Why We No Longer Know What We Should Do with Jordan Hall, Guy Sengstock, and Christopher Mastropietro

24:01John Vervaeke:The first time in which you are spending the first number of sessions basically dismantling all of the analytic dichotomies. Yes. Right. And so I see I see what you're up to in that. Right. Instructive. Right. For this, because all of those dichotomies, which are really interesting, are are central. I would see even guiding, right, in the conversations about intelligence, about all of the perception, how do these machines machine, how do we get it to align to ourselves? All these things, those dichotomies are like under deep sway.

24:41Guy Sengstock:I agree because I think the dichotomies strangle off participation. And then what happens is if we are not participating, but constructing and or projecting, right, then we are immediately put into a competitive mode with each other. And this is the driving engine I hear. And it comes out as FOMO, right? Well, if we don't do this, the Chinese, and if we don't do this, my kids are going to fall behind. Like that's what comes out. And that's because so at sort of the everyday level, I think how it manifests is people feel they're inherently in a competitive relationship at a fundamental level because we have strangled off the possibility of participation.

25:30Guy Sengstock:And this is Taylor's point, because participation requires that we share authorship. It's the Eastern Orthodox notion of synergy and the Catholic notion of synergy, right? That the sacred and us are co-partners in the production of meaning and intelligibility.

25:50Yeah, what I hear is essentially that purpose and the framing of purpose, the implicit framing of purpose that comes before our awareness of it, that has determined what we ought to do and what we must do and what our entitled feeling of responsibility is over the world around us has already constrained the scope and the field of possible insights that will be available to us in the process. If we are on a course to make something, the degree of understanding that we'll be able to access is already foreclosed in a way that we will never have considered when undertaking the exercise in the first place.

26:31And so the only way to actually reopen the field of possible insights and deepen the possible ambit of what we can understand is by calling the fundamental goal into question. Yeah.

26:47Guy Sengstock:And I think bound up with that, because I think it's always co-identification, our fundamental sense of what kind of beings we are. I think, and so we have gone from the being that knows and knows wisely to the being that makes and makes powerfully. And that's been a fundamental shift, I would say, because I think purpose is always relative to your sense of agency. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I think I'm seeing two structural elements to the implicit normativity. And it's interesting to think about it. One is the, a deep, profound, and I would even say it like neuropsychologically overriding sense of a winner take all zero sum arms race.

27:45across many different levels of intensity, but it doesn't matter where you are in the hierarchy, each one points to the next one. And then the sense of a, what's the right way of putting it? Well, you said it just right. A non-participatory, entirely human-derived normative landscape. And if you've got both of those, and I think they are actually linked in a very interesting way, then of course you're going to be, and it's interesting, John, how that notion of the reciprocal closure, the feedback loop fits. All these local moves that reinforce each other, right? So there's a kind of an attractor dynamic that holds, i guess you think about quite obviously for for generations has held entire human populations in this trajectory it's like the inverse if you if you look at uh what's his name kurtzweiler singularity map basically describing the the uh the formal modal structure that produces the the selection function that pulls us into that singularity that's that i yeah i i do agree i

29:02Guy Sengstock:I think you've got a reciprocal narrowing, whereas I think the primordial promise of participation is reciprocal opening. That's exactly the opposite promise that's given with a participatory model. Yeah, that's interesting. I'm wondering, I mean, so I guess I want to slow down here and ask.

29:33Guy Sengstock:when we are willing to share authorship over the normative space, what does that mean about what Chris said about our fundamental sense of agency and purpose or agency and orientation? Like what does that, what, what are we asking people to do is the question I'm trying to get clear on. What are we asking people to do? We're speaking fine theory, and that's good, but what are we asking people to actually do? Because this is Guy's ultimate question, I think, here. How could we go into the room, and what could we ask people to do, right? That's what Chris said, too, that could address this. What needs to be done in order to afford the possibility of recovering a participatory relation as opposed to a competitive relationship?

30:33I don't know if it's something that could be done upon request. I'm not sure if it works that way. My first reflexive answer would be some kind of divine humiliation. you know would be would be would be to you know what happens in the classic socratic aporia which is that you are you are struck dumb by the sudden emergence of a boundary that's unsurpassable yeah and okay well what does that mean what does it mean to present such a boundary that is evidently unsurpassable such that the goal that was formally concentering and predetermining your scope of activity is interrupted and you become helpless to achieve it.

31:24And then all of a sudden you have to renegotiate the frame of your activity because the goal is no longer attained.

31:29Guy Sengstock:That's very well said, Chris. So let me reframe what I would say then. I'm not, I'm not proposing a method, but it sounds to me that there's nevertheless advice in here, which is like, for example, do not turn away automatically unquestionably from aporia. just marginalize it as absurdity or irrelevancy and then go back to the normal as where you're grounding your intelligibility it seems like that becomes a strong recommendation i granted i'm not saying do x that was a poor formulation good correction but nevertheless it seems that there is advice that could be given at this point i mean socrates is constantly doing that in a

32:12John Vervaeke:And let's look at this for a second. Let's look at it for a second. So in some sense, I think what we're talking about, and where I want to kind of come into this conversation, right, is what I'm not presenting here is a problem, right? Like I think what I'm trying to name is a predicament. Can you explain the difference? Explain the difference, please.

32:40Guy Sengstock:Yeah. Yeah.

32:41John Vervaeke:Kind of like what you talk about, John, often of like where we take existential tensions and we have a tendency to then turn them into real fears in our lives to try to solve them. And that what we need to do is kind of actually re-existentialize them. Right. In some sense. I think, I think the thing that the, and this is what I'm hearing, Chris, in this of like, this isn't a problem to solve. This isn't, this isn't a, there, obviously there are problems to solve. Right. But like, but this, we're talking about, we're talking about something that isn't a problem. It's a, it's a, it's a disposition that is probably older than we can even conceive.

33:25John Vervaeke:Right. In terms of our being in some, in some way. So I guess if there's a question here is, given that, right, what is the right orientation, right, in this time that we find ourselves already of and showing up in, right?

33:46Guy Sengstock:So let me make sure I understand you first. What I heard is the difference between problem and predicament is the problem is there and I have a frame and I try to work within it. Whereas a predicament is something like I've, I've displaced the wrong framing or something like that. Is that, is that, am I getting it? And that's bringing about the kind of modal confusion. So it's not like, yeah. So I think that's a very good point. And that is what I was trying to get at with my answer to Chris. It's like, yes, it's not a problem for which we're looking for a method. It's like, yeah, that's appropriate laughter.

34:28Guy Sengstock:But nevertheless, there are ways which we are making things worse. And I think that displacement, and I guess maybe then I'll reframe my question is, what are the dangers, right? What are the dangers like displacement such that we could advise people such that they could more appropriately discern the dangers and reduce the fact, reduce the probability that they'll be captured by those dangers? Because that's exactly what happens with the displacement of existential anxiety onto fear, right? You do that displacement and then you get captured by, right? You get captured. Is that, is that fair guy?

35:10Guy Sengstock:Does that, does that? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So you've named one I'm opening, I'm opening up for us to bring our collective intelligence to bear. What are some of the other? So displacement is clearly one, which is to not properly recognize, appreciate aporia. I think Chris put his finger on that very, very, very, very clearly. What other things might be precluding people from recovering participation? One of the most powerful is the, a deep sense of shame at incompetence and participation. Oh, say more. If you've been operating in the mode that we're discussing for, let's say your entire life, since maybe you were two or three, with a increasing degree of narrow but intense feedback.

36:02You have not actually been cultivating the underlying capacities for true participation in, for example, the collaborative normative space that you were discussing. And so what happens is that you properly recognize that if you step out of the giant powered armor suit that you've been riding in for the past 40 years, you are actually just a toddler who doesn't really know how to walk. And that's a very, very painful, threatening, high vulnerability place to be where basically nobody wants to be there. And so, you know, like before you can even recognize what's happened, um, a big part of you says, fuck that and jumps back into the powered armor suit and says, no, this is actually really a problem.

36:42I will, we'll figure this one out. Just keep, you know, we'll intensify. What we need is a bigger button. That's what we actually need. Let's not, uh, let's not, you know, get, get back into just learning how to walk. Um, so that's another one. And it's a huge one, particularly by the way, when there's something running on the back here, that you remember that game theoretic arms race, it's like, wait, so what you're telling me is that we're, we're in a race in spaceships to a distant star and whoever gets there wins forever. And whoever doesn't get there is extinguished forever. And what you're telling me is I need to actually not just slow down, but turn off the engines and get out of the spaceship and try to figure out how to learn how to swim in space, that seems somewhere between insane and bullshit.

37:26You're either trying to trick me or you're nuts, but there's nothing there that's valuable.

37:30Guy Sengstock:Chris, just before you say something, I just want to say one thing. I want to bring in a distinction Guy makes because it might be helpful, just because I want to name these things felicitously. Guy makes a distinction between exposure and vulnerability, where vulnerability is a sensitivity to, you come out of the armor and you're vulnerable. you're sensitive you're oriented where exposure is like and you feel that threat and you want to get back in i just want to so i i just want to so we have some shared uh language so we've got displacement and we've got exposure as possible issues go ahead chris well you yeah agnes callard has a good term for these called chosen load-bearing answers yeah right you you can't You can't undermine this column if it's holding up the ceiling, right?

38:21Because the ceiling might come down if it wiggles. But nothing can change unless you agree to wiggle that column. And the thing that occurs to me in what you're saying, Jordan, is that if you risk asking a certain question, you risk being undone by the question. And it's the ultimate forfeiture of ego. It risks, you risk losing yourself in the process of asking a question if you step outside of that armored vehicle. It requires an ultimate self-abandonment. And that is an order so tall that most of us, even us on this call, are probably not prepared in most moments to do that. And to me, the thing that occurs to me is just the scope of that challenge.

39:12for most of us because we're being required to set aside all that defines us in worldly terms. And I would imagine that conferences like these composed of people like these are predicated precisely on maintaining and brandishing those identities. So what to me has to be called into question is how we identify as people who would deign to have a conversation like that? What is necessary on the level of identification on a person-to-person basis in order for the faithfulness to be directed to the logos, as we often say, rather than to the affirmation of the identity of the person who wants to be the one with the solution.

39:59Guy Sengstock:So Chris, that sounds like it goes back to that. Maybe you're saying something aboriginal i don't think i'm making a new edition maybe no no but fleshing out one of our existing well i want to explore that because it sounds like you're you've got a deeper presentation of this idea of again soul authorship that a notion of self bound to soul authorship seems to be at work here and if i were to lose soul authorship i would lose myself that that's what i heard is that yeah yeah yeah i think that's i think that's i think that is a new dimension to this i think they're i don't think they're all separable from each other that's not what i'm i'm just trying to i'm trying to bring intelligibility to it that's all right but i like that point that identify that the identification of self with soul authorship which is ridiculous given the kind of beings we are i mean because we're not even authors of ourselves in the first place within ourselves like it's it's it's it's kind of a when you state it like that it's kind of a bizarre proposal and and so the question like why is it so bloody attractive if it's so utterly ridiculous in the sense that it is so apparently falsifiable i think it has something to do with the point you just made earlier about displacement which is that when existential anxiety converts itself into fear and can't can't prescind the fear because there's something very real and powerful about the state of existential anxiety and necessary about it.

41:32I think most of us would agree, right? The displacement of existential anxiety into fear then becomes a very, very destructive and foolish move. And I think something about being capable of the kenosis, let's say, as you might put on, of identity required to undertake such a task piously, if I can use that term somewhat broadly, involves a, it involves a retraction of that fear back into its original existential form and an ability to hold company with it collectively.

42:10John Vervaeke:And really quick, kenosis, kenosis, just define that again.

42:14Guy Sengstock:Emptying. It's from the Bible, the New Testament, especially. It's an older Greek term, but it becomes into prominence in the New Testament when Paul describes Jesus as kenosis as he takes on human form. He empties himself of certain prerogatives and privileges of his divinity. So it's an emptying. And it became very central in distinguishing theosis from henosis. So Christian theosis is not just pagan henosis. It's henosis and kenosis together. that that's that that's an important move and and and i think it's relevant to our conversation because it it's it the strong claim of that christian tradition is those two need each other there is no henosis without kenosis there's also no kenosis without kenosis we can only one if we empty uh but we can only empty if we're one um and so i just want just sorry jordan i just want to finish that point.

43:13No, I'm trying to think in terms of prescriptions for the actual patient.

43:23So the vice, I'll start with the vice. I don't want to be mean, but it's sort of that we should be working with material that we actually have of this community. It's a reasonably low basic level of physical courage. And frankly, a reasonably low level of most forms of courage, with one very specific exception, which means that if we're going to ask them to proceed forward on the basis of courage, it's not going to work. And Christopher, you said, you know, divine humiliation. Well, that's one approach, which, you know, fortunately we don't have to do anything for that one. That's going to happen outside of us entirely.

43:55We can't induce that ourselves. So that's great. And that is, you know, it's kind of, it goes past aporia all the way to the 12 step program. You've been brought low enough that there's no way forward at all in the way that you're currently operating. So you're stuck. You're either going to stay where you are, which is low, or you're going to begin the process of reconstitution on a new basis. Okay. So that's that. That's that box. But in terms of virtue, there is actually a very significant and here embodied commitment to truth. Now there's some serious issues in terms of these preconceived notions of the underlying commitment to epistemology over ontology, et cetera, et cetera.

44:37But it is a relatively rich resource. And the reason why I'm saying this is this, it's plausible. I say that because I'm an example, N of one, that one can get to kenosis through a deep enough commitment simply to truth. And if you can get all the way to kenosis, then almost all of the other things that we've been talking about begin to happen as a consequence. And once you no longer have a fear of self-emptying, once you have stepped into the recognition that it is dying to self, that is the gateway that you've been seeking and is a necessary door to open under all possible circumstances. In other words, your own self-defined normativity becomes a complete closure on a single point.

45:22And that point is called kenosis. Then you open that door. Once you've done that, a lot of other stuff becomes possible. I don't know if it's pushed back.

45:31Guy Sengstock:And this goes towards Heidegger's work on truth. I want to point towards the aboriginal common ancestor. And it's even in the etymology of truth, trothing, and trusting, right? That there's a deeper sense that's, and I do that because the notion of truth just readily fits back into, for most people, the modern framework. Truth is that which confirms our propositions. Whereas if we can get the notion of true as true to, which is bound up with trust, which is trust is a proper recognition that you and I have a deeply participatory relationship, right? And trothing is to understand that that binds us.

46:24Guy Sengstock:We are committed. We share. And Jordan, you and I talked about this when we were trying to unpack pistis as something deeper than just true belief. And so I want to propose that, yes, I think the virtue that we're looking for isn't just the virtue of pursuing the truth. I think it's this deeper thing of truth and trusting, a kind of faithfulness to realness that is crucial. I think you just performed programmatically the suggestion I was making. I could be wrong. My sense is that, so just like tease apart the faculties that one would have to engage with to listen to what you just said. Yep. And engage in some sense to participate.

47:15So one is there's going to be probably three. There's the cognitive capacity to listen to the words and parse them into something that is meaningful. There's a noticing that there's a continuity and a coherence in the expression that has a reality to it. the part of me, the faculty in me, the orients towards truth can begin to get a grounding. Now, all right, so that's the first step. So you were in some sense doing exactly what I suggested. You were using the deeper grounding of the faculty of truth to give somebody finger holds that you could climb up. And in the actual act of expression, you were making those finger holds more rich by exposing the fact that this underlying faculty is in fact a deeper faculty than a narrow version that you may currently be relying on rationalism.

48:04So, hey, this thing that you identified as truth that you're very committed to, I'm going to give you a handhold. And then as you proceed forward in the handhold, I'm going to help you deepen and make more rich the faculty, which you may notice, by the way, in a very embodied sense feels right. And you'll notice in noticing an embodied sense that it feels right. Also now begin to cultivate the underlying capacity for how to operate in this collaborative normative stage, that faculty of feels rightness. I'm beginning to cultivate, let's just call it beauty to give it a tag or where beauty and goodness connect.

48:40See what I'm saying? So it's a practicum that hooks somebody where they feel competent, allows them to proceed in the basis of their own competence in a deepening of that competence towards this more real version. But of course, in so doing also enables them to begin cultivating the competencies in the orthogonal dimensions that they actually need to avoid having that feeling of exposure.

49:03Guy Sengstock:Well, I want to reply to that because that was helpful. That sparked something in me, which is, um, I, what immediately came to mind is there's a Greek virtue for that. And then there's it's, it's, it's opposite and it's opposite in Kratia is that self authorship model, right? I am my master of myself, and thereby I get mastery over everything else. And the opposite of it, or that which transcends it, is Sofreson. And Sofreson, I think you're putting us towards, what's that sense, right? I don't know if I'd call it a faculty, but maybe that's just my philosophical hackles, right? But what is that sense that you're putting your finger on?

49:54Guy Sengstock:Like that I was trying to articulate with truthing and trothing and trusting, but you're saying it's also beauty and goodness and truth coming together. But that, that, that, that was Sofferson. And what I would ask then is, like, can we deepen that? Now, if people were to cultivate Sofreson, could that counterbalance the displacement, the exposure, and the identification of self with soul authorship? I agree with you, Jordan. Telling people to be courageous is probably not going to work. That was Tillich's answer. And I don't know if it's going to function for us right now. We're too beset by overriding fears.

50:38Guy Sengstock:That's Guy's point. Does Sofreson help us not fall into displacement, exposure, and identifying the self with soul authorship? Just to bring some kind of practical things to put on those frames you just laid down.

51:06John Vervaeke:So one of the things I notice is that there is a sense with AI technology in itself that it's like you're an idiot if you think that there's anything you're going to do about it going forward. That's kind of like, I would say that that seems to be a mode that most people are in. right um very few people are like there are people like uh harris who are going around going no we're we're like we're about ready to make the last decision that we'll ever make so we should probably should get together and not make it right there are people that are saying that right so it one of the dilemmas right i think people are in is like i like when we talk about courage what is it to be courage, courageous in this time.

52:03John Vervaeke:Right. In some sense, I'm trying to do it like I've downloaded Hermes and OpenClaw and I'm like playing with these technologies, right, and learning about them and they're a whole trip. We could have a whole conversation about that world. But what is like when we're being vulnerable in this, in the current normative frames that we're in, right? What are we being vulnerable to exactly, right? Like, especially in terms of, you can ask ourselves, our relationship with technology, right? Our relationship with these things.

52:38Guy Sengstock:I disagree. I don't think we can cultivate this in the relationship with these machines. They are too noxious to us. The empirical research is just growing rapidly in quantity and quality that they undermine us. They undermine our cognition, our agency, our moral conscience, brain connectivity, et cetera, et cetera. It's like smoking radioactive cigarettes while you've been alone for five years. It's not good for you. I don't know if that's the strategy. I think instead what we are trying - Can we make it marrying radioactive cigarettes just Well, I was going to say another harsher F word, but okay.

53:21Guy Sengstock:Marrying. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I think so. But so guy, I want to put it back to you. It's that I think we're trying, I mean, sorry, this is maybe self-serving, but that's not how I got here. I think Sophocin to the logos, as opposed to control over the logic is exactly what we're talking about here. Right. We're trying to recover being faithful, being tempted, being naturally drawn into the logos as an alter. That's what the what's office and is as an alternative to controlling logic over the situation. That's what I'm that's what I'm proposing. I feel like we're less confused, not that there aren't lingering questions about this, But I feel as though we in this moment are far less confused about what ought to be done and far more confused about how a person is incentivized to do it.

54:22That seems to be the bigger question. I think we could spin together a vision of what a group of people working dialogically.

54:31Guy Sengstock:I'm not in consensus with that, Chris, because I think people think wrongly that what ought to be done is alignment. And I think that is a fundamental misframing of the issue. Sorry, I'm speaking of process. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Sorry. Sorry. Yeah. Sorry.

54:48John Vervaeke:Let me. John, I'm a great, I'm a totally agreeing with you there, right? Like these things are crack, right? In fact, in fact, I would say that we're in a place where, so we, we are now have a generation that was born into this. Like we all have some, some reasonable adult memory of a time before the internet. Right. Um, so there's a, there's a sense of, we still have a sense of possibly can imagine a world that didn't have total optimization and all the mania with, with everything that you're talking about.

55:24Guy Sengstock:Oh, but now I, now I understand Chris's question better. Now I understand what he's saying. Okay. Right, right, right, right. Right.

55:32John Vervaeke:Like to in a sense to be vulnerable. Right. In this time for which the it is obviously people are going to go in this direction because it's in their it's embedded in their presuppositions about where reality. Right.

55:50Guy Sengstock:OK. Right. So I misunderstood you, Chris. I apologize. So you're talking about we all agree that we we have to get out of the entrapment. The issue is what's how can we properly incentivize it? I misunderstood you, but that was clarified. That's okay. But yeah, that's the, I mean, this is the question Socrates had about Alcibiades, right? This is the question that goes back to Plato of how do you teach virtue? Can you teach virtue? How do you redirect a person's attention beyond the point of their fixations? It's a vexing, vexing problem. But what I, you know, there's nothing helpful about saying that except insofar as we're bumping into a very, very timeless predicament.

56:29Guy Sengstock:Yeah.

56:35So, Guy, let me bridge with your question into a kind of an orthogonal cut. So, an example of what I would propose as to what we would be inviting people into. Quasi-jokingly, actually not at all jokingly, I have suggested that literally in our neighborhood, not our neighborhood, but just a little bit further out, we create a boot camp of how to properly relate to your AI technology. at an ordinary individual level. And the boot camp is two weeks. The first week involves firearms training, whitewater rafting, and orienteering and camping for the whole week. So you're reconstituting the alighted capacity to be in relationship with an analog reality.

57:19And by the way, with analog humans. Pardon? I'd enjoy that boot camp. Yeah, me too. It's just an excuse to get a free view. Rafe Kelly does it. That's what he does. of you. That's right. So that, so now think now what I'm saying though, if I'm going into the room or the room that you're in, and I suggest that you go spend a week at Rafe Kelly's camp, that's going to cause a, an alarm because what I'm saying is get out of the accelerator. You're going to take a week from, of, of what may in fact be from your point of view, abject nonsense. Why in the world would I be doing that instead of plugging myself more deeply into the matrix so I can stay ahead of the guy next to me.

57:56And you're saying, Hey, the proposition is if you can think clearly enough about the, about the, the set of problems that you're ultimately dealing with, or just listen deeply enough to your own instincts that are telling you that you're unable to paddle away from the oncoming, uh, waterfall. The weird right answer is that you're going to have to go spend a week doing something that makes no sense at all. But there's a way of explaining why it makes a little bit more sense than nothing, right? It's not completely random. It's orienting in a certain direction. So that's an example. And notice what I'm proposing.

58:29And this is a very rough proposal. The proposal is that the kinds of people, literally the developmental, probably even neuro, phenotypic, and possibly even genetic characteristics that I've selected for the individuals in that room requires a remediated participation in ordinary homo sapien space. in order for them to have even the slightest possibility of not simply racing headlong down into the waterfall. That's that. Um, and we can use twist on is actually interesting example. Like the proposition to him would be, you're completely correct in your, um, diagnosis, but the key element of your prognosis is that you yourself have to no longer take responsibility for trying to solve the problem.

59:15If you cannot step into synergia, if you cannot step into some recognition that it is only on the basis of the fact that there is an underlying sacred order, that this thing can happen at all. It's only on the basis of the fact that there actually is a logos that you can pay attention to, that any of these things start to open up. Like if we actually do live in a world where there is just a flat normativity, that's entirely a product of the given rationality of a particular human in some kind of incentive landscape coordination tradeoff, then that's actually already provably closed. We don't even need to worry about AI.

59:45That's a closed system. That's done. Um, it's only on the basis of the fact that that's actually not reality. So first reorient yourself towards reality. Notice that on the basis of an increasing capacity to orient with reality, that you can actually begin to navigate more and more effectively. And a lot of the basic problems begin to resolve themselves. I can, there's one more big piece we can, we'd have to put in place, but that's sort of my contribution here at this point.

1:00:09Guy Sengstock:I love this because I hope I'm not misappropriating it, but I find this very convergent with my proposal for pilgrimage. Get out and move through many different worlds and environments and meet people you could not have met before and meet colleges and practices that are not normal or familiar to you and really try to love them as deeply as you can, because that is what's going to wake you up. in a very, very deep way. A sort of like 12-step pilgrimage. I think pilgrimage was always 12-step. In fact, I think 12-step comes out of the heritage of pilgrimage. Nice. Yeah, that's true. I'm not going on pilgrimage until I have already gone through the first two steps.

1:00:56Otherwise, I just stay where I am. Right. Yes. Yeah, I think maybe this is the moment. We are now in the moment of pilgrimage. That's the thematic for the next two or three years. that as more and more people become aware of the deep reality and the deep necessity of trying to exactly what you're proposing there. And therefore, as a consequence, the groove becomes to become more of a groove. It's just easier once the first people have gone off on that journey and began to name it. And you've got a couple of footsteps. So it's no longer high grass, it's low grass, and eventually an actual trail, more and more people can begin to participate.

1:01:30And then we're actually in a different place. It kind of feels like what you're proposing, Jordan in a way is sort of like a re it's a rescaling of the human spirit. It is a it's a move to counteract the digital infinitization of the person, the endless magnification that comes with a person's digital avatar and presence, which is flung so far beyond the realm of the body and its direct contact with the earthly. And so what you're, it sounds like what you're suggesting is that by reacquiring contact with those elements that most pressurize the person as an embodied person, implicitly there's a possibility of rescinding some of those projections and scaling down the magnification of the person as a digital.

1:02:24Guy Sengstock:Here's where the cog side can be of help, because I think we've got good reason to believe that that higher abstraction is always just an exaptation and a repurposing of the analog sensory motor participation in reality. If we're going to change it up here, we have to drop that down and then re-exapt in a new way. I would say we have good reason to believe that's how our cognition and sense-making actually work. So notice, by the way, another hook. Maybe I'm going to call this the V maneuver. You just articulated something which is completely legible both within reason and actually, by the way, within a game theoretic construct.

1:03:08Yeah. But it has the beautiful consequences. The payload brings you actually closer to proper reality from which you can then begin to move even more freely. It's like methadone. well it's like socratic it's an infiltration of one world view from somewhere outside yeah it's

1:03:29Guy Sengstock:socratic seduction um and the seduction is supposed to be into something like soferson where you start like it's right because that's that's what i felt in the pilgrimage the pilgrimage takes on a life of its own and draws you and the reason why you're doing it changes as you're doing it you you you are i don't know forced is the right word you're called to play an infinite game uh to some degree and not a finite game nice yeah and i'm gonna flag it's very important because for those who don't listen closely the word socratic precedes the word seduction yes yes and the implication is not that the v maneuver is not true or this is not a trick it's quite the opposite it is both more true and more than true yes simultaneously yeah yeah yeah yeah yes thank Thank you for that.

1:04:14Guy Sengstock:Thank you for that, Jordan. I don't want people misquoting me. Yeah. Well, they will anyway, but we'll do our best to limit it.

1:04:23John Vervaeke:This has me make sense of what I've, of myself a little bit more. Because I've re, I've re-implemented a practice that I used to do that's inspired by Rilke. Which I actually come to think of it has to do with a kind of deep, deep self-emptying. What I just do is I go someplace in nature and I sit there and I don't get up until sitting there. Whatever it is I'm calling to be, that place takes the form in the constraint of a poem. Yeah. Original poesis.

1:05:01Guy Sengstock:Original poesis. Yes. Yeah.

1:05:04John Vervaeke:And he got that, like that, that, that, that particular thing was inspired in reading Rilke's encounter with Rodan, where, you know, he talks about, you look at his poetry before he met Rodan and after him. Right. It's dramatically different. Right. Like his first poetry is very, was dripping in his own subjectivity. Right. And then he's watching Rodan get up at 5 a.m. every day. Right. Like studying the forms of the figure. and he's like, I'm not doing that. And so he starts scheduling times to write, right? And his book, The New Poems, are the... That's great. Yeah. And it's so interesting when I draw it, because I drive, I'm in Modesto, and so I drive through the farmland and there's a stream I've been going to where I sit in, it's so interesting the transition that happens, right?

1:05:59John Vervaeke:like I walk you park and then you walk down this little trail and it's just a simple stream right and there's a little like mowed of grass and usually no one's there and I just sit there and I look and there's this kind of experience of ah like my body my and it takes a while right for all the cells to kind of like eventually catch up to this ah but it is striking to me that that releasement that is, that happens there, right? Like it has me think about, well, what am I in before I walk up there, right? What am I being released from in some sense?

1:06:41Guy Sengstock:And to, but that's actually the metanoetic passage. You go, you inhabit a different perspective, a different identity, and then you, you get the capacity to look back and question where you were that you can't do while you're in it. You can't do it while you're in it. I think that's Taylor's great insight. It relates to another of Rilke's ideas, too, that comes up a lot in his writing, which is his particular relationship to time and the idea that certain realities and states that are implicit and in potential must ripen. And they must ripen according to an unfolding that we cannot over-determine with our will, that we have to wait.

1:07:30We have to be in service of the right unfolding of time. And only when something is ripe is it ready. That is an experience and a certain deference to nature, so to speak, that can only happen at the level of embodiment in a sense. Because one of the affectations of the digital world is that we're constantly vaulting ahead of the timeliness of a given action, ahead of our own voice. And so there's a rescaling of a person in time and a deference to the right course of that time that ultimately is an unconscious emergence into awareness precisely when it happens and not a moment before.

1:08:08Guy Sengstock:Chris, you and I have been talking about this in our conversation. The one conversation we had last Saturday, we were all a lot about, I won't go into the details, but it was about that. It was about the ripening, the kairos. Maybe what binds the kenosis and the kenosis together is the kairos, the ripening, the right timing. Yeah, that's a very good point. That's excellent. So I'll loop us back to the beginning, which is to recognize that there is the implicit normativity of the modality of beauty that acts as both a training regime for a transcendent normativity, or at least transcendent to yourself, and also as an antidote to the denatured normativity that comes from a highly processed diet of lowercase t truth.

1:09:04Which is nice, right? Because what happens is that one can in fact participate in a practice like you're describing guy. And most importantly, notice that there is a difference between doing this right and wrong. There is something that is actually properly necessary. Like you can even describe like the basics, like here's a couple of basics. and you can notice that if you participate, if you're not doing these basics, you will notice in yourself in a very vague, but real way that what you're doing is not as good as when you are participating in these basics. And that that's the sacred. In other words, that's the setting apart of one state to another state with a vector that points towards a directionality.

1:09:40And now you're on the way, right? Now you're on a path and you can begin to expand and expand and expand. And again, you're unfolding, you're beginning to notice that this entire modality of normativity of the logos, the way that one relates on the basis of beauty is real. And think about how much that explodes a whole lot of underlying assumptions. It removes that sense of exposure. Like this is a very profoundly good prescription.

1:10:07Guy Sengstock:Yeah. Jordan, you're right. It addresses all of them. It addresses the modal displacement. It addresses the exposure. It It addresses identifying this self with sole authorship. It's addressing all of them very, very powerfully, I think. So, guys, it sounds like you've got a very straightforward project. Just go and start inviting people, inviting lead AI researchers to go hang out for 30 minutes with you.

1:10:31John Vervaeke:I'll feed it in my AI. I'll mark it off in my calendar. Just have your button to talk to my button. Yeah.

1:10:44Yes. But see how funny that is? Cause it's, so you can say it right. Once again, there's a self-referentiality. This either requires a minimum viable level of courage to be willing to attend to that possibility. Uh, and, or like a trade-off of an ability to listen to what is, has been argued thus far and be able to grasp it well enough to be able to have confidere that what we're saying is, is, is plausible enough to meet your minimum viable, viable level of courage, right? Either one of those two can move up higher until you reach a point of inflection, at which point you're now engaging in an action.

1:11:21It's crazy. This is actually very much something like being saved. Once you've moved across that threshold, you are on the way. You are moving in a direction which is categorically life-giving for you and for the world. And every one person of that room ultimately can't help but have that recognition. It is a healthier, stronger basis for being in relationship with the choices that you are tasked with making in the world.

1:11:48Guy Sengstock:That was the original meaning of the term that has often been translated in the New Testament as inspiration, which then got reduced to God dictating to somebody. The original meaning of inspiration when it says all scripture is inspired is it's all, all of it is life giving. It is all life-giving, like breathing into somebody. It's that sense, yeah, the life-giving. So, I mean, what comes to mind then is, so one of the strategies of modernity is refutation by trivialization, trivializing re-description. And one of the lessons I've, well, one of the things I've learned, maybe I don't know if it's a lesson or not, from my engagement in the world of social media is that this is a prevalent strategy.

1:12:39Guy Sengstock:I will re-describe what you've done in a reductive, trivializing way so that I can dismiss it and not have to engage to it. So, for example, that's what they come to after all of this? Go out into the wilderness a bit? Big deal. We've heard that from the romantics, X, you know, and blah, blah, blah. I know that's not what we're saying, but I just wanted to give us an opportunity to properly address, respond, I don't know what the right verb is here, to that. I think this is back to Chris's incentivization question. I'm trying to do Tai Chi with this. How do we properly, right i want to if possible uh reduce or disarm that reflex that people drop in in order to not have to engage with anything i appreciate your peaceful nature john my tendency is to go more like to hop keto with this and notice that we used to live in a world where um belching in public was properly noticed as inappropriate.

1:13:54And the move that you're describing is identical with Belgian in public. My experience is that when I see somebody make that move, I feel sad because they have revealed themselves as a bad combination of obdurate, truculent, and remarkably self-centered. Yes. Which just leaves me to no longer want to meaningfully engage with them other than the degree to which I feel a certain responsibility to just help human beings as human beings. But if we lived in a proper culture, they would have a friend nearby who would rebuke them for inappropriate relationship with simple reality. And that's maybe the meta problem.

1:14:33So it's something like I would like to reinstantiate proper social shame or recognize that it's not random. Like it exists for a reason. The move that you're describing is a terrible reflex. Like it's a bad habit. And anybody who begins to participate in a kind of a deeper understanding of a reality and be how these concert conversations work just begins to notice that all you're doing is revealing yourself as not having proper social grace and therefore self exiting yet. And yet you're still hanging around, right? You're still participating. You're still listening. Your way of listening isn't actually using your own time.

1:15:12We're like, what are you doing? um so maybe you know that that i'm more of a hapikido kind of guy than a tai chi guy it was a profoundly eloquent way of saying tell them to go fuck themselves yeah yeah exactly well it's even worse it's like you were fucking yourself and you're like making yourself look like a fucking idiot and anybody who can tell can tell and the only question now is are they going to be generous generous enough to reach across the to invite you back into something. Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's it's I mean, you're you're bringing Hapkido into I've taken up boxing myself, so I think I'll only be more aggressive.

1:15:52I mean, ultimately, if a person is quite determined to dialogue in bad faith and therefore not dialogue at all, their first move will be the reduction of the meaning of what is said to the letter of what is said. It's the opposite of what we try and teach people when we do dialectic, right? It's to amplify a person's words by finding the logos within them, by finding what is meant, what is intimated, what is intended and what is reached for, rather than what is spoken. Understanding that what is spoken is partial and crude next to the sum of what is... What is... Conveyed? conveyed. That's the classic distinction in pragmatics

1:16:39Guy Sengstock:between what's spoken and what is conveyed. But Jordan's right in the sense that if someone is going to nominalize what is meant, what is conveyed to what is spoken, and they're going to retreat from dialogue on that basis, then the task of the task of insisting at them is it begins to feel like a fool's errand

1:17:13John Vervaeke:i'm reading uh evo de janeiro's latest book uh he wrote called the yoke of value um in which he's in his very way i i would recommend we all got to start reading evo like his way of interrogating, philosophically interrogating. But one of the things he's in this book, he is just, it feels like he's just slicing through just by paying attention to the word, right? And the etymology of the word and this unpacking of what he's distinguishing as being in the regime of evaluation. The of evaluation is the point from which all validity. Right. And where he kind of really shows that for us at the level of our enactment.

1:18:11John Vervaeke:Right. And is that truth has become synonymous with effectiveness. um and and this is all in the backdrop of him you know really doing a lot of a lot of re-presencing the essence of skoleia um the ancient greek sense of the word right which is which is like it can't be directly translated i mean it's directly translated in english as leisure, right? And as idleness. But it misses the fundamental, like, that it's really about, it's about time itself, right? Your relationship, where it's a way of being in time, right? So like, for example, Socrates said, I think actually, they shouldn't kill me, they should pay me to be in school.

1:19:02John Vervaeke:Yeah, right. Yeah. Right. Like all, all fear Aurea is only can only happen in school. And it's this kind of time that is precisely not effective. It's like, it's a, it's a way of being with, it's a way of holding time that in turn, time holds you in its sense of sufficiency right where where the end is is the beginning right and in this sense this kind of um dwelling in that and for the greeks that was the point of the matter right in this sense and i and and so i'm just i'm hearing these tones of this um in a big way in this conversation

1:19:49Guy Sengstock:Pieper has a really good book on this, Leisure as the Basis of Culture. And then, and Skolle is also related to our word school, which we don't get the educational sense with our words leisure and idleness that's also there. Yeah. Yeah. So it is that which allows for the contemplative way. way. And I think that's part of the problem, too, Guy. And I think that's part of the displacement issue, which is the foreclosure on the via contemplative way, the contemplative life as a legitimate form of life, and that the only kind of life that's legitimate is the productive life. And this is because we have defaulted, and I suppose that's what's happening with the nominalization to just explicit semantic content that Chris was talking about.

1:20:48Guy Sengstock:We have equated that with laziness, with the vice of being lazy, which I think is extremely problematic. Han has a book out on the contemplative life and how we've lost it. The same guy who wrote, The Scent of Time, right? Yeah. What is he called? Lingering. Yeah, the lingering. The lingering so that we recover the time below the atomization of time, the rendering of time into absolutely empty, absolutely equivalent moments that are merely calculated and processed, rather than as the sense of the flow of reality that we participate in in everything we're doing. Yeah. I think that's part of this too.

1:21:39Guy Sengstock:And when you do return to the source with Rafe and you go out and you do sit spotting, which is very similar, you go out and you meditate, well, I would call it contemplate, like you're sitting in place and you're not focusing on your breath. You're just opening yourself up to wherever you're sitting and letting the world disclose more and more of itself to you. And it's very poesous. The problem with that for a lot of people is a kind of restlessness. because there's a like there's a and i hope this i jordan i don't mean to insult you here but it's a kind of protestant concern uh that we're not working uh we're not working we're not working and in that sense we're wasting time because the point of time is not life or understanding or truth goodness or beauty the point of time is work um yeah producing even if producing means producing a certain eventfulness.

1:22:37I see this a lot in how people travel, which is just powerfully revealing of these differences. People program their travel within an inch of a day and cannot stomach the idea of idle time in which they might open themselves simply to let the world that they've stepped in wash over them and to take notice of it. Most people who travel don't take notice of anything as they travel. They have a series of marks that they predestined themselves to hit. They fulfill their marks and they leave and don't actually stop to watch the world go by. And if they do, suddenly the category of the activity they're undertaking changes.

1:23:22Guy Sengstock:This is a defining difference in the philosophy of pilgrimage literature, right? Versus tourism. The tourists, you know, that famous short story, Travel is So Broadening, where wherever the Americans go, they see the town they came from, right? And the tourist wants to bring a bubble of their world into a nicer climate, right? The pilgrim wants to go and do exactly what you say. The pilgrim wants to be surprised, challenged, threatened, transformed, and those are all bound up together by what is unexpected in the encounter. Hmm. So John, a way of returning to the defensive against the dark arts is that the one trivializing and dismissing is coming into a conversation already as a choice.

1:24:14Oh, that's tasty.

1:24:17Guy Sengstock:That's tasty. I love that. That's a great insight. Exactly. And that explains why they keep coming, right? Because I often, your question is, well, why don't you just stop listening? Because, yeah, but they're the tourists. They're the tourists. That's right. tourism basically like basically taking you never really leave your own context you take your context yeah that's travel is so broadening read the short story it's excellent look through the window yeah yeah travel is so broadening it's a great i can't remember the author and and there's this american couple and they come back and they talk about all the places they go in europe and all they see no matter where they go are instances of their of their own little town there's been And they keep uttering this phrase, travel is so broadening.

1:25:07Guy Sengstock:And that's precisely like there's dramatic irony because you're reading and you're going, you haven't been broadened at all. Yeah, it's exactly. And the irony is tourism comes from the Grand Tour, which was originally a pilgrimage. It was originally a pilgrimage through the ancient sites from antiquity that were designed to transform the European in a fundamental way. And yet, so it's so rife with irony. I wonder. There's no, the sheer economic and technical capacity to be a tourist is strictly bound to modernity as well. In fact, as cultures cross the boundary, literally at a cultural level, like when Japan converted from being a Japanese culture into a modern culture in the 60s and 70s, was the very moment when the Japanese tourist appeared.

1:25:59This is such an interesting relationship.

1:26:02Guy Sengstock:I'm wondering if this is a broader category. Like, are there people that are just tourists in their romantic relationships? Are there people who are just tourists, right, in their spirituality? um like there's there well i mean it's i'm beginning to explore the inverse are there is there anybody who isn't in the current world yeah like everybody i'm going back and going that actually begins to explain most people's relationships with the with the sacred is that they are just tourists in everything well i mean i i've been fortunate to meet people bishop maximus nicole bodden who aren't tourists they're genuine pilgrims uh towards the sacred and that was my own.

1:26:44Guy Sengstock:This sadly is the exception that proves the rule. But it's not only the exception that proves the rule, it is the exception that calls the familiar into question, right? Yeah. Well, I mean, you can think about that, like it just is a sheer basic antidote. So basically, I'm sort of doubling, double clicking on this notion of the, we're now, we've now officially crossed the threshold. We are now in the era of pilgrimage because we begin to recognize that it is the antidote to modernity comprehensively. If you go to a movie as a tourist, if you eat food as a tourist, if you relate to your children as a tourist, every single case, modernity is the denaturing of your relationship with all possibilities of the sacred.

1:27:27And the antidote is a pilgrimage disposition.

1:27:30Guy Sengstock:This is extremely helpful to me. I'm working on a book on the philosophy of pilgrimage and philosophy as pilgrimage. That's the title of the book. And I'm just extremely grateful for how the Dialogos is unfolding things here for me. So I just want to express gratitude right now. I will be opening up the e-commerce store that sells black hats with buckles on them. Sorry. Chris, you look like you have a thought bubbling. Yeah, it's taking this typology and transposing it in different domains. It's just a really interesting thing. I mean, ultimately finding the defining characteristic, the proper Aristotelian category of the tourist is something that I'm thinking about.

1:28:20I think a lot about Guy's point about vulnerability, how permeable a person is, how suggestible and impressionable a person disposes himself to be in the face of the world that faces him. And one of the primary characteristics of the tourists is an impermeability.

1:28:38Guy Sengstock:Yeah. They are not vulnerable to the touch of the place that they visit. They remain immutable. They remain unchanging. And they're not called into question. There is an unquestioning disposition. They don't open with a question. Everything closes to a point, a foregone conclusion. Everything is for later as opposed to for now. I take a photo of this so that I bring it back with me. There's a sense of an endless deferral of the presence of the moment in which revelation could conceivably happen. Or an undermining of self could conceivably happen. Or an appearing like an absolute idiot. And I spent a year in Rome.

1:29:24I was like ground zero for tourism on earth, basically. And it's fascinating to see, you know, one of the protectiveness that encloses the armored car, as you put it, Jordan. By the way, almost literally now, I remember being in Rome and I would see these gigantic golf carts go by. What is that? Why is there a golf cart in the street that would just be teaming with tourists? Now they've progressed to traveling around in packs and golf carts. It's effectively a kind of armored car in which you hold yourself at a distance from your environment. You certainly don't risk speaking the language of the environment, God forbid, because you might no longer be able to bring your self-possessed competency in your ability to express yourself.

1:30:16You might know what I mean. One of the things being linguistically lost, for example, is a profound experience because Because suddenly you realize that your competence at being able to express yourself and being able to be known, which is a profound thing we take for granted at home. We take being known. I first learned this from you, John, back when I'm talking about culture shock. And I never fully understood culture shock until that. But culture shock in some sense is the experience of not being... It's not not knowing. It's not being known. It's not being understood. It's having your internal reality incongruous with your external presentation to such a degree that no one who looks at you could possibly fathom the depths that you know yourself to have.

1:31:07And so there's this feeling of absurdity and alienation because of that. And that happens when you're in an environment that alienates you linguistically. and there's something deeply and anyone anyone who's immigrated to a new country knows this feeling anyone who's been in a place where god forbid they don't speak a lot of english knows this feeling of like you're stumbling you're tripping you're grasping you're there's this like you're trying to you find yourself so all of a sudden abbreviated and there's something about that experience that resituates you in a really profound way. And I think one of the defining, incidentally, the defining traits of a tourist is that they don't suffer the late they used to.

1:31:54Now, obviously, it's harder and harder to find that experience. But you don't get linguistically lost as a tourist now the way that you used to. And so, even the category of tourism itself is changing because of the affordances provided by, you know, the global saturation of, of, of the same few languages. Right.

1:32:18Guy Sengstock:Chris, in those conversations, we've come circle again. We're doing the, we're doing the circumambulation because I, I once proposed to you that, uh, the meaning crisis is culture shock while you're still within your culture. Oh yeah, that's right. And so that goes to Jordan's point that it's almost like pilgrimage is no longer optional for us. Because even if where we're trying to be at home, we're experiencing culture shock. If we don't adopt pilgrimage, we're in serious trouble. Right.

1:32:55John Vervaeke:It strikes me just the notion of a situation, right? This embeddedness, this embodiment, this character. It's where character is born and built, is with friction and encounter and everything that you're talking about. The question I have is, when we're doomscrolling, are we in a situation? This is what's really interesting. is kind of like it's not that clear what we're doing when we're actually immersed in the screen. Like, are we in a situation? Like, I know that working with some of these, like, new technologies, it is not self-evident the right elevation to come at those two. And if you go down in the wrong elevation, you're, like, coding something that, like, turns out you didn't even want, like, the next morning.

1:33:56John Vervaeke:It's a really weird, it's a strange space in which so much of me isn't included in that. Like my body's not giving it signals. It's just this kind of light, right? Dopamine, C, look more and light. And it's like I am not feeling all of the tension of my body in the midst of that. Like I don't even know if there is such a thing. Is that a situation I'm in? like the basic move of modernity which is to say the basic move of tourism consists of narrowing hyperification super salience and control yeah by necessity because those all go together i can i can only control within a certain set so i have to focus on a narrow set and the only way that i can get something like a proper uh a feeling of success on the basis of a narrow set is that i have to actually have that set be super salient And then I have to increase my capacity to receive, which of course then denatures my capacity in all the other directions.

1:34:57So when you are doom scrolling, you are engaging in a very narrow superficial participation in whatever it is that you're, this is why it's called doom scrolling, right? You're literally scrolling and you're only sipping and consuming the narrow set of inputs that you are hyper hyper perfectly capable of receiving, getting a super salient hit. but you can accomplish that with a very high degree of efficacy. Right now, at this moment, I can just open my phone and doom scroll, and I can get an immediate hit of some set of neurotransmitters.

1:35:26Guy Sengstock:But that bespeaks, right? I mean, and here's where I think Plato is different than Aristotle, or at least versions of Aristotle, right? Tourism is consumed by curiosity, the consumption of new information. That's what you're doing in doom scrolling. It's just curiosity to no purpose, no end. Whereas, and this is the platonic point, wonder is exactly what is, I would argue, the disposition you have to have if you're going to be on pilgrimage. I mean, that's the original idea. It's supposed to make you wonder, and then you come back and tell people the wonderfulness, right? And so – And you're not just wondering at the place, you're wondering at yourself.

1:36:19Guy Sengstock:Wonder is always – I think Fuller is right about this, that wonder is different than curiosity because wonder is always calling the world and yourself into question together, right? And that's why it is supposed to be the beginning of wisdom. And I think when Aristotle starts to make the move towards, no, this is curiosity. And what we're doing is trying to fill in gaps in our knowledge. But you see, as soon as you do that, you're a tourist because now you're holding the frame as constant. And everything is in service of fulfilling the frame rather than calling it into question. So we began this conversation offline, having a notion of, let's begin with a frame, which I think is perfectly reasonable.

1:37:10But we also began with a meta-awareness that we were having a disposition of pilgrimage. We didn't name it as such then, but the meta-awareness that our basic disposition as an ensemble is pilgrimage. And that we would begin with a frame, but we would not hold so tightly as to prevent ourselves from entering into the actual journey that was before us. And it is beautifully ironic that the journey before us was the journey to and from pilgrimage. That's well said. I love it when

1:37:36Guy Sengstock:you do that. I've missed that. You and I, we haven't been, our schedules have not been as well in sync, but I've missed that. I love it when you do that. That's a wonderful thing. I love it when you do that. I'm feeling like I'm sort of done. I feel like I don't I'm not saying we've come to a conclusion because that would just undermine everything we've been talking about here. But I I I'm done is the only correct way I can put it right now. That's that the Forrest Gump move is perfectly fine with me. That's all I've got to say about that.

1:38:17John Vervaeke:thanks for the situation with you guys since you were the one who convened us how do you feel yeah

1:38:29John Vervaeke:um let's see

1:38:36John Vervaeke:my i feel like some of my instincts are right like they're they're they're intelligible this is what I'm feeling. Yeah. I'm, I'm, uh, I mean, I think we, I, in some sense, we just enacted what there is to do about it. Right. Like some sense, like, and, and so, so in terms of whatever role I have in all of this is like, help make this happen.

1:39:05Guy Sengstock:I think it's wonderful. I want to thank all of you for coming on my channel here and doing this. This has been amazing. One quick note, completely technical. Don't leave when I shut this down because we're on Riverside. Okay. Okay. Just remember that. Okay. Does anybody else have any final words they would like to leave our listeners with?

1:39:34Nope.

1:39:35Guy Sengstock:All right. Awesome. Let's do this again. This is always wonderful. Thank you, everyone.

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1:40:36John Vervaeke:Go to Libsyn ads.com. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N ads.com today.