0:00

Howdy, this is Jim Rutt and this is

0:02

The Jim Rutt Show. Listeners

0:11

have asked us to provide pointers to some of

0:13

the resources we talk about on the show. We

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now have links to books and

0:18

articles referenced in recent podcasts that

0:20

are available on our website. We

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also offer full transcripts. Go to

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jimruttshow.com. That's

0:27

jimruttshow.com. Today's

0:32

guest is my good friend and

0:34

longtime collaborator, Jordan Hall. Jordan

0:37

is a successful tech entrepreneur and

0:39

is well known for his insights

0:41

into the ongoing global transition marked

0:44

by swift technological progress and the

0:46

potential for major societal shifts. Jordan

0:49

was part of the original Game B.O.G.s

0:52

back in 2013, and he

0:54

was the very first person I was there,

0:56

I'll swear it's true, to use

0:58

the terms Game A and Game B in that Game B

1:00

kind of sense. Welcome,

1:03

Jordan. Thanks, Jim. Yeah,

1:06

it's great to have you back. He's been

1:08

on the show a few times in the past. We actually

1:10

booked this episode way back in October when

1:12

I reached out to Jordan and suggested it'd

1:14

be great to talk to him about his

1:16

new Medium essay titled From City to Civium.

1:19

He was a little reluctant, so I hounded

1:21

him a bit until he reluctantly

1:23

agreed and we stuck it out in February. What

1:25

the fuck? Either one of us will die by

1:27

then and he wouldn't have to do it, whatever.

1:29

But here we are and I haven't died, nor

1:31

has he. Well, as it turned out, this time

1:33

turned out to be interesting for

1:35

another reason as well, which is that Jordan

1:37

has relatively recently come out as a

1:39

committed and baptized Christian. And so this

1:41

episode is going to actually be two

1:43

parts, but with a nice bridge that

1:46

connects the two. First part,

1:48

we're going to talk about Jordan's thinking

1:50

about Civium, From City to

1:52

Civium, and then we're going to talk about his

1:55

experiences I've had, and

1:57

then we're going to bridge from that formed

2:00

Jordan's big life change, become a committed Christian, then we're

2:02

going to talk about that. So that's what

2:04

we're going to talk about today. So

2:07

let's start with Sivium in the

2:09

paper from City to Sivium. The

2:11

first part of the analysis is

2:13

pretty strongly grounded on the

2:16

work of Jeffrey West, Luis Betancourt, and

2:18

some others on scaling laws.

2:20

Why don't you give us a

2:22

quick refresher on both biological

2:25

scaling laws and on

2:27

what Jeff West and friends have found

2:29

about city type scaling laws? Yeah,

2:31

all right. So the basic insight is

2:34

that they were looking at different relationships

2:36

associated with scale. For example, if

2:38

you take the mass of an animal and you double

2:40

it, what happens to the metabolic rate of that animal.

2:44

And what they discovered was that

2:46

as they went across a very

2:48

large number of biological systems, different

2:50

species, but even for example, looking

2:52

at trees and animals or forests

2:54

and trees that they

2:56

kept finding a sublinear scaling factor.

2:59

What that means is if

3:01

I take a mouse, for example, and I

3:03

take a look at its mass to metabolic

3:06

ratio, and then I double its mass.

3:08

So now it's like a really big mouse, then I double it again.

3:10

So now I've got a rat and I double it again. I've got

3:12

an ogini thing and I keep going up until I have an elephant.

3:15

Every time I double the mass, I

3:17

don't double the metabolic rate. In fact,

3:19

I increase the metabolic rate by 85%.

3:23

Actually, it's 75% on the biological

3:25

scaling law. It's a three-fourths

3:27

law. And so what

3:29

you end up getting is you get an asymptote, which

3:31

in principle would be that as you get up to

3:33

very, very large animals like a blue whale, or if

3:35

you had a theoretically zero gravity animal that was 100

3:38

times more massive than a blue whale, the metabolic

3:40

rate becomes relatively small in relationship to what it

3:42

would be if it was on a linear scale.

3:45

And there's a lot of implications of this. The

3:47

consequences of that are significant. In fact, the

3:50

consequences of that are how biology

3:52

works in the world. Yeah, it's

3:54

actually a fundamental rule of why animals

3:56

are the size they are and the

3:59

speed they are. And it shapes

4:01

the food chain all kind of stuff I

4:03

actually did some of the math and just

4:05

as an example compare a mouse and an

4:07

elephant Elephants about 20

4:09

times less energetic per pound of meat

4:11

that is a mouse for instance Which

4:13

is 20 times is a

4:16

lot, you know, damn it's kind of

4:18

interesting and curious and this is as

4:20

you said This is a ubiquitous law

4:22

across all known biology and very interesting

4:25

hugely powerful I will say Jeffrey and

4:27

his crew Jim Brown, etc. They did

4:29

not actually discover this empirical law But

4:32

they found the theoretical reasons why it's

4:34

the case just to be clear they

4:36

get credit for I don't

4:38

know why he didn't Get a Nobel

4:40

Prize, but I think he's just not

4:43

known in the biomedical field They should

4:45

have gotten one for this but they

4:47

didn't but it's that level of work

4:49

So animals scaling sub linearly the bigger

4:51

they get the less intense per pound

4:53

of meat Essentially a law you cannot

4:55

violate this law turns out. Well with

4:57

cities they found something very different out

5:01

Let's put corporations in between because they're

5:03

the human systems and they

5:05

discovered that for example Corporations and cities

5:07

had some of the same scaling laws. So

5:10

some aspect of human systems I don't mean

5:12

human bodies but human systems also

5:14

have a sublinear scaling So for example as you

5:16

add an additional piece of meat

5:18

additional human to a large organization The

5:22

income or the revenue does not increase linearly.

5:24

There's an asset to it Which anybody who's

5:26

been in a large company knows that feeling

5:29

but then as you point out they

5:32

discovered in the context of cities a

5:34

very very different curve and it's our

5:36

Precisely the opposite instead of sublinear scaling

5:38

they discovered super linear scale which

5:40

is to say that as you

5:42

double the population of the city you

5:45

increase the GDP or the income

5:47

per capita and other things like

5:50

Innovation and we'll talk about some other ones as well. But I

5:52

want a spoiler alert just judge them by

5:54

1.15 And so as

5:57

you double the number of people in a city with a

5:59

go to study from of one million

6:01

to the two million, the GDP

6:03

per capita increases, which

6:05

means of course the growth GDP increases

6:07

quite substantially. Yeah, we'll talk

6:09

about some of the other things, you know, both positive

6:12

and negative things that are scaled at the 115% super

6:14

linear scaling. And

6:16

this makes a huge difference, those of

6:18

you who are math inclined, as Jordan

6:20

said, if you have sublinear scaling, it

6:23

bends, the curve slows down, stops rising

6:25

as fast. If you have super linear

6:27

scaling, the curve gets steeper and steeper

6:29

and steeper until it's going almost straight

6:31

up. And those are qualitatively different regimes.

6:34

So the regime of cities in

6:36

particular and biology are

6:39

diametrically at opposite ends of the

6:41

mathematically driven force fields, which govern

6:43

their trajectories over time, which is

6:45

very, very interesting. Now you mentioned

6:48

in the paper, and this is

6:50

something I know that Jeffrey

6:52

and Luis et cetera are very interested in, they

6:54

have not yet quite proven though they have strong

6:57

reason to believe it's true, that a

6:59

fair bit of this has things to

7:01

do with increasing the amount of connectivity

7:03

in ways that are analogous to Metcalfe's

7:05

law. Right. So just to

7:08

kind of solidify in just the same

7:10

way that the sublinear scaling is

7:12

very, very central to the nature

7:15

of biology. It drives a huge

7:17

number of the aspects of how

7:19

biological evolution shows up across in

7:22

the world. The hypothesis, in

7:24

some sense, just a straightforward conjecture that I

7:26

couldn't help but have when I saw this

7:28

first presented a long time ago,

7:30

is literally my first visit to SFI, by

7:32

the way. That was the first visit was when

7:35

you used showing that, was that this

7:37

super linear scaling must have an equivalent level

7:39

of import, but in the context of this

7:41

new regime. And by the way, what is

7:43

this new regime? Like what are we actually

7:45

looking at? And

7:47

so I went ahead and just took the hypothesis

7:49

that what we're really looking at here is the

7:53

same thing as what we see in Metcalfe's law.

7:55

That's a conjecture. I can't prove it. I'm

7:57

not the rigorous scientist. Other rigorous scientists are going to have to

7:59

pick it up. But if you take that as

8:01

the hypothesis and a whole bunch of other things

8:03

follow. So the argument that I make in that

8:05

sit in paper is that what

8:07

we're seeing in the superlinear scaling in

8:10

cities is the same thing we're seeing in

8:13

superlinear scaling according to Metcalfe's law that it

8:15

has to do with the

8:17

fact that information transfer

8:20

or more specifically the information is a

8:22

different aspect of reality than energy. And

8:26

there's something about the ephemeralization

8:28

of pattern, transmission, formation and

8:30

copying that

8:32

is not the same thing as the energy.

8:34

So to kind of shift into the world

8:36

that you and I spent time in, two

8:39

examples. One is it takes a certain amount

8:41

of effort and energy and work to invent

8:43

calculus. And it takes

8:45

a whole lot less to transmit that pattern.

8:47

So once the pattern has been discovered, the

8:50

copying of the pattern, the transmission of

8:52

the pattern is a lot, lot less

8:54

expensive, which is there's a relationship between

8:56

energy and information that is woven into

8:58

reality. And there's dynamics of

9:00

information, which by the way, is the anti-rivalness

9:02

regime, which we may or may not get

9:04

into. That is what shows

9:07

up as this exponential. As we're talking about

9:09

how do you build communications networks within

9:11

the regime of information. And the hypothesis

9:13

that I came to was that, oh,

9:16

wow, that's the actual

9:18

dominant force that's pulling all these things

9:20

through. But because up

9:22

until very recently, almost

9:25

all mind to mind contact

9:28

has had to have been done

9:30

effectively in person. Like even when

9:33

the internet kicked off, the quality

9:35

of virtual communication was still so

9:37

much lower than the quality of

9:39

in-person communication that, for example,

9:41

all companies required all of their employees

9:43

to be together in offices, which meant

9:45

largely in the same more

9:48

or less in the same town. And

9:50

so the argument is that

9:52

this is actually the central driver

9:54

of this thing that I've been

9:56

calling cosmopolitan urbanism, which I'm going

9:58

to talk about. also by the way

10:01

becomes imperialism like and that's part of the paper

10:03

as well, which is the very

10:05

simple problem. If it is the case that

10:07

doubling population has this incredibly

10:10

powerful effect, a super linearly

10:13

increasing wealth per capita and

10:15

innovation per capita, then

10:17

this is a very attractive thing. This is

10:20

again an attractor and that

10:22

as humans over time began to say

10:24

discover that, I wouldn't say that there's

10:26

a conscious discovery, we began to notice

10:28

the consequences in some fashion, they

10:31

began to congregate and benefit from

10:33

this part of reality, super linear

10:35

scaling. And then they began

10:37

to run into trouble and you start getting these

10:39

problems you have to solve because you've got more

10:42

human bodies in one place than your processes,

10:44

your institutions are capable of dealing with. You've got to feed

10:46

them, you've got to water them, you've got to get rid

10:48

of waste, you've got to house them, etc. And

10:51

so there's a one arc of

10:53

the building out of this

10:55

category, civilization, is the progressive

10:59

solution, the discovery of different solutions,

11:02

different institutions, which include technologies and

11:04

processes and training for solving these

11:06

various problems, which then leads to

11:08

an increase in capacity to put

11:10

more human bodies in communication, which

11:12

then builds out more wealth and

11:14

innovation. Yeah, just to be really

11:16

clear here, the metric, you know,

11:18

crudely is obviously qualitative metrics as

11:20

well. But the implication of super

11:22

linear scaling is very naively, you

11:24

want your biggest city be as

11:26

big as possible. Right. But these

11:28

things that you discuss are constraints on

11:31

that. You can't feed them can't get rid of

11:33

the shit. It can't get any bigger than X,

11:35

right? Yeah. And so if you take a look at

11:37

that, use that as sort of the basic frame

11:39

of looking at it, I spent time thinking about it

11:41

in the context of Rome, ancient Rome, and

11:44

then the context of late

11:46

19th century United States, you

11:48

start seeing that the whole field of Rome,

11:50

when we all roads do actually lead to

11:53

Rome, that the entire empire

11:55

is the extended body of the city of

11:57

Rome. And that's the mechanism by which they

11:59

could actually. actually maximize the number

12:01

of bodies in Rome. And

12:04

so, for example, Egypt was

12:06

a source of food to put

12:08

bodies in Rome. And

12:11

the division of labor of that area was around

12:13

that sort of thing. Not that dissimilar from Chicago

12:15

in its relationship to New York City and 19th

12:17

century America. So now you've got

12:19

three basic solutions to the problem.

12:22

One is density. How do

12:24

we get more and more people in

12:26

the same basic space, which are different

12:28

problems that emerge as density gets higher,

12:30

like waste and housing, et cetera. The

12:33

second is transportation, which is

12:35

a virtualization of space. So

12:38

what does it mean to be in the same

12:40

place? Well, obviously, if you have trains, the

12:43

notion of being next to each other is very different

12:45

than if only all you can do is walk and

12:47

ride horses. And so if you think of

12:50

it as like velocity, by the way, there's a whole thing that

12:52

Doin did on how technology

12:55

manifests. Transportation also shows up

12:57

in a very interesting fashion. But

12:59

if I can bend space by virtue of

13:01

increasing the velocity that people can operate in

13:03

the same amount of time, effectively, I'm folding

13:05

the shape of the urban environment that I'm

13:07

in and expanding the number of the amount

13:09

of virtual densities that I can produce without

13:11

having to solve the problem of actually squeezing

13:13

more bodies into the same unit of space.

13:15

Well, yeah, and also, you do have some

13:17

things about bodies in units. Like, for

13:20

instance, things that happened right around the beginning of

13:22

the 20th century, the elevator, right?

13:24

Instead of stacking them four stories tall, you

13:26

can go maybe 15 stories

13:28

tall by 1910. We

13:30

still needed steel frame construction to go higher, but

13:32

you could get masonry up 15 stories. Then

13:35

things like the streetcar. The city's got

13:37

much bigger once the streetcar became

13:39

a thing around 1900, 1910 as well. Exactly.

13:44

So the first regime is technologies

13:46

of density. And the second regime

13:49

is technologies that virtualize space, i.e.

13:51

transportation. Then the third regime

13:54

is the one that ephemeralizes bodies

13:57

or ephemeralizes communication. So

13:59

the example of that is the Well that early as soon.

14:01

Big example. The easiest example is the

14:03

messenger or so I don't talk to

14:05

your my tell some gotta go talk

14:07

to Joe has some reduction. I don't

14:10

have to be the same spaces gym

14:12

but others is a big level. Up

14:14

was bright with writing. Some portion of

14:16

our mind is able to be in

14:18

collaboration even though our bodies are not.

14:20

and of course this is the spatial

14:22

temporal. Know I can be in some

14:24

level of communication with Aristotle by means

14:27

of reading his writing whether I happen

14:29

to be at. The same time is evident

14:31

a faraway city or a happy to be literally

14:33

standing in the same spot In Standing In two

14:35

thousand years Later. So. Does the three

14:37

vectors. To. The three kind of regimes about you

14:39

solve this problem. So the

14:41

conjectures that the the Assemble is

14:43

a sniff communities as a symbol

14:45

station is bodies has been a

14:47

major theme or has had significant

14:50

impacts of which humans can do

14:52

and I would do civilization over.writing

14:54

was a big would have a

14:56

seat, printing press, a telegram, the

14:58

telephone, the television, but in each

15:00

case there's a basic pivot point.

15:03

Where. The quality of communication and collaboration

15:05

is happening in the in person

15:07

encounter is still source and larger

15:09

than the quality. What'd happen through

15:11

one of his media forums that

15:13

the dominant center is still embodied

15:15

Collaboration hazardous, the drivers civilization the

15:18

driver. That said, he invited collaboration

15:20

has continued to be sitting in

15:22

the center in the throat as

15:24

a work. But as we move

15:26

into the realm of the surely digital.

15:29

We. Notice of uses the what Is

15:31

it The digital? The categories Not

15:33

Hussein is all his previous forms

15:35

of mediation. It is

15:37

the previous forms of mediation the and one

15:40

in general is tied to his particular for

15:42

by some writing is why did you can't

15:44

use writing to do video? can't use riding

15:46

to do party the right to do with

15:48

a particular kind of thing But the digital

15:50

can produce all forms of media. The

15:52

digital a substrate. It's actually one level lower

15:54

than the meet. The right now we're using

15:57

digital to do video and we're also using

15:59

digital do audio. And it weren't for we

16:01

could use, we actually did only taxes. while the not

16:03

that much. We. Can do. All

16:05

factory just yet. But the point isn't digital.

16:07

Principal we could have is nothing about digital

16:10

that makes any form of mediation unavailable. To

16:12

the first part is now that

16:14

we've entered the realm of the

16:16

digital, we have the capacity to

16:18

explore all possible forms of media

16:20

and ineffective probably simply will at

16:22

a fun time. And therefore there's

16:24

a point at which the assimilation

16:26

of communication reaches a tipping point.

16:29

Where. The quality of collaboration between

16:31

minds mediated by the digital

16:34

is good enough. That.

16:36

The. Center of Collaboration moves from the

16:38

embodied to his new possibilities that happens

16:41

in the purely virtual or the digital

16:43

realm. And I don't think

16:45

that happened. In. Nineteen Points

16:48

and metal think the quality of of

16:50

of least nowadays is high enough. It

16:53

might have happened. and twenty twenty of

16:55

the forcing function of moving people into

16:57

learning how to build capacity and infrastructure,

16:59

etc. And it hasn't happened yet. The

17:01

whole point is it will be happening

17:03

relatively simple out far. we've. Talked

17:06

briefly about the Twenty Twenty phenomenon. I

17:09

had a couple a podcast for simplified

17:11

guess of what was going to change,

17:13

what was not gonna change due to

17:16

the shock of the Jaco would experience.

17:18

I talked about the difference between homeostasis

17:20

and history says rights and then. I

17:23

did predict that there would be

17:25

a history says effect with respect

17:27

to video conferencing replacing some forces

17:30

of travels and the technical capacity.

17:32

Probably been there around twenty fifteen,

17:34

but cultural a nurse I had

17:37

kept it from actually happening and

17:39

so there was a surge, but

17:41

we have found that it isn't

17:44

yet. a replacement for all

17:46

kinds the collaboration but not be more and

17:48

more stepson a big one may have occurred

17:50

in the last couple of days which is

17:52

the release of the apple visit if you

17:55

got yours yet i have no i mean

17:57

i didn't get what what will be the

17:59

first technical innovation that I haven't gotten but we'll

18:01

see. We'll see. All right. Anyway,

18:04

continue your tale. Very much to the point where that

18:06

is a huge step function in the ability

18:08

to virtualize relationality and the big point is at

18:11

some point we're going to cross over. By the

18:13

way, we should also think about this demographically. Gen

18:16

Z has a very different relationship to

18:18

the virtual then boomers, for example. And

18:21

so it may just be that as boomers

18:23

begin to slip off their mortal coil, we'll

18:25

notice the centerpiece will be moving into the

18:27

virtual because it already has for Gen Z

18:29

just by hypothesis. But for my

18:31

argument, it's just a matter that we're not too

18:33

far away from that center point shifting. And if

18:35

and when that center point shifts, holy

18:37

smokes. That'll be as

18:40

big a shift as has happened when

18:42

we move from the indigenous mode to civilization.

18:45

And that's very large. It's

18:47

a very significant effect. And

18:50

ways I've talked about it is it's a

18:52

little bit like unplugging a light

18:54

bulb. When you unplug a light bulb, it's

18:56

a little while where you can still see the light.

18:58

It was a long while when you still feel the

19:00

heat from the electricity. But it's unplugged.

19:03

The trajectory is over. It's a done deal.

19:06

The famous saying about when Buddha died,

19:08

it still showed his shadow in the

19:10

cave for a hundred years. There's things

19:12

where inertia continues. And there's obviously a

19:14

lot of inertia in terms of psychological

19:16

habits, processes, and infrastructure. There's just a

19:19

lot of stuff going on. So it

19:21

will take some time. But the

19:24

hypothesis is that the center has

19:26

shifted. And the same

19:28

level of potency that drove human

19:30

beings to go through this long arc

19:32

of figuring out how to solve all

19:34

these problems associated with civilization is

19:37

now shifting into a new kind of fundamental problem,

19:39

which I just called civio. OK,

19:42

so now let's go back to the

19:44

bad superlinear scaling because that's important to

19:46

build in. And then we'll

19:48

pop forward to what this looks like on the other side of the

19:50

looking glass in infidio. When The guys

19:52

were looking at superlinear scaling, They did

19:54

notice that a number of good things

19:57

scaled superlinear, like wealth and innovation. Musical

20:00

creations. all kinds of fakes,

20:02

right? but the bathroom

20:05

scale super linear with as

20:07

well not sublinear animal or

20:09

bring forth three. One.

20:11

Is. Madness. And

20:13

corruption. And others crime and

20:16

a third his sickness yeah that's

20:18

a huge once. those is important

20:20

point that most people do not

20:22

know for most of human history

20:24

with the exception of the late

20:26

republican early Empire of Rome, cities

20:29

were net killers of people until

20:31

eighteen ninety of apps in the

20:33

west because they are amazingly unhealthy

20:35

places and that one of the

20:37

reasons hinterlands had to exist was

20:39

the reportedly cities every generation the

20:42

through their a little appendices it

20:44

it. Actually has a so the

20:46

hinterlands your got bio to with this

20:48

means is what happens is that as

20:50

cities doubled in size. They.

20:52

Get The Benefit is a good super your

20:54

scale. They have to

20:56

deal with the problematic of the

20:59

for me often sublinear stealing problem

21:01

but also come along with increasing

21:03

population. But then they have to

21:05

do this very special problem with the bad super

21:07

litter. Still. And.

21:09

What? That unbearably shows up as

21:12

is a radical shift institutional structure

21:14

when you have an of the

21:16

upgrade institutional to passes to deal

21:18

with this whole problem of these

21:20

bad super weather's great example of

21:22

the money you have supported to

21:24

which was the Victorian transition and

21:26

two distinct major institutions upgrades what

21:29

happened during that time frame and

21:31

was a good history like really

21:33

great listed as we have lots

21:35

of narrative discusses around crime and

21:37

corruption. Crime A political corruption. And

21:40

Ramsey's. Also had a series

21:42

of. Major. Problems of disease

21:44

happening in the City of London. From.

21:46

The latter part of the eighteenth century, all

21:49

the way up to the license or to

21:51

even the middle Ages of. and

21:53

it was a notable probably around climb

21:55

to the technique of policing was grounded

21:57

the medieval county sheriff what is still

21:59

the state of the art as you entered into

22:01

the 1700s, wasn't keeping up

22:04

with the increase in urban crime that

22:06

you're beginning to see as populations moving

22:08

past certain thresholds. And

22:10

this was creating tremendous problems, like more and

22:13

more conversations, more and more attention is pointing

22:15

to. I should point out by the way,

22:17

there was also a correlated corruption going on

22:19

in the political and governance system that was

22:21

also being talked about. And so what they

22:23

ended up doing is they had to retrench

22:26

and invent an entirely new institutional form that

22:28

we would know as policing, urban policing, the

22:30

idea of attacks that was associated with hiring

22:32

and training professionals who would play the role

22:34

of policing in a fashion that was, well,

22:36

that we're all very familiar with. It was

22:39

completely novel in the transition from the 17th to

22:41

the 1800s. And in exactly

22:43

that same timeframe, we also had

22:45

the development of urban sewers, waste management,

22:47

which was a real major piece of

22:49

the disease factors at that point in

22:51

time. And a huge upgrade. In

22:53

fact, London is still largely sitting on top of that

22:55

basic infrastructure. And I think I did the massive one

22:58

point, I did the research. We're talking about like a

23:00

$50 billion of

23:02

modern dollar capital investment

23:04

over a period of 50 years to

23:06

build out this sewage infrastructure, completely changing

23:08

the shape of how London dealt with

23:11

waste. So massive infrastructure

23:13

upgrades. And by the way, when

23:15

I say infrastructure, I mean technology,

23:17

processes, training, cultural artifacts, ways of

23:19

behaving, just a whole institutional shift.

23:22

Which means, of course, that it has

23:24

a big step function consequence. It's hard

23:27

and risky and largely resisted to

23:29

make those kinds of shifts. And so the tension

23:31

of the super linear bad has to be quite

23:33

high. And then they have to make the risk,

23:35

the valley crossing risk of going into a new

23:37

institutional form to make it across the valley. And

23:39

if they do, you enter into a

23:41

new moment. So the arc of civilization, I

23:43

would say, is sort of a series of

23:45

relatively meaningful step

23:47

functions as innovation and wealth

23:50

deal with the sublinear scaling problems

23:52

of population double A. And

23:54

then epochs associated with resolving

23:56

the super linear problems. Each epoch

23:58

has a reset. and gives us

24:00

the ability to go a lot bigger. Okay. Now

24:03

the reason why I want to bring that into

24:05

the foreground is that if

24:07

you haven't noticed, we're kind of

24:09

running into that same set of problems. Things

24:12

like crime and corruption. And

24:14

corruption by the way is the

24:17

degradation, the functionality of social institutions across

24:19

for a variety of different reasons. And

24:22

we most notably in 2020 had a big problem with disease.

24:25

And so this thing that has happened in

24:27

the tail end of the 20th century in

24:29

the first quarter century, the 21st, where we

24:31

had an old brother, is reaching

24:33

the limits of the institutional forms that got us out

24:35

of the 20th century. So

24:37

where the super linear scaling factors are

24:40

pushing the boundaries, which means that we're facing

24:42

something like a necessity for

24:44

a major regime change, some

24:46

new significant institutional form. Okay.

24:49

Now this is interesting because it's coming

24:51

up at exactly the moment when the center of

24:53

gravity is beginning to move us into the virtual.

24:57

Maybe what that tells us is

25:00

that the virtual is actually

25:02

going to be the solution to a lot

25:04

of those problems and that

25:06

this is going to be extra fuel for the

25:08

transition to the cidium construct. All right. So

25:11

now let's move into the cidium. There's like three basic problems.

25:14

So the idea of the cidium is that with

25:17

the center of gravity or the center of this

25:19

new attractor being at the level of the virtual,

25:22

we have a massive decoupling of the

25:24

body and the mind that the value

25:27

of collaboration, that being mediated

25:29

by the virtual can

25:31

be increasingly in fact will be increasingly driven by

25:34

the fact that you can get more minds in

25:36

collaboration in the virtual than you can in any

25:38

city. Even the biggest cities are

25:40

nothing compared to what's going on in the

25:42

internet. And so more and more and more

25:44

of our collaborative capacity will migrate up

25:47

into this virtual field, which

25:49

will, by the way, suck that clarity

25:52

capacity out of the cosmopolitan urban infrastructure

25:54

environment, which will have a reciprocal closure.

25:56

It will actually become super

25:58

linearly less attractive. because they'll still

26:00

have some bad stuff from population, but they'll have

26:03

less and less of the good stuff from population.

26:06

And, and here's the big piece, and

26:09

it will unlock a

26:11

new capacity to reestablish

26:13

these humane elements we've

26:15

been giving up for the entire arc of

26:18

civilization that you pointed to. The cities

26:20

are very unhealthy, very unhealthy at the

26:22

level of minds, right? Increasing insanity, depression,

26:24

etc. And at a level

26:26

of bodies, by the way, even at the

26:28

level of culture, because our cultural artifacts to

26:30

make civilization work require us to cobble together

26:32

things that subordinate the needs of humans to

26:35

the needs of scaling at the end of the

26:37

day. Yeah, just think about

26:39

oppressive policing as an example. I

26:42

live in a county of 2,200 people. We

26:45

know the sheriff. The sheriff knows us.

26:47

He knows who's a shitbird and who's

26:49

not. So the, the hand of the

26:51

law, while very vigorous when it needs

26:53

to be, is not at all oppressive.

26:56

Unlike you go to New York City and,

26:59

or even worse, London,

27:01

where the 2 million CCTV cameras

27:03

are watching you all the time,

27:05

you are in a panopticon and

27:07

it's horrible. No wonder people are insane to

27:10

live in those places. And yet they, even with

27:12

all that, they still have a crime rate 10

27:14

times higher than we have. That's right. That's right.

27:16

And as we're seeing right now, we may be

27:18

seeing it go through a crisis

27:20

point, an unsustainable crisis point. Okay.

27:23

So as I started going down

27:25

this path and started traveling around, looking at

27:28

different possibilities of what the smaller scale

27:30

might look like and

27:33

investigating indigenous communities and whatnot, one

27:35

of the things that I noticed

27:37

was how much we've actually given

27:40

up in the cultivation

27:42

of civilization. And this, this

27:44

how much shows up in quality. It

27:47

shows up in meaningfulness. So our friend,

27:49

John Verbeke, is the phrase, the meaning

27:51

crisis. But I

27:53

suspect that we modern

27:55

civilized urbanized people don't

27:58

even really have an inkling. of

28:00

how much we've actually given up in terms of area

28:02

under the curve, of meaningfulness

28:04

that could be available as a

28:06

Homo Sapiens, but that we don't have

28:08

access to. So we can notice

28:11

that the quality of life in

28:13

a beautiful natural environment with a

28:15

community of people who all care

28:17

for each other and have long-term

28:19

relationships, strong bonds, those kinds of

28:21

things, is obviously a noticeably more

28:23

meaningful and more vital than the

28:25

fast-paced, nobody knows anybody and kind

28:27

of is vaguely everybody else's throat,

28:29

and the environment is toxic in

28:31

multiple different ways. And

28:33

the point I'm making is, and even the

28:35

best that we can do, is maybe two

28:38

or three orders of magnitude off, someone can

28:40

actually be achieved by healthy

28:42

humans and healthy communities and healthy environments.

28:45

Yeah, let me insert here a little bit. I've

28:47

been talking about this for several years. It's

28:50

one of the big turns that it

28:52

happened later that we tend to think

28:54

actually, the majority of humans, the big

28:56

majority of humans, 70% in the United

28:58

States, still lived at the Mezzo

29:01

scale as late as 1870. By

29:04

Mezzo scale, I mean that you were

29:06

living in a community of between 50

29:08

and 500 people that you knew

29:10

well within the mental ability to

29:13

balance the books around ethics and

29:15

virtue, etc. If

29:17

you were starving, somebody would take you in.

29:20

If you went insane, somebody would

29:22

put you in their attic. You

29:24

know, you were part of an

29:26

intact community and it was just

29:28

qualitatively different than the transition that

29:30

subsequently occurred where we essentially made

29:32

the change from relying on our

29:35

face-to-face community for physical, social, spiritual,

29:37

and physical sustenance, and

29:39

instead, which were all very organic and

29:41

high dimensional, and we traded those in

29:43

for two sets of relationships, one with

29:46

the market and the other with the

29:48

government, both of which are anonymous and

29:50

sterile and don't give two fucks about

29:52

you, basically. Yeah, absolutely. And so I

29:54

would say that Sibium and Proto-B and

29:56

other ideas Are in part, the

29:59

local part of it. His return to

30:01

the massive scale. And

30:03

the the hypothesis is this actually a tremendous

30:05

amount of demand for that, It's been locked

30:07

into this other a tractor and therefore begin

30:10

to be liberated into exploring how to do

30:12

that void after. Build. New

30:14

Capacity. Both have a little bit restructure institutions

30:16

at the level just basic humanists his his

30:18

wife's a lot of those capabilities skills. And

30:21

relationships. And for further hypothesis

30:23

is that there's a lot

30:26

like is actually even more

30:28

than. In. The late eighteen hundreds

30:30

is a lot more than the be happy

30:32

to do with it happened one way of

30:34

looking at the shift from some was a

30:36

should descent. Mad. Quite nicely

30:38

to the ship, from quantity to quality.

30:41

Or as has New Kapoor

30:43

to put it from stealing

30:46

heaps. To. Growing living

30:48

things, Stealing.

30:50

A happy or a kilogram of wheat?

30:53

That pile of thousand kilograms. We don't

30:55

top of that stealing a heap of

30:57

our groves. I grew a family and

30:59

notice was a growth as a qualitative

31:02

distinction between each the different elements while

31:04

maintaining comedian internet. And so

31:06

quantity to qualities a major peter

31:08

The shift. And by the way, when

31:10

you move it to the virtual, the same thing happens

31:12

now. And. What happened at the

31:15

level of with metcalf Small which

31:17

is actually my profound arrived explore

31:19

the full details of Mecca for

31:21

measures and potential value of a

31:23

necklace. The potential value of

31:25

a network increases exponentially not quite that

31:27

expressly as an abrupt knows that at

31:30

work increases. But the actual

31:32

value? The network. Is. Determine entirely

31:34

upon the actual. Point to

31:37

point connection between the people on the

31:39

network. So for example of. You.

31:41

And I right now could be

31:43

having a conversation with anybody who

31:45

happens to have access to the

31:47

internet and zoo. for actually having

31:49

this conversation as the potential to

31:52

actual was also a quantitative quality

31:54

to shift the mechanism whereby were

31:56

able to orient are inescapably finite

31:58

attention. The highest

32:00

quality relationships within this vast

32:03

possibility to lose on the

32:05

network become the New Frontier.

32:07

In fact, instead of having this incredibly

32:09

interesting conversation, we could both be spending

32:12

two hours on tic toc. Death.

32:14

Exactly. And so it's to say about two

32:16

hours we have a finite amount of tension

32:18

and if I am of time on this

32:21

earth and we have no a very large

32:23

menus possible things we could attend. The question

32:25

is what is the highest thing the week

32:27

at attentive and this comes to very sharp

32:29

relief and in the in the category but

32:31

algorithms to think it's a plan. To.

32:33

The degree to which the algorithm is

32:36

dominated by the logic of endeavored to

32:38

maximize the revenue the Twitter makes

32:40

from our attention. It will

32:42

produce a certain attention allocation box and and than

32:44

a very sub optimal to sell cheese and function

32:47

to the point of view our quality. But

32:49

he different driver it was endeavoring

32:52

to consistently make the highest quality

32:54

use of our attention completely separate

32:56

from the notion of Twitter or

32:58

or revenue generation assuming to be

33:00

sustainable which as. Tribute to

33:02

the could begin to grow in a

33:04

tremendous unlock was if you look at

33:06

the the differential between the amount of

33:08

actual quality is being produced by Twitter

33:10

in the amount of potential quality the

33:12

couldn't be pretty to be did a

33:14

better job. that was enough to dental

33:16

again orders of magnitude. Maybe

33:18

a drug use be line under this.

33:20

Let's use Facebook as as I believe

33:23

we more advanced in it's strip mining

33:25

of our tents and and Twitter Twitter

33:27

sort of incompetent at it. you know

33:29

it's not as bad as face for

33:31

Priest was clearly worse and the other

33:33

damn thing was called Instagram was i

33:35

do not do hope you don't do

33:37

know Instagram Of course they have an

33:39

algorithm. These guys are really smart guys.

33:41

but what does the algorithm? Optimizing.

33:44

for it's optimizing for money

33:46

on money return fucking periods

33:48

in overturned us all into

33:50

social deviants cutting off our

33:52

genitals and that going insane

33:54

as long as it was

33:56

a profitable and as profitable

33:58

as possible that side effect

34:00

would be totally acceptable. It's

34:03

possible for just the next quarter. Yeah,

34:05

yeah. For the at most three years out.

34:08

The money on money machine is optimized for

34:10

at most three years out. And so that's

34:12

the driver. Imagine what

34:14

a world would look like if the

34:17

curation of how we expend our attention

34:19

was instead optimized for human well-being

34:21

within planetary limits. What a different world that

34:23

would be. Well, that's the world that we're

34:25

talking about. That's exactly the kind of world

34:28

that I suspect we begin to move towards

34:30

as we shift from civilization to civium. So

34:33

let's do a quick summary now of what

34:35

civium looks like on the other side, at

34:37

least the early stages of it. And then

34:39

we'll switch to the difficulty of getting there.

34:42

Topologically, it's actually very simple. You

34:44

have the downward direction,

34:46

which is humans beginning to

34:49

increasingly migrate into human

34:51

scale, humane embodied

34:54

congregation, where you have probably

34:56

Dunbar level, almost certainly that's

34:58

the right number, different

35:01

levels of Dunbar, and almost certainly

35:03

also long term embodiment in particular

35:06

locations. So you actually have

35:08

a sense of care for the place you're in

35:10

and a sense of adaptation, by the way, to

35:12

the place that you're in. Like this is not

35:14

trivial. Your gut biome cares where you are. And

35:16

if you've been there a long time, you adapt

35:18

to that environment in a way that is very

35:20

difficult to do if you're constantly moving about. So

35:22

you have the humane direction, the physical level, the

35:24

embodied level. And that will involve a

35:27

traverse as we get there, a recovery

35:29

of migration, people moving out of cities

35:31

and into these environments and then trying

35:33

to figure out how to do it

35:35

and building new infrastructure, building new cultural

35:37

artifacts, relearning how to be humans together, like all

35:40

that, that's the traverse. But landing in a place

35:42

where you have human beings

35:44

who are vastly more capable of

35:46

humaning than we are. They

35:49

are much less emotionally volatile, much

35:52

more capable of engaging in dialogue

35:54

and conversation. They have a deeper sense

35:56

of embodied wisdom because they actually are practicing

35:58

that as a value. things

36:00

that will show up. Okay, then on the other side,

36:02

let's go vertical from the top, we

36:04

now have real attention being

36:06

pointed towards the qualification, the

36:09

quality dimension of the virtual. Finally,

36:12

at long last, really beginning to say,

36:14

okay, as you said, Facebook, how do

36:16

we pivot from the cultural

36:19

logic that's driving how we're

36:21

designing these social media

36:23

systems, being governed by

36:25

the logic of civilization

36:28

to being governed by the logic of civium? And how

36:30

do we actually change the algorithm? So

36:32

it's orienting towards the highest quality relationality

36:34

between and among all the individuals who

36:36

could come into communication. How

36:39

do we deal with high quality dialogue? You

36:41

were talking about another podcast you're going to

36:43

launch that's focused on the notion of how

36:45

do we use all this vast number of

36:47

people that can communicate and information we can

36:49

access to get something like the truth out

36:52

of these conversations and not just nonsense, noise

36:54

or propaganda. And of course, that's a matter

36:56

in some sense of design, and

36:58

in some sense of the human component. If

37:00

you have good people, people who understand virtue

37:02

and embody virtue, they actually are virtuous people,

37:04

not shipbirds. Have we talked about that? I'm

37:06

happy to bracket from other spend a little

37:09

bit of time on this thing that you

37:11

pointed out that game may have a vector

37:13

towards minimum viable morality or

37:15

maximum sustainable immorality, it just degrades human virtue

37:17

to the point that until it either collapses,

37:19

or there's like some bottom level, the bottom

37:21

of the barrel that can still work. But

37:24

imagine if you have virtuous people as the inputs

37:27

to the network, and the design constraints, the network

37:29

are looking to find ways to make sure that

37:31

they're interacting with people in a fashion that is

37:33

actually healthy for their well being and for the

37:35

relationship, and as good as surfacing things like truth

37:38

and generative dialogue and insight and things like that.

37:40

And this is not vaguely polyandrous. The point is

37:42

that as you move across the line from

37:44

civilization to citizen, what you begin to

37:46

see is the amount of possibility and

37:48

the amount of actuality that opens up

37:50

and begin to reorient your design constraints.

37:53

We're talking about as much value

37:56

and here's the word values no longer strictly

37:58

indexed by dollars, but as much. value

38:00

production in this new regime as the

38:02

sum total of all value productions happened

38:04

the last 50,000 years of the development

38:06

of civilization. It's a lot. A lot

38:08

of leading. I'm gonna draw

38:10

a lot of this so the people

38:12

understand the significance of it. We're actually

38:14

winning in two different dimensions simultaneously which

38:17

you seldom see. You know we're winning

38:19

on the ground in our embodied life,

38:21

right? You know you're not living in

38:23

a New York City high-rise where you

38:25

don't know your neighbor who you've been

38:27

living next to for 20 years. It's

38:29

noisy all the time. It smells like

38:31

piss. You know you're eating manufactured food

38:33

of God knows what Providence. You're dealing

38:36

with crazy people literally all day long.

38:38

Instead you're living in an intact

38:40

beautiful physical community. You're healthier. Your

38:43

relationships with people are normal. Love

38:45

family. Your kids are not

38:47

being propagandized with shit that

38:50

destroys your values, etc, etc.

38:52

And at the same fucking time and

38:55

you know Ron Papiel and his peelers,

38:57

right? And it also doesn't just peel

38:59

it also scratches your back. We

39:01

also have the new

39:03

network with attentional curation that

39:06

allows us to have the

39:08

correct conversations and interchanges

39:10

and problem-solving with somebody wherever they

39:12

may be on earth. And

39:15

you multiply two good things together and

39:17

I suspect the two up regulate

39:19

each other. So it's something close to

39:22

multiplicative. The upside here is tremendous. Yes.

39:24

We actually have a lot of good

39:26

solid research on things like how to

39:28

produce creative groups and

39:31

individuals who are healthy

39:34

and stable and have a

39:36

high quality feeling of trust with each other collaborate

39:38

a lot better than groups that are made up

39:40

of people who are neurotic and worn out, squeezed

39:43

and don't trust each other. It's not intuitively obvious

39:45

but the point is that the research is actually

39:47

quite substantial. So there is a positive

39:49

feedback loop and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger

39:51

as you get more and more possibility. That's the topology.

39:53

And I should mention by the way you've got this

39:55

you've got the down you've got the up as you

39:57

mentioned you've got the relationship between the two. that's

40:00

important. And there's a lot of

40:02

stuff like technology hygiene needs to be taken

40:04

extremely seriously. This stuff is not trivial. The

40:06

fact that I could put on the

40:09

Apple Vision and sort of be a mother

40:11

raising my child, my baby, right? But I'm

40:13

wearing my Apple Vision goggles and then putting

40:15

virtual overlays on top of my child. I

40:17

would just put forth that's an abomination and

40:19

a terrible idea, please never, never, ever do

40:21

that. But building the hygiene that puts

40:24

the cultural construct in place that we are

40:26

able to know how to

40:28

do the right thing and avoid doing the

40:30

wrong thing is part of that middle layer,

40:32

the intermediary layer between humans and the virtual

40:35

is this relational dynamic between the two. If

40:37

we do it right, they

40:39

are highly compatible, mutually reinforcing and

40:41

produce a reciprocal opening that as

40:43

far as we know has no

40:45

obvious limit. And the opposite, you

40:47

know, there's this thing that we're

40:49

hitting right now is if we

40:51

don't move into a place where

40:53

they're interfacing quite nicely, technology and

40:55

the domination of the digital and

40:57

the virtual begins to consume the

40:59

seed corn of humanity. And

41:02

we cross thresholds that we really don't

41:04

want to cross. And that's certainly certainly

41:06

feels to me like that's there and

41:08

accelerating has been for the last 15

41:10

years probably, right? Yeah, I mean, you

41:12

see like SSRI prescriptions, which

41:14

is a good proxy for at

41:16

least self reported and doctor diagnosed

41:19

depression, declining or in fact, collapsing

41:21

fertility rates, suicide rates, which are

41:23

now beginning to show even given psychological

41:26

interventions, you're seeing a very large number

41:28

of vectors that were hitting low

41:30

points, maybe non recoverable

41:32

thresholds in human well being,

41:35

which are necessary for people to continue

41:37

moving forward at all. And

41:40

I would propose I don't think I've got the

41:42

ability to metricize this effectively, but I would propose

41:44

that we're also hitting Oh, actually, we mentioned in

41:46

the preamble, levels of institutional corruption that are now

41:48

beginning to be salient and surprising. As you mentioned,

41:50

like an institution that had been functioning at 98%.

41:52

One key person retired,

41:55

so it drops down to like 2% or whatever 1015 20%. Notice

41:57

of what? and

42:00

surprising. And by the way, that then produces

42:02

a systemic cascade

42:04

because all the negative consequences of

42:07

that capacity now push the sex outside.

42:09

Alright, I think we both agree on this, that

42:11

this is what the future looks like, which we've been

42:13

trying to do for the last 10 or

42:16

12 years, but it's fucking hard, right? And

42:19

in particular, the one strong finding I

42:21

believe that came out of the original

42:23

Game B 1.0 2013

42:26

mission essentially was that we

42:28

all concluded after the fact, when we look

42:30

back at the train wrecks, that to

42:32

make the transition we have to do

42:35

two hard things simultaneously, which is people

42:38

have to change and the institutional

42:40

structures have to change. And

42:42

you still buy that as a core, hard

42:45

part of the problem, because I have

42:47

a very good analogy why this is

42:49

the case. So let's take the example

42:51

about technical hygiene, which is something we

42:53

both strongly agree on. You know, the

42:55

idea that an eight-year-old or a nine-year-old

42:57

should have a smartphone with them at

42:59

all times, to my mind is an

43:02

abomination, probably qualitatively worse than teaching them

43:04

to smoke cigarettes, right? It's an abomination.

43:06

However, you are the parent of

43:08

an eight or nine-year-old, which

43:10

you will soon be again, and I'll be

43:12

the grandfather one at about the same time.

43:15

And if all of

43:17

her friends start having

43:19

smartphones and their social

43:21

life is mediated via smartphones, it's

43:24

going to be an extraordinarily harsh decision to

43:26

make. Do you cut your daughter off from

43:28

her friend network or do you let her

43:30

smoke cigarettes when she's nine years old? And

43:33

to my mind, having the personal

43:36

change to realize technological hygiene is

43:38

hugely important and a top of

43:40

the food chain value, unless

43:42

you can also influence the

43:44

institutions, particularly the ones in

43:46

your local social network, it's

43:48

only the most hard-bitten person

43:50

can stick with their new

43:52

values without the support of

43:54

the institutions around them. So

43:57

for instance, we lived in

43:59

Jordanville, where one of the covenants,

44:01

the concords, as Megan likes to call

44:03

it, is that children under the age

44:06

of 16 shall not have

44:08

smartphones. And everybody that lives in

44:10

this community absolutely agrees on that.

44:12

And oh, by the way, it's

44:15

an expulsion offense if you intentionally

44:17

violate that concord. Suddenly, it's real

44:19

easy. None of your

44:21

eight-year-old or nine-year-old daughter's friends have

44:23

smartphones, so the technical hygiene

44:26

becomes trivial. So there's a case of

44:28

we got the insight and the personal

44:30

change, but if we don't have

44:32

the institutional structure around it, it's almost impossible

44:34

to maintain. But once you have the institutional

44:36

structure around it, the correct culture and the

44:38

correct norms, values, and virtues, it becomes easy.

44:41

And somehow, threading the needle of doing the

44:43

two at the same time is what's turned

44:45

out to be the hard part of this

44:47

mission. Agreed. Agreed. And we went on a

44:49

long journey of trying to figure that out,

44:51

and so we're now moving into the next

44:53

topic, I think. So let's briefly talk about the

44:55

fact that you and I both in our

44:57

own ways tried to build early-stage civium-type things.

45:00

In my case, like we called them protobees.

45:02

In your case, you call them civiums. Very,

45:04

very similar, conceptually. And by the way, I

45:07

want to read my write-up on protobees, and

45:09

it's old. It's not my current thinking. But

45:11

a journey to game B on Medium. Link

45:13

will be on the site as usual. But

45:16

we both found it a harder lift, I

45:18

think, than we thought, and for different reasons,

45:20

have kind of backed away from that as

45:23

our mainstream approach, which

45:25

very briefly, in three or four minutes, your

45:27

experience on at least a couple of these

45:29

civiums and why they didn't work. I'll work

45:32

backwards a little bit, because as I discovered,

45:34

for example, one of the reasons why you and

45:37

I got, we had some wrong inferences, was

45:39

that you and I are actually unusually good

45:42

at identifying a value, deciding

45:45

that that's our value, and then living that way. So

45:47

I remember when I was 20, I

45:50

said, hmm, my current value is telling me that I'm

45:52

going to be a vegetarian. And the next day, I

45:54

was a vegetarian for 20 years. That turns

45:56

out that is not actually common currency. If

46:00

you don't have an existing, let's go through

46:02

the words, it's actually religion, but for the

46:04

moment, community infrastructure and institutional structures,

46:06

like you said, that kind of

46:08

make it easy, embedded, built in,

46:10

swimming downstream very much, almost

46:13

nobody will actually maintain a diet for

46:15

example, even as simple as like just

46:17

choosing to not eat sugar, right? Choosing

46:19

not to have donuts when they're walking by the bakery. By

46:22

the way, that's when you and I both have trouble

46:24

with, so we're not, you know, no whole other than

46:26

that. Famous fat man, by the way, so I'm a

46:29

really bad offender on that one. Here's

46:31

the second, is this notion of

46:33

hierarchy of values. It turns out that's a

46:35

key, key, key element. Jonathan Pazgeo put it

46:37

very nicely, he had a great keynote, very

46:39

well worth watching. He had to get at

46:41

the ARC form, maybe in the last six

46:43

months. And the point he made was

46:45

that first, you're going to be worth doing something, which is

46:47

just to say that you're going to have a hierarchy of

46:50

values. There'll be some things you value more than other things.

46:52

And the things that are at the top of that value

46:54

hierarchy, you're going to be the things that will be orienting

46:56

your choices and selecting between what sorts

46:58

of things you will and won't be trading. And if

47:00

you're things more valuable than other, that's the thing you're

47:03

going to do. So that's what your

47:05

worship, the word worship just means, the thing that you're

47:07

orienting more and more and more is the highest values

47:09

in your life. And as it

47:11

turns out, cosmopolitan urbanism does a

47:13

very, very poor job of creating

47:16

aligned hierarchies of values. And

47:19

so what that means is that groups

47:21

of people in cosmopolitan urbanism end

47:23

up doing something like the lowest common denominator.

47:25

And we see this Alpewa

47:28

Zoo out in California. So

47:30

you get nice, it's nice. People can

47:32

be very nice and pleasant. And you

47:34

can get together at nice cafes that

47:37

everybody can agree have good design and

47:39

they have neat new food.

47:41

And everybody looks good. Like they're all sort of healthy

47:43

and have good dress, which is a thin, not

47:46

very, not at all deep. You can't build anything

47:48

important on it. And so it's a sort

47:51

of minimum viable communion upon which

47:53

you can maintain the necessary components to

47:55

be functional elements of the market in

47:57

the state, which you mentioned earlier. market

48:00

and the state are like, look, people have to

48:02

be ready, willing and able to go to

48:04

work on a relatively recurring basis and not

48:06

getting too many fights. And so that's the

48:08

level of the value structures the market and

48:10

the state project as the hierarchy of values.

48:12

And that's the least common denominator. Now,

48:14

individuals and groups can and

48:17

will and must sort different things. But

48:19

now because you don't have a recurring

48:21

group of strong bonds, everybody

48:23

is ultimately selecting from what is ultimately

48:25

a relatively flat and relatively tepid hierarchy

48:27

of values. And this shows up as

48:29

things like people being ultimately at

48:31

the end of the day unwilling to

48:34

do real stuff when she takes the

48:36

van, a civeum or any real

48:38

community. You know, if you've

48:41

died, who supports your wife

48:43

and your kids? And as

48:46

you mentioned, in old fashioned communities, in real

48:48

communities, if your cousin is

48:50

nuts, somebody has an addict

48:52

to put him in, make sure he's safe, make

48:54

sure he's well fed and relatively adequately groomed. That's

48:56

happening at the level of the human, not

48:59

at the level of the state institutions, the level of

49:01

the human, the level of the relationality. That has to

49:03

do with the hierarchy of values and with the proper

49:05

community. We don't have

49:07

that. These days, as long as everything's

49:09

relatively nice, everybody can

49:11

kind of get along and have nice smoothies

49:14

and good hairdos. But

49:16

if anything, it's ever so slightly out of that, you

49:19

drop off the radar pretty badly. And this is,

49:22

by the way, less true, the lower on the

49:24

socioeconomic strategy until you hit a threshold and that

49:26

is very true. You drop

49:28

to the bottom, it's catastrophe. If

49:31

you're kind of working lower class, they actually

49:33

still have to have community and due to

49:35

a meaningful extent, particularly in rural environments. And

49:37

if you kind of go up the urban

49:39

elite, there's nothing going on there in terms

49:41

of communion. In fact, it's all status.

49:43

If you look at who's at a funeral, it's

49:46

who needs to be seen to be there. Very

49:49

little if anything to do with real human relationship.

49:51

And I would say that's definitely not the case

49:53

here in the country. We go to funerals when

49:56

they're real things, very real things. That

49:58

was one chunk. So the chunk is

50:00

this notion of hierarchy of values and the

50:03

strength of relationship that is based on a

50:05

real communion. And the

50:07

difficulty of fabricating that out of the

50:09

material of people who have

50:11

been brought up and are currently living in

50:13

cosopals and urbanism. The second piece is

50:16

the very, very large amount

50:19

of difficulty and complexity in

50:21

fabricating a whole or wholesome

50:24

social environment. This is

50:26

not the kind of thing that we're going

50:28

to be building from scratch. This is the

50:30

intentional community, the hippie commune, those

50:33

kinds of ideas that

50:35

break meaningfully, not just with space, but with culture.

50:37

So there's a difference, for example, between the Greek

50:39

colony or even the various

50:42

kinds of townships that came

50:44

out of the American diaspora and a

50:46

new intentional community. Because the new intentional

50:48

communities are different to innovate at the

50:50

level of culture, not just move a

50:52

whole bunch of people a hundred miles to the west. When

50:55

Puritan communities migrate and built a

50:57

new town, they copied the

50:59

entire cultural architecture all the way

51:01

down to the tools that the

51:03

blacksmith used, all of that, which

51:06

they had figured out how to survive

51:08

and almost didn't make it. They've been able

51:10

to over about six generations, they built a

51:12

functional toolkit, a cultural toolkit that was wholesome

51:14

enough to survive in their environment and then

51:16

just copy. Each colony is literally a colony

51:18

in the sense of like a sport. We're

51:21

not going to be doing that. We don't have six

51:23

generations. And unfortunately, our

51:26

cultural toolkits at the far end

51:28

of civilization are very,

51:30

very dysfunctional in a wide variety of different

51:33

ways, the result of all these toxins. So

51:35

that then leads to, oh,

51:37

wait a minute, how do we plug back into

51:40

functional wholesomeness that's

51:42

already there that we can actually revivify?

51:46

This is not a new thing. This is a pouring

51:48

water on plants. The plant is wilted,

51:50

but it's not dead. If we pour water in it,

51:52

it will grow back and now we can begin to

51:54

cultivate and actually allow it to grow. So it's not

51:57

Creating a new seed all the way down to the level

51:59

of DNA. We've had of the idea

52:01

of a little while with the city and

52:03

journey but rather pouring water on plants sorority

52:06

well suited in order to images except for

52:08

me that was a journey of journey was

52:10

was very. My. Personal What we

52:12

actually moved my wife and daughter nice,

52:15

physically put our bodies into different context

52:17

and lived with groups of people with

52:19

intent is dire, sometimes as anthropologist watching,

52:21

sometimes as actually committing to what's going

52:24

on and need less keep a harder

52:26

so. Obviously. Ones.

52:28

Wisdom is limited. I can't say categorically the what

52:30

I'm saying is true. I can see I can.

52:32

I would definitely. Urge

52:35

It has been heated considered as the

52:37

right answer. Okay, so now we're going

52:39

to resist the park to discuss it.

52:41

We talk about how your journey of

52:43

thinking about severe had led you to

52:45

become a committed Christian. I want to

52:47

say something here for we start with

52:49

someone to try very hard to be

52:51

charitable on open in this conversation. Even

52:53

though I'm a pretty well known atheistic

52:55

li inclined agnostic on things metaphysical fact

52:57

I often say when I hear the

53:00

word metaphysics I reach for by pistol

53:02

as so I'm going to try to

53:04

avoid sodding. Sarcastic and scoffing at if

53:06

I do market down as a

53:08

personal failure cause it's not my

53:10

intent in this discusses. I wanted

53:12

to start at our with that

53:14

you were said to take him

53:16

back about two years. Okay, we

53:18

talked about this category of institutional

53:20

structures that make it easy. It's

53:23

a viable closet. The people do

53:25

so flight. Not. Have their twelve

53:27

year old get a smartphone and as

53:29

it turns out that categories called the

53:31

Little and Don't I were looking. To

53:34

remake, eat and are looking at this Okay, how do

53:36

we were taught that it's A with the in that

53:38

category. And how do we identify

53:40

are distinguished the parts that are. Good.

53:43

And necessary the religion, And

53:45

separate out the parts that are. Bad.

53:48

and in media have historically been the

53:50

corrupting our it so it's not a

53:52

religion sort of up capital or lower

53:54

case are every like to do it

53:56

and that's the idea know the categories

53:58

for how human being about cultivating

54:01

communities that have strong bonds, community,

54:03

and have a shared orientation towards

54:05

a hierarchy of values in the

54:08

lived fashion and that is

54:10

durable across different kinds of permutations. That's

54:12

the category known as religion and the

54:15

challenge is to say that historically we've

54:17

noticed that religions tend to

54:20

go awry for a variety of reasons. Okay,

54:22

can we do a job, can we do

54:24

a better job of distinguishing

54:26

between the parts that are good and necessary

54:28

and the parts that are bad or corrupt

54:31

and do something new? Yeah, let me draw

54:33

another line on that. Several conversations with John

54:35

Verbeek, including five long podcasts and

54:37

one thing just to make sure we all have

54:39

this as a ground spot, at least with respect

54:42

to John, he is an absolute

54:44

naturalist. He believes in no supernatural

54:46

stuff. All right, would you say

54:49

you were also on that same

54:51

page with John at the time?

54:53

Yes, at the time. Less

54:56

so. I think part of the reason why less

54:58

so is because he's a

55:00

professional scientist, which means that

55:02

he has professional credentials

55:04

and even status that necessitates such an ideology,

55:07

whereas I'm not, so I can believe what

55:09

I want. I may lose friends or I

55:11

may lose sort of face that goes down

55:13

to a personality issue more than anything else.

55:15

Okay, so in fact we can take a

55:17

step back a little bit so that the

55:19

step has to do with exactly this issue

55:21

of something like the Overton window for

55:23

certain ideas, concepts, and

55:25

aspects of culture. So words and

55:28

concepts like say spirituality and

55:30

religion and faith and

55:33

even hope, but like the supernatural.

55:35

And I'd say there's two

55:37

discoveries that I made. One

55:40

is universally in this category

55:43

are the contemporary, I'll say this

55:45

is secular or the

55:48

blue church elite urban cosmopolitan

55:50

understanding of these terms Is

55:53

impoverished. And Sometimes to the point is

55:55

in fact being upside down, absolutely the

55:58

opposite of what they actually mean. Can

56:00

you? I'm done to some extent. And

56:03

then the second part is that they are. Are

56:06

the some of them are necessary? As as

56:08

I should Crucible, we hit a certain threshold.

56:10

We all while we actually have to do

56:12

something like spirituality wouldn't that be a dive

56:14

into it and engage in the rectification names

56:16

on that they were from their. Sittings,

56:19

Religion or like gnostic and I

56:21

think I was agnostic for backup.

56:23

Like were caught using the word

56:25

in a group setting like was

56:27

ten My never directly atheistic water

56:29

because. I. Would recommend that was

56:31

incoherent by the way of thinking people when

56:33

I was ten. But. Leaning

56:35

and that Russia certainly naturalistic. The

56:37

Manuel de la the. Required.

56:40

Me to have a concept around what he

56:42

called a virtual. Wishes.

56:44

To open the ontological scope, you could

56:46

have been real, the non physical, which

56:49

courses not radically controversial, but this notion

56:51

of the supernatural should have fun to

56:53

play with him, movies and will players.

56:56

But. You shouldn't be given any

56:58

real consideration to the agency the world.

57:01

So. Then a a process of being

57:03

dragged, kicking and screaming through these doorways

57:05

of these of these ideas. Spirituality the

57:07

middle of the first. Person

57:10

Married. And exploring that's what

57:12

is this they were we talked about were has

57:14

a work and spirituality by the way. we'll get

57:16

to have to the too much time on it

57:18

but has to do with the deep south. Of

57:21

the psychology being kind of like a

57:23

week version of that and relationship with.

57:27

Wife. How. Do you become a

57:29

wholly integrated so. How. Do you

57:31

com all into a leash with all

57:33

the aspects of yourself and that he

57:36

moved to live in such a fashion

57:38

with or friend as X Time screech

57:40

from installment? In such a fashion the

57:42

your experiences carve out a deeper and

57:45

deeper self. What your soul, your your

57:47

capacity be relationship with the meaningfulness of

57:49

life is deeper and richer as you

57:51

experienced life itself. So. Often

57:54

times your ears pierced life might be more

57:56

than you can handle it to you as

57:58

a to make a traumatic experiences. though as

58:00

a certain. Height news source scar tissue

58:02

on it. You. Become a relatively

58:04

narrow person or persons avoiding

58:06

that scar tissue. With this

58:09

sore areas and spirituality is

58:11

the practice whereby healers dramas

58:13

and the practice whereby you

58:15

deepen. Our max me take

58:17

advantage of were healthy pain for the

58:19

pain no gain process to become more

58:22

and more deeply insult. Right and

58:24

says okay great of my that

58:26

are not that ruff the next

58:28

week mother was Edward worse for

58:30

but that doesn't employ your podcast

58:32

with Bj Campbell as our friend

58:34

Ryan Hundred Records not long ago

58:36

that was fun f And so

58:38

this notion that opens up the

58:40

question the of. Agency.

58:43

Agent. Identity. Been

58:45

at different levels of

58:47

steel and transmitted meaning.

58:50

Okay we have some degree of hypothesis.

58:52

much are supposedly that human beings are

58:54

persons and agents and you have something

58:56

like identity and have choices and you

58:59

navigate the world. We can identify the

59:01

other kinds of primates or even your

59:03

dog is you know quite well dear

59:05

had something in that continual but that

59:08

the same level but I have the

59:10

question record is okay to me. think

59:12

about this at a level of the

59:14

this mechanism independent is or something going

59:16

on with say like with money or

59:19

with your Bullock Famous that. We

59:21

can use some of these notions. Of

59:24

agency for example, To think more

59:26

effectively about structures that are going

59:28

on. They're not strictly human beings

59:30

visible, From. The as by the with yeah. Well

59:33

sort of part of river we

59:35

went down this road. urology space

59:37

with dress go wire. our moloch

59:40

are not included eventually. that it

59:42

is and it is comps last

59:44

winter does not think. That

59:48

I thought that was a pretty sound

59:50

inside at the time. And.

59:54

As as we were, I remain with

59:56

most of record wars and further. Some

59:58

of them. Cause us

1:00:00

or preferably rent movies on the

1:00:03

idea of no way. I pointed

1:00:05

out that. Every person who

1:00:07

thinks they have an idea of

1:00:09

your way are you the Abraham.has

1:00:11

a different and so while there

1:00:14

is a meme plants which is

1:00:16

least some of everybody's views of

1:00:18

the idea of the always and

1:00:20

that ideas traction in the world

1:00:22

which are quite real that is

1:00:24

qualitatively different than eight. Individual

1:00:27

who's bound by seconds of

1:00:29

minute scale homeostasis around gases,

1:00:32

nutrients, and talks their qualitatively

1:00:34

different kinds of these. So

1:00:37

laugh. At the just a lot

1:00:39

of the sort of it is that I would

1:00:41

take the concept of agency a mother will accompany

1:00:43

person which is even more fundamental. And

1:00:45

say that. I've. Come to the conclusion

1:00:47

that there's a higher order way of thinking

1:00:49

about that. That. Of which

1:00:51

are particular version is a subset. And

1:00:54

that while was just go with some

1:00:56

a lot. Ain't the same kind

1:00:58

of thing? A proper understanding of person in agency

1:01:00

would say that bullet is a chance. It. But.

1:01:03

That can be lowered to unravel that

1:01:05

that the is thinking about these things

1:01:07

in this way and then also facing

1:01:09

the real difficulty out okay we're going

1:01:11

to need something like a religious or

1:01:13

political with would have the design space

1:01:16

of religion was a look like to

1:01:18

construct cultures that how appropriate practices doesn't

1:01:20

bother with for lot of work into

1:01:22

this both in terms of comparative anthropology

1:01:24

history with yeah lots of different of

1:01:26

the coaches talking with indigenous music looking

1:01:28

at to build a man when ritual

1:01:30

structures look like wider which will. Barry.

1:01:33

Wire results boxes to serve what kind

1:01:35

of role they play with feel pretty

1:01:37

sizable amount of ever been put into

1:01:39

that and then noticing that without. Many.

1:01:42

Generations of time we're going to have no

1:01:44

luck in building anything is going to successful

1:01:46

in this in the do with so so

1:01:48

the concept, religion which is that they're. This

1:01:51

is where there's a lot of sitting

1:01:53

on. This is to say it again,

1:01:55

because of religion, broadly speaking covers the

1:01:58

the question. Ah, of

1:02:00

a liturgy, which is to say, communion. Liturgy,

1:02:03

I'm using the essential message. You can send a link

1:02:06

to it, but I'm not making this up. This is

1:02:08

coming from a particular, the Orthodox use

1:02:10

of the term. And it refers to work

1:02:12

together, the actual origin, the etymology, work together,

1:02:14

people work that we do together. And

1:02:17

it's cognitive, but it's also

1:02:19

embodied, behavioral. And

1:02:22

with both the intent and the result of

1:02:24

producing communion. So, raveling people together. It's

1:02:26

how we bind each other into groups that

1:02:28

have an identity as a group. And

1:02:31

of course, there's many, many different liturgical practices. If you've

1:02:33

ever been to a concert, you've been part of a

1:02:35

liturgical practice. If you've been to a football game, you've

1:02:37

been a fan of a football team, you've been part

1:02:39

of a liturgical practice. These are raveling groups of disparate

1:02:41

people together into something that has a shared identity. But

1:02:45

that's religion. Right? So religion, that piece.

1:02:47

It also has two more pieces. The

1:02:49

second piece is the hierarchy of values.

1:02:52

Or to say, which communion? Do you want to

1:02:54

orient your life energy towards being a fan of

1:02:57

the Ravens? Or do you want

1:02:59

to have your life energy oriented towards say, for

1:03:01

example, your family? What's higher on

1:03:03

the stack? Where you orient your attention? What's

1:03:05

the verticality of it? And then the relationship

1:03:07

between that two, which would be something like

1:03:09

rituals, which are the things

1:03:11

that ease or create

1:03:13

structures or infrastructure scaffolding that makes

1:03:16

it easy for people to live

1:03:18

according to their values, to

1:03:21

come into groups, into communions that

1:03:23

are driven by those values and

1:03:26

are able to respond to the context of

1:03:28

reality as reality impinges upon the life we're

1:03:30

trying to live. How do we deal with

1:03:32

a war? How do we deal with a famine? How

1:03:35

do we deal with sickness? How do we deal with

1:03:37

people retiring from our business without the entire thing unraveling?

1:03:39

And so that's the category of religion. So again, my

1:03:41

journey was one of coming to know what I just

1:03:43

said, which was super not on

1:03:45

my radar at all three years ago, endeavoring

1:03:48

to grasp this thing deeply, but in some

1:03:50

sense from a very academic perspective or an

1:03:52

intellectual perspective, trying to understand it. Maybe I'm an architect

1:03:54

or a designer perspective, this may be even better. How do

1:03:57

we design this kind of a thing? Top

1:03:59

down. to embed it in order

1:04:01

to actually live it. What does it look like

1:04:03

to actually do this in real life with real

1:04:05

people? And by the way, real embedded people who

1:04:07

already have their literatures, already have their hierarchies and

1:04:09

values, already have their rituals and they have a

1:04:11

sort of an entropic characteristic. And by

1:04:13

the way, oftentimes already have

1:04:15

their spirituality and the short answer is,

1:04:17

by the way, that's really, really hard.

1:04:20

Like how do you get people who

1:04:22

have already come with acts and may

1:04:24

actually have tremendous degrees of difference and

1:04:26

distinction and disagreement, lack of

1:04:28

harmony at subtle levels that they are even

1:04:31

aware of to come into something like proper

1:04:33

comedian, proper comedian, just like lightly

1:04:35

bonded comedian in a temporary purposeful container, like

1:04:37

a football game or Burning Man, but actually

1:04:40

a real thing, vertically and

1:04:42

horizontally integrated with strength and

1:04:44

the kind of thing that would thrive in

1:04:46

the world. Right. So you got three characteristics

1:04:49

and that's where my ship sort of hit

1:04:51

the rocks. Okay. This is not, I can't do this

1:04:54

and I'm not even trying to do it. I've sort

1:04:56

of spent all that. I've got to try to do

1:04:58

it and I don't think it can be done the

1:05:00

time pending we've got. Okay. So what's the next step

1:05:02

on that front? And then we'll say luck would have

1:05:05

it. We'll stay in your frame for the moment. I

1:05:07

ended up being invited by my wife saying, he

1:05:10

looks like one more very, very

1:05:12

halfhearted run of this. Let's go visit this town in

1:05:14

North Carolina. I talked about this a little bit with

1:05:16

Daniel Thorst on the podcast, but as

1:05:19

we were doing the citium thing, I made

1:05:21

this very good analytic criteria, various places that

1:05:23

sit within the design space and this region

1:05:25

of Western North Carolina was on that list.

1:05:27

It was actually like number eight and we

1:05:29

did that RV trip, but we went and

1:05:31

visited your place. I went to Highland County

1:05:34

and the next stop was

1:05:37

supposed to be here in the

1:05:39

Ashmore region, but because we were all

1:05:41

worn out and burnt out and we're ready to move on,

1:05:43

we skipped it. The only place we skipped it the whole

1:05:45

trip. And then we moved from the RV

1:05:47

world to the airplane world and traveled to different countries

1:05:49

and islands and whatnot, but it was kind of sitting

1:05:51

out there. It's like the one slot on the spreadsheet

1:05:53

that not had a red X next to it. And

1:05:55

so coming out of Ecuador, put a red X next

1:05:58

to that. We ended up looking at the spreadsheet. Vanessa

1:06:00

said, let's do this then. And

1:06:02

so we did, with very, very

1:06:04

little hope. Effectively no hope actually.

1:06:07

More about, maybe we can find a

1:06:09

place that we can live and it'll be a nice place.

1:06:11

We'll be able to hang out there and that'll be good,

1:06:13

but not any real intent or hope that we can be

1:06:15

able to build this city. In fact, I think I largely

1:06:17

said, that's done. Maybe somebody else

1:06:20

can figure it out. And interestingly enough,

1:06:22

we actually landed initially in Asheville, but

1:06:24

we drove through Black Mountain on the

1:06:26

way and we stopped in Black Mountain

1:06:29

for reasons that are, in some sense, pretty stochastic.

1:06:31

The guy we wanted to meet, happened to be

1:06:33

nearby, just grabbed coffee in this town, it's kinda

1:06:35

cute. Got out, walked around,

1:06:37

had a very strong sense of, hmm, now

1:06:40

this is actually not, let's say good

1:06:42

vibes, these contemporary parlays. Went to Asheville,

1:06:44

Asheville, as you mentioned, by the way,

1:06:46

you very correctly pointed out, didn't have

1:06:49

as good vibes. Nice place. Some

1:06:51

elements are really, really nice. Some elements are not at all nice. But

1:06:54

it was, okay, Asheville's not gonna work, but maybe something

1:06:56

in this region will work. Went back

1:06:58

home, grabbed some more

1:07:00

resources, including my mom coming out, so

1:07:03

she could watch the Eloise, Eloise too, so she could

1:07:05

have a voice in this thing. And

1:07:08

came out for an extended period of time.

1:07:11

Tried a place in Asheville, tried another place

1:07:13

in Nashville. After about the second week, I

1:07:15

had a very strong sense of, this isn't gonna

1:07:17

work, let's eat all the rest of our Airbnbs

1:07:19

in Asheville, and let's try Black Mountain. Let's give

1:07:21

it a real run. It wasn't even the, we

1:07:23

hadn't chosen to get an Airbnb there on the

1:07:25

second trip. But we did. Went

1:07:28

out there, we happened to, think

1:07:30

about amazing this is, we landed on a particular day,

1:07:32

which is called the Holly Jolly, which is like

1:07:35

December 21st or something like that. It's kind

1:07:37

of a Mayberry, everybody's out on the streets,

1:07:39

all the shops are open, lights are on,

1:07:41

like 15 different live music venues walking around.

1:07:43

We just happened to land on that day.

1:07:45

We happened to have an Airbnb within walking

1:07:47

distance, and we walked out, there's this media

1:07:49

like, whoa, this is actually still

1:07:51

a part of reality, this is a thing that is

1:07:53

not made up, it's a real thing. And

1:07:56

then the next day, we went up and

1:07:58

watched a choir. concert at Montreat

1:08:00

College, which is a beautiful kind of Presbyterian

1:08:03

liberal arts college, which happens by the way

1:08:05

to have a world-class cybersecurity program. And

1:08:08

over a period of about four or five days, there

1:08:10

was a very strong sense of, I think

1:08:13

this might be the right place. So

1:08:15

we made a commitment. We've got

1:08:18

a long-term Airbnb, well, several months,

1:08:21

which I'm currently in right now, by the

1:08:23

way, and dropped in with

1:08:25

no real idea where we're going to live. And by the way,

1:08:27

not knowing anybody. And here's the interesting

1:08:29

thing. All of the lessons

1:08:31

that had been learned in the previous

1:08:33

journey of civian, I started being dotted

1:08:35

and T started being crossed. Simple

1:08:38

stuff sometimes, like, oh, I really

1:08:40

thrive in this physical context. It works for

1:08:42

me, works for my wife too. Unlike, say,

1:08:44

for example, she does pretty well

1:08:46

at the beach. I'm not really a beach guy, weirdly, since I

1:08:48

was in San Diego for so long. This

1:08:50

particular kind of nonsense, which by the way is

1:08:52

super non-trivial. The hypothesis here is that we're

1:08:55

humans. We're particular. We're homosapiens. We actually have

1:08:58

something like a niche that is our proper

1:09:00

physical niche that we should thrive in better

1:09:02

than another niche. But simple stuff that you've

1:09:04

got more familiarity with because where you live,

1:09:06

it seems like people

1:09:08

are kind. People are open. The

1:09:10

people across the street were sitting on their porch and

1:09:12

they started chatting with my daughter and she got to

1:09:14

know about their names. And a few days later, we

1:09:16

got invited to a potluck and human.

1:09:20

Communion is somewhat real here in a very broad

1:09:22

sense. Community is certainly very, very

1:09:24

real. So we started getting drawn in. And

1:09:26

as part of this being drawn in, there was a sense

1:09:29

of, oh, shit, pay

1:09:31

attention. Maybe there's something to be

1:09:33

learned. Maybe the right way to do

1:09:35

this is actually just to pay attention to what was

1:09:38

happening and why it's happening and

1:09:41

go very slowly and listen and

1:09:44

notice. And maybe there's a little tiny

1:09:46

bit that you can add. But and

1:09:48

the word I used is my podcast with Dan,

1:09:50

humility. Like really, really was do the humility thing.

1:09:53

By the way, the humility was earned. So it

1:09:55

wasn't conceptual, it was real. And still

1:09:57

is real. So After a period of

1:09:59

about... It's really. Quite

1:10:01

clear that this is the place you wanted to watch. A

1:10:04

degree of. Will. Be wholesomeness.

1:10:07

satisfaction, happiness to film it.

1:10:09

Just. Go for a walk, interacting with people

1:10:12

are the city and stuff like oh wow

1:10:14

factor fear is is true. Living in the

1:10:16

right place with the right people is actually

1:10:18

radically to sell it a meaningful as is

1:10:21

actually very easy if you're in the right

1:10:23

context. And then. We.

1:10:25

Went to a birthday party. But

1:10:28

the way not invited by the people whose body was

1:10:30

And yet there was five. And

1:10:32

to the people who they're the deterred by

1:10:34

administered you going to deter. This

1:10:37

is the last. Doorway.

1:10:39

Even after that for us to have an allergy to

1:10:41

church and never got injured. An

1:10:44

even deeper our algae christian church

1:10:46

like a good visit a buddhist

1:10:48

monastery which identical that. I

1:10:50

could participate in. I was too similar in

1:10:52

the Amazon to problem but christian church, food

1:10:54

up and even work but at this point.

1:10:57

A. To. Good

1:11:00

stuff is happening Here is vastly beyond.

1:11:02

We're not doing anything which is participating.

1:11:05

Why? That is. This seems going.

1:11:07

we've been invited. Let's go and.

1:11:10

Interestingly enough, as it turns out that particular

1:11:12

Sunday I was already pre community Good peter

1:11:14

way out to San Francisco to hang out

1:11:16

with the i thought. To. The Zebra

1:11:18

a nicer juxtaposition. Vanessa. Dropped

1:11:21

into a simple country church

1:11:23

and I jumped into the

1:11:25

the antibodies that the farthest

1:11:27

levels of the cosmopolitan, urban,

1:11:29

techno, secular universe. And then

1:11:31

we came back into Period

1:11:33

Notes. And by report

1:11:35

was this is bad didn't worse. Purple

1:11:37

was this is really good Them I

1:11:39

did yoga. Okay, So.

1:11:42

We've added what amazes have a laugh at this

1:11:45

is on the naive and not connected to the

1:11:47

Buddha. The we were. Do. You think

1:11:49

the maybe the past would be willing to come by our

1:11:51

house and talk to him. Africa which

1:11:53

of course now he knows officers can

1:11:55

get our now i want. my

1:11:59

faith that part So we

1:12:01

invited him to come by, a very generous person. And

1:12:04

this particular church, by the way, is interesting because

1:12:06

we have three pastors. One is

1:12:08

full time, two are kind of on their

1:12:10

own dime, and probably on the order of

1:12:12

like five people who rotate

1:12:15

through that slot on a rolling

1:12:17

basis, and then another 13 or

1:12:19

so people who do something in

1:12:21

that regime in the environment because it was

1:12:23

a COVID church, it was an amalgam

1:12:26

of a variety of different churches that when COVID

1:12:28

shut everything down, everybody had to leave their physical

1:12:30

big building. They ended up saying, well, screw that,

1:12:32

we're still going to go to church. They ended

1:12:34

up going to the house church, which meant they

1:12:36

ended up mixing houses that

1:12:38

happened to be nearby, regardless of previous

1:12:40

church affiliation or denomination. And found that

1:12:42

something very powerful and good happened in

1:12:45

that intimacy. So when the possibility

1:12:47

came back, one of the groups was

1:12:49

gifted a church building, a very

1:12:51

modest church building. And so I

1:12:53

don't know, maybe 30 or 40 people started showing up. By

1:12:56

the time we got there, it had grown to about 120. So I

1:12:58

went for the

1:13:00

first time, and I had three

1:13:03

different primary experiences. The

1:13:05

first was a profound

1:13:09

sense of the aliveness, the

1:13:11

vitality, the health, and

1:13:13

the wholesomeness of the people,

1:13:15

and in particular, the young people. On

1:13:18

my journeys over the past several years, one of the things that

1:13:20

has just broken my heart is how ravaged

1:13:23

Gen Z has become.

1:13:26

They do not look healthy, almost anywhere. It

1:13:28

doesn't matter whether you're in a beach community

1:13:30

in Southern California, up in the

1:13:32

mountains of Vermont or New York City. Our culture

1:13:34

has not been good to Gen Z. And

1:13:37

it's obvious, like in the physiology, their facial

1:13:39

expressions, and of course, their clothes, and probably

1:13:41

their ideas. But these young people

1:13:44

look amazing, like literally even at the level of like

1:13:46

just their physicality. And they went with their family.

1:13:49

As I mentioned, in fact, in our email over a period

1:13:51

of a year or so, since we've been going at

1:13:53

least six times, I've noticed a teenager between

1:13:56

the ages of say 14 and 17 come,

1:13:59

often with their friends. maybe come again,

1:14:01

maybe come again, but then bring their

1:14:03

parents. So not parents dragging their unwilling

1:14:06

teenager into church, but teenagers bringing their

1:14:08

parents into church. That's a vitality. There's

1:14:10

something, a need being met. So

1:14:13

the first, healthy, multi-generational families,

1:14:16

healthy kids, healthy teenagers, and a

1:14:19

sense of present joy and vitality,

1:14:21

aliveness, and wholesome in this space.

1:14:24

And by the way, from

1:14:26

a purely theoretical perspective, that's the gold

1:14:28

standard. That's the currency. That's

1:14:30

the thing. Whatever produces that is

1:14:33

the thing to be thinking about, to be orienting towards,

1:14:35

but that's the measure, that's the test. For

1:14:37

me, like for Sivian, as it turns out also

1:14:40

for Christian, by their fruit you shall know them,

1:14:42

but I already had a

1:14:44

cognitive model that said, work from

1:14:46

the embodied, the imminent first, and

1:14:48

work out to the the

1:14:50

narrative of the balloon structure. So the second

1:14:52

is I sat down and actually listened to the

1:14:54

sermon. Oh, sorry, I participated in the singing, as

1:14:56

you mentioned. The singing is fantastic and I continue

1:14:58

to participate quite happily. I've never been much of

1:15:01

a singer or I can't even remember lyrics, but

1:15:03

I'm doing my best. And then

1:15:05

sat down and listened to the sermon. And what I found

1:15:07

in the sermon that was just quite wonderful

1:15:09

was one, I love the architecture,

1:15:11

the technology of service. It's a problem that

1:15:13

us talking heads and the internet have. If

1:15:15

we go high level, it ends up

1:15:17

being too esoteric, too

1:15:19

theoretical, it's nerdy, doesn't

1:15:22

connect with most people, or you can go very low

1:15:24

level, in which case it often has to become the

1:15:26

lowest common denominator on this marketing. But

1:15:29

in the context of a live sermon,

1:15:31

the pastor's capacity to hit profound

1:15:34

theological points, and then drop down

1:15:36

and articulate them in a SEC

1:15:39

analogy was beautiful. And I can feel the integrity by

1:15:42

meeting the point they made it to in the SEC

1:15:44

analogy was the same point you've been in terms

1:15:46

of theology. And as we went through

1:15:48

it, my sense of listening was, okay, you're not saying

1:15:50

in this a way that I'm familiar with, you're saying

1:15:52

things that I perceive as being very true. And

1:15:55

I'm noticing as I'm watching,

1:15:57

having the inside of holy cow,

1:15:59

obvious. obviously, liturgy, obviously, a

1:16:02

ritual whereby a group of people commit

1:16:04

to contributing a significant amount of their

1:16:07

time and attention to orienting towards the

1:16:09

architecture, the hierarchy of values and understanding

1:16:11

how to live in that way and

1:16:14

make concerted real commitments to

1:16:16

live according to those values and to support

1:16:18

each other doing it, acknowledging the difficulty of

1:16:20

it is at the middle of the

1:16:22

bottom of the stack, like at the actual center of this thing. You

1:16:24

can't do it otherwise. Okay, let's pause

1:16:26

there. This is very important. And this

1:16:29

is all the stuff that

1:16:31

at least some formulations of civium

1:16:33

or protoboea are looking to achieve.

1:16:36

And so through whatever methods, especially

1:16:39

the wholesomeness for children, etc,

1:16:41

you know, the rich feeling of

1:16:43

aliveness and community and mutual care,

1:16:46

it's all that great. However,

1:16:49

the church you belong to and we're baptized

1:16:51

in is a, shall we

1:16:53

say, no weak sauce church or

1:16:55

in rut speak, very little branch

1:16:57

water with the bourbon, you know,

1:17:00

this is the real deal. I

1:17:02

first saw on Twitter, Jordan comes

1:17:04

out as a Christian. My first

1:17:06

thought was, Edgar Gore, Jordan is

1:17:08

going to make an interesting, sophisticated

1:17:10

intellectual argument that we can think

1:17:12

of Yahweh, the idea of Yahweh

1:17:14

as an agregor, therefore it's real,

1:17:16

therefore I'm a Christian. But then

1:17:18

as I dug into this quite

1:17:20

a bit further, the commitment you made

1:17:23

is very different. I mean, this is

1:17:25

the old time religion. I went to the

1:17:27

website of your church, which I'm not going to mention because we want to keep

1:17:29

those people up so privately. And I

1:17:32

read the statement of basic beliefs. Anyone

1:17:35

pursuing membership and or baptism

1:17:37

must agree with the statement.

1:17:40

Here's one of them. I'm going to read a few

1:17:42

of them. I want to get your reaction to each

1:17:44

one. There is one and only living and true God.

1:17:46

He is an intelligent, spiritual

1:17:49

and personal underscore

1:17:51

the word personal being. Do you actually

1:17:55

believe that? I do. Okay. So personal

1:17:57

as in not an agregor, not

1:17:59

a loosely cut. coupled, meme plaques, but there's

1:18:01

some dude with a white beard, throw lightning

1:18:03

bolts at him, et cetera. Not

1:18:05

Zeus, definitely not Zeus, not Michelangelo's

1:18:08

mistake, but yes, personal. Talk

1:18:10

to me about how you got there, right?

1:18:12

I mean, like you, I have, since I

1:18:15

was 11, been an apiistically inclined agnostic. You

1:18:17

know, we both agree that saying you're an

1:18:19

atheist is an idiotic thing to say, since

1:18:22

you can't actually prove anything about metaphysics, at

1:18:24

least so I would represent. You know, I

1:18:26

can't even prove the universe didn't flick into

1:18:28

existence two seconds ago with our memories in

1:18:31

place and will flick out of existence in

1:18:33

two seconds. So to say anything fundamental, underlined

1:18:35

about metaphysics is just an error. And I

1:18:37

was smart enough to realize that at age

1:18:40

11, also, you got there a year before me. So

1:18:43

how did you come to believe strong enough

1:18:45

to put your personal integrity, which I know

1:18:47

to be of the highest order on

1:18:50

the line and say, I'm willing to be

1:18:52

baptized because I believe in a personal God.

1:18:55

Yeah, you're saying it just right. So yeah,

1:18:58

can I just maybe take me a little bit to

1:19:00

lay it out? So the first step was the one

1:19:02

that I just mentioned. I walk away from that first

1:19:05

day of church and have this, okay, this is what

1:19:07

healthy community looks and feels like. This

1:19:09

is, there's something extremely good going on here. And frankly,

1:19:11

I want to continue to participate in this. I want to

1:19:13

engage in it. I want to go to church again. So

1:19:15

I went to church the next Sunday, like, okay, two

1:19:18

dots, we're starting to get a line. This is something going

1:19:20

on here. And by the way, I continue to grow. And

1:19:22

there's people coming in and we started meeting with other people

1:19:24

in the church. Wow, there's just so much depth in reality

1:19:26

and people having real hardship and caring for each other. So

1:19:28

all this stuff, like checking all the boxes. So

1:19:31

then I had a crisis of conscience. Well,

1:19:33

shoot, back to integrity. I

1:19:36

can't participate. I can't come to

1:19:38

this church and participate in what's

1:19:40

happening here. If I am cynically

1:19:42

removing myself from what's actually things

1:19:44

they value deeply, like if their

1:19:46

hierarchy of values has certain elements

1:19:48

and I'm not participating in that,

1:19:51

then that's just wrong. Like, and I shouldn't do it

1:19:53

deeply, deeply wrong. The other work, I

1:19:55

can create an intellectual confabulation to sort of

1:19:57

allow me to dodge some of

1:19:59

the ideas. that they have been still come.

1:20:01

That's just like immoral, like evil, I would

1:20:03

even say, at a deep level, Luciferian in

1:20:05

the contemporary language. Okay, so now

1:20:07

I'm in trouble. I have to take this seriously. For

1:20:09

the first time in my entire life, I

1:20:12

took Christianity seriously and began to engage with

1:20:14

it. And I engaged with it tremendously. By

1:20:16

the way, interestingly enough, Vanessa too. So we

1:20:18

were both like troubled and challenged with, okay,

1:20:20

what are we gonna do? And she has

1:20:22

her whole world and background. And

1:20:24

so we started grabbing books of theology and

1:20:26

doing a process. I did it from the

1:20:29

bottom up, reading, beginning to read scripture for

1:20:31

the first time, reading the apostolic

1:20:33

fathers, the church fathers, like in from historical

1:20:35

perspective up, grabbing a whole, just getting recommendations

1:20:37

of who are great contemporary theologians and what

1:20:39

are they thinking about and talking about reading

1:20:41

this stuff down. And I've read a lot

1:20:44

of this stuff now, like thousands and thousands

1:20:46

of pages. And by the way, just considering

1:20:48

a tremendous amount of videos online, which is

1:20:50

very helpful. It's a different modality. And noticing

1:20:52

that something about the, well,

1:20:55

there's certainly challenges and some significant

1:20:57

negatives to the denominational

1:20:59

diffusion of Christianity, of

1:21:01

Christian dome, the fact that

1:21:03

the Orthodox and the Catholics and of course

1:21:05

the Prod diaspora are different. There's an advantage,

1:21:08

which is that you can orbit around different

1:21:10

ideas and get a bunch of different perspectives

1:21:12

and takes on them. And sometimes one

1:21:14

will have a different insight of the land

1:21:16

and get you more deeply understanding what's actually

1:21:18

going on. And I had, you know, five

1:21:21

major blockers or objections that I

1:21:23

came across that I was in me going,

1:21:25

okay, this doesn't work. This doesn't

1:21:27

make sense. It seems wrong. All right, let me be

1:21:29

into two on it. It's that point of humility just

1:21:31

keeps coming back. What I noticed is that as

1:21:34

I delve deeper, and as I paid attention,

1:21:37

I noticed that for the most part, I

1:21:40

just didn't understand the question properly. I

1:21:42

was dealing with a projection, my own projection,

1:21:44

my own model of what the

1:21:47

question was. It was somewhat defensible in

1:21:49

the culture. It wasn't a result of

1:21:51

actually a wise understanding of what was

1:21:53

happening in the theology or in the

1:21:55

religion. And then by the

1:21:57

way, for thousands of years, very committed people

1:21:59

have working with these problems earnestly and

1:22:01

honestly and in a fashion with the monastic sensibility.

1:22:03

They made real commitment much deeper than my commitment.

1:22:06

So then I would struggle with it. Okay, let

1:22:08

me take a look at it. How other people

1:22:10

who really care about this looked at it as

1:22:12

it turns out. My thoughts are

1:22:14

objections were not novel. It's not like they hadn't thought

1:22:17

about these things before. I was just like smarter

1:22:19

than them. Oh, you only knew what I knew

1:22:21

you wouldn't have fallen into this pitfall. But rather

1:22:23

than the, in some cases, actual modes of thinking

1:22:25

were wrong. I think it may have mentioned, for

1:22:28

example, one thing that I really got my teeth

1:22:30

in right now is this

1:22:32

Orthodox sensibility, Beauty First. This

1:22:34

guy whose book I'm reading, I'll give you his name for

1:22:37

the link. It's a great book so far. See the ethics

1:22:39

of beauty or the beauty of ethics. And

1:22:41

his point is that in the West, we have

1:22:43

a notion of a truth first sense towards ethics,

1:22:45

meaning truth endeavoring to understand

1:22:47

goodness, and therefore subjecting goodness to

1:22:50

the form or the structure of

1:22:52

truth, which maybe not at

1:22:54

all. Ironically, another way of saying that was that the

1:22:56

knowledge is good and evil. But the Orthodox

1:22:58

come at it from the point of view of Beauty First. And

1:23:01

he makes a very compelling argument, which I,

1:23:03

in fact, completely agree, that Beauty First is

1:23:05

the appropriate way and shows how this allows

1:23:07

us to have a relationship, by

1:23:10

the way, a relationship with goodness,

1:23:12

as opposed to an idea or

1:23:14

an ideology with goodness. Right.

1:23:16

So I went through my objection, each

1:23:18

one very intensely over, I don't know,

1:23:21

probably a period of

1:23:23

six months, talking with different people, sometimes

1:23:25

lies, sometimes reading their books, I got

1:23:27

through them all. Each

1:23:30

one ultimately got to the point where I realized that I

1:23:32

just wasn't understanding it properly. And as I

1:23:34

got to understand it properly, one of two things that

1:23:36

happened either. Oh, I get

1:23:38

that now. I'll give you an example in a moment. Or,

1:23:40

oh, this is actually the kind of

1:23:42

thing that's more in the direction of mystery. And

1:23:45

it's not the kind of thing that you're supposed to

1:23:47

understand in this fashion. Rather, it's a way

1:23:49

to live. It's a way

1:23:51

to practice. Okay, interesting. So

1:23:53

for example, the Trinity, the

1:23:55

doctrine of the Trinity, the trying God,

1:23:58

if you say the word trying God, that could throw

1:24:00

a little bit more of an accent on it.

1:24:02

The triune God with the little banjo music in

1:24:04

the background. As you said, it's all time. Your

1:24:06

religion is nooking around. You better pass a little

1:24:08

faster boy. I sat with the Trinity

1:24:10

for quite some time and then it just dropped.

1:24:13

Oh, wow. Crap. Now

1:24:15

I get it. I see it. Now

1:24:18

that I see it can't see it. It

1:24:20

is actually above the top of the stack

1:24:22

at the level of philosophy. It

1:24:25

describes the most compact necessary

1:24:28

and sufficient components of any

1:24:30

possible reality. Which

1:24:33

ain't gonna happen. We ain't gonna close that in the next 30

1:24:35

minutes. But the point is. I was going to say when I

1:24:37

was 12 years old, I did

1:24:39

the work without having read any

1:24:41

other person and disproved Anselm's ontological

1:24:44

proof of God. And

1:24:47

I later read, of course, that had been refuted

1:24:49

even by Thomas Aquinas and some others, but I'll

1:24:51

be a little careful about some of that stuff.

1:24:54

Not the mono God, not that

1:24:56

one, but the Trinity specifically. Specifically

1:24:58

the Trinity. I was raised a Catholic and

1:25:00

so, and I was actually reasonably devout until

1:25:02

I was 9.75 years

1:25:04

old and in

1:25:07

part being grossly seduced by science

1:25:09

and inside fiction. Then in the

1:25:11

year between sixth grade and seventh

1:25:13

grade, I spent two weeks researching

1:25:15

comparative religion and then had an

1:25:17

epiphany that, nope,

1:25:20

not so probably, and it

1:25:23

was invented by men to control other men.

1:25:25

Of course, today I would have a little

1:25:27

bit more nuance that it evolved as

1:25:30

a way for men to control other men as

1:25:32

opposed to it was created for that purpose. But

1:25:34

anyway, I thought about these things a little bit

1:25:36

and so continue your story. So the Trinity is

1:25:39

an example where as I finally got

1:25:41

to the point where I understood it, what I would say

1:25:43

properly, it landed. Now in my

1:25:45

case, it landed because I'd spent a lot

1:25:47

of time thinking about that kind of problem,

1:25:49

you remember, Forest Landry and thinking triadically. Almost

1:25:52

like a puzzle piece dropping in. Once it dropped in, I

1:25:54

was like, whoa, crap, now I'm in trouble. Because

1:25:56

I believe that this is true. Like

1:25:58

if I run the. checksum and I

1:26:00

keep going back and forth and thinking

1:26:02

about it, I no longer have the

1:26:05

ability to think about a viable reality

1:26:07

where this isn't actually the generator function

1:26:09

of that viable reality. I mean that

1:26:11

philosophically as well as theologically. Well,

1:26:13

now I have to start taking the rest of the

1:26:15

truth seriously, making it seriously. So now we get to

1:26:17

the top one, like the gristle between the teeth. It's

1:26:19

funny that you hit on it because it is actually

1:26:21

the gristle. For Vanessa as me

1:26:23

as well, even more so than me,

1:26:25

which is this sort of personal, personal

1:26:28

relationship. And to the Western

1:26:30

mind, this is particularly gallant because we are

1:26:32

truth first civilization. I'm

1:26:34

not going to A, be able to get you there. And I'm also not really

1:26:36

going to be able to describe it well, but here's the point. The

1:26:39

notion of person needs to

1:26:41

be taken properly. The

1:26:43

notion of relationship needs to be

1:26:45

taken centrally. This is a key

1:26:47

insight. The essence of the

1:26:49

trying God is pure relationality.

1:26:52

Relationality as the ontological primitive

1:26:56

out of which other things are produced. And by

1:26:58

the way, the phrase relationship is more fundamental than

1:27:00

the Lhasa is a good one to take a

1:27:02

look at. There's a number of folks who are

1:27:04

beginning to say that out loud. And

1:27:06

that's get you pretty close. Get you pretty

1:27:08

close. And by the way, it's sort of

1:27:10

the cutting edge of thinking clearly about reality. So

1:27:12

when you realize the relationship is the primitive,

1:27:15

many have a question of, Oh, wait a minute.

1:27:17

Remember that? Did you see my tweet that the

1:27:20

inverse of ideologies relationship? Yeah, I think I recall

1:27:22

saying that. And, uh, yeah, maybe

1:27:24

if we endeavor to approach this

1:27:26

through the modality of idea, the

1:27:29

faculty of mind that sinks by

1:27:31

means of semantics, I.E. ideology, we're

1:27:34

actually in the wrong regime. It

1:27:36

has to be through the modality

1:27:38

of relationship. It's just

1:27:40

a different qualitative regime. I can

1:27:43

give lots of arguments for why that happens to be

1:27:45

the case, but you just posit them and it is

1:27:47

the case. And when you begin to

1:27:49

proceed in that fashion, you go, well, I have no idea

1:27:51

how to do that. And that's a good place to be.

1:27:54

Like, it's kind of like when you acknowledge, if you say,

1:27:56

what was the phrase you want to bring into the vernacular?

1:27:58

Now's the time the hero's phrase. The

1:28:00

hero's answer to difficult

1:28:02

questions is, I don't know.

1:28:05

Right. When you don't know the

1:28:07

answer, say, I don't know. So Vanessa goes to me and she

1:28:09

goes, how exactly do I

1:28:11

have a personal relationship with you?

1:28:14

I have a personal relationship with you. And

1:28:16

my answer was, I don't

1:28:18

know. However, I'm going

1:28:21

to assume that

1:28:23

that's the right approach and I'll

1:28:25

start working on that as a faculty. Like

1:28:28

what's it look like? Okay, okay, so let's stop there. So

1:28:30

you postulated the personal

1:28:32

God, but don't actually

1:28:35

have any evidence for it. I have the Trinity

1:28:37

gets me to the point where for the degree

1:28:39

to which I can think about anything at all,

1:28:42

this must be true. Now, given that it

1:28:44

must be true from a logical perspective and

1:28:47

the point of view of thinking, how

1:28:50

might you come into relationship with it? Let's draw

1:28:52

another line here. Listen to this thing, so I

1:28:54

like to make a lot. There's a lot of

1:28:56

things that are logically possible, but aren't actually

1:28:59

existent in our universe, right?

1:29:01

This is logically necessary, not

1:29:03

logically possible. Okay, because

1:29:05

I say this, but flying spaghetti

1:29:07

monster is actually logically possible, but

1:29:10

seems rather unlikely to exist. And

1:29:12

I've always acknowledged that Yahweh is

1:29:14

logically possible, which is why I'm an agnostic,

1:29:17

not an atheist, but I just have always

1:29:19

said, like based on a

1:29:21

large constitution and pattern of evidence, it

1:29:23

seems highly unlikely. Yes. So

1:29:25

you're saying that your view of the truth, this

1:29:28

is gonna be over our pay grade

1:29:30

for today to say why does the

1:29:32

Trinity make Yahweh not only logically possible,

1:29:35

logically necessary? Well, not Yahweh, the Father, the Son,

1:29:37

and the Holy Spirit. It actually has to be

1:29:39

the whole Trinity. Got it, got it, okay,

1:29:41

got you. So it has to be the classic, and

1:29:44

I did notice that your guys' triune

1:29:46

God is delineated very carefully and in

1:29:48

a very orthodox fashion. As you know,

1:29:51

because you read this stuff so far,

1:29:53

but it was worse than death and

1:29:55

you thought about the nature of the

1:29:57

three persons, homosion versus homosion. Greek

1:30:00

words, hundreds of thousands of people

1:30:02

killed over one you in the word. And

1:30:05

the version that your church has is

1:30:07

one of the more orthodox ways of

1:30:09

describing the Trinity. So it's one that

1:30:12

a Catholic, for instance, would agree with,

1:30:14

for instance, but not a Greek

1:30:16

Orthodox. Not a Greek Orthodox. And that's a, it may

1:30:18

be a bone, or it may be a bone to

1:30:20

pick. We'll find out. Let me restate it. Cause

1:30:22

I said it earlier, but I want to say it again. Cause you, I want to

1:30:24

make sure it lands is that I proved to

1:30:26

myself and I worked you

1:30:28

read it several times that

1:30:31

the Trinity is both compact, necessary,

1:30:33

and sufficient for any possible

1:30:35

reality, any possible real universe. And it's a

1:30:38

very, very, you remember the deep code project

1:30:40

is the deepest code. So that's

1:30:42

the kind of the easiest way of saying it. And

1:30:44

once that hit, once that landed, I was

1:30:46

now stuck because now I have to work

1:30:48

backwards from that. So now the

1:30:51

practice of, okay, what, what does it mean to

1:30:53

try to have a personal relationship? I

1:30:55

can see Jordan and Yahweh, all freedom.

1:30:57

The ghost was at the spook, the

1:31:00

father, it was a good joke version.

1:31:02

The four of you hanging out at

1:31:04

a bar, shooting the shit about who's

1:31:06

better, the cowboys and the raisins. Yes.

1:31:10

So that has now been the work of

1:31:12

the past. Oh, I guess the

1:31:14

past six months, the past six months of, okay, what is

1:31:16

this? How does this work? Like, how do you do this sort of thing? What

1:31:19

does it look like? How does it feel?

1:31:21

So prayer, for example, like, okay, prayer, how's

1:31:23

prayer work? You need to build a praying practice. And

1:31:25

by the way, you can imagine, I think

1:31:27

when I do something like this, I say quite seriously, not

1:31:29

maybe as seriously as others, more serious than

1:31:32

many. So Fridays are

1:31:34

my fasting and prayer day.

1:31:37

And so I fast from Thursday to Friday.

1:31:40

And Friday is whenever possible, most

1:31:42

of the time dedicated to also

1:31:44

being in prayer and practicing without slight and

1:31:47

exploring the parameters of it. Often in this

1:31:49

case, also being in nature or

1:31:51

with my, you know, my daughter and wife. And

1:31:54

all I can say is there's

1:31:56

a reality to it. I can't give you, and

1:31:58

I don't want to give you. other

1:32:01

than to say that in my experience, as

1:32:03

you enter into this as a practice

1:32:06

and you begin to live in a particular fashion,

1:32:09

it's like a dimensional opening. It's a little

1:32:11

bit like this. Imagine that you walk into

1:32:13

a room and when you first walk into

1:32:15

the room, it's just a cube. But

1:32:18

after you spend time in the room, you begin to

1:32:20

notice that you can discern something like

1:32:23

doors that before you couldn't even

1:32:25

notice. And then so you open one of the doors, which takes

1:32:27

a little while. When you open it,

1:32:29

it opens up to three more cubes. And by

1:32:31

the way, let's say an additional dimension. So now

1:32:33

you're in a tesseract, which is very difficult to

1:32:35

navigate. You have to actually embody some new capacity

1:32:37

and navigating the tesseract, which is not the kind

1:32:39

of thing that a three dimensional hominin is pretty

1:32:41

good at. But after a while, you

1:32:44

begin to be able to navigate tesseract space. If you're

1:32:46

in a notice that there are now new portals that

1:32:48

have appeared in this, we thought was a bounded space.

1:32:51

And so then you open up those ports, and

1:32:53

it continues to unfold in this fashion. And

1:32:56

so one of the phrases that I've begun

1:32:58

to use is to say that this term,

1:33:00

faith, faith needs

1:33:02

to be understood as a faculty in

1:33:04

our world, particularly in the secular world, but even

1:33:07

largely in the Western tradition. The

1:33:09

word faith has become isomorphic

1:33:11

with something like degenerate understanding,

1:33:15

almost willful self delusion of an

1:33:17

imaginary construct. You said, what does the

1:33:19

word faith mean? You try to get

1:33:21

it defined properly among kind of most

1:33:23

educated secular people, if I were to

1:33:25

say, willful self delusion

1:33:27

as an imaginary construct. Yeah, yeah,

1:33:29

that's what faith means. Yeah,

1:33:31

that would be my answer to that. Right.

1:33:34

All right. You're too lazy to do the

1:33:36

work. So I'll just fucking believe. Right. Exactly.

1:33:39

And it ain't that Oh, yes, please

1:33:41

degenerate belief. And it ain't that it's

1:33:43

completely not that it's no more that

1:33:45

than seeing with your eyes is

1:33:48

the same thing as a really degenerate version

1:33:50

of smelling. It's a faculty,

1:33:53

the faculty for navigating a

1:33:55

particular relationship with reality. And

1:33:57

it can be cultivated through practice and

1:34:00

And as you cultivate it through practice, by definition,

1:34:02

you can get slightly better at it. And this

1:34:04

gives you an increasing capacity to have a personal

1:34:07

relationship with God. So

1:34:09

all I can say is my

1:34:11

invited experience is that there's enough

1:34:14

reality there, more than enough reality, that

1:34:16

three months ago, I

1:34:18

just had a very strong sense of, as you

1:34:20

say, I need to get baptized. And as you

1:34:22

say, I did not take that trivially. It's a

1:34:24

real thing. It's a real thing.

1:34:26

I honor these people and their beliefs deeply, and

1:34:29

the traditions, and all the different people who

1:34:31

are Christians. I'm not going to get falsely baptized.

1:34:33

And also, once I begin

1:34:36

to say out to people, I got baptized. I hope

1:34:38

that everybody who's been in relationship with me in some

1:34:40

way understands I am committed to

1:34:42

this thing. I believe that it is, in fact, true

1:34:45

and meaningful in the deepest possible way. I

1:34:47

appreciate that. I absolutely believe that you're operating

1:34:49

in total good faith, because I've never known

1:34:52

you to operate in any other way. Now,

1:34:54

you could be delusional, which I suspect is

1:34:57

wrong. It could be wrong, but I

1:34:59

absolutely believe it's in good faith. Let me go down

1:35:01

some of the things that your church believes, and these

1:35:03

are the basic beliefs that you have stated

1:35:06

you accept. Man is

1:35:08

the special creation of God made in his

1:35:10

image, as

1:35:12

opposed to part of

1:35:14

the Darwinian evolutionary stream. Do you believe

1:35:17

that? I do. Now,

1:35:19

does that mean that I import

1:35:21

the Creation Institute's interpretation? In

1:35:24

that case, no. I don't

1:35:26

import the Creation Institute's interpretation of what that means.

1:35:29

So that's going to require some careful

1:35:31

discussion about what that means. I

1:35:34

would say that I am somewhere between

1:35:36