, I gotta read up on that guy now that I have an icon. Thank you, Ethan. You know, you need to be enchanted. Like you’re not just gonna walk up to a lion on an average Tuesday when you’re pissed off and survive that very well, right? That’s a very different face of it. Yeah, so you don’t wanna be- Fascinating. And you don’t wanna be hating on enchantment because A, it’s gonna happen anyway. So like, what are you doing? Like you have to deal with it. Like it’s not going away because you wanna wave it away. Right, but also, you can make arguments that certain dictators, and there were a bunch of them in the 20th century, used enchantment and hijacked a really good idea. Absolutely, absolutely. And people do that all the time. If not for Stalin, communism would have flourished, garbage argument, that can’t be correct. But at the end of the day, that could have gone the other way. And because charisma exists, because some people have the skills of enchantment or train them very carefully, as Jordan B. Peterson points out, although not very well, because he’s missing a bunch of the story there, by the way, a bunch of it, tons of that story are missing in his retelling. Because that exists and can be done, you can’t just say no to all of it. It’s not gonna work. Like, because you’re not gonna erase it from the world and you’re not gonna say, see, that person’s charismatic, so you must move away from them. That’s not even true. Like the Dalai Lama, he’s pretty charismatic guy. I’ve been enchanted by the Dalai Lama many times. I love some of the stuff he says. Yeah, Winston Church, I was charismatic on his radio programs, right? Like, yeah. FDR, very bad president, very charismatic. Yeah, so there you… Anyway, keep going, Josh, what do you say? No, I’m just kind of listening along, but yeah, no, I see what he’s talking about. And you see, as you’re kind of describing that, I’m going back in my mind of times that I’ve tried to convince somebody of something or been, you know, because like I said, in my early, a while back, I was very into apologetics because I was trying to, I guess in a way, build a path to Christianity, like in my own mind, and that I could hand over to somebody else and be like, this is my logical and reasonable path to Christianity. And kind of like what we talked about on Father Eric’s Dream is I got right up to that last part, and then you’re kind of like, this last part is the faith, like that’s where I stopped asking why, and it’s a giving in. It’s like a… It’s a… Submission? Yeah, well, yeah, but it’s like, that’s why I was talking about the make-believe with faith, or in your said with faith and belief, or I think it’s faith and belief we were using, those words, but that, like I said, at a certain point, like, and I’m okay with it, like I don’t mind that it’s, that, you know, when somebody says, well, you know, that when I said I have faith that God will provide or that God will take care of me or that, you know, that this and that, but I have no proof of that. That’s not something I’m gonna be able to, there’s no way that I can prove this. That’s not that, and so they’ll say, well, you know, it’s cute, but you’re basically playing make-believe. And that’s where I’m gonna have to say, yes, I’m gonna make myself believe that this is the reality, that this is what is real, like in that. And so, and if, you know, they don’t wanna participate in that reality, then yeah, now, I guess, like I said, I have to be okay with being accused of playing make-believe by atheists as my faith and saying like, yes, yes, that like, I’m okay with that, with that because we’re all, like reality is perspectival, like your perspective on reality is what determines your reality in a lot of ways in that, but there’s this other, I guess, reality, like an ultimate reality. That- That determines, your perspective determines how you see reality and what parts of it you see and don’t see. Yeah, because I can’t see everything, like Christ, yeah, I believe Christ, you have a plank in your eye, you have a giant, you know, thing in your eye. Which parts are you gonna look at? And which parts can you look at? Because if you’re in a flat world, if you’re stuck in a binary, you’re on that flat plane with those little people, right? And then you can’t do a bunch of things, like they’re not functionally available to you. Well, and like you said, you don’t, they don’t even have, like you can’t really, like you can only get so far in this conversation because they don’t have the concept, like that concept of faith, they do not have, like they’re not gonna, they’re not gonna- What do you mean, look up Josh? Yeah, exactly. What are you talking about? There’s no opposite. There’s only a cross, we’re all one, we’re all equal. We can just let everybody into the country because we’re all one people, right? And it’s this constant, like when people start talking about unity, I’m like, oh, there’s neoplatonic garbage, it’s all in, it’s scientific enchantment, right? It sounds logical and reasonable and rational. And then people go like, oh yeah, well, obviously there’s the one and the many. And all we need to worry about is the one and the many. It’s binary, it’s totally false. There isn’t only the one and the many. That is ridiculous. That will solve nothing, but it will create war. For certain, you will always create war when you’re stuck in a binary. You have no choice but to go to war. And it breeds elitism. Yeah, it is war. It breeds elitism because you get into the Hegelian, the dialectic where you rise above the binary. I was like, okay, dude, maybe you rose above the binary, although I kinda doubt it. I knew it, Martha. What about all the people that you think are stuck in the binary? How are you treating them? Can we replay you doing Hegel? Hegel’s the worst. He’s the worst, he’s so ridiculous. You can’t even believe that. It’s not even his fault, right? You get it so funnily. Oh, that’s the best Hegel thing I’ve ever seen. And it’s not his fault, Elizabeth, because everyone’s like, he’s a philosopher. And so all the philosophers claim him. And I think if he were alive and you called him a philosopher, he’d punch you. Nobody wanted to be a philosopher. He was a theologian. My argument is he was a bad theologian, but I’m not qualified to judge him on that. So fair enough, I don’t think he was a good theologian, but he was a theologian. He didn’t wanna be a philosopher. He wouldn’t have been wanted to be known as a philosopher. Nobody wanted, philosophers are like actors, right? Like nobody wanted to be an actor. He’s done so much damage that seriously, I think he’s, I don’t think, I’m not imputing motives, but he’s done total damage to modern thought. I mean, a lot of people- He’s the worst. But a lot of people have come to that conclusion. And I think this is the problem with philosophy after Aristotle, right? Like the amount of brain power it takes to come up with something like Karl Marx is approximately equivalent to the intelligence of your above average three-year-old. And so a lot of people come to those conclusions and some of them publish about them because they’re motivated and they can write like Karl Marx, because he had nothing to do all day and he was busy getting fired from every job he ever held. These might be hints, by the way, as to his success incidentally. And so because of that, they get given all this credit, like, oh, he’s a brilliant thinker because he wrote a book. And I’m like, do you know how many books there are, dude? And most authors are terrible. Like most authors are bad writers. I’ll just say that flat out because I’m not a bad writer. Not that I don’t write badly sometimes, different problem, but like I’m not a bad writer. I can write very well, thank you very much. I’m lazy, so it’s hard. I’m also dyslexic, so it’s really hard because dyslexia just makes reading and writing miserable. But at the end of the day, like, they’re just not good writers. Like pick up a romance novel and tell me that’s good writing. And I’m not saying there aren’t any, but my goodness, do you know how many romance novels there are? There are a lot. And most of them are just terrible writing. And most books on philosophy, you know, like, and Peterson only makes this point about Lacan, but he says, I tried to read Lacan and I couldn’t make any sense of it. And therefore I think he’s full of garbage. What if that’s true of all of them? Like, what if that’s true of everybody after Aristotle who claimed to be a philosopher? Well, there you go. What if? What if? That’s part of my thesis is exactly that. Not that none of them had any good points, but like, if you have a good point based on a bad set of axioms, who cares? Who cares? I don’t care. Yeah, well, wasn’t it Dante’s Inferno where the philosophers are pasted to the steps leading up to heaven. Like they can’t, like they’re literally like embedded in the cement and they can’t move. They can’t go up. They can’t go down. Yeah. Yeah, they’re in their own special spot actually. Yeah, the philosophers. But what I find brilliant is this idea of enchantment, the way you’ve rounded it out. Like Josh, I don’t know how you see it, but I just think it’s incredibly brilliant. I got a- It’s a rich way of seeing enchantment. And I think it’s absolutely important that it is indeed connected to the patterns of, it is part of the pattern of reality for sure. And I love the way you did that. So how are you gonna connect that to your age of gnosis in chapter 10? That’s chapter 10, is it? Okay. No, I’m serious. I think your idea is so unique and brilliant. I’ve never heard anybody say this before. And I think it’s critically important because today, strangely enough, I was trying to read C.S. Lewis, the discarded image, and he was going on about all these little beings, the enchanted world with the elves and the fairies and stuff. And then I went back to Dante, Josh, going back to that. And I got to thinking of how Dante did it. And his is rooted in the traditional Greek thinkers and Roman thinkers. He doesn’t go into this other place. And I think it’s really interesting that so many people are interested in the elves and the fairies and the Tolkien thing and da-da-da-da-da. I really, I think you’ve got a point there. And I think that ties in with the age of gnosis right now. Oh yeah. It is not a coincidence that everybody’s interested in Tolkien right now, folks. Sorry. I agree. I agree. And C.S. Lewis even makes the point about Dante at the beginning. I didn’t read it thoroughly because he knows all of his Greek philosophers up the yin-yang. And I can’t even follow half of it because I never studied it. But he does say that Dante was the one, he was an avid reader of Dante, right? C.S. Lewis, and he said that Dante was the one that was able to actually root everything in the way that you’re saying almost with the, he didn’t use the word enchantment. I’m gonna find a quote maybe for next week. But that same idea of rooting everything firmly in Greek Roman tradition and yet not getting lost without the pillars on the dock. Yeah. Brilliant. Right. Really. This is a first. We’ve just witnessed the beginning of a great, no, seriously. That’s because I’ve been wondering about this for years. I’m glad you get it. I’m glad you get it. I’ve been waiting for someone to catch up. I just think because I read this book when I was like, in 1960, I read this book by Francis Schaefer, Escape from Reason. And he was actually, he was grappling with what you’re talking about. And I think he would come, you know, and what he did was he basically, he wrote, it’s a tiny little book. I gave it to Jordan Peterson, actually, but when he first started his book tour, so he probably never read it. But I gave it to him because of what you’re talking about, because Francis Schaefer was seeing exactly what you’re saying and the problem of the dock once the pillars are taken out. Nobody sees. Nobody can see it. And to your point, Mark, I think you’re absolutely right. If you don’t stop people, once they’re gone, man, you’re not getting anybody back. You’re not getting anybody back at all. And they’re in trouble. Like talk about, wow, age of nothing. They’re dug in. They get dug in. And then it’s war. Like, and that’s what’s causing the war is, one side’s too polite and the other side just doesn’t care, right? And they’re arrogant. They think they’re right about everything. Like Destiny, Destiny is one of the most obviously arrogant people I’ve ever seen on the internet. Like he is like such an arrogant jerk. It’s amazing to me that anybody listens to him because my arrogance meter is really high and sensitive. And I’m like, this guy’s pegging the needle on the arrogance. I can’t deal with it. Wow. So Josh and Mark, so I’m really interested in how you see how, if you can flesh out anything more about this rich concept of enchantment. Like I wonder Josh, even with your background, I’m really curious. But I have, truthfully, I came across the enchantment a little bit later and I need to do more research on it because I’m still wrapping my head around the concept. And like the, like I’ve heard it used in a lot of different ways. Because the Jordan Peterson sphere and everything like that, and everybody on here, like there was that lady that, yeah, Peterson interviewed. And she did work with people, like it was kind of an alternative to diversity training, basically. She was, and she, and her, I think her company or her program was called Theory of Enchantment. And yeah, and I was trying to, and ever since then I was like, okay, I’m still, so I’m still grappling with it and that, but Mark, what Mark said, that actually helped with his little diagram with the pillars and how the people don’t fall. Like it’s a weird, it’s a strange thing that happens. So, hey guys, I gotta run, but yeah, thank you, Mark. And yeah, I’m gonna think on this some more. And yeah, hopefully we’ll be able to engage on a little bit more some other time. Good to see you. Thank you, sir. Good to see you guys. You guys have a great night. You too. Bye, Josh. Bye. No, that’s exciting, Mark. It’s really exciting, actually. It’s so weird that I’m thinking about that today. Like it’s so bizarre because it suddenly hit me. No, it’s true. Because like, you know how I read Dante forever and Dante just doesn’t go into the, he is rigorous, man. There is no way those pillars are gonna be built. He will not, no matter what. Right, you can’t let the pillars be built. I came up with that example, I think today. So, something’s going on. Wait, wait, you mean that happened today, that whole picture? I’m fairly sure that example of pillars happened today as a result of me watching like 10 minutes of Destiny mouth in his freaking yap out and me getting pissed. Because I was just- Yeah, it’s a brilliant way of saying it. Well, good. Well, I’m always struggling with you guys. I’m like, how can I make people understand these simple things? No, it’s better than what he has. I’m so stupid. No, it’s better than what he has. What Schaeffer does is he shows where the splits are happening in the realm of reality, I guess you could say. He has this upper story, lower story thing, but I like yours even better because he has to kind of, he’s missing a piece there because your pillars, it shows so very clearly the critical importance of disciplining the pathway, you might say, or the conversation even, or the dialogue, or anything else. Right. It’s brilliant, Mark. That’s hard to do and no one wants to do it because they don’t want to take responsibility. Well, it’s nasty. You got to read Dante and see Beatrice and the way she treats Dante. Like she is brutal, Mark. Like she doesn’t, he starts going off one way or two. I don’t know what he’s doing that’s ridiculous. It’s just slightly ridiculous. She doesn’t allow anything. That’s the feminine too, right there, right? The woman doesn’t let the man get away with it. Right. Mark, I’m so, this is so exciting to me. I’m never going to forget this because I’ve been, no, I’ve been trying to figure this out because of this whole picture and your way of seeing it, tying it in with enchantment is so important because enchantment is a slippery slope. Well, I think that’s the key. Like if you wanted like a quick definition of enchantment, enchantment is the recognition of vertical causality in the world. Okay, okay. So slippery slope is correct. Like once you start seeing up or down, and if what you’re seeing is down, that’s nihilism. That’s the slippery slope on that side. That’s why, again, stoicism is good because it stops the downward slide. Wherever you’re, the nice thing about stoicism is stoicism scales perfectly because it’s just a process. It’s a totally neutral process that doesn’t depend on your location in the verticality. Right. When you talk about the universe is, I got to correct Jonathan Pigeot, a self-similar fractal, not a fractal, a self-similar fractal, a specific type of fractal. I’m a technical guy, sorry. Say why are you saying that? I wonder why you said that. Yeah, so the universe is a self-similar fractal. Well, the fracticality is the verticality. It’s the same thing. Right, right. I like fractal, better than verticality. Fractality, I like that a lot better because there’s a nesting there, and verticality has a problem. I’m sorry, I’m a little bit, I’m still having trouble with verticality. Well, the reason why verticality is a problem. Because of your point. You’re gonna like this. So the reason why verticality is a problem is the following. Here’s what we do. We have this, and we do X and Y. Yeah, yeah. Okay? Yeah, yeah. All the time. Yeah. Right? The problem is that when you do this and you draw X and Y, that is actually supposed to represent this. Right, right. And so what the science people do is they do this. Right. And then they do this. And then they do this. Right, yeah, yeah. And then they do this. And I actually, that’s really hard for people to understand. So what I actually like better is Pastor Paul talks about covering the eye and then covering the other eye. That’s the same thing. Cover the left eye, cover the right eye. Cover the left eye, cover the right eye. Wow. Right. And I think that’s also the same, because Pastor Paul also talks about eyes up versus eyes down, same thing. Okay. That’s the same as covering one eye or the other. Either you’re looking up or you’re looking down or you’re looking up or you’re looking down, except that’s not correct. You can also look across. That also happens to be the, we’ll call it the Protestant, sorry guys, but we’ll call it the Protestant problem, is that they’re like, ah, we can look across and make everything equal. And then we’ll solve the problem that way. And I’m like, no, that’s neoplatonism actually. That’s actually the neoplatonic heresy of the thing they label that doesn’t exist, is the neoplatonism, it’s foolishness. And that’s where people get lost again. And I don’t blame them. Like it’s easy to get lost there because clearly you’re not gonna resolve anything with two. Hegel couldn’t, right? He just made up a three. So why does Jonathan Pajot sometimes sound neoplatonic? Because it’s not, it’s all platonic. It’s not wrong. I’ll tell you what Elizabeth, man. I need to read that Flatland book. Ethan, oh yeah, Flatland’s wonderful. Ethan sent me this, right? Sent me this wonderful Plato’s Republic, Alan Bloom. Oh. Right. And then Danny was like, we wanna do a book club on it. So we did the book club on it. It’s a Texas wisdom community YouTube channel. You can watch me in the book club. I’m in, I think all but two of the episodes anyway. We had a wonderful time. You read that book, and then you suddenly realize, and don’t read it alone. Don’t even try to read that book alone. It is way too dense. It’s like, I would never read Dante alone. That was just, I can’t even conceive of why anybody would try to do that. No, no, you can’t read Dante by yourself. You’re not smart enough to understand a single line of that by yourself. No. But the Republic’s the same. When you get to the end of the Republic, if you’ve done it correctly, you suddenly realize the entire grounding of Christianity is right there. And all you’re actually missing, this is the funny part. You’re not even missing the resurrection because the book ends with a story of resurrection. Whoa! Did anybody tell you that ever? No. And by end, it’s not like at the end of the book, it’s a story of resurrection. No, no, no, no. The ending of the book is a story. There is no commentary or comment after the story. None. It ends with that story. So the only difference, in some sense, I know I’m reducing it, the only difference between Platonism, which is what people are calling Neo-Platonism because they’re dumb and they wanna make something new. That’s what Neo means, by the way. It’s not a coincidence. They’re giving away their trick. New Platonism, it’s not new, it’s just Platonism. They never got past Plato. The trick is, the only thing missing is Jesus. So why do people go on about Neo-Platonism if it isn’t different? I don’t understand. I don’t understand. Because you get past Plato. Do you solve the problem that Nietzsche and Heidegger couldn’t solve and you get past Plato? That’s what new means. It’s like, oh no, no, no, we’re not stuck at Plato. We got past Plato with Plotinus. It’s like, no, you didn’t. You didn’t get past Plato at all. Heidegger didn’t get past Plato. Nietzsche didn’t get past Plato. Plotinus didn’t get past Plato. You’re not gonna get past Plato. Sorry, you’re just not that smart. But they’re like new Platonism. We’ve already gotten past Plato. They came after Plato. They must have gotten past him, Elizabeth. They came after him. And they play this game. That’s the game of metaphysics too. I have a video on that. Oh, so here we go. So there we go. So that was the, okay. All those people also use the word meta all the time for everything. And I’m like, wait a minute. That’s just an identification against, right? All you’re saying is, so there’s the physics and then there’s metaphysics. That’s a publishing trick by a publisher. Really, look it up. I didn’t make this up. It’s right there on the internet. Like the publisher publishes the physics and then there’s a bunch of other papers left over that aren’t labeled. And so he goes, well, this is the stuff that’s outside of or comes after in my publishing schedule, the physics. And then everybody adopts this word. Like it’s some magical philosophical term that means something. And I’m like, it was a trick to sell books to idiots. You idiot. And it apparently worked. Like what is wrong with you? Wow. That’s like the DSM. Yeah, it’s like the DSM. We don’t have to worry about getting past Plato. It already happened. And we’re using that because we’re wicked smart. Like they’d say in New England. That’s right. See, and I look at all this and I go, people are fooled by this, really? And everyone’s like enchanted and they’re going, ooh, look at the neoplateness. They’re so smart. The tiniest was such a genius. And I’m like, I don’t know. They were just playing on top of Plato, right? They were just playing. They were doing games. Okay, got it. They were all doing different things. That’s the other thing. I asked my good buddy, Lantern Jack, if you haven’t seen his YouTube channel, check it out. Ancient Greece Declassified Podcast. Wonderful podcast. Jack is a smart guy. He’s really smart. So he, and he’s talked to Verbeke twice, by the way, and they’re fascinating conversations. So I asked him once in Clubhouse, that’s where I met him. I said, tell me something. What do you think of these neoplateness? Like everybody keeps saying, like, you know, it was like a branch of Platonism. Platonism could have gone either way. It could have gone towards Christianity or towards neoplatonism. And it didn’t go towards neoplatonism. It’s like a roll of the dice thing or something. That’s how Verbeke talks about it. And other people, he’s not the only one. There’s tons of people to talk about it that way. And Jack was like, what? Like Christianity won. Like they just wiped out neoplatonism because it was a bunch of small groups who weren’t practicing the same practices or doing the same thing or believing the same things. And Christianity just rolled over it. Why are we having this discussion basically? Right, so why are we going there? Wow. Jack and I are like this. Like on philosophy and philosophers, we’re like right together. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff we disagree on, but like the main stuff, we ran a clubhouse room once, basically saying all modern philosophy is garbage, prove us wrong sort of a thing. It was hysterically funny. That’s fascinating. You know, because I- He has all the, like he’s got a PhD in ancient philology. Like he’s got the creds. He actually knows all this stuff. And I just have all the logical arguments. It was a hysterical room. We had a blast. I think we ran it for a couple of hours. What’s it called? Ancient Greek declassified? Is that what it’s called? Ancient Greece declassified. Oh, Greece, sorry. Yeah. It is so interesting. AncientGreeceDeclassified.com, yeah. So, have you, so, wow. But my friend, this is so strange because I have a friend who actually lives part-time in Greece and I met her at Librae actually. And she’s always maintained what you’re saying basically that the Greeks had it all wrapped up in Plato, that it was already there in place. And I always used to look at her and think, what? But now there you go, Mark. Wow. So what does Manuel say about this? Oh, probably most of this I got from Manuel. Ah. So what’s the name of your Plato again? I gotta listen to that. What’s the name of what? Of all your Plato discussions. What’s it called? Oh, that’s on the Texas Wisdom Community YouTube channel. I’ll post a link to that. Give me a sec to get it. I don’t always keep that one up because I never know. I should probably just keep it up because I always end up talking about it. That’s really interesting, your pillars and your dock. And did you run that by Sally? She might’ve heard that this morning. Wow, she could do something with that. And the other thing is, so that whole image of the- Sally is busy. Don’t distract Sally right now. Wait till after the conference. Right after summit, right after the summit, she’ll be free to do other stuff. Is she going to the summit? Sally is going, yes. No. Yes. Oh no. You were the one, by the way, the reason why my friend is going is because you posted that you were going and I told her, and now Sally Jo’s going and I’m not. Oh crap. And I think Adam’s going from Ireland. I think he’s gonna spring and go. Adam from Ireland. I like Adam from Ireland a lot. He’s amazing. I love Adam. Yeah, he’s amazing. He does such great work on my channel for me. It’s fantastic. Really? I can see that. I can see that he’s rich, right? There’s so much going on there. He is so sharp and he’s like way too young to be that smart. It kind of pisses me off. Yeah, but he has experience wisdom and that’s what’s strange about him. He’s got all this experience wisdom for a young guy. Irish wisdom, man. Yeah, it is Irish. I’m telling you. Most of them are brawling drunks, but every once in a while. But even the brawling drunks, my friends always say when they go golfing, now everybody’s drunk, but they’re amazing. I can make out of the Irish because I’m part Irish. Me too, me too. County for Manor, where are you from? We’re in Northern Ireland. I don’t know, actually. I don’t remember. Yeah, I don’t remember. I’d have to ask my uncle where Great Grammy was born. But I think Great Grammy came on the boat. Yeah, my- On my mother’s side. Yeah, we have one that came in the flamon and died on the way over. Ooh. My ancestor, yeah, in 1848, died on the way over in the coffin ships, right? No, we’re way more recent. We’re early 1900s. No, we’re 1848. I actually knew my Great Grammy. Oh, cool. I remember her. Oh, no wonder you’ve turned out so well. I was wondering. Okay, but you know who else is greatest? Marcus of Mark Christ. He’s a phenomenal thinker. Have you ever listened to him? He was at a conference. Which one was it? Oh, the one in Dublin, of course, with Jonathan Peugeot and oh, the storyteller, Martin Shaw, is mesmerizing. Oh, well, we’re gonna see him in the Carpenter Springs. I believe him. Oh, hell. I’m gonna have to go get a plane fare tonight. I’ll have to tell my husband I’ve changed my mind. I just, there’s so many cool people going. It’s gonna be really great. Did you see the video? I think they released it this morning on this thing. No, I didn’t see it. Oh, darn it. It’s gonna make a world. Oh, just watch the video. You’re gonna be like scrambling to sign up immediately. I was like, Neil DeGrade does such a good job of selling this thing. I was like, man, now I want VIP tickets. I really do too, but it’s so expensive. I like, I’ll have to pay for it. At first I was, well, there aren’t any available, he said, so that sucks. But at first I was like, well, there’s no way of paying that much money because the only interesting thing in that whole thing is the church tour. I know, I know. But then this morning when he sold it, I was like, oh. That’s so sad. I’m like, why do you need VIP tickets? Well, are you telling me there’s no more VIP tickets available now? They’re gone, oh well. He said they sold out instantly. I was like, what? Yeah. I was like, wait, what? They did? You’re kidding at that price. I was kind of angry at the price. I’m shocked. I was really annoyed. I was like, this is highway robbery. What’s wrong with it? That’s so true. That’s why I wasn’t gonna go because of the price of everything. I just can’t quite, it just seems very expensive to me. And of course we’re Canadian. I got the world’s cheapest hotel. I got the world’s cheapest hotel. It’s great. It’s like three and a half miles away, but I’m gonna have a car. So I’m like, I don’t care. Three and a half miles is nothing. We’ll just hop in the car. I found a really beautiful, elegant hotel that I really shouldn’t use. But I’m old. I’ll be the oldest one there. Sorry? If I had millions. Originally, I thought that the lawsuit was gonna settle in the beginning of December. And I was like, this is looking really good, guys. And if this settles the way I want, which wouldn’t be too bad. It’s not a million dollars, right? Whatever. But if I had settled it that way, I was like, nope. We’re all going and we’re staying in a really nice hotel for three days. I was like, yeah, yeah. I had big plans. I was like, we’re gonna fly Jesse in from Australia. I was gonna fly Sally down. I was gonna do the whole thing. Oh yeah. It was gonna be real nice. Cause you know, whatever. Like I shared the spoils, right? And then it didn’t happen and I was just crushed. I was like, oh, I had such big plans. I had such big plans. I was so crushed. I was absolutely devastated. It was really bothering. But now the lawsuit’s over. So they admitted guilt. I’m glad. I’m glad. You must be very relieved. When did that end? They threatened me with three more years. And I was like, I can’t do this for three more years. Just financially or mentally. I was just like, I got things to do. I gotta go to this stupid summit. I gotta go to the symbolic world. I can’t be bogged down. Yeah, I should’ve. The minute the mediation went bad, I should have just called it right then and there. But I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was completely bamboozled. I completely caught off guard. There was a lot of deception. Like if you want justice, don’t go anywhere near a court system or mediation or lawyers. For sure. My lawyers were good. My lawyers, the other lawyers are just, I mean. I know, I know. It’s horrible. And getting anybody to believe that there are people that malicious in the world that would steal all your stuff is impossible. Just no one will believe you. No one will believe you. No matter what you do or what evidence. This is what I mean. You cannot give people enough evidence to prove that there’s evil in the world. It’s not possible. They just won’t believe. That’s another one of your chapters. The number of people I say, no, really a lawyer took my house in Massachusetts and they just flat out think like, you must’ve done something wrong. And I’m like, not only did I not do anything wrong, but I did everything right. And I went to court and the courts would have none of it. They’re like, we don’t know these people. They’ve provided no paperwork, but we’re gonna give them your house anyway and make you homeless. That really happened. And it’s documented. I believe it. It’s fully documented. You can go read the, oh, we’re gonna introduce evidence into a case, not tell anybody. And it’s not real evidence. It’s been faked. They faked my signature on a document or maybe they didn’t. I never worked this out because I was just disgusted with the whole thing after five years and 50 grand, which is cheap by the way. You get a lawsuit going and multiple court cases, 50 grand, you’re doing good. But I was like, I don’t know. And they just said that I wrote a letter that I didn’t write, obviously, that was contradicted by the existing evidence and they made their ruling based on that. And I’m just sitting there like, what can you do with a system this corrupt? Yeah. What can you do? And I was like, I could spend more money. I had way money. I plundered the money back then. I bought my house cash. That’s how much money I had back then. I’m like, oh, I could just leave and buy a house for cash before I could spend another 50, 100, 200,000 fighting this. And I was like, there’s no point. I’m just gonna go buy a house, which is how I ended up down here. Just left and bought a house. Left Massachusetts. I wanna leave Massachusetts when it began. I wanted to get out of Massachusetts five years before I did. So I got out of Massachusetts like seven years ago. But I wanted out already. So I’m like, well, I’ll just leave. I’ll just take the loss, the half million dollar house, gone. I’ll spend whatever I have to spend and I’ll leave and I’ll buy a house, which is what I did. Which is exactly what I did. And here you were. And here I am. And now you have a great- Elizabeth, am I a successful YouTuber? This is a dream. Oh my gosh. I have to tell you, your live stream is phenomenal. I see great things ahead for you, Mark. I don’t say that. And I’m not a nice person. So don’t let anybody imagine that I am. I don’t give compliments lightly. Thank you. I know. I do appreciate that. I’ve seen you in person a couple of times. You are not to be trifled with. How’s that? Well, I’m not nice particularly. Cause I’ve always, I figured out when I was about two years old that if you start lying, you’ll never get out of it. So like who wants that? Right? But anyway, Mark, I’m so excited about your enchantment idea. But I think I would like to think now the Gnosticism Schaefer puts up at the top rather than down below. So I hate this up and down. Can’t we just do the Dante medieval thing, with the dome of heavens and, couldn’t we do that like in the Greek Orthodox church? It’s so much better than up and down. You can still have a pencil poking through the paper. Up and down is a big problem, right? It’s a problem. Well, right? Because you’re doing this. Yeah, I know. And you’re still stuck on the flat plane. And the bottom line is it’s not this, it’s this on this side. And it’s this on this side. I know. I know. When you talk about up and down, left and you don’t, dimensionality is a hard concept. Well, I’d like you to solve that one because I’m really, it troubles me seriously. That’s the fractal, that’s the self-similar fractal nature, right? It’s self-similar, it’s not the same. Right, but you have to be careful when you get the up and down going. I’m sorry, Mark. I feel really strongly. I argued with poor little Dr. McGill-Christ about this and he wasn’t very happy with me because he sees everything as an upward moving spiral. And I’m sorry. Right, spiral doesn’t work. Spiral doesn’t work. I’m sorry, no. Because there’s a, right, because as you move through the vertical causality, there’s a change in scale and scale. I have a video on that. A video on that. I’m just saying, there’s a video on scale. There’s a change in scale. A scale works, scale’s good, scale’s good. Keep scaling. And the change in scale causes a change in the rules. And actually, Nassim Taleb talks about this. Effectively, what happens is, as the size of the set you’re dealing with in mathematics changes, the nature of the things change. So let’s suppose you have a concept called randomness. I don’t like this. Keep going. So you’ve got a concept called randomness and you have a set of numbers. Oh, I know what you’re gonna say. The numbers are from one to 10. Okay, I know what you’re saying now. I know what you’re saying. You cannot discern randomness from order in a set of one to 10. Right, right, right, right. Because you can make any pattern out of it. Okay, that’s okay. I can let that go. Okay, but. When you expand that number set, say past 1,000 or up to 1,000 or something, now that same process of randomness looks different. There’s no more order in it. Right, right. There can’t be, we’ll say. There can’t be order in it. But guess what happens, Elizabeth? It just turns out, and they’ve only kind of proven this mathematically recently, which I think is funny, because I was like, oh, I already could have asked me. I knew. I couldn’t do the math proof, but I knew it. As you get bigger number sets, like really big, like I don’t know if it’s trillions. I don’t know where the line is. Order reappears from the random process again. Wow. And randomness disappears at the top. Right. That’s what people don’t understand. And the thing is. That’s totally cool. Oh my God. Peterson talks about this. Peterson talks about this, but not in that way, right? This is the old thing about communism works at the family, at the, for a family, but it doesn’t work for a community. That’s the same thing. Right. Right, it’s the same thing. The scale of the problem is, the same thing. The scale matters. The, I like scale and I like fractal, but I’m very upset with the up and down deal. And I’m really serious about it. Like I think, and I, because these words are hanging in the middle of nowhere, Mark. People are using them constantly. And there’s, they’re just, you know, they might as well be a fart. I’m sorry. Well, that’s why they idolatries everything, right? They make everything into an idol. Because they don’t have a choice. Like you need propositions in a world where you’re denying creation. Right. And that’s what it’s all wrapped up in. Right. This is where I keep getting at. Oh my God, write that down. Write that down. Well, I keep getting upset, right? Because like I saw a Ken Ham video, and like Ken Ham’s the most ridiculous person ever in some sense. But he’s right about a bunch of stuff. His solution is completely stupid. Completely stupid. Like this whole art project. Yeah, yeah, often times that happens. But he’s right. The problem is you have to start at the beginning. And that actually is the problem. You know, Jonathan Pigeot loves to say, you know, or used to say all the time, where are you standing? And nobody got it. Nobody, except I went, oh, I know what he’s saying. I know exactly what he’s saying. But I think the mistake he made there, if it’s a mistake, and probably for me to criticize my favorite French Canadian. I know. He is wonderful. I think the mistake he made there is, it’s where are you starting? Because where you’re starting leads to where you’re standing. And that’s actually the trick I used to play on people all the time with logic, reason, rationality. I’d say, you give me anything you want, and I will justify it using logic, reason, rationality. It was a game we used to play. It was a fun game. I won every round all the time. I was trained by the best, to be fair. You know, whatever. That wasn’t a natural talent, believe me. It was years of practice. But you can do that, because you can stand anywhere on any point, including genocide, very easily. You just have to start in the right place. And so your starting point matters to where you stand. Yeah. Right, and that’s what people don’t know. So if you’re not starting from creation. I agree, yep. You’re gonna come up with random things. But also, if you’re not starting from creation, you don’t have a handle on the world. So you’re gonna make idols out of everything so that you have some handhold. Absolutely. That’s where the agenosis comes from. Yeah, for sure. You propositionalize everything so that you have it. Yes, yes. And this goes back into having mode versus being mode. Yep, yep. Right? No, but absolutely. What you just said, too, is super important. Like that is the starting, absolutely. The standing isn’t gonna work, especially now. Especially now, maybe. Right, well people don’t have a concept of where they’re standing. Like the whole idea of, you mean where I’m standing in an argument. You don’t stand in an argument, right? They’re too materialistic. Right, right. And so they just equate standing with physicality. And they go like, well, I’m standing here and you’re standing there. And they can’t make the leap to, no, no, no, no. You’re philosophically or metaphysically, both bad words, are standing somewhere, right? You’re basing your axiomatic, or you’re basing your assumptions on axiomatic statements. What are those? But axiomatic statements, by definition, are where you’re starting, not where you’re standing. Right, right. Brilliant again. I’m sorry, you went on that one. You went on that one, too. Oh my gosh. And incredibly important. Like all of these points that you’re making tonight are so critically important for people. Because otherwise everybody’s lost, like in every which way. Yeah. And that ain’t no joke because we’re imitative creatures. And when more and more people are getting lost, man, you’re gonna have to cut them off as soon as they go one quarter of a second off. Exactly. It’s true too in teaching, right? It’s absolutely true. When I taught children K to eight, it was always the case that you needed to have those very strict guidelines for everything. And if things start, like you could have a fair amount, you can have the openness with the centre in the circle, right? But once you go one step over, you got it’s got, and the kids love it. Because they know intuitively nobody should be going there. It’s like when you listen to Sam Harris, like everybody knows they’re feeling nauseous listening to the guy. Like they can’t even stand listening to one sentence because it’s so obvious that nobody stopped him. I feel sorry for him, Mark. I have compassion for him, you know why? Because nobody obviously ever stopped him. And he’s got this gig going and he’s made lots of money and he’s known to be the big guy in this realm. And so he has no choice. He has to keep mouthing the same stuff. I don’t think he believes it anymore. I think, but he’s stuck there. He’s got to make his money and have a family and do what he does. Cause he’s so blase about it. You can tell he’s had it. That’s true. It’s been a while. Good word. Yeah, he’s very blase. Yeah, because he doesn’t, it’s his gig and he’s caught in his own game now and it’s too late he can’t get out. I agree. Well, yeah, the big problem with enchantment is health enchantment. Yeah. It’s one of the great points. Another one of the great points that Vickie makes. Yeah, but he got stuck there poor man. Can’t you go and help him? The BS. That’s a story for him. The BS is a good point. For Vickie, he talks about BS, right? In the technical sense. And then he talks about the real danger is self BS. Absolutely. Not BSing others, it’s BSing yourself. I don’t think he’s got enough time on it cause it’s a really hard problem to solve. Especially if you want to solve it with like meditation or some other thing that won’t work for sure. Well, what’s he going to do? Like he’s put himself in that place. What’s the guy, like someone needs to go and rescue Sam. You hear that in that talk. Was that a Peterson talk that he just did recently? I can hardly, I can’t listen to him. Peterson, when you could, well, that was a fascinating talk because you just listened to the talk and you’re like, oh my goodness, I got off of Twitter because people were disagreeing with me and now I’m happy because everybody’s disagreeing with me and they’re supportive. And I’m just like, wow, why do you think that’s good? Wow. I mean, he just flout admits it to Peterson and I’m just like, talk about lack of self-awareness. And the thing was, I tried to explain this to my buddy Bruce, who’s a very good Christian. I said, I think it was Bruce. I said, the problem is that the whole time the guy’s talking he never talks about what he gives to that community. He only talks about what he gets from it. Yeah. And I’m like, that’s the difference between we’ll say a true Christian and a solipsist. The solipsist is just talking about, oh, these people support my ideas. They don’t push back on me. They make me feel good. I’m happy because I have the discussions that I wanna have. That’s wonderful. But a Christian wouldn’t talk about any of that. They’d be like, I spend my time working with these people. I listen to them when they disagree with me. They wouldn’t make it about them. They’d make it about the people they’re with. And nobody sees that. Nobody sees what he’s saying is self-referential and exclusive of other humans. The world that Sam Harris lays out in the first, I don’t know, 10, 15, 20 minutes of that conversation is the most tiny world. It’s just got him in it and he’s at the center of it. And he’s the only thing that matters in it. And the only time, energy, and attention, which is the frame that you need to use, is around him. It’s not around anyone else. Why do I do these live streams? Because people like Josh come in and they have insights. I don’t do this for me. This is misery for me. First of all, Friday night. I know, I figured that out. I could be out there having way more fun than you would, to be honest with you. I could. It wouldn’t be that hard. It’s Friday night, man. I could go bowling. I could go. I could go out ax throwing. And I do, in fact, next Friday, no live stream by the way, for reasons. I’m gonna be having fun on Friday instead of doing this. And for that, I apologize. But also, come on. That’s the thing. Like, I gotta dress up like this silly pirate. And this thing is not comfortable. And when I take it off. I can’t see. I can’t see for a very long time because my damn eye has this blue filter over it for three hours. And it’s not that much fun. I’m sorry. I do this for you guys because I think it’s helping. And so that’s why I’m pleased. Like when Josh comes in here and goes, oh, I have this insight. I’m like, all right, it was all worth it. I don’t care what I wear. I have to draw on the damn board. I don’t know how I organized it. I spent like four hours working on the monologue for today. Four hours. I know, Mark. It’s vicious, man. I hear you. I hear you. I would never try this. Like gosh, the amount of effort that goes into this is crazy. And the thing is, so Friday, dinner has to come early. And thank goodness, I’m not making my own dinner anymore. Somebody else has to prepare dinner extra early every Friday. Every other day, I don’t care when I eat. Like 6.30 is fine. I can’t eat at 6.30 on Friday. I get a live stream at seven. So I’m inconveniencing other people. And the usual schedule is eat dinner and then sit and watch TV. I don’t sit and watch TV on Friday. I don’t get any TV on Friday. There’s no rest for the wicked. I wondered about your eye though. I wanted to ask you if it’s, how much it’s paining you. It’s a lot of work. And I’m not mad. I’m not, I don’t regret any of it. Oh, Mark. And also like this is a non-trivial effort. Yeah, for sure. Messing with lights today. And like I found what I think is better lighting hopefully. And the thing is too, right? Not really. But from my side, totaling gratitude, where are the damn comments on my video saying, good job, Mark. I’ll take negative feedback. I don’t care. I don’t get that much feedback. Sometimes I do. I’m very grateful because it’s almost unheard of that anybody gives me a useful feedback. It’s not like I can ask Sally. Sally goes, I just watched your video, Mark. I remember nothing of it. I’m like, I said, that’s great. That was your topic, Sally. And you remembered none of it? Oh, household. Are you? Thank you, Benjamin. Thank you, Ben. Look at Benjamin here. What’d he say? I appreciate your time, energy and attention. I, that is good. We’re not worth it. All the Muppets are worthy. All of you Muppets are worthy. I know it’s like, it’s amazing that you keep going. Like I know you have your tea and your home baked cookies and things, but man, I don’t know how you do it. Seriously. I’m being serious. It is a sacrifice. But I know. Well, after hearing you and Josh have insights tonight, I’m like, ah, it’s all worth it. It’s all good. That redeems all of the live streams because it takes them all to get here, right? Like I couldn’t just put this one in a vacuum. Like it, and that is the thing. Like it’s the work. The work is hard. The discord work we’ve been doing for like four and a half, five years or whatever it’s been now, it’s hard work. Oh, I’m sure. It’s hard work. I hear you and you’re, you know, you’re being, you’re going back the origins all the time. Like that’s deadly, man. Oh, like I don’t even, you even, you went through Plato and you’re doing all of this, right? Like really? Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There must be something in that. Right? So we’re doing the book club. So what is that? That is prep Friday. You know, you got to prep at least in the afternoon for a couple of hours to have the live stream. It’s not only prep, but like it’s almost only prep. And thank goodness I don’t have to make my own damn food anymore because that was killing me. And then, and then, you know, usually I’d be on here with Jessie and like what nobody knows is that usually we end the stream and then there’s a two or three hour conversation with Jessie, catching up with him and oh yeah. And then it’s one in the morning. Saturday morning with the book club, I wake up, I read half a section of freaking Plato which is not easy to read at all. Especially with dyslexic. And then right after that with maybe a little bit of a break, sometimes not, we go and do another freaking stream. And it, oh yeah. And I was just like, man, this book has got to end. I am going to die. This is going to kill me. And then, and then Saturday’s done. Like it’s one or two in the afternoon on Saturday before I’m disconnected. I’ve missed the farmer’s market in Columbia. I’m like, what the heck? Missed it? Oh yeah. Brutal. Oh Mark, oh that is hysterically funny and tragic at the same time. I know, I know. I mean, missing the farmer’s market. Laugh at my misery. Go ahead. No, but I, I, I’m, well, come on. It’s ridiculous what you’re doing. Like you have to admit, it’s ridiculous. You’re just doing so much. But I, honestly, this enchantment thing is so important. I hope you get more insights because I’m really excited. That’s what it is too, right? Like, you know, for me, it’s been like, how do I explain enchantment and the way to manage it? Because that’s really what Peterson does is he deals with enchantment. I don’t think he thinks of it this way. That’s fine. He deals with enchantment and he manages it well. Yeah. And I think if you’re, you know, say you’re in that business, you’re a pastor, you’re a priest, whatever, you see that as success in the way that you know and then you’re trying to emulate that. And like, fair enough, maybe you should. But I don’t think they’re really understanding enchantment well enough to understand what Peterson’s doing. Right, right. And so everybody’s doing something a little bit different. Like they’re trying to exemplify Peterson. Right. And maybe you should. I mean, maybe that’s what I’m doing to some extent, right? No, you’re not. I’m gonna do what Peterson’s doing. Well, to some extent, right? I’m trying to fill in a bunch of gaps that I see, right? Right, right, right. So, and point out things like responsibility and leadership, which I think are very much missing. I’ve talked about that all over the place, especially on VanderClay’s channel on a bunch of the live streams. And I think that’s actually really important. But a bunch of people are following and going, wow, psychology is really neat, let’s do that. And a bunch of people are following and go, oh, look, you can get up and talk about the Bible. I know, let’s get online and talk about the Bible because it worked for Peterson. And fair enough, like I’m not denigrating any of these projects. Like they’re all useful. But are you really doing what Peterson’s doing? Are you actually capturing the same audience? Because I argue in my Peterson videos, where I have three of those. Of course I have videos on that. That that’s actually really important, what your audience is and how you’re getting them and how you’re keeping them for that matter. The keeping them part, I gotta tell you, I don’t quite understand. The getting them part, I think I actually have a good handle on. And reach is important. And there’s the man in the moment, see the PetersonSphere.com for more. I’m gonna write, I’ve got that written actually. Did I publish that? I don’t think I published that yet. And I’m gonna write a long article about it too, for that website. And then there’s a way in which things come together around the great man Peterson, if you wanna use the great man theory, which I don’t particularly like, but it’s useful. And that happens around the rise of YouTube. And that whole thing is important to understand because it creates a set of conditions that you can’t replicate by doing what you see Peterson doing. And if you don’t understand it, Peterson honed his presence on TV by being on Canadian TV for years. Yeah, I was gonna say that too. There’s all this backstory with Peterson. There’s a huge Canadian backstory that most people don’t see. Right, right. At all. And I just happen to have a bunch of insider information for reasons. And so it’s like, oh, I didn’t know that. That’s an interesting connection, right? Like Vervecky doesn’t do Vervecky’s thing without Peterson. It’s not just that they know each other. There’s way more going on than that. And nobody knows that. No one should know that. There’s no reason for you to know that. I just happen to get lucky and meet the right people and understand and have the right conversations. And then, so you can’t, it’s the same way. Oh, I’m just gonna be Mr. Beast on YouTube and be a big YouTuber. It’s like, dude, you’re not Mr. Beast. You’re not gonna do that. Like, and who knows if Mr. Beast could do that now because the moment that he did that, it was a different moment in time and there were different conditions. And so the same trick may not work now because the conditions have changed. People don’t appreciate that. That’s part of enchantment. The world is really complex. Like really complex. I’ve got that video planned. It’s coming. It’ll be the third video I release, we’ll say between now and Tarpon Springs, the Symbolic World Summit. But yeah, I’ve got that video planned. But just the point, in my opinion, I think John Vervecky has a little bit of a smell of a taste of what you’re talking about this evening. And I think, I kind of tend to agree with him in a way that, yeah. Elizabeth, we’ve talked all of his work. Yeah, there’s things that he’s pointed out that are highly, no, but I think, you know whose work you remind me most of Dr. McGilchrist though, you’re thinking? Honestly, I know it’s not, I’ve read his book like three times. Most people having read them, it really annoys me. I’m sorry. Please don’t critique a great scholar folks if you haven’t read his work. Like it’s just, it’s totally unfair. No, I wasn’t talking about anybody here. I was just saying, I’ve noticed people critique him and they say this about Dr. McGilchrist, they haven’t read his work. It’s extremely, but many times you’ll have insights that he has. And so I find that really fascinating. That’s why I sort of became interested in what you’re doing. But I think that what you’re saying and even what the points you made tonight about stoicism are so, it can’t be overstated what you said. People need, like that, I mean, even that could save the Christian churches if they would just listen to the point you made. Stop focusing too high. If they stop focusing on the end result and get people to, you would not believe the success we had with stoicism on the Verveki server. Oh yeah, I would actually. If you were already interested to be fair, but man, and yeah, like John has a lot of good points. Like we take all of our work from John and other places, but like we modified a bunch of John’s work. That’s what we worked on that for years. Yeah, his link is so important. Like three of them. And we continue to refine that work. And we were working with John for a long time until we weren’t, whatever reasons. Also, he apparently talks to the god Hermes, which I don’t know about that. That’s another, there’s a reason why we don’t talk to John anymore. We saw this coming. So, you know, that’s important. James Lindsay must be just having a field day with this. Yeah, no kidding. And no kidding. I’m supposed to have thought I had. Absolutely, absolutely. I saw that clip and I’m like, James Lindsay must be in heaven. Yeah, has he commented? I, yeah. I haven’t, I do follow him as closely as I can. I just don’t put a lot of time into, although I have more time now. I really love listening to him. And I don’t think Jonathan quite, what’s your opinion? I don’t think Jonathan quite understands where Lindsay’s at, what he’s pointing at. Do you think so? I think Jonathan does. I think Lindsay went off the rails and just started attacking conservatism and Christians. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he’s got a point. He’s making the same point that you made this evening in my humble opinion, I think. Maybe he can’t see it clearly, but he can see what you were talking about with this enchantment thing and the pillars and the dock. He sees that. I think he sees that. I think he sees that. I don’t think he knows how to deal with it because most people don’t like the answer. The answer is to do what people call being mean, which isn’t mean. Right. It’s, you know, you punish children because it’s kind to them, not because it gives you pleasure, right? If you’ve ever met an Italian Catholic priest and gone into a monastery tour with them and heard the way they treat all of us because we’re a bunch of twitlets and we’re disrespectful and blah, blah, blah, they are still like that. They don’t put up with any nonsense. Some girl was, I don’t know, she was chewing bubble gum or something. He just straightened her out quickly. You know what? Like, seriously. Yeah, they’re not nice. Well, we shouldn’t be nice. This is important. To be nice is to harm people. And I think that’s the modern problem, if you want to put it that way. Everybody’s too nice. Everybody’s too nice dealing with America. I’m serious. But then you don’t know where they stand. Right. And now they don’t. Where did the genocide come from? I don’t know where anybody stands. I have no idea. And that means I can’t trust anybody. And they’re like, we don’t know why people can’t trust people because everyone’s too nice. And. Thank you. Oh my God. Chapter 11, please. That is my big thing. Chapter 11. No, seriously, Mark. That’s my big thing. But it’s worse. But Elizabeth, it’s worse. They’re too nice and no one’s polite. Right, right. Absolutely. And actually, if you want, here, here, I’ll make you very happy. You should come to Sicily with me. You should come to Sicily with me. You’d love the people. If I could afford Sicily, I would go in a heartbeat. Well, you might get there. Maybe we should have a conference there. You know what? Fundraiser for Sicily. Jordan Peterson is copying me. I just want you to know I’m really upset. Oh, okay. Please, Ted. Let me take him down a peg publicly for you. For you. For you, I will do this for you. I think Jordan Peterson makes a huge mistake, an actual error, when he does not force people to formally call him Dr. Peterson first. I agree. I agree. That is a mistake. I agree. That is bad for everybody. We need to re-enchant the hierarchy. And I think hierarchy and re-enchantment are actually the same thing, or enchantment. Enchantment and hierarchy are, they’re not the same thing. I don’t like the word hierarchy. I think you’re all full of baloney. I will never accept that word unless you, I want a new word, Mark. That’s your inspiration for next week. I’m not, I’m tired. I don’t think the word hierarchy is it. Structure. I think we’re missing something. You don’t like structure? Structure is not Patino, but keep going. Maybe you’ll have another insight. Whatever he’s gonna say is I’m really annoyed because you’ll never believe it. Dr. Peterson said the other day that he and his wife are planning to spend a lot more time in Italy. And I’m quite annoyed because that’s where I go. You know, Mark? Like that’s my place. Maybe you can bump into him and straighten him out, Elizabeth, because you’re not gonna be nice to him. I’m really upset that he’s copying me again. Like what’s the problem, man? Like I’ve been going there for years. It’s none of his business to be going to my country. Anyway, you know what, Mark? The people, and that’s why I love the people in Sicily, because they come from this aristocratic culture, right? In Southern Italy, because it was the kingdom of the two Sicilies, right? It was a great aristocracy with all sorts of noble people. And you can still feel it in the way people behave. Like even the waiters, for example, or the people in the hotels, like the standards are so high. And yet, on the other hand, you know, to your point tonight in your conversation, like so much is kept out though. Everything’s nicely ordered in a very small, well-contained spot, right? And there’s no nonsense about behavior. So I just adore that culture. Anyway. It’s not a big tent. It’s not a big tent. All right, Mark, I’ve taken, that was one of my, you know, I really miss these. I wish you would do them at a different time when I go to Sicily. Tell me when. Tell me when I’ll do them. No, because all your friends have to, all these other. No, I did one specifically for the European time zone and almost no one showed up live. I know, but you didn’t tell me. Anyway, no, because it’s six hours difference. No, it wouldn’t work for people in the afternoon. You have to do it this time. Maybe I’ll be awake in the middle of the night sometimes. Eleni, no, no, tell me when. Because I’m thinking of adding an afternoon, my time thing. I mean, part of it- No, Mark, you’re too busy. No, no, part of it. No, no, not anymore. Now I don’t worry about the lawsuit. Part of it was just lawsuit and part of it was just like, I don’t know when to do it. But I want to set up one in the evening for Europe. I just got to find a good time. And actually the reason why we’re stuck here to some extent is actually just Jesse. Just Jesse, we’re just helping Jesse out. Yeah, because it works for him and it’s really- Well, I don’t know, but Jesse’s good. Jesse’s great. No, no, leave it, leave it, leave it, leave it. It’s good for me to suffer a bit and not get to do the live stream sometimes. Well, do additional live streams, I promise. I do want to, I’m planning that. It might be after, in March here, after Tarpon Springs, because everything’s in transition until then. Because I got to go, oh yeah, I’m going to miss another live stream, well, two more live streams because I’m going to go to a wedding in Texas. And then I’m going to go- Oh, so you’re going to miss two. Yeah, I’m going to come back and then I’m going to go to Tarpon Springs. So I won’t be doing a live stream there either. Well, unless I do one on site, which is, I don’t think so. But I don’t know. What do you think the conference is going to be? I can’t figure it out though. Is it going to be mainly focused on artists then and writers? No, there’s three tracks. Watch the video Peugeot put out this morning with Neil deGrade in it. There’s three tracks. One’s an artist track, one’s a universal history track and I forget the other one. And you pick which one, I guess each day, which I was just like, that’s nuts. And I’ve got this whole thing set up about which choice to make that I’m going to, I’m going to spring on Thursday. It’s going to be very funny. I assure you, it’s going to be hysterical. I thought about this- I think it’s going to be amazing. It’s going to be an amazing conference, right? It’ll be- It’s going to be great. Yeah, I think so. Okay. Well, it’s all your fault if I go, I’ll tell my husband it’s your fault. That means I will have brought three people with me. That means I’ll have sold four tickets. Well, I thought you already did two and then you did my friend. So that’s three already. I’ll be four, won’t I? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Mark, it’s all your fault. Just so you know, that was so inspiring. I really, I can’t believe that I was thinking the exact same thing today. My mind was going at the same, chewing on the same problem because of Dante. You’re very popular, Elizabeth. Benjamin Franklin says he likes it when you come to the show. So that’s- Oh, aren’t you kind, Benjamin? I don’t know you. He is occasionally very insightful. I am a live wire, but oh man. You are. What do you have for parting thoughts here as we close this down? What do you got? What I’ve got is thank you so much for doing this live stream because I appreciate it immensely. And your innovative way of thinking is the kind of, I think you’re trailblazing. So thank you, Mark. You’re most welcome. I’m glad you had some insights. That makes it all worthwhile. You and Josh and other people having insights. Well, we had a good laugh too. Like, and I loved your Hegel thing. I wish, couldn’t you get a care of the dawn to put that to music? Cause it was hysterically funny. Seriously, you should make a clip of your Hegel thing. Right to a care of the dawn and tell him to put it to music. I’m sure he would. I would totally give him permission. Can you make a clip of that? Can you make a clip of that? It was so funny. I will try to get my people on it. It could be called the Hegel clips. The Hegel clip is perfect. Yeah, that’s really good actually. And then there could be a dance to go with it. Okay, gotta go. Have a good night. Thank you so much for joining. That was fun. Take care. See ya. Yeah, we’re gonna close it down. I’m not gonna do a live stream next week because I have things in the real world to do. We are gonna miss at the end of February, we’re gonna miss two live streams then. But comment, let me know what you think. Things you like, things you didn’t, whatever. I’ll take any kind of comments. And look, I hope to see everybody in two weeks. Have a lovely time. And take care of yourself because it’s a strange world out there.