What is value？ A live pirate Navigation! (3yYH62aLT-Q)

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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? What is truth? Young men speaking in the city square Trying to tell somebody that it cares Can you blame the voice of youth for asking What is truth? Yeah, the ones that you’re calling love Are gonna be the leaders in a little while When will the lonely voice of youth cry What is truth? This all-world’s waking to a newborn babe And our solemn lists, where 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? Excellent. Well, welcome. It’s good to be here on a Friday evening. It’s nice that I get to leave work really early, because, man, when I don’t do that, it’s no good. What do we got today? Better Sam Pal, because Sam Pal. If you don’t have Sam Pal, are you really a person? I don’t even know. And then, uh, went to the grocery store today, so I got myself some dried almonds, because I should not be allowed to shop on my own by myself, or probably at all, at a grocery store. And then I got maltesers, because maltesers are the greatest candy of all time, can confirm. And then, of course, um, we have our Marathon tea from the Table Rock Tea Company, and, uh, we’re ready to go. Got our snacks, they’re all candy, I don’t know why these things happen. Don’t, don’t, I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t shop alone. It’s just a bad plan. Today, we are talking about the concept of value. And value is hard, right? We’re not, this is not, we’re not on an easy journey, right? And we’re not here to provide answers. We’re just here to provide navigation, right? The, uh, the name of the channel is navigating patterns, right? So one of the things I’m trying to do is to show some patterns for you to learn to navigate and understand, right? And, and help sort of interact with the world. So I’m going to start out kind of the same way I did last week, right? So value, what are the sort of associated sort of cloud words if you want to put it in modern terms, right? Values, valuable, what you value, when you value it, right? Where it’s valuable, right? You must value those things which hold you together day by day. So you cannot measure caring by the time that you spend. There is a hierarchy of value with lower values upon which higher values rest. And, you know, we talked about caring, right? It’s not a quantity, so you can’t measure, you can’t say, oh, I spent this much time with you. Yeah, but I was on my phone the whole time, right? Then did you really spend time with them? Like, you can’t, you can’t measure it that way, right? It’s not measurable. And that’s what values are for. Values are the quality that we’re really going after when we’re doing the material things, right? So that’s ultimately where we’re at. We’re talking about value as the quality, that higher quality that’s outside, right? Value is defined by your telos. Or more accurately, the prioritization of values is determined by your telos. If values exist outside, we’ll say, our thoughts, then they are ideal representations in the platonic realm of forms, or I like the term Eidos a lot better instead of forms, forms a little too materialistic. But our aspect to these values, right, is our orientation, right? And it is determined relative to the frame. So the framing matters. And if you take that seriously, you have to take seriously the justification for a relativistic framework and the idea of relativism as such. So that relativism is there, right? But it’s relative to what? So notice that it all started with a frame that was determined by a telos. So it’s not relativism first. It’s framing first, values first, hierarchy of values first. Then you have a frame. Then you can go into the relativism. That’s how you avoid the dead reckoning, because now you can have orientation in the world. And that seems to be what people are missing. You have values, they’re there, they’re interacting with you, you’re interacting with them in some significant fashion. You feel judged by values, for example, because they’re above you and to somewhat beyond you. So what’s the way we can know value? What’s the interaction we have with value? Well, I would say relationship is the most significant medium for value to know and understand and interact with value. And how do we know the value? Through the manifestation of it, our continued revivification of the value or values, the rectification of the material towards the value or values. By embodying values, we enact, negotiate, and remedy that which gives us purpose. And that’s what makes the orientation important. Because we’re negotiating and we’re trying to manifest something above us, these values, in order to orient in the world, in order to get something done. And there’s a hierarchy and that hierarchy may change because time is a factor as always. So one example of these values and enacting them and embodying them. What does a king point to? Does he only point up? I think no. I think a king also points down and looks at his subjects and says, oh, and looks at his holdings and says, oh, and then figures out what to do. Now, does he do that perfectly? No. Kings happen to be people. People happen not to be perfect. Weird coincidence. I know it seems to work out that way all the time. One of those perennial patterns, if you will, is that you don’t get perfect kings. Even philosopher kings are perfect. So it’s that pointing, that embodying of values. And you can, it’s easy to see that the embodiment of the values exists independent of the king. And the king or the future king or the ones in future king exists independent of that embodiment. But then when they come together, that’s a different thing. So that’s, I know people have problems with that. They want to compress everything to flatten it out, but that’s not how it works. So how do we use values in the world? You don’t solve a problem by relating to just the situation here and now. You need to connect the here and the now and the problem here, the now and the problem and relate it to the value of the present. This raises up the problem in a way that it can be solved fractally, not just now, but in the future and maybe even in the past. There’s a way to understand your past as the thing that brought you to the place that you are now. And whatever bad thing happened in your past, it still brought you to this place. And had you had a different thing happen, you would still be in the past. You can view that as good or you can view that as bad. I say, did you view it as good? There’s always things to be grateful for. So if there’s a problem in, say, an active relationship, right, you can’t be grateful for it. So if there’s a problem in, say, an active relationship, right, with another person, say a friendship, a living situation, a marriage, right, then you have to relate the other person to the value or values that you share. That is how you go from being separated to being bound together to communing. And how you that’s how you move from spreading apart, say, along the horizontal, right, to getting back together. Right. Because you’re looking at something higher that you have in common. You don’t have anything common on the horizontal. You don’t have anything common on the horizontal. It’s something in common up above the values. That’s how you reverse the magnetic pole of your connection, right. You switch to attraction, right, towards the common value from the repulsion of rebellion against the value or against the other. You can always you can always deny the value. You can always deny the other person. You’re stuck on the horizontal plane. Again, you’ve got this conflict, right. The conflict can’t be resolved there. You have to aim up and then you can come together and cooperate. And the value is the thing that points you the way to doing that, right. The values, the hierarchy of values, the prioritization of values is how you get there. And look, you could be in a relationship in a marriage and not have exactly the same prioritization in the hierarchy. That’s going to happen because different people happen to be different. Radical statement, I know, but also true. So how do you get back together? You look up. The common thing is above you. It’s not with you. It’s not equal to you. You’re not equal to it. It can’t contain you if you’re equal to it. That doesn’t make any sense. And it needs to contain you and the person you’re in relationship with. So you can imagine that people who aren’t going towards value, who aren’t headed towards a value, aren’t going up. And if you have to live on that horizontal plane, you have no option but conflict. It’s always going to be conflict. You want equality, you’re going to get conflict. People aren’t going to be equal ever. And if you try to make them equal by squishing the world and flattening it, put them on the horizontal plane, You’re going to get nothing but more conflict. It’s not only about how you are now. It’s also about how you will be, your future self. How long you will be, right? How long you’ll be around, right? And that’s three things. Direction is insufficient. Again, direction is insufficient. Again, you need orientation to get to the value. You need orientation to have value. Or values, right? This is all above you. All of it. It’s higher. Right? It’s part of the quality of the vertical causality of reality. The way to be true in the world is to be oriented towards a value or values. That is proper relationship. It’s impossible to have right relationship in only the horizontal. That is a discrete procedural or legal contractual idea. And I’m not saying throw out procedural, legal, contractual, discrete ideas. I’m not saying that. But if that’s all you have, it’s insufficient to understand and have right relationship with the world we live in today. That enchanted world that we actually inhabit. You can’t reduce justice to a value. You can’t reduce justice to law. You can’t do that. It doesn’t work. Because you can keep the spirit of the law while breaking the letter of the law. It’s well known by lawyers, by the way. Well known. Well studied. Tons and tons written about this over the years. And that’s because the value of justice is sometimes in the outcome and sometimes in the implementation. You get into this whole ends justify the means argument. It’s like, why does that seem like a paradox? Because it’s not real. Because you can’t resolve it. Because sometimes the answer is the ends justify the means and sometimes they don’t. Sorry, it’s not a universal. Bummer. Like almost everything else. You can’t just sit there and say all killing is wrong. You can’t just say, oh, I’m going to kill my wife. I’m going to kill my wife. Obviously if someone is trying to kill your wife, you should kill them first. And maybe even you. Someone is trying to kill you. Maybe you should kill them first, too. Someone is trying to hurt your child. You should kill them immediately. Like is killing unlawful? Not in that case. We don’t treat it that way. Like the law doesn’t even work that way. People just misunderstand these things. I want to propose that the intimacy crisis is not just a question of justice, but justice. Which is that higher thing. I want to propose that the intimacy crisis, which I think precedes the meaning crisis, is all about a quality that is higher than us. That is the only thing that is able to contain us. That quality that’s bigger than us can contain us in an important way. And that’s why I think the intimacy crisis is important. And when you’ve done away with vertical cause, your relationship with values is non-existent basically. Or at least broken. Because we flatly relate to an underlying notion of safety that’s a common theme. broken because we flatten the world. We’ve reduced it. We’ve compressed it all down to the material. And this limits the range of the quality of the relationships we can have with and in the world. We need to have value to be enchanted, to go up and down so we can sense and properly participate in deep quality relationships, reversing the intimacy crisis. This is why we need hierarchy. And if you have hierarchy, you need to be submitted. You’re not at the top of the hierarchy. That’s playing God. You’re not there. I’m not there. We’re not there. We’re not going to be there. That’s not where we belong. It’s okay. It’s very comforting. The weight of the world is not on your shoulders. You’re not Atlas. You’re not holding up the world. That’s a good thing. You don’t want to try to hold up the world. You can’t. It should be obvious. And yet it’s not. Submission to the fact that we are not responsible for holding up the world is one of those things that keeps us sane and mentally healthy. When people think they can control the world, we call them maniacal. We don’t consider them healthy. They don’t have a proper sense of intimacy. If it’s all postmodern, top-down, from above power, there’s no intimacy in that. It’s just you at the top. See my model videos, excellent model videos. The fourth one got a lot of views lately. But the whole series is good. It goes through this set of models about the flattening of the world and how to re-enchant it. It has slides. I never do slides. So how do we understand this materialistic, flattened, reduced, compressed frame? When the only value you can sense is through measure, quantity, it becomes material only. What is the material value of a relationship? Is it only physical? Maybe we can make it more material and fix it with more material. Let’s add money. So you get married because you now have a physical thing that is approved of by the fact that you’re married and now you’re sharing the money. And so there you go. Now the relationship is two qualities or quantities really. And that’s the problem. They’re not qualities. They’re quantities. Doesn’t work. You can’t add properties to relationship to come at fixing the intimacy crisis, to being more connected or better connected, more deeply connected. That’s what values and values alone give you. And values are access to virtues and the transcendentals, the true, the good, and the beautiful. So what do you do with a person? Do you offer them sex? Do you spend time with them? But what if proper relationships are about other things like listening, understanding, loving, loving, growing, being? Maybe that’s what relationships are about. Maybe they’re not about sex or money. Those are just the material aspects. They might not be optional for some types of relationships. Hopefully they’re optional for other types of relationships. Relationships have qualities for sure, but they don’t all have the same set of quantities or properties. But let’s sort of explore this, this flattening a little bit. What would a world without value or with, we’ll say, lesser values or low quality values look like? What if we just reduce it to quantity and material aspect? This looks like a flat world. It’s on the horizontal. And when you’re stuck on this horizontal plane, when everyone’s equal, fair enough, we’re all stuck on the horizontal. No one’s higher or lower than anyone else. There’s some form of equality for you. And it is. I agree. What else is true? We lose a bunch of space to navigate because we’re all stuck on the horizontal. We can’t, we have to get around each other. We can’t commune together to build something higher that outlasts us. We’re all stuck. We lost the space to navigate. But we don’t even need orientation in a flat world on the horizontal. We don’t need it. Navigation becomes a moot point, completely irrelevant. Well, you just need direction. You need to know this way, that way, this way, that way, whatever. That’s all you need. Near direction will do in a flat world. Everything’s on the horizontal. It’s all a matter of formal plus material cause. That’s all there is. It’s all you need. You don’t need anything else. You can add efficient cause, but you don’t even need it. And T-Lost, that higher goal, obviously we’re on a flat plane. There’s no higher. It doesn’t exist. The hierarchy has been flattened. It’s not there. You can’t go up. You can’t go down. You can’t be worse than me. You can’t be better either. Everything’s been flattened. It’s all been squished. It’s compressed. It’s reduced. It’s taken a whole dimension away. That’s what a world with a poor quality or low quality or no value looks like. Everything’s equal, man. But then why have a family? It outlasts you and we only have material. Why bother? And it’s worse. You get a family. You get to pay for the kid. You get to spend your time, energy, and attention on the kid instead of on yourself. You don’t have anything past yourself. Why are you doing this? Why? Why? It doesn’t make any sense. Ultimately, you can’t make sense of it in a world with no value or with low quality values. You can’t because that sense is above you and you’ve denied it. Now, does that mean you’ve accomplished your goal? Of course not. The values are still there. You’re still being judged by them. You’re still under them. They’re still above you. You can get rid of anything. You’re just acting as if things are equal. But therein lies the meaning crisis, the nihilism, the denial of the future or the significance of the future. And that’s how the meaning crisis arises from the intimacy crisis. It’s this loss of value or this lack of value or the reducing of value Oh, what’s valuable to me is my time. That’s your highest value? Really? Oh, what’s valuable to me is more money. What? I’d trade time for money any day. And we all do. Oh, I’m going to order from Uber Eats today. Yeah, you’re not going to cook. Trading your time for money, huh? Oh, I’m going to order from Uber Eats today. Yeah, you’re not going to cook. Trading your time for money, huh? And why bother with the future? The future is above you. It’s potential. It’s not here. It’s never here. The future is never here. By definition, it’s not a word game. It’s a hard conceptual definition that you need in order to understand time. You’re not getting around it. And what about the past? How we write our story to date actually matters to us today, to us in the future, and to our past traumatized selves, because we’re all traumatized. There aren’t any non-traumatized humans. That doesn’t happen. And Jordan Peterson talks about this. He talks about his past offering program, and his present offering program, and his future offering program, and their lovely programs. In a flat world, the past becomes a series of connected events. They can be arbitrarily connected. But then they’re merely about those quantities, those horizontal things, which connect us to today. And then anything that doesn’t fit our model in the moment, because while we have our moments, the future’s not there. It’s not valuable, because we squished the world. The future doesn’t exist in our heads in some very real way. So anything that doesn’t fit in our model has to go. We reject it. Well, I voted for the right candidate, but they didn’t do what I thought they were going to do, what they said they were going to do. So I’m going to rebel against them now, too. Your model of the world is flat. It’s small. It’s simple, but it’s easy to understand. And it gives you that sense of top-down power from above. It gives you that sense of intelligibility. It gives you that sense of your ability to control the world. But it’s wrong. That model is wrong. It’s too flat. It’s too simple. You can keep it in your head. You can understand it. You can’t understand the world. You can’t even understand what you’re doing in the world, because you don’t understand the values that you’re enacting when you’re acting. And you are an agent in the world. It’s not optional. You’re taking action all the time. It’s a great line in a Rush song. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. That’s correct. So what happens when we try to live in this world, in this fantasy, hallucination, previous livestream world? Our ability to orient atrophies. It lessens. We lose the skills of orientation, because we aren’t using it. We’re trying to live in this flat world. What do we need all those extra skills for? Like all other skills, we just, you don’t use it, you’ll lose it. Not all of it, but it still gets worse. The sense of enchantment, of our ability to sense enchantment, goes away. The world loses enchantment for us, the observer. It doesn’t lose enchantment. It’s still enchanted. It’s just you can’t interact with it, because you’ve lost the skill of sensing enchantment. The complexity and beauty of the world go away. You wouldn’t see justice if it were right there being enacted in front of you. You wouldn’t know goodness if it took you by the back of the neck. You wouldn’t see evil if it walked right up to you and burned you. You’ve lost the skill, because you’ve been trying to live in a flat horizontal world, in the name of equality doctrine. We are not equal. We are not supposed to be equal. We live in an enchanted world. If you don’t have senses for that, I’m very sorry. I deal badly for you. You need to re-enchant the world for yourself and see the enchantment that is around you, that you were created to be. You are not supposed to be equal. You are not supposed to be equal. You need to re-enchant the world for yourself and see the enchantment that is around you, that you were created within. That you can co-manifest stuff in that will outlast you, whose impact will be so great that you can never understand it. For better or for worse. The tools that we have to relate to the world when we’re trying to live in a flat world, so that we can own it or understand it or predict it, they’re unavailable to us. We can’t be in right relationship with the world. We can’t be in right relationship in the world, because those tools are unavailable to us, because we’ve denied the hierarchy. We’ve squished everything down. We’ve compressed it down to something that’s easily accessible, or so we think, to our tiny brains. Because at the end of the day, you’re a muppet. I’m a muppet. We’re all muppets. The earth alone is so vast. You don’t know anything about it. You just don’t. The vague average temperature, sorts of garbage, it’s five to ten degrees cooler at my house, and it is a mile down the road, reliably, in the summer. Reliably. You don’t know that. I know that. I’m here. I live it. And I pay attention. You can be here and not pay attention and not know that. You can lock yourself off from the knowledge of the enchanted world, which is a participatory knowledge, if you’re going to use John Vervicki’s framework. You can lock yourself off from your engagement in hierarchy, because you’re sad that you’re not at the top, but you’re not at the bottom. You’re not at the top. You’re not at the top. You’re not at top. Oh, boo hoo. But if you do, you can’t be better, ever. You can only be worse, and you will get worse. You will, because you’re not looking up. You’re not aiming higher. You’re not struggling for values. You’re not even aware of the values you’re enacting in the moment, because you squish the world. You don’t have access to the tools. You’ve forgotten the ways to use the tools, or maybe you don’t have access to any of the tools of the enchanted world anymore. That’s what happens when you try to live in a flat world. Top-down power from above, power narrative. See my video on postmodernism. Ridiculous. Or my video on power. Both good videos. So where are we now? Where have I led us? You cannot have proper relationship to anything in the world without values that are higher than you, than me, than material, than time. Value is that which transcends those things. The truth, the good, the beautiful. Through time. That’s why it’s not truth. It’s true. It unfolds. It changes continuously. Entropy is real. The good is not some static thing you can grab. The good is not something good is not some static thing you can grab. The beautiful is not like a painting. Those transcendentals, they exist not in this material realm, but in the ethereal realm, the idos, the platonic forms. Without a good sense, a good understanding, and an appreciation for values, and for value as such, for the qualities of the world, of the values. Not only can we not sense the enchanted world that we are still part of, but we lose our ability to relate to anything except the physical world around us, or the imaginary world in our head. That hallucination, that fantasy came up on Twitter for some weird reason. Carl Benjamin, Sargon of Akkad. Very strange. And now we have to choose or balance between pure physicality, which you can argue we share with everybody. It’s very comforting too, right? Because there it is in theory, the same for everyone. But it’s not. Not everybody senses everything the same way. Or look, we can just find a fantasy and illusion, a hallucination that we can be in alone. Oh, but wait, Muppet Mark, you say video games. I could be in the same video game. We could play together at the same time. First of all, no, you can’t. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t. We can play together at the same time. First of all, no, you can’t. Don’t want to get into computer technical stuff, but I could. Lag. It’s a big deal. Latency exists. Latency is lowest when you’re physically together. After that, it gets bad. Quick. What about the metaverse? We could walk around the metaverse together. Okay, I’m not. I’ve played video games. I still play video games. I’m not saying no video games. Entertainment important. But, and I’ve played, you know, multiplayer. If I could afford it, and certain people were in one of these virtual worlds where we could do the 3D thing with the metaverse and swords and whatnot, tomorrow I’d buy the rig and do it. Tomorrow. I’d do it tomorrow. That isn’t where we’re at. I mean, there are dear friends of mine who, you know, I moved away from a bunch of people. So, and there were a bunch of people I always knew that were half the world away that I’ve never met in person. But listen, do you share those experiences? Like, if you read Plato’s Republic, do you get out of it when I get out of it? No, you don’t. We can get a book club together, which we have on the Texas wisdom community. See their YouTube channel and the discord server. And we can discuss it and try to get more out of it. But it’s not like we come to a consensus on the damn book. We don’t. We all get more out of the book though, which is weird. We don’t close in reciprocally narrow, if you want to use some Vervecki language, onto the core meaning of the Republic. No, we don’t. I’m not saying you can’t do that with some books. I would call those bad books. That’s what I would call them. You don’t have to call them that. I’ll call them that though. The Republic is a well. You go there over and over again, as John Vervecki says, and get more out of it each time. But if you go there with other people, they get things out of it that you don’t get. And when you all talk about it together, you all get more out of it. That’s amazing. That’s enchantment. So you don’t share the experience. And that’s not a bad thing. You think you do. And that’s a bad thing. I go on a roller coaster. I don’t get the same thing out of it as somebody else going on a roller coaster. I may go on a roller coaster with somebody who also likes roller coasters. In fact, I do. We’re not getting the same thing out of it at all. And that’s okay. We’re both happy about the roller coaster. Roller coasters are fun. If you don’t think roller coasters are fun, you’re wrong, by the way. Just don’t put that out there. Roller coasters are fun, especially wooden ones. Wooden roller coasters are great. But it’s not the same. It’s way bigger than my experience or my friend’s experience or your experience. It’s way bigger. It’s far more enchanted. And look, it turns out, and we’re learning this as a society, that we do not share these experiences, not in the way we want, not in the way that gives us intimacy. And the baby is split. Either we engage purely with our experience or we fail to have meaning-making relationships. E-girls. Anyone? Online relationships in general? Only fans? Your best Discord friend? You ever see any of that blow up and go horribly wrong? I have. Seen it for years. Years ago. Years ago. Saw people get married and met online. Met online, got married. Boom. I’ve seen it. Years ago. I’ve seen it all. And the illusion possesses us. And that’s not to say it doesn’t work out sometimes. Of course it does. Randomness happens. That doesn’t make it good. It means we have to be careful. We have to understand what we’re seeing. We have to understand the dangers and the risks and what’s actually going on. If I interface with you every day on Twitter, I’m going to be able to tell you what I’m seeing. If I interface with you every day online. Not that I’m speaking from experience here or anything. And then I meet you in person. That doesn’t mean it’s going to work out. You may decide the day-to-day in person is so totally different than what you anticipated that can’t be with that person every day. You can’t have that deep, real relationship with the struggle together. You have a struggle. I have a struggle. And we struggle together. And if we’re not struggling towards the same values or value or transcendentals, we’re struggling apart. Sometimes we struggle apart. But if we’re not trying to struggle together and struggling to struggle together, it’s not going to work. And you can’t control that necessarily. But you can do your part. And when the other person isn’t able to do their part or willing to do their part, you can do your part more. That’s true. I’m not saying it’ll work, but it’s still your best bet. You don’t want the illusion of similarity to possess you. You don’t want to withdraw from the liminal space outside of us and between us to a space purely inside your head, a space purely of your own, of your own making, inside your own fantasy, inside the hallucination of your brain. You don’t want to self-isolate. And we tend towards that. You think drug addiction is bad? Try being addicted to hallucination. You can fool yourself into thinking it’s real because other people have the same description of the hallucination. That’s a worst trap, for sure. Aliens? Every year people describe alien abduction. Have you ever met any of those people? I have. Are they true believers? You bet they are. And you know who those people look and sound like? Those religious folks who say they’re saved. They’ve been saved. They had an epiphany and they’re saved now. In fact, I describe those two groups as identical. Think about that. If you get abducted by aliens, are you different? Should you be? If you’re saved, are you different? Or do you need to go right back into the struggle from whence you came? What do these people look like? It’s a great episode of Babylon 5. I forget which one it is. Need to re-watch Babylon 5. It’s a great episode of Babylon 5. I forget which one it is. Need to re-watch Babylon 5. This guy comes to the space station. It’s a space station, guys. It’s a mechanical spinning thing in space next to a wormhole. He comes to the space station. He’s looking for the Holy Grail. You know, the artifact from Earth. The Mimbari race treats him with reverence. Rightly, I say. Why? And they say, because the Earth contingent’s like, because the Earth contingent’s like, let me explain to you about the Holy Grail. It’s not real. And if it was, it wouldn’t be on some foreign planet because Jesus or something. Some ridiculous argument. And the Mimbari are like, nah, bro, you don’t get it. He’s a true believer. We will give him whatever resources we have access to to get to the Holy Grail. But the values point you towards the struggle. And the common values bring you together in a higher plane. Actually, mathematically, triangles are important. I don’t know where you may have seen any triangles lately. It could be everywhere. I don’t know. It could be in my model videos, early videos, indeed, but apparently useful. So hopefully you can see the pattern here. How value, relationship, enchantment, addiction, and our behavior are all related, constrained by these patterns. I’d call them religious patterns. If you believe you do not have a religion, one will be provided to you without your knowledge or consent. Do you know what values you hold? What it is you are pointing at when you’re acting in the world? Do you know what world you actually see, you actually have access to, you’re actually acting in? What world you’re an agent of? Are you Agent Smith, like in The Matrix? Are you sure you’re not? Are you the baddies? What have you been doing? What have you done? That tells you what values you’ve been pointing at. Do you even know? Are those values shared? We all trust our sanity. Are they values? Are they actually higher than you? Is money higher than you? I don’t know. It’s given to you, and then you have total autonomy over it once you obtain it, irrespective of how you obtain it. You can have money, good hint, that it’s not higher than you. Or are the things you’re interacting with just whims of the moment? Because money is temporary. You can’t take it with you. You die, somebody else gets your money. You die, somebody else gets your money. Are the things you’ve been acting out just illusions, hallucinations in your head from inside, like AI has hallucinations, where it’s, you know, wrong, and they say, oh, it’s not wrong, it’s having a hallucination. No, it’s wrong, dude. You can say it’s wrong because it’s having a hallucination, but it’s still wrong. It’s the wrong that’s important, not how the wrong happened. You can be mistaken in any number of ways. So can AI. I don’t care about the method by which it’s wrong. I care that it’s wrong. I don’t care the method by which you’re screwed up, by which your values are terrible, or by which you’re enacting bad things. I care that you’re enacting bad things. Do you know what you’re enacting in the world, what you’re trying to bring into manifestation? Have you looked? Have you paid attention at all? What have you been doing? Jordan Pearson talks about this. You believe what you act out. That is a reflection of your values. And hopefully this gives you a new spin on an old theme, because we talked about the participatory knowledge. Know thyself through which values you embody, not some hallucination in your head or rationalization of your mind. Examine your actions. Ask people about your actions. That’s how you will know that’s how you will know thyself. All right, that’s it. I hope you found that helpful. The team worked on it quite a bit. And there’s quite a few people working on this stuff with me. So the format is going to be that we’re going to let people in who we know are going to come here in good faith and interact. And we’ll do that for a while. Maybe that’s only Jesse. Maybe somebody else will ping me on Discord or somewhere else and I’ll give them an invite link. And we can stay on topic for a bit. And then we’ll open it up to the group. And we want more people to participate. We love participation. You can participate by just being a part of the group. You can participate by just chatting up in the live text. That’s fine. Or you can participate by jumping in and having a chat. I’m going to take a drink because long monologue. Much better. Sam Pell is always good. Lots of lithium. And now I’m going to address some comments if I can. Hey, Andre. Qualitative is the ticket. Not quantity. But value and quality is non-mathematical. It is humanistic. Well, yeah, that’s a better way of thinking of humanism is through quality, not quantity. The humanists are all materialist, quantity people. That’s why I’m not a fan. William Branch, what is the value of an enigma message? Not the encryption. An encoded message has no value unless you have the encoding key. And then the value isn’t in having the key. The value is in the message. Anselman claims he was taking cosmic responsibility. I knew it. I knew it all along, Anselman. That’s why I did this. The West is in crisis because it is looking for itself and can’t find it. No, I don’t think so. I don’t think there is a West. There’s no agency. Thank you, David. I like my background drawing, too. It was very last minute. But sometimes these things are done very much in the spirit. Anselman, I prefer delight and appreciation to the world in word enchantment. Oh, okay. That’s fair. Look, this is why you need to be on the Discord server and stuff, dude. Delight and appreciation are what you get from interfacing with enchantment correctly. Can we split that baby correctly? David Walker, what do you make of cryptozoology and paranormal encounters? Materialism fails, and when it does, that’s what you get. Materialism can’t explain the world. Science can’t explain the world. Science knew this. It no longer knows this. It seems like people are like, science can know everything. Science isn’t even remotely able to do such a silly thing. Damn, Mark’s unedible RN. I see. Anselman, lovable Muppets, hopefully. Look, I mean, it’s up to you to be lovable or not. Some people are not lovable. Sorry, they should be. Physicality is uncomfortable. Well, it certainly can be. Andrea thinks Muppet Mark is funny. Well, hopefully it’s not just my looks. Looks aren’t everything. Mills, excellent stuff. I remember as a kid having the notion that everyone experienced things the same way. I think losing that notion is an important part of growing up. Yes, couldn’t have said it better myself. Thank you. See, that’s a wonderful contribution. William Branch, my family and I have paranormal encounters, but by definition, they are not Yes, isn’t that scary. You’re just a tiny little Muppet in the world. Bummer, dude. Andrea, hallucinations is one thing, but delusions are more comforting, I think. Mills, delusions being more durable? Yeah, perhaps. Perhaps. Andrea thinks delusions are more, delusions being more sanity degrading, hallucinations is something you can still pull yourself out of, possibly, arguably. Yep. As someone who suffered both, yeah, well. Anselman, I toast you with my cup of Darjeeling tea. Excellent, sir. That’s a good reminder to drink some tea. Anselman, I toast you with my cup of Darjeeling tea. Excellent, sir. That’s a good reminder to drink some tea. And yes, I’ve had my marathon tea from the Table Rock Tea Company. So Mills, I see you select false axioms that continuously corrupts and renders you improperly fitted to reality. Yes, you can render yourself improperly fitted to reality. That is a thing you can do. It’s not that hard. It’s a bad idea, but you can do it because you have free will. If you didn’t have free will, this stuff couldn’t happen, guys. It’s not. This free will versus determinant argument is so dumb, it’s sort of hard to imagine. Karen Black, there’s a basic pattern of intoxication and rejuvenation, for example. If an outsider joined the conversation, we might start hallucinating. Well, I don’t know about that. Well, I can actually agree with Benjamin Franklin on something for one rare moment. Yeah, I think when people use the category of quote the West, they are pointing to some kind of past prototype while they’re pointing to something that is not a past prototype. Exists, but not in the form they’re pointing at it in. It’s the same problem as the word modern. Yeah, I have a whole video on the word modern. It’s a big problem. Aaron Black, there’s no such thing as aliens, but the word is still used accurately. Yeah, well, I don’t know about no such thing as aliens. We’re all alien to one another in some ways. Andre, comforting, not comforting. Indeed. Indeed. Where is Jesse? Jesse, where are you? Why are you not here? Jesse has abandoned me and left me to my own devices. As have a number of other people that could jump in by pinging me and I can give them the invite link. We talk more about value and values and why they’re important. Yes, I know where Jesse is. How dare he? Well aware. Do you have stuff to say on value, Andre? Because as long as you can stick on the topic, you are of course welcome to jump in, my friend. We’re just trying to keep the people who want to hijack the topic away from doing that right away. We can do it later. People can talk about whatever they want later, but we want to stick more to the topic in the beginning and then stray later on so that we get enough value out of the values discussion. We’ll say, well, is the monologue is supposed to be a centering point for the conversation? Right? And then from that, other things can emerge, but it’s actually really important that we stay at least close to on topic. At least for a while, right? Like I said, we can stray later. Uh-oh. Jesse claims that OBS is being BS. Well, it does have BS in the name, so that is an understandable position for OBS. Who has other comments on value here while I’m waiting for Jesse and Andre, either of which who in the role of theology and cooperation, never going to happen, buddy. Monotheism versus polytheism. Monotheism versus polytheism. Monotheism versus polytheism, I can probably do. I can’t touch theologian, not theologian. I’m not going to be a theologian. Theology is evil. I’m going to stand by that. I’m going to die on that hill. Sally, don’t listen to the monologue and be covered in mower dirt. I’ve failed. Okay, Sally, I’m sorry to hear that. Here’s Andre. Hey. So yeah, I don’t know how long Jesse’s going to be, but I can more miss say it. Well, I’m glad that you hopped in. Benjamin Franville, what’s the relationship between value and T loss? Did you not listen to the monologue? I said the T loss is the thing that determines the value or values and the prioritization of those values. I couldn’t have been more clear, I don’t think. Maybe. The fluff at the side is my cat is sitting right next to the webcam. Let me just move. Okay, cats are allowed. I’m suffering. Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Suffering is difficult, but suffering is also inevitable in life. Courtney, most of the monologue I can hope to join later. Well, you are welcome to join whenever you wish, Courtney. We will give you a try to see if you can stay on topic. Uh oh, class punk. Here’s one. Human beings seem to have a weak understanding of virtuousness. Yeah, well, some do, some don’t. Like values and how these things link to intimacy and meaning in life. Yes. What might be the primary cause of this? The intimacy crisis. I have two videos on the intimacy crisis. One of them has over a thousand views on Andrea with the Banging’s channel. Oh, there’s Jesse. And the other one is with Catherine on navigating patterns. So there are videos to talk about the intimacy crisis. Ben Green missed the first part of the monologue. Yeah, fair enough, dude. I’m just saying I did cover it in the monologue. So you might want to engage with that first. Uh oh, Anselman. We always love Anselman. And then we’ll say hi to Jesse. Anselman, if your T-Los is for a supernatural end beyond this life. I don’t know. I categorize it as supernatural. But it’s fair. I’m not denying it. It causes you to set a lower value on some things you might otherwise give greater importance to. You can’t be all stuck in the Eidos, right? You can’t be all stuck with the ever after. All right. Yeah. I mean, that’s fair. Jesse, welcome. It’s good to see you, my friend. Hello. Is this working? Yes. It is working perfectly. You sound gorgeous. Oh, magical. You sound like a you sound like a flack file. Perfect. Only audio. How about my mic, Jesse? I’ve got it right here. It’s right here. Yeah, okay. Good. Good. All right. I don’t want you bitching anymore. So we both told you that. Oh, here we go. William Branch. Yes. T-Los is basic. Modernity rejected. It doesn’t reject T-Los. There’s no place for T-Los in materialism. That’s why I don’t like the term modernity. See my video on navigating patterns. I don’t like the term because it doesn’t work. What works is materialism cannot account for T-Los or values or value. It can’t do it. That’s why they don’t. That’s why economics doesn’t work. Nassim Taleb is great. Read on Nassim Taleb’s books. They’re truly great. Nassim Taleb is great at this. No, economics doesn’t work. These guys are all frogs. Why? Because they’re materialists. Non-materialist economists are fine. It’s just William Branch. Some people are broken. Okay, dude. I haven’t met any non-broken people. If you know any, please, let me know. There might have been one once, but I wasn’t there, so I can’t prove it. I’m just going to say, so far as I can tell, my phenomenological experience, William Branch, Simeon Stylitis is elevated. Maybe all the saints are elevated. Maybe that’s why we call them saints because they had embodied values that point to value beyond us that allows us to cooperate. Well, the very fact we remember them too is because of what they embodied. Right. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be a story there. They wouldn’t be a reason to remember or to record or to admonish or to… What’s the Orthodox term? Lift up, I guess, in some sense. It’s a Greek word for it. Admonish is close. Oh, don’t get me started on Christianity. It’s a complicated subject. We’re trying to avoid those crazy Christian terms. I think I will address this. Benjamin Franklin, Anselman, there might be some issues with overvaluing short-term aims. Yeah, material aims. Right. Materialism. Still true. Maybe the meaning crisis is something to do with… Yes, the meaning crisis is all about materialism. Also true. Nihilism comes from the meaning crisis. That is true. William Branch. He sat on a high pillar. He did. He sat on a tall pillar permanently, according to Anselman, which is correct. Nathaniel. Venerate. Oh, yeah, that might be the Orthodox term. Who knows? I’m not an Orthodox. Venerate sounds good. It’s a good word in any case. Mark just confirmed something, guys. Guys, guys, Mark just confirmed something. I can’t confirm. I literally spend half my day on Twitter saying Ken confirmed a thing. It’s like my goal in life is to say Ken confirmed all the good things on Twitter. Some people might not see them as good, but I can assure you if I’m saying Ken confirmed, there’s some good in it. And if you don’t see the good, you’re in trouble, buddy. Yeah, I mean, you’re always pointing towards the good. How can you not see good in that? Thank you. I try. I try. I hope I succeed. That is the issue. Do you succeed in pointing at the good? What’s the what’s the value of the food behind you there, Jesse, that higher painting? Ah, this is Van Gogh’s painting of a be a Dutch, wouldn’t it be a no. Yeah, Norwegian town. Oh, no. The demon of stream yard has descended upon us. How so? What do you do to you? It’s. Oh, don’t get me. Yeah, I want to get into that. It just does things. Dream yard is dream yard, man. It decides that it will take over my audio settings without permission. And I do not. It just turns everything up. The discord, the discord demon got me today. It just stopped working in the car randomly. So I was like, what the hell happened? I can’t get back online. It’s like a little conversation discord. They’ve built in this random wiggy app of reduced background noise to. Oh, yeah, no, I know all about that. That’s not discord. That’s third party libraries that they’re using, by the way. And I know that. I mean, right. It’s not screaming. It’s also discord because the third party libraries that they both share. Anyway, that’s what I meant to say. Don’t get me struck on technical stuff. We could go forever on that. Cancel it. Go spend time in Belgium and France. OK, as my good friend, Adam, and I’m going to do a recording with Adam tomorrow, by the way. I don’t know when that video will be out. I know. I know I want to see if we can get that. We excited. Yeah, I’m going to recording with Adam. We’re going to finish out that third in the series on French Revolution and American Revolution and all that. Yeah, Belgium is not a real country. Adam has total proof of this. And France is France. And like, there’s no good in France. Sorry. Sorry. All the goodness left France and went to Canada and would rather live in the winter with beavers than the south of France in beauty, but near the Paris, too near the Parisians. I don’t know what else to tell you guys. Like, that’s what happened. Anywhere in France is too near Parisians. That’s my point. Oh, well, these are delicious. The only the only thing the Brits got right, man, I was listening to the rest of history podcast. Oh, my God. Those Brits, they’ve got an expert from Oxford talking about the American Revolution. I was like, dude, do you have like a reading problem or a comprehensive problem? You’re just wrong about a bunch of this. Like, you know, I don’t know. It pissed me off. Totally. Demon got Jesse. And Streamyard Demon has taken Jesse. It’s an interesting question from Melzil. Hold on. Hold on. I want to get to competing value. It seems to be a problem. Well, only if you make it a problem. The famous wise ones seem to emphasize alignment to grapple with it. No, no, they don’t. But I wonder if over alignment can lead to omissions. Of course, you wonder such a thing because that’s a ridiculous thing to wonder. No, it’s really not that hard. There is a hierarchy of values. It’s not stable. Sorry. You know, like, I’m not going to give you an answer because there isn’t an answer. But also, too bad. Anselman, I protest on behalf of Mess Amis Belgien. You can if you want, but you’ll still be wrong. Melz, how would you delineate good values versus bad values? Fuck, good. Someone’s paying attention. Thank you, Melz. That’s good. That’s good. Would you say they need to be universal to be good? No. Values are not universal in that way. They might be universal in the way that Eidos or the realm of Sonic forms is universal. That’s the way they’re universal, which is not universal in the material because nothing is universal in the material because the ethereal is where the universals exist and the material is where they don’t exist by definition. And would you say good values get perverted? No. The values don’t get perverted. What gets perverted is when you implement the values in a way. It’s the implementation of the values that causes the perversion. And it looks like the value. But this is where we get stuck. Values are bigger than you. So if I go, I value peace, right? And then I implement war, it is not clear and it cannot be made clear if I truly value peace and am corrupting it or if I truly value peace because you need war to get there. I’m sorry. There’s just no way by the material manifestation in the moment, in the moment, in the moment to know that. That’s where everyone gets wrapped up. A lot of things make sense in hindsight. Sure. This is an infinite number of descriptions in hindsight that make the past make sense. And I am going to do a video on this. In fact, I think I have it. I think the Rest is History podcast is reprehensible as those worthless Englishmen are. They actually did give me some good inspiration. So I am going to excoriate them tomorrow, believe me. The lies, the utter lies, the utter like, oh no, we’re the good guys. It’s like, yeah, whatever. When you look at, when you want perverted values, there’s the British Empire, like bang, perverted values. Right. Because they brought civilization and goodness all over the world. They really did it. Indisputable, indisputable, but also, that causes some harm for sure. But also, the largest corporation to have ever existed in history, which is by far larger than any 10 corporations combined today, was the result of the British Empire and also was partially, if not entirely, the cause of the American Revolution, which I think the one thing they got right in that podcast was they kept calling it rebellion, which I think is a better word. So how do we delineate this good from bad? Well, and the problem is that we suck. That’s the problem. We’re muppets. Like we can’t implement values correctly because we’re just flawed, useless, worthless, stupid muppets. Is the value perverted? No, the value’s up there. Is the triangle imperfect because of my useless ability to use a marker on a board poorly? No, the triangle, the perfect triangle still exists. The founding Americans too thought they were more English than the English. They thought they were keeping up the Anglo-Saxon spirit. These freaking jerk-offs totally leave out the fact that the reason why New Englanders are in New England is because they were monarchists. You kicked out the monarchists. Did you expect them to stop being monarchists because you kicked them out? No. Why would you leave that out of your account of the revolution? It’s kind of key. And it’s not just the people up north that are monarchists. It’s everybody in the United States is a monarchist or everybody in the 13 colonies out of the 26 total. They make some good points. Really good history there, but there’s some really bad history. Well, all history is in some sense a story, right? It’s a story. How you tell a history is a narrative that you weave through. Because it’s just data, facts, information, right? And then you have to frame it in order to have a point to signal something, to communicate a message. In order to see the value or values that were inherent in the moment and being enacted. Or to leave out values. Or to leave them out, right? You don’t want people to know that the British Empire brought a lot of good to the world. You could just say slavery 17 times until they give up. I’m not saying anybody’s doing that. Oh, no. I’m totally saying people are doing that. Anyway, let’s move on. Benjamin Franklin, does Impressionism as an art movement, oh, it’s way more of an art movement, hold any value for any of you? Of course it does. The problem is, and if so, can you say a few words? All right. Before Jesse goes, I know, really, duh. Before Jesse goes, other than pointing at the painting, totally fair. Impressionism is still happening. There is a phenomena, which I will be doing a video on, although I need a little more time and probably a little more energy. Verbal Impressionism is a thing. Watch the, I think she has two TED Talks, but she probably does it all the time. Brene Brown has a TED Talk where she does verbal Impressionism, right? And these people, a lot of people do verbal Impressionism. They say stuff like, you know, we need world peace. And the way you get world peace is you all meet each other with empathy and love. And then the peace emerged. Now, everybody that heard me had a different vision in their head about what I mean by empathy and love. But it’s not wrong, but it’s also all different pictures. That’s verbal Impressionism. That’s just one example. Is it somewhat akin to maybe effective altruism in that sense? That’s a form of a verbal Impressionism. Saying, putting those two words together outside of a context is verbal Impressionism, because you have to impose a frame in order to make it make sense. But when you impose a frame, it definitely will. The problem is the frame I impose and the frame you impose will be totally different every time, almost guaranteed. But we’ll think we’re talking about the same thing, because we’ll never dig into the detail. And fair enough, maybe we can. He’s going to continue his reprehensible campaign, French-speaking Belgians value their language, and Flemish-speaking Belgians value theirs. Sure, they do. But that’s why they’re not a country, because they have different values. That’s what makes a country. How did you not get that from my monologue? Really? Doesn’t Switzerland do? Don’t the Swiss have three different languages? Running around the world? Swiss German, Swiss Italian, and French. Swiss French, yeah. Uh-oh, nil. So after the fact, pragmatic analysis would be how we see the value of an implementation. It’s one way. The other way, you don’t have to see it. You can sense the value. And I did excoriate Paul Van der Kley recently for his video on CRC progress, which was by far one of the most worst and possibly most reprehensible videos that he’s ever done. It’s terrible. It’s absolutely terrible. Totally misses the point. So I went on a comment rant, and I excoriated, I think, every single point he made in that video. However, Paul Van der Kley and his project, and the project that was started by Joey around Paul Van der Kley’s work, is valuable. I don’t see this. I sense this. It’s not by my side. I’m not there. And I have met people part of that and seen the results for sure. But that’s not how I know it’s valuable. But yeah, the proof is in the pudding, which is in, it’s not in the implementation. It’s in the co-manifestation of the values that were enacted. Anselman claims the British Empire stopped widows being burned alive in India and gave them railways, etc. Dude, we could, I could off the top of my head with no research go into dozens of things that the British Empire did that were awesome. I could. I don’t even want to though. Not after that podcast, because now I’m pissed, Oxford prick. They’re laughing. They’re literally laughing about the front, about the revolution. I’m like, what, what is wrong with you people? Like, yeah, total mischaracterization. We stop on India for a moment too. What they did was they imposed a value set on the land that had the developed divided value set through different religions. All right. And these essentially warring tribes, you know, it doesn’t matter if it was physical violence, they’re still warring tribes, did not want to have shared values. And then there had to be a hierarchy of values that were imposed in order to bring some sense of negotiation, peace, harmony, harmony. Bringing people into an empire is bringing them into a set of values. That’s what it is. I’m not saying that’s implemented well. If you want to know more about that, Adam and I talk about the French Revolution on navigating patterns. I suggest that video highly, you will understand. That video is about values. We don’t probably talk about values. It’s about values. That’s what it’s about. And the lack thereof. Right. And then William Brant, see William misses the point, but he’s still right. I like my American ancestors for being reject. They were not reject. But I also admire the TOS. Oh, we were rejects. We were rejects. Yeah. Yes. The freaking kangaroo lovers are all rejects. That is true. Unfortunately. That pronoun’s a convex. Monet was myopic. Yes. Which is why he was able to do that and invent. Art is invented by constraint. Karen Wong on the Meaning Code. If you haven’t seen the Meaning Code, I don’t recommend all her videos because I can’t and she’s kind of all over the place. But some of her stuff on art is so fantastic. She talks about this constraint. I’ll be talking to her soon. Where art comes from. I’m going to talk to her soon. I’m actually doing my research to talk to her soon. Oh, great. That’ll be wonderful. I love talking to her. I’ve got a bunch of videos with her. Double good evening to the pirate captain and his gunners. Oh, are they canineers perhaps? I don’t know. I like it. Thank you. Good evening to you as well, sir. William Brant, Chinese is ambiguous, particularly classical Chinese. That is how you avoid getting chopped. Yes. Well, Benjamin Franklin, speaking of effective altruism, I would kill to see a debate between Peter Singer and David Benatar. I don’t know who those people are. They both sound evil. The swish also have reniche, whatever that is. Sounds like a disease. Yeah, it’s like a fogey swanglish. I hope someone invents a drug that can cure that for them soon. I think Belgiums are united in value in waffles, beer and frites. Fair enough. I’ll allow it. Well, if we allow ourselves to a second to talk about Belgium, they have preserved their old medieval towns well. Yeah. Yeah, but some of it’s Croatia, dude. It doesn’t help. Yeah, well. The island, I can’t say it right, Brach or something. I can’t pronounce it. That island, it’s the largest island there in Croatia, right in the Adriatic Sea. Wow. What man rented a car two days and just drove, rented a convertible, drove around the island. It was awesome. It was all. There’s a church. There’s a center to the village. They seem to be the same. And you can just sense it, right? You just walk around the village like, oh, I’m in a medieval village, clearly, or laid out like one. I don’t know how old the village is actually or it doesn’t matter. Yeah, it was amazing. It was really amazing. Really, I was just blessed. What a trip. What a wonderful trip for very many reasons. That one chief among them. Highest point in the Adriatic Sea. Very, very cool. I’ve always wanted to go to the French Castle on the beach to what’s that called? Whether it’s like the long land. It’s only accessible when the water’s out. Yeah. Yeah, that one. I’ve always wanted. I’d go there. Anybody who wants to fund my trip to wherever, that would be great. Yeah, to Georgia. We’ve got to invade burning. Oh yeah. Well, I don’t know. When is that? Is that October? October. If anyone wants to crowd fund me for my birthday, I’d be more than happy to go. Seems highly unlikely that I’ll be able to get out there, Jesse. But it’d be awesome to meet you in Georgia somehow, I was hoping. But the man, the world is upside down. All right, Mills. So it seems like scale would factor heavily into the assessment of value and implementation. Yeah, scale factors heavily into everything. Another word for scale, by the way, is fraticality, or the fractal nature of the world. What’s terrible at one level may be good at another. Well, look, things appear terrible and good at different levels for different reasons. And people get confused about that. For example, your suffering now may facilitate your flourishing in the future. Was your suffering terrible? I don’t know what to tell you. These are just, yeah, we don’t live in a flat world like these things are supposed to go up and down. Anselman, will Adam touch on the creation of Belgian national holiday in 20? I am not reprehensible Belgium. You get to catch him on the Discord one of these days, on my Discord on Mark of Wisdom. He, every time somebody brings up Belgium, man, he just goes off. It’s really funny. It’s like a little Belgium button on his forehead. You just press it and he just, no, Belgium’s not a country. He just dives into it. It’s really funny. I really love your themes of looking up. Orientation requires up looking. Yes. Well, that’s a good way to say it. Ethan always says some good stuff. I’ve got an Ethan file now for Ethan’s metaphors when he talks about the, excellent. No one’s better. No one. No one. He can’t do metaphors for everything, but when he does metaphors, you’re freaking awesome. They’re absolutely awesome. Oh yeah. I was going to use, shoot, I was going to use your metaphor and it didn’t come up. So Ethan’s excellent metaphor since we’re here. We’ll just, we’ll talk about it. This is an example of value. So you can say as a goal, I am going to mow the lawn on Saturday. Okay. That’s, that’s one example. Or you can have a goal to be a good steward of the land. Okay. Goal number one, if it rains between now and Saturday, never gets accomplished. Goal number two is unaffected by the rain. That’s example of pointing at a value and having the value as the goal rather than the material manifestation of the value. But Ethan came up with that kind of on the fly to help out Sally Jo, who I think was helped by that. Although you never know with Sally, sometimes she just takes a 180 some days and forgets everything. I think she does that on purpose just to piss me off. William Bringe, Mount St. Michael in France, or St. Michel, sorry, in France, matching St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall. Maybe, I don’t know. Sounds good to me. Bubble of this. Island with the castle, Mount St. Michel. Thank you, Wiki, Wiki person. Yeah, yeah, a bubble and we’re even found at the same time. William Bringe, Treaty of Vienna Leftovers. Oh, I don’t know about that. Great Minds. Well, look, this is a place of Great Minds. Indeed. Yes, it is. This is the place of Great Minds. I can confirm that. All right. What do we think? Are we good on value? Should we open it up and see who else wants to participate? I have some questions. Go, go, go. I didn’t know you weren’t done. Please continue. Oh, gosh. So, okay, here’s one to begin with. There’s such a phenomenon called gold medal depression. So, when you reach your, you have this value of achieving the highest thing in the Olympics. You achieve a gold medal, right? There’s a, and this can happen through, this is, is it called gold medal depression, but it’s called, yeah, it’s a phenomenon. So, if your value is to achieve a materialistic reward, a success, right? And then once you attain that, right, you have no higher sense of being or purpose or value that’s driving you on. And so, once you attain that, you drop out. You’re at the end of the world according to your value set. So, this is what happens too when people become influencers or fashionable e-girls or all those sort of things. They attain the attention, the reward, the success, and they assume that that’s what they valued. Often, it’s actually something underneath that’s causing them to have that drive for success. So, that’s just one thing I wanted to, to like, group, like what, how do we mitigate that? Yeah, let’s address that. Right, because I thought that Ethan’s example actually addressed that, right? When your goal is set in the material and not in the value, the value of being a good steward to the land is a value. There’s no value to mowing the lawn. Mowing the lawn is a neutral action in the world. The value comes from being a good steward of land. Would you say that like, one is like a short-term goal in the material and the other is an identity? So, if you identify towards wanting to be a good steward of the land, then that’s something that’s achievable regardless of the material circumstances. I might flip that, Andre. I mean, it’s good. It’s good that you grabbed identity. I really appreciate that. I might flip that and say, like a bad goal, a bad identity is in the material. It’s like, hmm, I’m seeing a pattern here. So, you’re saying a bad goal, a bad identity, and a bad value are all material? Yes, yes, because when you try to make those things material, they’re limited. Material is limited and it’s subject to entropy and it’s subject to time and it’s subject to decay. Jonathan Pigeot did a great video. I think it’s part of the Chino, but I don’t remember. On disappointment. Yeah, it’s a Chino talk, right? On disappointment. Yes. You know what’s going to disappoint you? Anybody? The material world is going to disappoint you, right? And so, and I think that goes well with Courtney’s comment here, which is, when you find yourself outside the hierarchy, you’re never outside the hierarchy. Due to decisions made in the past. Okay, but the past is gone in such a way that your life doesn’t mirror your values. Look, I mean, you’re a living being. How do you navigate the highest value? In your case, you’re saying it’s God. That’s fine. We can make claims to that effect. That’s fair. Without wrecking the lives of those around you. Oh, well, maybe you will. I don’t know that that’s avoidable. I would like to think it was. Can we get back to the start of the comment? Sure. What’s the start of the comment? Because there’s… When you find yourself outside of the hierarchy, which I rejected, you’re still in the hierarchy. Due to decisions made in the past. Right. Yeah. Which hierarchy? What hierarchy do you think you’re escaping? You’re not escaping hierarchy. Hierarchy is older than trees. Jordan Peterson, right? Like, he’s not wrong about that. Right. But I’d rather focus on the second part, right? Which is… I wanted to go to the past because you’re always in a conversation with yourself, right? And your values of the past. Like you made decisions in the past based upon the information that you had at the time and who you thought you were at the time. The second part is the most important because there’s the relationship to yourself in the past that matters. That actually points to a hierarchy, right? Because as you’re moving up through life or going through time, you’re reorienting your sense of purpose in the world. And that sense of purpose has values that you’re constantly negotiating with yourself and with others to achieve or to drive you forward. Essentially, once you have no purpose, classically speaking, that’s what they call depression, right? It’s withholding of values and purpose. And you become, instead of being thrown into the world to use Heideggerian, you’re kind of stuck. And I know Heidegger’s got this whole set of problems, but that’s such a great existential way to think of it. Like time is being thrown at you, whether you like it or not. Like you will sleep, but you are still here in this moment. And you’re still embedded in a set of constraints, values, principles, hierarchy, and you’re not going to escape that. So the second part was just as interesting that I wanted to. No, I agree with that. Was it thrown projectiveness? I think Heidegger uses, like we’re sort of like condemned to live a life. And I think Victor Frankl uses the term existential vacuum, which is equivalent to the depression. So when you don’t have a purpose, worth of meaning, you fall into that trap. So you’re continually. Yeah, I want to point out the problem with Heidegger is that Heidegger is actually four years old. Right. And so he makes up a new term called thrownness. And all he means, all anybody can ever mean by thrownness is that you’re a created being who was created at a certain place in a certain time. OK, everybody already knew this because they had the Bible. I don’t know why he restated it and use new words, but he’s an idiot for doing so. Like this is bad. I just do it. It’s important to people. You brought it up in your monologue. You brought it up in your monologue. So if you bring it up in your monologue, I can reply to it. He’s not wrong. It’s just not a very interesting point. It’s an obvious like, yeah, you were born. Oh, wow, I was. Holy Mary. Jesse, did you know I was born? Did you know you were born? Andre, were you clued in? Like, really? No one told me this. So the second half is, you know, what do we do about this? Right. Well, Peterson, as you rewrite your past, you tell that wonderful story about the woman who was abused by her brother. And then it just turns out there were like six and eight or something stupid. And he was like, are you sure that like that qualifies? And she was like, oh, no, I guess it doesn’t. And bang, our whole life is fixed from that aspect. It’s like, wow. So you can rewrite your past and forgive yourself, your past self will say, right? And then write your future. Look, and did you make bad decisions that, you know, like, and this is this is my deep thing. Like, well, and maybe I go overboard in this. I’m always struggling with this. There’s no one there’s no one ever helping me with this. Cursed to all of you for this. I, you know, I am very much like you made your bed, you lie in it. Like you just and it’s not like if you want forgiveness or redemption or whatever, like you can do that. Like, I think you can do that. But if you’re not doing that, like, whatever, dude, don’t come to me at the end and go, oh, I’m like, I’m not I’m just gonna be like, yeah, whatever, dude, you chose what where you’re at, like, chose to ignore the people you ignored. You know, you chose to be mean to the people you were mean to, like, you chose to be nice to people you were nice to. And maybe that didn’t work out too well. Like, I don’t know what to tell you, like, you need to take responsibility for that. And once you’ve taken responsibility for that, everything changes. But don’t come to me and go, oh, I did the I’m like, I don’t like whatever, like, I don’t know. Fine, like you made a choice, you need to come to terms with that choice. I’m not gonna save you from that choice. I can’t I don’t have that that power. So so so sometimes, right, we end up in a situation where we have to decide, do I make it worse by leaving, at least in the short term? Because maybe that doing that saves you. And maybe that’s better. I don’t I don’t know, like, I’m not, you know, I’m not here to give you answers. Like, that’s not my definition for caring. Right? Well, this is why we talked about it last week. Right, right. Yeah, last week’s topic was care. Or or do you stay because being there makes everything better, even if you suffer for it? Right. And this is that point about and this point all over it’s been made all over the place over the years over the recent recent years, like, in one way, reverse colonization is the worst thing to ever happen to the world. Right? The United States in particular, but most Western countries are stealing the best and brightest from the poorest countries. And that makes those poorer countries poorer, period. And it has to like go. Right. And so we’re taking in a tiny number of people, but they’re the best. And then those countries get worse. Those people’s lives get better because they’re here. But everybody around them gets worse because they’re gone. Well, that’s true. What’s the value set there? It’s individualism. Fundamentally, that’s an individualistic project. Right. Materialistic individual project. Right. And so what’s our definition or our agreed definition of caring qualitative embodied action. Right. So it’s it’s not that you don’t like if you don’t have the qualities and you don’t have the embodiment, you won’t be able to care properly. You won’t be able to act on those those two prerequisites. So that’s that’s how you navigate the highest value there, Carol. You actually have to you have to investigate what you care about and your intimacy to that thing that you’re caring for. Right. All you’re attending to is another word for caring. And so that’s how you navigate to the highest value. Like you have those things seem mutually exclusive. Well, yeah, the contradictions are things you haven’t dealt with. Right. It’s it’s the Matrix second movie. Right. We can’t see past the choices we haven’t made. It’s the same principle right there. Usually exclusive things are things you haven’t seen past. You haven’t you haven’t made that choice. And so until you make the choice, it’s contradiction. When you make the choice, it’s not a contradiction anymore. Right. Maybe it’s how you conceive of God. Maybe it’s time to smash an idol and get fresh or maybe it’s time to make a decision. Nathaniel, Holy Grail, Sorcerer’s Stone, etc. cannot be fully defined. Right. Unless you use conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theory is a compression. So I haven’t watched it yet. But Jonathan Bajaud did a chat about conspiracy theories with I think it was Mary Harrington. Great chat. Cannot wait. Cannot wait. I got sidetracked by VanderKlaun. Go back to that. Go back to that. Go back to that. Because you’re bringing up story. That’s my wheelhouse. So Nathaniel, you’re pointing to the inverse. Like the fact that there is a Holy Grail, a Sorcerer’s Stone, a magical sword called Excalibur. That is a definition of a principle or a manifestation of potential in the world. That’s right. That’s not the conspiracy. The conspiracy is the lack of value that we give to these phenomena or that we’re not able to see ourselves in. Right. You’re not able to participate because there could be multiple Excaliburs like He-Man. Literally like Star Wars, he gets an Excalibur. Right. So without being able to see that from peer view, you just see it as a materialistic thing. You don’t see it as things that happen in stories. It’s not the denial of value. It can just be the reduction of value. Well, it’s the same. That’s how Sam and Frodo must be gay comes about. Right. Because they just reduce the value of friendship down to physicality. And now either you’re gay or you don’t know each other. I don’t understand the format. Like I can’t, my brain can’t be that flat. So it’s like, I don’t. Emile, the disappointment talk was so needed. The disappointment talk was brilliant. If you haven’t seen the show’s disappointment talk, it is fantastic. I have to watch it. It’s really good. It’s well worth it. William Branch, not into medieval fantasy, ran out of mead. Fair, fair, fair. I’ll allow it. Pirate captain will allow it. Benjamin Franklin, actually, just all about narratives have a central conflict between competing values. Usually the value of the hero and the values of the villain. That sounds fair. What do you think, Jesse? You’re the narrative guy. Usually you’ll never know one of the other. That’s why it’s a story. So either the hero’s values are being propagated on the world and that’s the embodiment frame perspective of the film. And then the adventure or the question, right, the quest of the film is for the hero to redefine himself in a world that’s been imposed by one or the other. Or the hero has an existential crisis, a loss of value, purpose, and embodiment. And therefore it needs to challenge the, whatever you would consider the opposition to that existential crisis. And so that it doesn’t, heroes and villains is a little bit too lacking in contrast because you can have multiple villains or multiple oppositions or multiple holes for the hero to navigate through. Essentially like everything. The hero shouldn’t be alone. It’s not a binary. The hero has supporting characters, right? And that’s really important. People miss it when they squish the world. Right. There’s all kinds of characters. When do those movies start sucking? When there’s no ensemble anymore. When there’s no ensemble. Right. There’s no supporting characters. Do you think with the values of the good and the values of the evil movie structure is usually either identifying towards or identifying against one of them on those sides? Here’s the key. Here’s the key. No, except you’re right, but not in the way you think. Right. This is what I wanted to put back on Jesse on is that no, it’s not necessarily good values versus bad values or values versus values. Because, this is where people go, both murder and take a point. Yeah. On top of their head, their dunces, literally. Okay. They don’t have a point. They haven’t said anything new or interesting. Okay. You can reject the idea, the concept of value. Yes, you can. And that makes you not an enemy. That makes you the enemy of the good, the enemy of being itself. That’s where the nihilism comes from. Recognizing that there isn’t just competing values, but there’s something that wishes to remove value as such from existence as such. This is why buddy films were such a phenomena in the eighties. Right. Because you actually have that very mechanism going on with it has to be the relationship between the value of the teamwork versus the actual embodiment or the exchange of that value system. Lethal weapon is actually the best example for that. Well, and that wasn’t competing values. Right. Because they’re being fooled into helping a porn ring, basically, and a drug outfit or something. Right. They’re being fooled into this. Right. And so the villain isn’t like a person with different values or a law breaker, per se. It’s somebody who is against order itself. Yeah. Double this talk about setting a goal. Elon Musk just founded a company with which is the stated goal to quote, understand the true nature of the universe. Elon Musk dreams, and I’m all for it. That’s why he’s the wealthiest man in the world. I have a video about this. Right. It’s not hit my one on him and Twitter. It’s before it’s the one I did before that. Elon Musk and money. It’s one of the money videos. They’re short, but money videos are both short. Yeah, that’s, you know, that’s the problem. William Branch divorces reset. Oh, yes, they do. Secret radio 69. Hello. Hello. Secret radio 69. Benjamin Franklin. Why do I just already get the feeling this isn’t going to go well? When the villain kills, it’s emphasized. And when the hero kills, he’s always killing anonymous goons. No, not always. Yeah, not always. I don’t know what movies you’re watching. Well, what he’s pointing me to here points charitably. What he’s pointing to is the goons are an extension of the villain. And that’s actually classically the case is like you have storm troopers, right? What are the storm troopers are the embodiment of the empire. So that’s why they’re that’s why the act of removing that threat from the environment is not seen as a definition to the story. Right. Well, then there’s the fact that there is right. But the fact that there is a different value in killing the body of the villain, whether that’s the villain directly or the goons and killing the body of one of the supporting characters of the hero. That’s value. That’s what it is. It’s not equal, dude. It’s not supposed to be. Yes, it’s not supposed to be equal. Villains are real and they are bad. And that is the problem. William Britch. Elon is nuts. Yes, sometimes he is. Deep German-ness. Yes. Secret radio 69. I love March. I do not critique. That is actually not as what is going on. I know people have this pre-programming about critique. I actually don’t critique. Sometimes I state things outright. And that is actually not critique. If you pay close attention to what critique actually is, it is pointing you at something without talking about it and pointing you away from the thing that is obvious. And I never do that. I pointed obvious things and say, this is obvious. And look, I’m not saying I get it right all the time, but maybe I do. I don’t know. You need to consider that case carefully. It may be that I am so freaking careful with my speech that I only talk about things when I think I’m going to get them right. And that makes a difference because it might. It really might, guys. Bubble this. Thrown-ness is an important clue to the nature of existence. Thrown-ness is the statement that we were created. It’s like it’s Genesis. It’s right in the Bible. You can use different words for it, too. You can say, oh, we were born. Okay. Yeah, we were also born. And that is also thrown-ness. Those are actually the same statement. I don’t know why you need a fancy word for it. It’s kind of stupid to come up with a fancy word to sound more important and intellectual. I hate that. Like, actually hate that. I grew up in Boston. I hate those people. I do. I hate them. They are arrogant bastards who know nothing. And they pretend that they know something. And that is what pisses me off. And that is what Socrates was bitching about when he was walking back from the Oracle of Delphi, considering why he was the wisest man. Why did the Oracle say this? I don’t think I’m the wisest man, says Socrates. Oh, here’s this idiot I’m walking with who keeps claiming he knows stuff that he clearly doesn’t know. That’s why I’m wiser than him. Fair enough. And then Socrates acquiesces and says, yeah, maybe the Oracle’s right. Good for him. By the way, all of that is an exemplification of wisdom without an admission of wisdom, which is super important. No. Courtney. All right, Courtney. Fast decisions resulting in children from the same-sex marriage that I no longer believe in. Well, that’s tough. So it’s not just lives. It’s my highest purpose, my children and their rearing. Yeah, look, I don’t know what to tell you again. There’s always a conflict, right? There’s always a conflict with your past because you were differently imperfect in the past, which is not to say you’re better or worse now. It’s like, yeah. And this was part of my complaint on Brandon Clay’s video. It’s like, you know, you can’t just pick vices or sins to exalt and redeem automatically or forgive automatically. Like that’s not fair, dude. And we do just because like some group of people has some particular, you know, proclivity towards some version subset of a sin like sodomy does not mean that you focus on that and go, oh, you knew what, we’re gonna give those people proactivity because you don’t do, first of all, you don’t do any of that anyway. But like, what about the other people? Like we all, original sin doesn’t mean we all sin exactly the same way because of our birth. That’s not what it means. Like, I don’t know what book you think you’re reading, but, and I haven’t read it, but I know it doesn’t say that. I don’t know what to tell you at that point. Like you think you read the book, huh? I don’t know about that. Well, one of the things I have here is how do you prepare for a long lasting relationship? There’s plenty of examples of that, but the most foundation of the one that I want to point to is you don’t build on foundations of sand. Like you have to build on things that are quite literally stone or some sort of something that’s going to hold value over time. It’s not it’s almost as if, if you looked at the world as a triangle, not that there’s a triangle we can point to anywhere. And you said, oh, if there was a set of values along the bottom, it would not unify because in order to unify, you have to move inward at the same time towards a common, I don’t know, let’s call it a star random. I’m just picking this random, random example, correspondence to anything on my whiteboard or anything like that, or anything in my slides or anything. It’s just a random came right from my brain just now, honest. Yeah. And, and look, welcome my friend. Long time no see. Love and responsibility. Yes. And those are in conflict all the time. Like love and responsibility. Yeah. Intimacy. What to myself, to myself later, to my spouse, to my spouse later, right? To my friend, to my friend later. Do I, do I piss my friend off now? So that, you know, whatever. I told the story before. I feel like I got to tell it again though. So my uncle tells this story. I only, I only heard this recently, I think the past few years, basically. So when my uncle was young, he was a drinker. He was an alcoholic for a while. He doesn’t drink anymore. And he’d eat cold turkey. The fevers are just like, we’re not even human creatures. Like you guys are human creatures, we’re not even close. Like we just do weird things. Like we could just absolutely will ourselves out of alcoholism and stupid things. I haven’t had to do that one particularly, but I’ve done other similar stupid, just ridiculous things that sound improbable. So when he was young though, he would go to parties and you know, he’s at a house party. His friend hands him his keys and said, don’t give these back to me if I’m drunk. And he says, all right. And he’s still a fever. Like that’s a solemn oath that must be upheld come hell or high water or death or fiery brims. It doesn’t matter. Like the fevers are just, this is the nature of being like one of us, right? Just is what it is. Almost my whole family is like this too. So later on, right, the guy gets totally drunk and he’s harassing my uncle. Give me my keys, and he is so amassed. Like nobody thinks that guy should be driving. Zero people think that he should be driving. And he just won’t leave my uncle alone. And unfortunately, the fevers are also quite impatient at times. I’m sure you can’t imagine any of this. But anyway, so what ends up happening is my uncle’s like outside and the guy won’t leave him alone. And he says, fine, take your effing keys and go kill yourself. And he takes the keys and he throws them down the street, like several yards away. And he leaves. He just takes off. Gone. Doesn’t see the guy for like 10 years, 15 years, something stupid, some stupid amount of time. Never sees the guy. Like gives up on these, screw these people, man. All they’re going to do is ask me to do something and force me not to. Like that’s like high heresy in Lafeverland, right? So no. So meets the guy like 10 years later and he goes, you saved my life. I never drank again after that night. Well, because he realized no one cared about him enough to tell him in the moment, you’re going to kill yourself and fine, go do it. That’s a risky strategy, my friends. I am not recommending this. I am just giving you my, it’s not my story. It’s not even my story. Right? This happened for sure. That’s a risky strategy. Right? Do you tell your friend in the moment that they’re being a jerk or do you wait later? I must, look, I’m not here to give you answers. Right? I’m here to say these are the actual problems you need to pay attention to. And this is what you pointed to with the sense of horizontal learning, right? Well, on the horizontal, right? You have to, right. So, and then like, shared values are also mutual obligations, right? And so if in this case, right, the mutual, the mutual obligation to uphold your word, to do the right thing, to not see no harm to others, they’re all there. And then there’s also like, you know, the, don’t denigrate someone else’s virtual character. But it’s bigger. It’s bigger. Look at the climate. If our shared value is the climate, then I don’t have to save the climate by myself. And I don’t have to convince other people to do it because we’re already doing it. Right? Yeah. I’m not Atlas anymore. I mean, that’s why I brought up Atlas in the monologue, right? You’re not Atlas anymore. You don’t have to do it alone. You still have to do your part though. And that’s what it breaks down. Like, when you’re saying this person needs to do that, and that person needs to do that, you’re wasting all your time telling other people what to do, which means you’re not spending your time doing those things yourself. Sorry, I need to break it to you. That’s what’s happening. Your time, energy and attention, T, is limited. When you’re spending it critiquing, which is invalid, all critique is invalid. You’re a muck. You can’t critique anything. You’re stupid. You just are. Sorry. When you’re spending all your time, energy, and you’re doing that, you’re not saving the planet for sure. But you’re trying to place that burden on others. Now they have to make up for your lazy ass. Think about that with your moralizing. That’s why you don’t moralize right there. That’s the reason. And I agree with William Brish. Some nations want to own you. Some leaders want to control you using top-down power from above, which as we know is a postmodern power narrative, which is invalid. Ethan, we used to be forced to physically look up to the sun and stars for physical orientation in the world. Look up astrolabes. Oh, I lost my astrolabe. Oh, it’s one of the things that really makes me angry is I do not have my astrolabe. Those are freaking mine. Astrolabes are cool. We used to use them for navigation on the O shot and on land. Now we look down at GPS for navigation. Yes, we do. Ethan, you made me look down. You changed my GPS orientation. I was almost going to craft that car, damn it. This is not what’s held by the current state of cultural nihilism. Right. Well said. Ethan’s great. He’s so good. Ethan’s so good. Well, there’s a huge difference too between a virtual environment and a digital environment, right? Like his… Yeah, one’s fantasy and the other’s actual reality, right? Benjamin Frankel, I like this point. It’s about time, Benjamin. I’m glad you’re participating more healthily. Also remember in the past, babies used to come from the sky, from the store. Yeah. And now they come out of the testicles and ovaries. Exactly. It’s eyes up versus eyes down. Wow. Wow. Mr. Frankel, that’s the first interesting thing you said. A little harsh, but close to true. Close enough. Paul Van der Kley, I got to find this video. He talks about eyes up versus eyes down. Man, that is one of his best videos. He should talk about that stuff more often. He is great when he talks about that. He’s horrible when he talks about his California leftism. Nathaniel, maybe a better way to say it is once you obtain you, your world must end. Oh, that’s true. William Branch, your world will end. Also true. No, the world never ends. We’re always in a continuum. The future is always open. Look at this heresy. Do you want to fight me? Yeah. That’s it. I’m risk it. He’s Australian. I’m going to hunt you down. And yeah. We’re going to call Ross Crowe on you. Actually eliminate value. That is correct. I actually said that in the final one. Action is impossible without value. That is correct. That is true. We talked about discernment, judgment, action. And that’s why value is in this sequence here. The sequence is deliberate. I’m not saying it’s well planned out or planned out hugely in advance, although discernment, judgment, action was, that’s for sure. This set of three has been, the last three has been. There’s a lot of negotiation going on with the group. And if you want to be part of that negotiation, you can be, by the way. Video comments are helpful. Discord is the easiest way. There are other ways to reach me. We’re working on the website. Andre specifically is working on the website. Thank you, Andre. And we’ll have the website up soon with all these features so that we can do more of this community sense making and distributing cognition. And attention is impossible without value. Yeah. Attention, well, attention will create value one way or the other. That’s how marketing is done, right? They sell you the value of something through gaining your attention. It’s not the other way around. The value is a proposition to you, right? This toothpaste is better than this toothpaste. Well, it’s pointed to. But sometimes the value is there and you just don’t, like, it’s not all that. Like marketing is like, you need toilet paper, man. Like, and it does matter which one you buy, at least if you’re me, because I’m like, really? It’s the appearance of value. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Well, how’s that being turned on since the 80s? Literally, literally. It’s different, right? Are you pointing at the value or are you trying to create the value? That’s how you know good marketing from bad marketing. Right. Are you saying like you need a computer therefore by Dell or are you saying you need a Dell computer? All right. Those are two very different statements. Well, underneath that is a whole set of propositions about why Dell is better than other, why Intel chips, why this, why bigger screen. So there’s a whole hierarchy of preferences that have to be negotiated. There’s a fundamental difference when somebody comes up and there are commercials like this. You know, I’m not saying the problem. There are commercials like this. When somebody says you need a good computer and then they advertise their brand and just advertising their brand without saying what they’re, why. It’s an association. Right. Or using the associated property and saying HP has this flaw. Or the other way around. You can say, Dell does this better than anybody else. Right. It’s like, sure. I’m not denigrating any of these marketing techniques. I’m saying those are three different techniques. I’m pointing at the bad in others, pointing only at the good in yourself or pointing at the value of the thing. And then incidentally, because it’s lower, mentioning your brand. Those are three different marketing techniques. You can say one is better than the other. Whatever. I don’t care. I’m just pointing out that that’s there. How you point and what you point to matters. This is, I think, Peterson, again, first, second wave Peterson, or whatever. What do you want to say? Early Peterson is what I like to say. He used to really harp on this sense of be aware of unattended consequences. Right. Because there are in those sort of embodiments, in those sort of framings and interesting Mark is three again, there are unattended consequences of it’s not an argument. It’s and it’s not a proposition. It’s actually the definition of what’s happening there that matters because they have unintended consequences. When he pushed something up, you make it bigger. You make it. You signaled the value essentially in that definition. You change the value hierarchy, the prioritization. And maybe that’s good. And maybe it’s not. And that’s the other thing. It’s not like, oh, the value is good. And therefore it’s like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, the prioritization is good or bad too. And that makes it all the harder. I was pointing to the physical embodiment of that though, because when you agree to someone else’s definitions, you may be unaware of the unintended consequences of that. Right. They may be, they may be doing those definitions on purpose. Like that might be the trick of all postmoderns. Anyway, fancy words sometimes renew meaning to what has become banal. Yeah, well, they can. Fancy words work best when you have a concept that you haven’t associated with the words yet. And so one might ponder, for example, that there would be a condition in which if you weren’t exposed to language, let’s just use some random language that I would never normally talk about, like Christian language, and you just weren’t exposed to it, then you might end up inventing those concepts yourself again with different words. Especially if you assumed that the Christian language words were automatically bad because they’re automatically preachy or they’re automatically religious or they’re right. That could happen. I’m just saying theoretically. I’m just talking about. Happen when you explain the word liturgy to me. Yeah. Yeah. Like what you could do thrownness. Oh boy. Why? Why are you doing this? You’re doing it to seem smart. You’re not doing it because you’ve invented a new concept. You just put a new word something that is obvious and banal. And it just doesn’t add anything, but it does confuse people and give them this sense. I think you’re so smart. He’s literally four years old. Literally. Word increases intimacy. Did not get past Plato. By his own admission, did not get past Plato. I’m not making this up. He said that. Like, why are we listening to somebody didn’t get past Plato? Just read the freaking Republic problem solved. You don’t need him. It’s all there and it’s better there. This is the distancing effect, right? The proximity effect, right? Because you’re creating intimacy. You’re drawing people into your essentially your space, your right sense of being. And then you’re taking intimacy with the greater world and drawing it into your box and stealing it from the rest of the world. You’re basically a freaking Paris parasitoid. Ted taught me that that word. It’s not a parasite. It’s a parasitoid. Well, yeah, they destroyed things. They destroyed the host. It’s like, yeah, you’re trying to destroy the host. You nasty little modern philosopher. All philosophers past Aristotle throw them out. Don’t need them. Don’t need them. Nathaniel risk is always part of it. Yeah. Nassing’s lab talks about that. Many people avoid seeking long term relationship while thinking their foundation is inadequate yet. But any day now, right? Well, look, I have this new thing where, you know, people say the perfect is the enemy of the good. No, it’s not. The perfect, it’s worse. The perfect is the enemy of the better. That’s the problem. Because you’re doing nothing while you’re waiting for perfection. And so you can’t even get better. Forget about good. You can’t even get better. I actually have noted on this. I was going to end on that. But this the sense of completion, right? We modernity is sold this individualistic idea that you need to complete yourself. There is things come to a completion point. And that’s that was not the Christian worldview. Metaphysically speaking, sorry to say metaphysically speaking, the Christian worldview was always beginning, middle, beginning. There’s always a sense of continuation of not progress because a progress defines once you’ve progressed enough, you’ve actually completed a cycle. But this is the Christian worldview was always in the cyclical time. It was never linear time. That’s the materialist, not the modernist brain. Those are the things modernism. Yeah, jump in. You can’t avoid all mistakes. Some people are babies at 30. Right. That’s the problem. I achieved maturity at 61. Are you sure? You’re welcome. Nathan is continuing his war on PBK. Are we going to rename PBK to PWK? Paywall clay. No, I do find that amusing. No. So mills. Money changes everything. No, not really. Only if you let it. It’s just trade. Oh, please state your favorite ice creams. Mint chocolate chip. Go ahead, Andre. What’s your favorite ice cream? Boring like me, vanilla. Okay. Jesse. Jesse. I’m going to have to say it’s some version of Nutella. It’s like dark, nutty chocolate. Fair. Wait, we can get that here. Yeah, you can get it. It’s good in like mueses and like tiramises. You can get it like that. How do you not get? How can you? More of a gelato thing, I should say. Nutella is rare here. It should be like common everywhere else. Bubble is when something helps you reach a goal of yours, then it has value. Well, no, that’s the value you try to create. It doesn’t necessarily have value. Right? You might tell yourself it has value. It might not. Like, and that’s the gold medal problem, right? The gold medal depression that Jesse was talking about. If you think the value is in winning the Olympics and getting that medal, you’re screwed. Because once you get it, you’re all done. Like it’s all downhill. It’s like with performance enhancing drugs, they might make you reach that goal. It doesn’t mean performance enhancing drugs have value. Right. Instrumental values. Right. Thanks, Will. What other values are there? Value is a verb, right? As a way of relating to something else as a person rather than a thing. Exactly. Exactly, Mills. End principle. Right. Right. There are lots of types of values. As in I value you, you are right. Yes, he is. Goodnight and viva Belgium. No. No. No Belgium. Take one. Soho. What about the fundamental belief in the end of history? It’s not fundamental. Those people are crazy. You should just like spend your time with other people. Fukuyama has points. He doesn’t have a telos. That’s actually fundamentally baked into his premise there. The end of what? Like the end of the story is the Unitopia. Then you have no story. Well, then how would you know? Like if it’s the end, you’re never going to know it because when it happens, you cease. It’s like so not a thing. It’s like, well, that’s unhelpful. What I do like to point out though, when Marx is still bringing up Fukuyama, I do concede that he has this point on the, oh, I’ve forgotten it. The battle for recognition. No. Right. I think he has something there and that’s what the modernity and most likely post-modernity has for it. That it’s pointing to a phenomenon. It’s not necessarily right or wrong. It’s a phenomenon in the world that was always happening because the battle for recognition is essentially to say my values were more long-lasting or more beneficial than yours. And I, you know, will compete against you. Now, competing and negotiating are two completely different things. And I think Luke came on a couple of weeks ago and said, oh, we’re not having a debate. It’s like, well, by saying that we’re technically in a debate now, that’s the trap of saying, well, we’re not debating. It’s like, no, you actually started. Yeah. You started debating once you said that. So, and this is the, I guess the, the interjection of values in the great chain of being. And that’s if Fukuyama in that sort of the battle for recognition, if he has something there we need to concede. Yeah. I don’t know how to resolve that though. I think that’s just another phenomenon. The problem only arises if you take an element that you didn’t account for and say, you need to account for this this way. No, you don’t. You need to enchant the world. If you meet something that isn’t accounted for in your worldview, your worldview is wrong and needs to change. It’s that you don’t fit the thing into your worldview. You open your worldview to fit the thing. You’re just doing it backwards. That’s all. I’m not a big deal. People do it all the time. I do it all the time. Not a big deal. But also, that’s why you need the humility to realize, no, you don’t fit the thing into your worldview. You open your worldview to fit the new thing. Like your worldview sucks. You’re a muppet. And you have to continually remind yourself that you’re a freaking muppet. This is that simple. Your worldview is never going to be complete enough. And so you need to keep opening it up. Willi-Nilli, you have to do it very carefully. I agree. But also, you have to do it. You can’t be a muppet with hubris. If you believe your worldview is complete, then it’s not. Right. But that’s Karl Marx. Look at, oh, the worker is just as valuable as the manager. But never in history have they been paid the same. So what does that tell you? It tells you worldview is wrong. It doesn’t say there’s something wrong with the world. The Karl Marx conclusion is there’s something wrong with the world because they’re both people and they’re four. And it’s like, have you worked, bro, anywhere doing anything at all? Because if you have, you realize some people run the checkout register faster. Are those workers really equal? Of course they’re not. Like duh. Right? So obviously Marx is wrong. He’s just wrong axiomatically incorrect. And instead of changing his worldview, he says, oh, no, no, no, no, we have to fit everything into mind. And therefore, tyranny and rebellion, concert rebellion. Fair enough. If you’re retarded, that’s the answer you come to. But also don’t be retarded. You have to come to, but also don’t be retarded. Like that’s the solution there. And I want to say this straight to the camera. I am the definition maker of muppetism. Hear me raw. Muppetism is admit thy hubris. Postmodernism is find your true self. Modernism is seek thy pleasure. But muppetism is admit thy hubris. You are never going to be complete. You are never going to feel authentic. You’re never going to be authentic. Well, yeah, you can never fully understand yourself. You need to get it out of that trap of being understanding. Like how do you speak in that? You don’t have to. Like there’s a problem. They’re told they have to. You do not have to do that. The person they told you that’s an idiot and you shouldn’t listen to them. That’s why I rail against the modern philosophers because they’re all based on that principle. And that principle is observably incorrect. They’re just wrong. I get that they’re wicked smart or they sound wicked smart or whatever, but they’re wrong. It’s not hard to see that they’re wrong either. They’re just wrong. It’s okay. Everyone’s wrong about something. Nathaniel, that completion point was that I was trying to get out with the grail. The mystery is ever renewing. The mystery is different for everybody. Peterson talks about this. Each night goes to a different part of the forest, the part they think is the darkest to look for the grail. They don’t look in the light, by the way. They’re looking at the darkest point for the grail. They’re like, oh, it must be here because we would never go here normally. William Branch is part of the pistachio heresy noted. Oh, it’s pistachio ice cream is great. Yes, it’s not bad. That doesn’t mean it can’t be a heresy. Pepperoni pizza is a heresy. Anything can be a heresy. Come on. Oh, yes. I thought that is true. The adjuvantical cheese pizza is all. Hold on. I saw this live debate on Rumble and it had 100k live concurrent viewers. Wow. People really like debates. They do because debates have a resolution. And I’m not giving you an answer. This isn’t a debate. We don’t debate here. So the postmodern trick is aimed at the overthrow of the traditional values, yes, by defeating the notion of value itself. Yes. With some truce type of ethics. Nope, they just deny ethics exist, but then they insert them because of course they do exist. And so you have to insert them, right? But they tell you they’re not. That’s just a lie, right? Whose mean attainment is a use of power. I have a video postmodernism on navigating patterns. Watch it. Watch it twice. Whatever. Comment if it’s not clear. Tell me if it’s not clear, guys. I’ll redo the damn whole video. I’ll do a whole series on it if you don’t get it. I will. I absolutely will. Or I’ll at least try. Right? Top down power from above. That’s the whole trick with postmoderns. And then I forget who said it. I don’t think it was James Lindsay. Somebody said they said the trick of the postmoderns is they tell you there’s no grand narrative and they remove all the narratives until they get to the one they like. And then they stop removing narratives there. That’s it. That’s the whole trick. Right? Yeah. And that is the same as saying they insert their own narrative, except they don’t really. They just remove all the ones that they don’t like. And then the only one that’s left must be right. Right? But it’s only the only one that’s left because it’s the last place you look. Right? The thing. When you find something that’s always in the last place you look, that’s axiomatically true. Because when you find something, you stop looking for it. Right? It’s not a trick. It’s just like the way the universe exists by definition. And so people get fooled by that. Another way to say it in the universe is they’ve casted veils over things that do exist or over values or they’ve interjected things from the past and they’ve veiled them. They’ve caused a blindness to you. So you only see what they want you to see. It’s essentially that kind of thing. Filtering is the superpower that everybody has. Mills, so the realization of Muppethood is epistemic humility. No, no. Epistemology is bankrupt. It is humility as such. It’s not epistemic humility. It’s humility about everything. Your being is imperfect. The crazy Christians might call it original sin or something stupid. They got dumb nins for things. It doesn’t matter. It’s not epistemic humility. Epistemology is garbage already. Actually, Ethan freaked out and went, all knowledge is evil. We need to burn the books today. On Discord, I’m like, Ethan, I’ve been telling you this for months, dude. I was already there. Apparently, he’s reading well into book seven here on the Republic because he’s part of the book club, the Texas wisdom community. Yeah, he got there. I was like, I’ve been there all along. Courtney, would like to thank you for your definition of Muppetism. I would too, Jesse. That was excellent. Thank you. Follow me on Twitter. I’m waking into the Muppet crisis. Neapolitan. Put your Twitter thing in the thing. Okay. I’ll do that. Thank you. Neapolitan. I mean, come on, dude. More Hercules. Neapolitan is the agnosticism of ice cream. Exactly. You’re right on that. It’s the most postmodern ice cream too. It’s like you get a bit of this, you get a bit of that, but you’ll combine them together to do something that’s not something. Andre’s ice cream wisdom is second to that. Nathaniel, doesn’t the dark equal the mystery? No. Mystery is in the light as well. You can’t look at the sun in Plato’s cave. I haven’t read Plato’s cave yet. We’re getting to that point. Ponder that for a while. We’ll discuss it later. Bubble Viz. Imagine Muppetists’ purity spiraling. I shall. Thank you. I like Muppetists’ purity spiraling. We are definitely going to be using that. We are definitely going to be using that. What is this? What is this nonsense? Why have you plagued me with this? Here. This is… This… Whoops. Hold on. There. All right. Posted. Jesse’s Twitter. You should follow Jesse’s Twitter. It’s quite good. Here we go. Nathaniel. I might need to concede to being a postmodern. Look, we’re all soaked in postmodernism, dude. It’s not your fault. Don’t blame yourself. You’re not Atlas. You’re not the world. You were born into a time. You were thrown into a time and a place. There’s a place I feel I’m missing still. There’s lots of places you’re missing. It’s okay. We’re all missing. That’s why we’re here. We’re navigating the waters together. They are choppy waters, my friend. I don’t feel I’m trying to choose my own hierarchy or frame, but I am an autodidact. Oh, you’re certainly trying to choose your own hierarchy and frame. Not that… I’m an autodidact too, but I don’t choose my own hierarchy and frame. I’m submitted. Mills. Jesus nodded. Too late. Indeed. Jesse nodded. Jesse. Sorry. Also autodidact. Jesus is just there nodding. This is what it has to be. That doesn’t choppy. I need more Twitter followers. I’m going to bring up my Twitter now. You’ve inspired me, Jesse. Where is my Twitter? I don’t even know. Twitter’s hard. Things are hard. The other thing I wanted to bring up too is to be in the world, but not of the world. And that’s how you keep your values center and strong. Because when you’re of the world, you’re all this fluid object, which you’ll never be able to contain or understand. And then you’ll project that onto yourself of wanting to contain and understand, to proposition, to join in that battle of recognition. The only way you may be… One of the proposed ways I think you get outside of that battle of recognition is to not participate in that battle of recognition. You withdraw yourself from the conflict of being of the world. You participate with others. You outsource your sanity. You outsource your understanding of yourself. And you build on your character, which means your actions and your integrity in the story that you’re living in. That’s how you navigate values. That’s how you navigate values. Look, if anybody wants to join us, you have to come on camera, but you’re welcome to join and ask questions directly and all that. I don’t know why Rand is United didn’t post the link correctly, but I posted it, so it’s there now. Yeah, feel free to jump in. We’re here. We’re here to try and help and navigate these things the best we can. I’m out of them all teasers, so the world is at an end. I will ruin the world with Jordan Ammons. If anyone wants to hear about my second watching of Star Trek, as I’m watching Star Trek to go on absolute tirade against the John Feveke video, I think that’s going to be my first reaction video or just tear John Feveke’s premise of Star Trek apart. Man, you watch that first one and you watch it with the lens of this film is about Gnosticism. Did Feveke talk about the first film? No, they didn’t. Of course they didn’t. They never actually talked. They talked objectively about Star Wars and not Star Wars. They talked objectively about Star Trek without actually talking about the values of this. They just assumed this is the value of Star Trek. Well, this is the first 20 minutes I watched anyway, which got me so irate. The whole point of Modern is they avoid value. Meditation and prayer are the same for them, except that prayer is bad and meditation is okay because autodidactism. Wait, what? How did you get there, John? But he does. Not just him, Sam Harris, all these guys. They get there reliably. They’re like, well, because you know your own values, they’re all Nietzsche. You can’t create your own values. Meditation is an acceptable ritual, but prayer is not an acceptable ritual. Well, we could go dark here. No, but that’s what they’re saying. Yeah. No, they will actually go darker because you’re an individual from a certain ethnicity or cultural group will allow that prayer. But the one that is a part of the makeup of the West, right? And the makeup of the West is actually in the modernistic mind, the makeup of the West is actually West of Germany, not West of Rome. Right. They’re actually breaking that up. East of Germany is literally the East of Russia. That’s why we’ve always been at the war with the East, which is not technically true at all. So how is, okay, so we have socialism. Do I even need to go here? There’s lots of that. Socialism belongs in space, in fantasy. Socialism belongs in space. Yeah, fire socialism to the sun. Yes. Where it belongs. Right. How is Star Trek Gnostic? Okay. Specifically, we’re talking about the first movie. All of Star Trek is not Gnostic. But the first movie, like the first, a classic Star Trek is certainly not Gnostic in the way that the first movie is. The first movie is horribly Gnostic. Like it’s just like Gnosticism on steroids pumped up on cocaine or something. It’s like, wow. So the whole story is that the human race sent out an object called a satellite into the universe to capture all the universe could be. They sent out a container to trap all the knowledge and wisdom outside of, not inside, but outside. And then it’s meant to come back to Earth. In its coming back to Earth, it comes back to it as a primordial storm, a darkness of waters, which are meant to descend upon the Earth. And inside of that dark waters is this seven lays of Dante’s hell that they go through to get to a data-driven computerized hell that contains that satellite that wants to fuse with an object, which is this outsider, this other alien race, which has been possessed by a force greater than itself. And then in order to complete the story or to complete the mission that we have sent it off, the thing is returning back to itself and wants to fuse with the human race to transcend the human race in order to become like God or like mankind. But it’s actually a new, the new fundamental being or to return to even more chaos. What is the value stated in Star Trek? The value is to explore, right? And gain new knowledge. The beyond, essentially. Gnosticism is the worship of knowledge. That’s what it is. Now there are implications from it and people tend to point to the implications of the Gnosticism and that’s fair. But yeah, actually, oh, bye males, have fun. But actually the Gnosticism is just the worship of knowledge over the worship of being. And that leads to things like emergence is good. So even classic Star Trek, the mission is to seek out new life, right? And new civilizations, right? Without ever talking about where this new life and new civilizations came from, it’s presumed. But it’s not stated, which is fair in Christendom, that would work fine. When you take it out of Christendom, now you have a problem because you removed it from the frame. Well, it’s pointing towards the end of life. It’s pointing towards being. We know that being is good, so it’s pointing towards the good, wouldn’t you say? No, it’s pointing to the beyond. It’s beyond. Beyond that. So the being is located in the beyond. So the being is located in a context. The beyond is decontextualized. The continued revolution, essentially. It’s the continued exploration of new civilizations. So emergence is good, not being. Emergence is good. And you can see that because, and it’s funny because it doesn’t work, right? Sometimes they go to the alien race, the alien race tries to destroy them. Maybe this emergence thing isn’t always good, right? But it’s fundamentally an emergence is good narrative. And that’s the narrative it’s pointing to, even though that narrative is wrong. It’s fundamentally incorrect. You can’t transcend your being. You can in the first Star Trek movie. Not without attitude. Exactly, exactly, Andrei. Exactly. Yeah. Didn’t you watch the Matrix? Jesse, you transcend his being. There will be a Matrix dream and it will be violent. Yes, yes, we will both get worked up. Courtney, curiosity for the unprepared brings darkness. Look, I like the way John Brevicki talks about this, actually. John has some good, oh, you know what? I should put that on the server. I have a section on my Discord server. I’m just gonna make a coffee. I’ll be back. Okay, that’s fair. Yeah, you guys can abandon me, right? That’s fine. One of John Brevicki’s good points, where’s my channel on John Brevicki’s actual good points? Because I do keep a list of them. Brevicki, great concepts. I’m going to type this in now. So one of John Brevicki’s really good point is the axis of awe and horror. Okay, good. Now I have made a note of that on my Discord server, the Mark of Wisdom. Thank you very much. Join my Discord server. It’s awesome. We have great discussions almost all the time. And then what does that mean? That means you can encounter something bigger than you, and you could have one of two responses. Either, oh my goodness, I’m gonna get crushed and die and fair. Like maybe that should be the response. Again, I’m not here to give you answers. Or you go, wow, the world is so much bigger than I realized, and it’s so much more wonderful. And cats could come on the camera. Cat, at least show your cute face. Andrea is an adorable cat, but it’s not showing its cute face. So curiosity can lead you to the axis of awe and horror. And which one you go with is an aspect. Right? It’s how you’re viewing the world that you’re framing. Hopefully that helps, Courtney, if not, you know, and feel free to jump in. Ethan, PMs are children of materialism. True. They are just pointing out the modern materialists, that the things they hold to be valuable are not intrinsically valuable, which is actually true. That, ah, I hate to give postmoderns any credit, but that is not an incorrect statement. Sigma, tri-electric, to become new worlds, to bring forth new realization, to boldly become what no one has become before. Yeah, well. Well, Ethan, but modern materialists can’t push back because they can’t see the vertical causality. Right. Actual value. That is correct. William, matrix, man in the machine, man in machine. Yes. Ethan, and the postmoderns are exploiting this weakness of moderns as a means to give themselves power. I don’t know. I don’t like this postmoderns moderns thing. Benjamin Franklin, I have a late question. I was driving. Kind of an ironic question. Are any of your questions not ironic? How do we know that knowledge is bad? Do we even know it? Yes. Knowledge is evil. That’s why eating of the fruit caused a fall. There you go. Problem solved. Uh-oh. Elizabeth. Yay, Elizabeth. Four official languages in Switzerland, German, French, Italian, and Romance. And the up is a problem. What? What do you mean the up is a problem? See, everyone’s happy Elizabeth’s here. Even Ethan. Courtney, I mean the tree of knowledge of good and bad, or good and evil, I think. I think actually mature might be incorrect about that, dare I say it. I think it Matthew Pigeot’s content here. Yeah, I agree. I love Matthew Pigeot. Obviously, he boosted my channel. And I love his book. So I think it’s good and evil. I think bad is the horizontal and evil is the vertical and goods on both, which is where we get confused. But it also creates the triangles. I don’t think it’s. Yeah. I don’t know. I mean, it’s the usage of the knowledge before you’re ready that is bad. Not the knowledge itself. And sure, it’s confusing and it’s hard to frame correctly. Then you’re framed. The joke is how do we know that knowledge is bad? Well, yeah, the joke is ridiculous. There are different types of knowledge. It’s another great insight of John Breveke, the different types of knowledge. I only have two in my model, or actually in our model. I have four types of information and two types of knowing. That’s on navigating patterns and the knowledge engine video, which Andre was a key part of developing. William Branch, nuclear physics knowledge is bad. Yeah. Well, it can be used for bad things. That’s for sure. That’s the problem. It’s not the knowledge itself that’s bad. It’s what you do with it. Right. It’s that pointing in the value that creates the problem. That’s intention and action. And the thing is, you can value war and you can value killing. And, you know, the value is going to happen. The question is, is it spread across the bottom of the triangle or is it moving towards the top of the triangle? Is it pointed up? Right. Ethan. Oh, here we go. Postmodernism is evil and must be destroyed. Okay. I actually like what my buddy Jonathan says. Postmodernism is a civilization destroying mind virus. This is correct. It also makes it evil and a parasitoid. And yes, it should should go away. Welcome back, Andre. Are you all come? Oh, there we go. I’ve got my tail save this little coffee. I am glad you guys are back because I know I’m going to leave. Go ahead, Jesse. Take it away. Postmodernism is evil. Well, this, okay. This goes back to the bias of perspective, right? And it goes back to this myth of completion. Um, maybe controversially, we won’t be able to defeat postmodernism. That’s, that’s the thing. I think we actually have to, if it is a storm, which is the way I think Star Trek actually has the right idea there. If it is a storm, it will pass. I don’t think we can actually, I think opposing the thing that the parasite, right? This is the whole phenomena of the leech. If you try to pull the leech off too quickly, you’re going to cause the leech to go away. And then you’re going to have if you try to pull the leech off too quickly, you’re going to cause bleeding and all sorts of bacterial infections, right? You either have to apply salt and light. There’s some Christianity for you, or you have to let you have to apply some heat as well. But you don’t fundamentally destroy the thing. You just destroyed the thing that it’s, you destroyed the attachment of it, of the parasite to its subject matter or to your leg or to your arm or whatever the leech is. So that’s my contentious argument there is. And sometimes too, if you’re in a storm, like you just have to wait it out. I think that’s the Christian model too, is that it’s quite a seasonal model. It’s also why Christians have the model of Jubilee, of this sort of cyclical nature of being enslaved or being sort of contracted or being under someone’s authority for a certain time. And then things are renewed after that. And then there’s a sense of freemen of the obligation. So this is where you get into the bias of the perspective, which is why I’m starting here. It’s like if your perspective is that we just need to smash everything, you’re actually not going to, you’re doing just as much damage as the evil postmodernists. I think you actually have to be very surgical and very tactical, aware of where these parasites or where the corruption is. And then you can actually mitigate, you can mitigate mold too. There’s a sense that you can cause mold to recede. So it depends again, it depends on how you want to poetically frame it. I’ve just suggested two things there, that you can see that it’s a mold, you can see it as a parasite or you can see it as an animal or a spirit that you’re trying to destroy. I don’t think that’s the right framing for some of the reasons I just listed. Some of them are obvious, some of them are not. The other sense too is the myth of completion. So if you think that you can just destroy the thing over a certain period of time, there’s plenty of stories about trying to kill sons of empires and what would be other examples, trying to force the cycle to self-complete, which only causes another cycle of hatred and violence. Actually, that’s the right. When you say about the passage of time as well though, I think with postmodernism, it’s sort of destroying itself in a sense. It’s already shifted to metamodernism with the people who are trying to apply it. Metamodernism is even more vaguely constrained and defined compared to postmodernism. The constraints and the definition are actually the same. The constraints and the definition will actually cause it to cease. I think that was the trap of postmodernism. It was so fluid. It was this giant big Jackson Pollock indulgence of finding, nostrically finding the authenticity of self-expression. So now that that can only go on so long before the fluidity has to… If it’s a fluid object, it will run in some direction. I think it’s run to the gutter and then because they don’t want it to all spill out, they will start to put gutter lines in or pathways start to define the flow of where this fluidity is going. If you want to find problems, they’re not in systems. Systems do not actually control you. Systems are methods for agents to cooperate. In that cooperation, there is a concentration and manifestation of power. The power is not in the system or the structure or the institution. That’s not where it is. It’s in the people. And so, Ethan, it’s in the grasp for knowledge and the opposition of the granting of knowledge. Right. Right. And I think that’s the problem is that when we misidentify how the world works, let’s suppose we say, oh, well, it’s the tax system that’s forcing us to pay taxes. No, it isn’t. Nothing is forcing you to pay taxes. Are there consequences? There are consequences even if you pay taxes. They may get it wrong and punish you anyway. Now what? There’s no solution in acquiescing to the system. The system is already corrupt because it’s full of corrupt people. Right. And therefore, when you attack the corruption, so when you say this person broke the law and therefore, they’re not eligible to do what they’re doing, that’s proper. When you say that person shouldn’t have been elected to that office because they broke the law, that’s improper. This is too late. But you needed to stop it before the election. It’s not to say you can’t stop it after, but now you have a bigger problem. Yeah. Once they’ve broken the law and anybody can break a law, laws don’t prevent you from breaking them. Laws just point you in the way of what to do and not to do. So they’re just pointers. You break laws all the time every day. It doesn’t matter where you live. There are so many laws, no idea what laws you’re breaking. So if you don’t even know the law, how can you avoid breaking camp? So therefore, law can’t be constraining you. But not to say the law doesn’t point you to ways to constrain yourself, that’s a totally different thing. Or point other people to a way to constrain you, but that’s a totally different thing and you’re confusing those things. And that’s the problem. That’s the problem. Elizabeth, there isn’t knowledge apart from action. Oh, no, of course there is. It’s propositional knowledge, which is devoid of all action. It doesn’t have to be, but it can, like, propositional. Purple talking unicorn has no action, no possible action. Right? Oh, kid woke up. Have to run night or day. Night, Courtney. Grasping versus granting knowledge. Yes, well said, Ethan. We are known. Yes. It is all ritual. Well, look, you can know people’s beliefs, as Peterson points out, right, by their actions. That’s a way of knowing. But what you know is their participatory knowledge, as John Vervecki would say. You don’t know their propositional knowledge. And that’s Peterson’s point. I don’t believe what you say. I believe what you do. So what you say may not lead to an action. Right? Is it knowledge? Is what you’re professing knowledge? It’s a form of knowledge. It’s just a weak form of knowledge. I actually have some notes on here about advice. Advice is always almost 99% based on someone else’s value hierarchy and experience. The thing to mitigate this is does the person have already what you want or know how to do the thing that you want to be able to do? Right. So you need to, when you’re seeking proper advice, you need to either circumvent or get a good understanding of what someone’s values are. And maybe do they, or do they not align to yours? Then maybe don’t seek advice from that person unless you just want to argue with them and debate them. Or you want their values. Like what are your values? These are my values. What are your values? Contrast is good. How do you know if your values are good or bad? You need contrast to see, buddy. That’s it. Elizabeth, and you don’t need to look up to act. Well, no, you don’t need to, but you really should. Haven’t an answer already joined? Well, I don’t know about that. Surely doesn’t look that way to me. Ethan, they’ve been disjointed. This is the look, I’ll give it to you again. I know this is, this is so hard. It’s hard because it’s easy and the implications are huge. They’re Peterson’s implications, right? Like maybe everything you do matters. We co manifest reality. We stand between that which is above, which is below the ethereal or spiritual and the material. And we join them. We do this. This happens as the result of our thrownness of our creation, right? It happens. Okay. That means that we co manifest reality. It doesn’t pre-exist us at all. Physics actually says this, called the observer problem. You can look it up. You’re not getting around the observer problem. A bunch of people claim you don’t know. No, they don’t. None of them do. You just, you look real close. You’ll see. It’s like the string theory of people saying they solved the big bank. No, they didn’t. They just made a larger number of questions than what caused the big bank that are equally, if not harder to answer, right? It’s the same thing. No one has solved the observer problem. No one’s going to solve the observer problem. The observer problem is what’s called a hard limit of reality. It’s not that hard to figure out. We co manifest reality. That is what we call the co manifest reality. That is what the collapse of the wave function or whatever other system you want to work with. I know there’s more than the Copenhagen interpretation. No, I actually do know this. Sorry, guys. I’m actually well-studied. I hate to break it to you. There is no way around it. If you actually talk to physicists, and I used to live in Boston, so I did, MIT, Harvard, Boston University, Northeastern University, a bunch of other places, actually talk to them. They know they don’t know this. They are well aware that physics doesn’t know this, can’t solve the observer problem. They know they can’t solve the observer problem. They’re well aware of this. You aren’t because you’ve been fooled by evil people, but they’re evil, so don’t be fooled by them. That’s still my way. And there is also the fall in heaven. Yes. So there is a fall in heaven now, but it’s still the same pattern. Separation of something from its vertical causality. That’s what we’re dealing with. That’s the problem of value. Value doesn’t exist when you separate vertical causality. That’s what’s causing the loss of values and the loss of understanding of virtue and the loss of the ability to engage with the transcendentals. Can you explain vertical causality to me again? Sure. So horizontal causality is maybe formal cause for Aristotle. Mark, do you want to finish eating first? No. I love your nomins. The horizontal causality is the materialism, right? Yep. So if you go with Aristotle, it’s formal plus material cause, which is the starting point plus the material unfolding, right? What are the other two causes? They’re final and efficient. Those are vertical. The final cause is first in intent and last in action. Why is it first in intent? Intent is in the future. It’s in the potential. No. Where’s that coming from? It doesn’t exist in the here and now. It exists in the future. But where’s the future? The future is on the vertical. It’s not on the horizontal The future is on the vertical. It’s not on the horizontal because it’s not set. The past is in the horizontal because it’s done. It’s finished. You can’t change it. That doesn’t mean you can understand it just because it doesn’t change because you can’t understand the past either. History can be interpreted pretty much endlessly. You could be some bastard prick Oxford Brit who just totally misinterprets the entire American Revolution in some ridiculous frame that is a historical and completely wrong according to the text and nobody will even question it. They’ll go, oh, the rest of history podcast is wonderful. No, it’s not. It’s a line scumbags. I don’t want to tell you. I’m not saying it’s an invalid interpretation. I’m saying it’s leaving out a lot because you always leave out a lot in history because A, you weren’t there typically and B, there’s a lot you didn’t see in the moment and there’s a lot you can’t even see after the fact. We can look back on any event. Andre, let’s look back. Do you even remember the sequence of events for the breakthrough on the parabolic way of knowing? No, I only remember getting the tarot cards out. Yeah, you were there, dude. Why did you get the tarot cards out? Do you remember? I think I just bought them. You would have had to talk with PBK and you’d mention in your past, like you lived with hippies or something. Unless I came afterwards, I’ve got high anxiety. See, this is the thing. All of the things you’re saying are 100% true. However, what actually happened was we were working for something like two hours on a list of archetypes because Captain Muppet over here was convinced that the problem that we had to solve, which actually we had already solved to some extent, was the realm of transformative coupling. I really got to do those slides someday. The realm of transformative coupling needed to be explained with respect to the T loss of it, which is to get to archetypes. We were trying to list the archetypes. We were working very hard on this problem for weeks, for weeks. This particular day, Manuel, for some reason wasn’t around, which just seems inconceivable nowadays because he was always online back then. Don’t forget about now, he was always online. He was in my time zone, which was just terrible for him. So happy back in his own time zone. He wasn’t around. It was just you and me. We’d been working on this on and off. We were working for like one and a half or two hours. You said, let’s take a break. I just got some tarot cards. The whole tarot card discussion was couching this longer discussion about PBK and the dirty smelly hippies I used to live with. Then you took out the tarot cards and went, you want to take a break. Of course, I don’t. What is a break? That doesn’t exist. My fans were fever. We don’t recognize such bizarre terms that don’t exist. I’m like, whatever, we’ll take a break. Andres was taking a break. Fair. I don’t know what breaks are. So it’s probably good when somebody tells me to take a break. I should probably submit and listen, which I almost always do. We took a break. You took out your tarot cards and you were doing the thing. Then that brought back all these memories because to your point, we had been talking about that earlier. Then what happens is, how do tarot cards work? How do they relate to archetypes? Oh, there’s two types of tarot cards. We went down this whole rabbit hole and in a way, we didn’t solve the problem we said we were working on because that was not a valid problem. But we solved the bigger problem, which was the four types of quote knowing at the time, although it’s since been changed to information. There’s a historical event with so much richness in it. And we could go back, how did we get to four? How did we link that back to Mary Cohen, who was already there? Because she was already there. She had her way of knowing already, although she added it to the other four and made five, which we said, nah, we’d already figured out the perspectival is not a way of knowing. We can prove that pretty much pretty easily. Actually, it takes some understanding. It takes some time, but it’s not groundbreaking. It’s kind of obvious. So that one historical event has so much richness to it that that was like 10 minutes. And I just talked about it for more than 10 minutes. And we didn’t even touch on all the things you remembered and all the things other people remembered about the story we told after. It just unfolds forever. That’s the problem with history. We cannot know history either. That’s the frustrating part. We can’t know that. I can’t know the American rebellion correctly because it’s not a revolution. I can’t know that. I know a bunch about it, but I can’t know that. That’s not possible. Yeah, that is right. And even as you saw me trying to think back to the events, I was correct in guessing them and I knew them, but I second guessed myself because I felt like I was analyzing something that was unsure of. Right. And the chronicity of it. I remembered that I thought I referenced your talk with PBK, but I wasn’t 100% sure because it felt like that came before and that would have been a linking context, but it could have also been after and I could have gone, oh, this is why Mark was interested in the tarot cards because of his story he told after. Sac. Multitasking. It’s efficient. Maybe. Nathaniel. I think Mark is actually meta-modern. There’s no such thing as meta-modern. See my video on meta. Meta is not a useful term to use ever because it never refers to anything and it cannot. It’s impossible to use in the language. Gnostic. Definitely not gnostic. Propositional. No, I don’t. He’s not getting it. This is about muppetism. No, just kidding. I have to run family time. I’m glad. I hate meta-modern. It drives me nuts. Loss of vertical causality equals fail. Okay, fair enough. Final cause is T loss. Yes, I agree. Beginning and end. Yes. What is this assignment? Your identity has been negotiated for you by Ethan, Jesse. You are the first mate muppet. I don’t know. That could be true. He has better values than I do. Andre, our first chat together, our first proper chat together was that was fire. I wish we recorded that because once we got in, like, Apex Twin and then it was just, it was on. It was like, oh, wow. I actually didn’t think about that. Why didn’t we record that? It was also our first time talking and I think that element would have made things like, we wouldn’t have been so open and sort of just like going all over the place. It would have been like, oh, let’s discuss the salience landscapes and let’s all use big language. Exactly. Yeah. Because you want to get to the insights as quickly as possible and you want the enthusiasm to come through on the topic too. I think that’s a big thing I’m trying to, I guess, negotiate with myself is only to talk on things that I’m enthusiastically because you want to transfer the spirit and you want to communicate a message or you want to signal to someone your values, right? So it depends on, yeah, you can say a couple different ways. Yeah. You want to embody them and get into that conversational flow state rather than be stuck in a formalism where it’s like, this is the structure, like, can’t go outside of it. And if you go outside of it, oh, it’s not going to be a good video. Instead, it’s like, you identify against, it’s like, it doesn’t have to be a video. Let’s not care. Let’s just like connect. Yeah. This is the problem. Ethan’s got it nailed. Meta, mega, magic, modern, monster. There we go. He’s got all the M’s. I love alliteration. Yeah, I’ll take it. I’m all in on the alliterate. All alliterative things are automatically true because they are alliteration and therefore, and state that as an axiomatic truth of the universe. Alliteration is good and therefore, how’s that? Yeah. Automatic axiomatic alliteration. Yes. Automatic axiomatic alliteration is always good. What else do we have? Nobody else wants to jump in. Why does nobody want to jump? Nobody loves us. Why? Why is this? I guess we’re answering everybody’s questions perfectly. That’s what it is. I like metamodern Gnostic propositional tyrant. That’s a good summary. The thing about modernism is it fails under its own definition because saying it oscillates between modernism and postmodernism. So you can’t even decide what it’s doing. It’s just like, oh, well, it’s a bit of both. We can’t decide. It’s even more fluid than postmodernism. Well, this is the thing. I was trying to get to this. It’s essentially a beaver dam. It’s trying to contain its own spirit. But eventually, if a dam, if it’s not properly regulated, will just contain bacteria and kill itself. Which is what I think will happen to metamodernism. Because it’s also trying to develop a philosophy of a type of normal, a type of normalcy. What’s the guy’s name? Oh, he’s got a beard. Anyway. Chomsky. No, not Chomsky. Chomsky’s an idiot. It’ll come to me. Anyway, I had to unfollow him. He had a book that was basically a reaction to Peterson and doing the complete opposite to Peterson on the 12 anti-rules. It’s like, just be normal. You’re not going to be accepted. It’s kind of like a parasitic cynicism that had truth to it. It has truth to it. It’s like perhaps trying to be this authentic self right. But what is wrong, but what he’s also doing at the same time is saying there is no such thing as exceptionalism. That was one of the things. I think that was the first thing I was like, oh, okay, I’m out. It’s the same thing that happened to me with Viveki too when he said, oh, we need to get beyond grand narratives. I just went, fuck off. I was like, this guy, if he’s in a grand narrative, his whole cause is about a grand narrative and yet he wants to break grand narrative. It was just like, wow, way to be self-defeating, man. That’s the men modernism thing. I think that’s coming to me, but I think that’s what it is. It’s a self-defeating proposition that’s very different to what I’m trying to propose with muppetism, which is about humility. It’s also about proper character, about being a character and not trying to seek out to be a character or trying to attain all the things you need to be a character. Having a good character and not trying to be a character. Yes, yes, yes. More than likely, you already have enough experiences to build a sense of good character on. If you don’t feel like you have enough experiences to build yourself on, they will come to you whether you like it or not because shit happens. Sorry, I’m going to go through too much. It’s true. If you don’t have enough life experiences, they’ll just happen. Oh, Zizak. Is it Zizak, the crack addict? He didn’t write a response book, but he’s seen as the opposite of Peterson, even though he’s so vastly not. He’s a galleon. Well, he’s also angry and trolling people because he’s angry still, which is fine. Yeah, he’s a big troll. The cocaine is a bit much. I mean, I’m just saying. No, he has a sinus. No, he doesn’t. He’s on coke, guys. I don’t know what to… Really, at some point, really? Yeah, they all do the same thing. They don’t know it. I did know somebody who was literally on coke. She could not admit it. I mean, yeah. No, I’m not. What are you talking about? I’m not on coke. What are you talking about? I’m not. No. The story doesn’t ring true for me because everyone I’ve ever been around on cocaine, that’s all they talk about, is just loving cocaine and that they’re on cocaine. They want to tell everybody. They will if they’re partying, but if they’re hiding it from you or more to the point, hiding it from you as well, even after the fact… Oh, no, I wasn’t. No, just because I was watching my friend’s house, who supplies me with cocaine for free, doesn’t mean they traded me cocaine to watch their house. Really? That’s your story? Because I only do cocaine when I’m with people. Yeah, it’s something else. Because alcoholics never drink alone. Do you ever meet an alcoholic to drink alone? They all tell you that. No word of a lie. I’m not even joking. Every alcoholic I’ve ever had a conversation with has started with, oh, I don’t drink alone. And I don’t judge people. They get judged by the fact that I don’t drink sometimes, but they all told me they don’t drink alone. And within 20 minutes of conversation with them, they will talk about a time that they drank alone in the past week. Every single one of them, all of them. And I’m not saying every single one in the world does this. I’m just saying this is a pattern of the world that I have noticed because this happens a lot. Yeah. Oh, Hansi. Hansi Freininkart. Never heard of him. He’s a, yeah, he’s a mid-modern. He’s one of the guys that’s basically turned into existence. Never heard of Bevelviz. Never heard of any philosopher making any sense except for A2TMC. Wish he had a YouTube channel. I don’t have Twitter. Working on it. He’s either going to have a YouTube channel or he’s going to come on mine eventually. And then we’ll just get a bunch of videos recorded and then you’ll be able to see them. Yeah. The two things I’m working towards is A, doing a whole series, short series on animals and symbols. So to do it in two to three minutes on just a deep brief of what does this animal mean? How has it meant? What is it and how to notice that sort of phenomena in the world? So same thing with like other symbols. And then I’m working on the critique of Star Trek. Just I think that’ll give me enough of momentum. I think if you, yeah, because the YouTube space is if you make enough of a scene on something, you know, people pay attention to you, but you have to be prepared. This is a thing. You can’t just, yeah. So. It’s a lot of prep. It’s a lot of stuff. Very hard to stand out. More content uploaded to YouTube every minute than you can watch. It’s like, what? And you also want to do things at scale well, because you know, this is the thing. If you value time, which I think is one of my principles is like, don’t waste my time. Like my time is my life. I only have so much life and energy to give. And also, you know, you want to be intimate with those around you. Right. There’s a trade off between the more online you are, the less private you are, because eventually you’re known for things. Right. So whether you’re, you might be private in real life, but technically speaking, in this digital environment, this virtual environment, right. You’re no longer private in. They are actually two separate worlds in some sense. Like, but they do bleed over life, the dreamy and waking state. They do bleed over. And the boundary line between the dream state and the real state is very porous. One of the things I like about what Carl Jung has said, he said that the boundary line is porous. Um, oh, Benjamin Franklin, you know how to get me triggered. What did you think about the Black Mirror Star Trek parody episode? Come on, Jesse, tell us. I skimmed through it. I skimmed through it because it was nonsense. It was boring. Like, like it wasn’t there, but like people enjoyed that because it was nonsense. Right. And there’s a time and place for comedy and there’s a time and place to be thrilled. But it’s, you know, like why participate in something that’s purposely nonsense? It’s not like tongue on cheek. It’s not like Street Fighter where it’s in the most campy movie possible. By the way, Street Fighter is a great movie. And Charlie Manon, one of Australia’s best exports. Yeah. Something even like Caddysack, all those sort of irreverent movies, Ghost Busters, right? Fundamentally, they are nonsense, but there is a value set. There’s other things. There’s a lot more subconscious. Entertainment is good, but entertainment is entertaining. Yes. But it’s fundamentally simple. And the problem is when you’re trying to point at something not simple, so you’re already pointing at an abstraction of Star Trek and you’re trying to parody it, right? Which is a second abstraction. I need a second order of abstraction. That’s not simple. Like you can find entertainment in that, but it’s not entertaining. And it’s not designed to be. It’s designed to be a critique. And critiques are hard. You have to think about them. And it needs presupposed knowledge as well in order to enjoy the entertainment. To be pretty. Exactly. That’s why it’s not entertaining because it presupposes too much knowledge. It’s not nice and simple. Native Black Mirror season was trash, but I haven’t seen it. Except for Beyond the Sea, the Astronaut one. I haven’t seen any of it. Two episodes were good, I think. No, that’s all I was saying. It was a couple good episodes. He’s a good rule for a TV show. I can’t believe it. Very basic guys. It’s been around for almost forever. It’s called Jumping the Shark. A TV show can only last for so long. And you kind of know, this is the best it’s ever going to get. The Walking Dead. When Rick kills his best friend, because his best friend got bitten by a zombie. That was the end of that show. It became something different after that. It jumped the shark. Because the show originally was about this brotherhood and the drama of who was around, who was in a coma, what’s the world become, what’s become of us. As soon as that relationship is severed, whoo, jumps the shark. It becomes a completely different show. And then it did it again, and then it’s doing it again. It’s going to keep doing that. People are kind of addicted to this Jumping the Shark tendency now. But that’s where it came from. Jumping the Shark comes from Happy Days. Happy Days has a certain set of values that it is embodying. Those values get destroyed in the episode where Fonzie literally jumps a shark on a motorcycle. It is the purest example of Jumping the Shark because the wholesomeness of the show, the message of the show, the values of the show were intact until that episode. And then it became about something greater than the simple values that it was showing. It became a complex show unnecessarily for no reason. And look, there’s some other counter examples. You can look at something like How I Met Your Mother. If you haven’t seen How I Met Your Mother, How I Met Your Mother is genius. It is so funny, and it is so good, and it is so topical. If you didn’t live through that time, I can see where you were wicked confused. I love that show so much that one of my friends bought me the Bible, the Bro Bible, whatever the hell it’s called, Matt Coons. It’s freaking hysterical, by the way. But do you see in that show how, in some ways, the first season is the best, and it never gets that good again. But in other ways, some of the subsequent episodes are better than any of the first season episodes. But the first season is still the best season. And there’s another show like that. There’s a bunch of other shows like that. But one show that’s like that, too, where you have this perfect embodiment because it was designed for one season, is Burn Notice. Burn Notice is a fantastic show. And in some ways, the first season is the best, and it never gets any better. And in other ways, there are some really great episodes in subsequent seasons that are not missing. And in both cases, I never saw the end seasons of those shows. Yeah. Burn Notice, I saw maybe first four or five seasons. And the plot devices and the arcs can get really good. But you’ve got to be a fan who’s watching over time. But the first season encapsulates all the characters and their quirks perfectly. His friend, was it Sam, I think he was played by? Sam, yeah. Bruce Campbell. Bruce Campbell, yeah. He plays this older womanizing ex-Navy Seal and just carries around a revolver with him and helps him out on his missions. And then you meet the ex-girlfriend, who was in the IRA or something like that. Yeah. And it’s perfect pairing and you get the plot. It’s not summarized up at the end. And it’s all fourth wall breaking. He’s telling you how the spy business works. It’s pre-John Wick, John Wick. So what does John Wick do? John Wick creates the archetypal killer hero, assassin hero. That’s what John Wick is. He is the embodiment of the archetypal assassin as hero. And Burn Notice is the same thing. It creates, it’s a revival of the spy thriller, except it’s a, in some ways it could be considered a critique, but it’s not actually. It’s not a critique at all, but it could be considered a critique. You can see where the confusion comes in. It’s a revivification of the spy as the sort of the fundamental sort of a thing. Right? And it is archetypal, where he’s describing what makes spies spies. How they think, what they react to, all the little rules. He’s putting all these rules around it in the same way that John Wick does this whole secret organization that runs on a completely different economy in the underground, but it’s right in plain sight, but it’s in the underground, but it’s right in plain sight. Right? And then their rules are different from everybody else’s rules because they’re extremists. Right? They believe either you’re alive or you’re dead. It’s very binary. Right? And then their job is to change people’s state from alive to dead. That’s their whole job. Right? And then there’s all this honor stuff around it, all these rules, and they just tell you the rules. Right? The rules are made explicit by Ian McShane. Ian McShane is awesome. Right? And so, like, it’s the same format, really. And it’s the same sort of critique of critique sort of a thing that just goes on and on and on. And in many ways, how I met your mother is the same thing. Right? He’s an older man talking about his younger days to his children. He’s like, wait a minute, what’s going on? And he’s describing a time and place that they do not live in. Right? And yeah, describing the time and place that the viewer is in. And it’s just like, oh, and it’s well done because it’s done as entertainment. It’s not done as proper critique because it’s not a critique. Right? It is trying to accomplish something by exacerbating virtues and values in a certain way. I think it also, like, both Burn Notice and John Wick sort of utilize a writing technique called I think it’s Chekhov’s gun or something. I can’t, if I got the name right, where, like, the gun is in the first scene and it’s shown in the plot. And then it’s always utilized later. So John Wick, when you say the underground, but it’s not underground, but it is, it’s shown to the audience. Like, this is the underground and you can see it, but it’s assumed to the characters in the story that it is underground. And in Burn Notice, he’s doing his spy work, but he’s sort of winking to the audience and going like, I’m making a bomb. This is how you make bombs. Don’t do this because then the bomb will go like blow up in your face. Right. Right. Right. And this is why spies do this and spies will often do that this way because this is, you know, it’s giving the narrative. It’s giving, it’s breaking the fourth wall. Like John Wick, how does he get back into the game? He digs into his floor. He goes into the underworld. Look at right there. He digs into the floor and suddenly he’s back into the underworld. And then he goes into the fancy pretty city and walks into a building and goes back in time in the building. And now there’s all these rules and those rules are different from all the rules that were in existence before he walked through those doors. And when he’s in those doors, those rules are enforced. And then once he leaves, because he’s gone to the underworld and resurrected his toolkit and shown his profession again, now that he’s gone in and self-identified effectively, right, as the character he was before he walked away, right, he is now re subject or revivified as that character and subject to those rules once again, but also those protections. Right. And it’s very two worlds mythology, right. It’s, it’s so two worlds mythology. It’s, and it’s so obviously two worlds mythology. It just cracks me up when John Ravichy says, we can no longer live in a two worlds. You try to live in a not two worlds mythology, John. I’ll wait here and chuckle while you struggle because anything can happen. It’ll be a two worlds, a muppet ology that he wants to live in. Two worlds muppet ology. Yes. Yes. Well, you can never get the presence of the past, right. It’s just, how do you escape? You can’t like you, you always cast a shadow. Well, and what’s a proper way to do this? So if you don’t know, and you probably don’t, because I engaged, especially when I was younger with a lot of stuff across a lot of decades, there’s the James Bond and you know, there’s danger man or secret agent man, depending which country you’re in, right. And then there’s the prisoner, by the way, best TV show ever made. At least maybe Breaking Bad’s better, but whatever. They’re right there. They’re both right there. Okay. And then there’s the Avengers, the original Avengers series. Oh my God. And like once you understand it, especially the ones with Diana Rigg as Emma Peel. Yeah. Yeah. It’s fantastic, but there’s a reason why it’s fantastic. And, you know, there’s Mission Impossible, the original series, right. Like all this stuff, right. And Get Smart, Get Smart and the original Avengers, right. There’s original, that’s the 60s, I think. That’s very funny. Now, if you watch the original Avengers, and you only really need to watch a few episodes, but if you actually watch it and you understand it, then you can go watch the Spy Who Shagged Me, right. The Mike Myers. And that movie is so much funnier than you know, unless you’ve seen the Avengers. You have no idea how funny the movie is. I was in the theater watching that with my girlfriend at the time. And the movie was announced like a year before it came out. And I was like, oh no, no, no, honey. You need to see this before you will understand it. Because I knew right away when he did it, I’m like, oh, he’s referencing the Avengers. How is he? Because the mystery is how are you going to do that? Because the Avengers is a parody. It’s already a parody of all these other things. Of Mission Impossible, of James Bond, of the Saint. You haven’t seen the Saint, by the way, Roger Moore. Oh my God. I love the Saint. It’s on, no, no, no, the original series is Roger Moore. That’s why he wasn’t James Bond at first. It’s on Samsung TV. You have a Samsung phone, you have Samsung TV for free. They’ve got the Saint, at least a couple of seasons. The Saint is excellent. It’s so cool. Anyway, right. It’s a parody of all these things. It’s a parody, right. And Secret Agent Man or Danger Man, right. It’s a parody of these things. So it’s like, what are you, how are you going to make fun of something that was already making fun of itself? And yet Mike Meyer, being the absolute master that he is, we’re in the theater, because I showed her a bunch of Avengers episodes. We’re in the theater laughing our ever living bones off. We are just all through the thing because we get all the jokes, all the jokes. Everyone else is laughing every once in a while. And we’re like, no, no, this movie is at least 10 times funnier than you realize, because they were older or many of them didn’t know British TV, even if they were old enough to have seen, we’ll say the reruns on PBS or whatever. So they didn’t know that it was great though. It’s absolutely great. I think there’s also another thing like that, that they pointed directly in the movie, because they pointed at the movie In Like Flynn, which I think is another parody. And he goes, oh, In Like Flynn, I love this movie. And it’s the guy in the exact same, the lower tracksuit doing like a dive roll. And he’s just going, oh, this is great. That’s correct. And so that can be done, right? So you’re actually layering, you’re taking something that’s poking fun of itself, and then you’re able to make fun of that in a way that is really funny. Right? These monologue films are terrible, by the way. But yeah. So I can push this further into maybe a less optimistic note. So Peter Sellers did a James Bond movie, right? So yes, it’s called, I’ll get it up. And the thing is, when people think of James Bond as the womanizer. Peter Sellers, the Pink Panther. No, no, no. He also did a James Bond movie that features Woody Allen, at the point of Woody Allen from the bad guys in it. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. This is a Psy-Up. This is a Psy-Up. It’s just embodying his true nature. Well, yeah, Peter. The Pink Panther is a whole other thing. The Pink Panther is what you’re talking about. I saw a video at the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, North Carolina, right outside the airport, by the way, flying to Charlotte. I saw a video of Billy Graham talking to Woody Allen on Woody Allen’s TV show back in the 50s or 60s or whatever the hell it was. Holy crap, man. Knowing what I know now, you watch him on that and you’re like, oh yeah, you can see it. Like you can totally see all his badness right there on TV. Oh yeah. Dude, I practically fell over. Because I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t even know he had a TV show. I had no idea. It was an interview show in New York. And I saw the interview. And this is obvious. It’s way before his movie career. It’s way before all that. And I saw the question that he asked and the way that he asked it to Billy Graham and the way Billy Graham answered it. And I was just like blown away. I’m like, you can just feel the Satan emanating from this guy. And I’m like, wow. I had no idea it was that obvious that early on. But it’s called it’s Casino Royale. It’s 1967. We’re right in the middle of the Big Si up. See my non-existent for more. But so when people associate James Bond, they don’t associate James Bond to the book at that point from that movie. Or they don’t even associate James Bond to the Sean Connery movies. They start associating James Bond to this Peter Sellers movie. In this Peter Sellers movie, we have outrageous gadgets. We have the womanizing in full force. And we have the breaking of realism, spycraft into this sort of fictional, fantasy narrative going on. From that point onwards, you start to see the James Bond movies becoming like the parody of itself. And that’s where you get to the ridiculous Roger Moore days. Roger Moore? Yeah, yeah. Right. Where the books are no longer even important to the identity of James Bond. The identity of the James Bond character is now pointing to the parody, the parasitic parody of James Bond in Casino Royale. The thing starts to become its own of conspiracy in that sense. It starts to cover itself up and its true identity. Because if you go back, which is one of the things I’m doing in the room, as I’m reading on the James Bond novels, guys, I can’t tell you how differently and how more definitive and how much the contrast is stark from the reality of those films and how they’ve shifted over time and what that means in terms of cultural significance. So have you seen PBK talk to Dr. Jim about this? Where Dr. Jim’s like, well, James Bond is non-generative, right? Because he doesn’t get married. That’s right. That’s in the books. That’s like, like, it’s like book two. All these things are nonsense. People referring again, they’re referring to the parasitic parody of the thing rather than the thing itself. So in the books, is he married? Does he have… No, the implication is if you are in the Secret Service, you can’t get married because you can’t be trusted. Right. Right. Even the secretaries, right, they can only have relationships with people in that, in the inner circle, like long lasting relationships. Right. They’re forced into a parasitic relationship. It’s a trap. Right. Because, well, you can have all… And furthermore, the relationships in the books that Bond has aren’t propositional or explicit or they’re not exploitative. They just, they happen to be a part of the narrative of that story, but he’s not exploiting the females in the books as far as I see them so far for like their own devices. They happen to be persons involved in the story. They’re not there to like… Transactionary. It’s not transactional. That’s the word I’m looking for. So yeah, but that starts happening because of Christina Royale. That’s where that node begins. And that’s where you, when you have, when Goldeneye comes out, you kind of have a return to form, but you have a return to form in an even darker fashion because that’s where you start to see the realism come back, but it’s a fake realism in Goldeneye and the Pierce Brosnan films. It’s no longer grounded in tradition. It’s this realism grounded in post-modernism. And then from there, you get to the Daniel Craig movies where Bond is no longer masculine or properly embodying masculine. Oh lord, those are terrible. Well, like, it was refreshing to see a person fully embodying a type of persona, but it’s just a very delicious persona, which is why, again, why people like Skyfall so much because Skyfall is the only one out of, say, the last 20 years of Bond where there’s an authentic story being told, where it has a sense of completion of the character or associations that you can make to that character. It’s before you couldn’t make those associations. However, if you go back and actually read the books in Bond, there are implicit story notes following through. It’s not necessarily episodic, but things are slowly being revealed about Bond and his character. But it would be good to meld that with the anadromous work on the music, because the different art forms move at different speeds. This is what everyone gets wrong. This is one of the things that struck out to me about how we got here. We had this argument the other day again. I’m like, I understand that you were of a certain age when Kurt Cobain died, and that was seminal, but it wasn’t seminal for me because I was like, oh good, you’re a lazy guitarist. I love the music. I actually do like the music, lazy guitarist, period, end of statement. All of that is embodied. Seattle is the core center of a lazy artist. And I hate laziness. I hate laziness. Laziness pisses me off. You can be lazy all day long. Don’t do it near me because I will call it out. California is just lazy. The whole state is just laziness. Not everybody in it, but the state embodies laziness. And that’s partly because of the good weather, right? Like fair enough, but also like laziness bad. Like no. The state’s lazy itself. It’s always on fire. Well, that’s because they’re lazy and they don’t want to do the work to make sure the fires don’t happen. And then they get mudslides and then they complain about that too. But it’s really their own laziness that causes all this because they don’t want to do the hard work. They want nature to take care of itself. It’s like, okay, but nature is going to kill you if it takes care of itself because it doesn’t care about you when you don’t care about it. Oh, how interesting, Mark. Yeah. How interesting. Nature doesn’t care about your feelings. Not unless you care about it. Yeah. But it can. Right. Well, and so look, what do we think our topic is next week? Do we have any thoughts on next week’s topic? What did we say? What did we agree on? I don’t think we agreed on anything because I don’t have anything here. Oh, no, I don’t have anything. I did put forth worship. Yeah, I did put forth more higher abstractions that have bigger implications. We could talk about pragmatism. We could talk about what else is in my notes? Man, these notes are ridiculous. I gotta rearrange them. We could talk about postmodernism. We could talk about miracles. In miracles, that’s it. Miracles and potential. Sounds good. Miracles it is. Actually, it helps us continue on this series of what I’ve been calling the great train of being. Right. Because once you have values, you’re able to see that miracles do manifest themselves in the world. Right. Sorry. No, no, I agree. We can do potential and miracles. Those are related in important ways. In the same way I managed to smash together values and relationship. Thank you, Jesse. Right. Oh, yeah, we can do that. That’s possible. Yeah, I think that’s super important. So yeah, why don’t we tentatively, I don’t know what the topic will be exactly. But, oh, thanks, Andre. I will. We can also do consequences as well. Yeah, I mean, I think that we’ll figure out a better title. But yeah, roughly the topic will be around miracles and potential. I think that’s a reasonable way to do it. So. Final thoughts? All right, everybody. On that note, we’re going to sign off. And thank you very much for joining. We’re looking for more participants next time. But understand if you can’t, we don’t want to be on camera or whatever. Fair enough. Always welcome comments, likes, all that stuff. Trying to get the channel boosted up. Andre’s hard at work on the website. Jesse’s completed, I think, all the work for the podcast. So we’re going to podcastize everything. And we appreciate your engagement. To whatever extent, we’re happy to engage further. And we look forward to future engagement. Tell your friends, tell your family, force people at gunpoint, whatever it takes. Thank you very much. Have a lovely evening. We value you. We are valuable. Thank you. And we value in you in in embodying values with us.