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Dec. 14, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:10:39
3150 Save Me From Irrationality - Call In Show - December 11th, 2015
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Alright, alright, alright, people.
We have this show tonight for you.
We're dealing with a good-hearted, kind, and curious mystic.
Not the most common combination and definitely somebody worth chatting with.
And he had this question.
To what extent do patterns in nature exist?
Do patterns of nature exist outside of the mind?
Can we control nature?
Nature, through accepting its patterns and having something proactive to help us avoid disasters in nature and so on.
Sounds kind of abstract, but it got really personal really quickly and we actually found some good common ground between rationalism and mysticism, which I think you'll find very interesting and I give my thoughts about phenomenons such as astrology and so on and how they could be valid in some circumstances and contexts.
So I hope that you'll enjoy it.
I found it a really fascinating, fascinating conversation.
So let's get started right away.
Nick wrote in and said, In this way, it is possible to generate good luck slash avoid bad luck, as well as mature into a better person.
In this vein, I propose it's rational and optimal for people who meditate over crystals and getting involved in mysticism such as astrology and tarot cards, because it helps humans learn nature's archetypes and natural law.
Please save me from this irrationality, if that's the case.
That's from Nick.
I don't know if the tea leaves are going to predict me saving you from your potential irrationality, but welcome to the show.
Well, thanks, Steph.
Yeah, I almost regret putting that last sentence in because I actually am going to take a firm stance so it's a more entertaining discussion that, in fact, it is reasonable to...
Wait, wait, wait.
Are you going to take a stance you don't believe in to try to be entertaining?
Well, it does...
The people who I follow, secondary to you, present an argument that I think is reasonable, that is an esoteric perspective on these divination arts like tarot and astrology, and my first loyalty is to whatever's true, and so I think it could be true, but if not, you know, we'll find out.
Okay, just don't try to be entertaining by arguing something you don't believe in, because that's a life-too-short category for me.
I mean, you know, argue what you believe, and if you have doubts, we'll see if we can tease them out, and maybe you'll convince me.
Certainly open to good arguments, so...
Nice.
All right, so...
Do you want to go one by one through the questions that you sent in?
Do you want to talk more freely about these topics?
Is there something in particular you'd like to focus on?
Yeah, let's...
Instead of going one by one, let's...
I've got a little bit of some notes and I got an idea for how we might approach these things.
The general category that this all falls into is an understanding of symbolic language and how symbols have been passed down throughout history that speak to archetypes, which allow people to develop and follow a pattern of rites of passage and basically to reach, to grow and mature into one's full potential.
And I think it's Applies to all people.
So, let me try and...
No, no, no, no.
We gotta...
I don't want, like, long speeches, which then I have to sort of ask questions afterwards when I've forgotten half of what you said.
So, we gotta go...
We've got to go bit by bit.
Right, right.
So let's start with the pattern element, I guess.
No, no, no.
We started already.
Okay.
You had an opening statement.
Okay.
Question back.
Okay.
So the degree to which there are archetypes, you know, what Jung would call archetypes in the collective, unconscious or whatever, and there are rituals and passages and so on.
I accept all of that.
I mean, I think that puberty is a rite of passage and illnesses can be rites of passage.
Childbirth is a raising.
Death is a rite of passage.
And there are symbolic elements to All of these that I think have some commonality.
You know, you've heard me do dream, actually analysis like I'm an analyst, but dream examinations.
You've heard of me talk about various stories, and if you haven't, you should, but I mean, various stories and the elements within them and what they might mean in sort of our collective unconscious, and the fact that people prefer some stories to others, that some movies or some Genres tend to be more successful than others means that there must be something in common in the way that we process analogies, stories, metaphors, and significant life experiences.
I think, you know, there's very few people who mourn marriage, and there's very few people who celebrate illness, right?
There are general patterns in human life.
That is different from the question of the metaphysical reality.
Of things outside the mind, right?
And so that...
Do patterns of nature exist outside the mind?
Sure.
Whirlpools exist in nature.
Stripes exist in nature.
Nature abhors a vacuum everywhere, right?
Things rush into a vacuum except rational arguments into the mind of a liberal.
One significant exception, but...
So, there are patterns in nature.
Now, the question that you have, do they exist outside the mind?
Well, sure.
So, for instance, evolution is a pattern of successful adaptation to local circumstances, either in reproduction, avoidance of danger, or the gathering of food.
And those patterns exist in nature.
They existed prior to humanity, which is why we're not a single-celled organism, but we're so far the most complex thing that has evolved from that particular earlier form of more simplistic life organization.
So, patterns of nature certainly exist outside the mind because the mind is a product of the patterns of nature, adaptation to environment and evolution and so on.
So, I think that those things can be fairly easily and well established.
And I'm just wondering where you think in terms of our conversation so far.
Yeah, I think that's helpful.
That That was an important part of the question.
So, since these elements...
So, for instance, let's take one pattern, which I found to be very interesting when I first came across it, which is the phi ratio, which is a certain set of numbers, the Fibonacci sequence, zero, one.
Oh, I thought it was one-third of a giant's call.
I don't know much about Fibonacci numbers, but I think they show up in Dan Brown novels quite a bit, if I remember rightly.
Well, and that's funny that you mention that, because really how I first came to this area of research was through conspiracy and looking at the occult societies that are...
In power and are really doing a lot of the mind control, if you will, or elements that help, that are controlling the population, right?
And I see that they have been successful and they've got certain...
Do you mean a bohemian growth stuff?
Is that...
Yeah, and even like Freemasonry and things like that.
And going back to...
Like the Rosicrucians and the Gnostics and these other secret societies.
I believe the Knights Templar show up somewhere there as well.
Right.
And so those are more contemporary incarnations of groups that go back to, I think, like Pythagoras and the Druids and a lot of these, a lot of the people who are high up, like Aleister Crowley and these other people like Albert Pike, who...
I see that these groups that are in charge seem to value things like astrology and use knowledge of these archetypes as a method to I certainly would not disagree with any of that.
It's not an accident that in a lot of religions the priests are called fathers.
Well, you know, I mean, of course, because there's an archetype of father, which for most of human history, children had to subjugate themselves to in an unquestioning sense of obedience to arbitrary power and authority.
And so the fact that there are the founding fathers in America, the father of the country, the son of Ohio's most famous son, like the city gave birth to someone and therefore that person owes fealty.
The pope who has, I don't know, maybe there's a giant tea cozy that people all worshipped in the past or whatever.
And so the degree to which people are programmed into obedience through particularly parental archetypes is very, very common and very, very powerful.
We all grow.
We're dependent on children.
As children, we're dependent on our parents.
And the idea that that could be transferred to both religious and secular authorities, to me, is indisputable.
That there are organizations who believe in irrational things that rule mankind.
Well, yeah.
I mean, I don't know that we need mystical because there's this imaginary thing called the country or the state that human beings claim to represent and therefore you subjugate yourself to the law, which, as I've said before, is just an opinion with a gun.
And so, to me, the religion of the state and the religion of God Are fundamentally the same.
The priest says, I speak for God, and God knows what is best for you, and you must subjugate yourself, not to me, but to God.
It's just that God happens to speak through me, and therefore you can pretend I'm not just a human being wearing basically a hairy dress.
And in the same way, a politician will come and say to you, I represent democracy, I represent the state, the nation, the collective good, you name it, I don't care.
But you need to subjugate yourself to the law, to the good, to the culture, to the collective, you know, because otherwise you're just subjugating yourself to me and I'm just some big-toothed juggy at Beanpole with a destruction complex.
So...
The idea that there are irrational beliefs that are used to manipulate and control people through archetypes, I think, is indisputable.
And somebody whose book I've read, The Origins of War in Child Abuse, I've read it as an audio book.
You can get it at freedomainradio.com slash free.
Lloyd DeMoss does a lot of work in this area.
And these archetypes are very powerful.
And you can deconstruct religions and symbolisms and so on very carefully and very powerfully.
And, you know, there was a show called The Good Wife where the guy who was running for office wanted to declare his running for office for presidency on the same steps using the same coat and scarf that Obama did, because apparently that is an unconscious way of programming people that they're going to accept this as kind of successful.
And so anyway, that is, and you know, it's generally the case that people with Silly causes often enlist good-looking, famous people to speak for them because we have the natural high school subjugation to good-looking and athletic people, and therefore good-looking and athletic people, especially if they're famous, when they tell us something, it's very hard to say no because we're afraid of getting a wedgie or being locked into our own locker or something.
So I think these archetypes and these irrational beliefs are very much what controls people.
And once you can get people to believe in mysticism, you own them.
Because mystical beliefs, irrational beliefs can be manipulated in a way that reality can't.
I can tell you God loves you.
I can't tell you that the tree can walk.
If I say God loves you, okay, or you've got to give back to the nation that raised you, or the nation has given you all of these goods you owe at taxes.
I can make up all that stuff in the same way that I can add one more tentacle to an eye of beholder in Dungeons and Dragons and no biologist is going to call me up and say, hey man, I got one right here in the lab.
That's too many tentacles.
It's all made up.
So you can manipulate irrational mystical nonsense.
And once you get people to believe in that irrational mystical nonsense, they don't have independent integrity and empiricism and rationality through which they can legitimately resist excursions of your power over their lives.
So once you can get people into the soup of mysticism, you own them because you can make up their reality through your language, which is why the word spell means both to use the correct sequence of letters in a word and a magical utterance that changes reality, right?
That's because in mysticism, language is reality.
Whereas in empiricism, Sense data, objective sense data, and objective reason is reality.
So if you want to control people, first of all, you have to invite them into a world that you can control.
And that world is language.
And whether the language is God, or whether the family is the tribe, or whether the family is the government, or sorry, whether the mysticism is the government, or whatever, it doesn't matter, fundamentally.
Once you can invite people into a landscape that is defined by your language, you own them.
And so the fact that groups that control human beings have a strong focus on the occult or have a strong focus on mysticism, it couldn't be any other way.
There's no way you can control people.
If you teach them reason and evidence, you empower them.
If you invite them, I think we're very much on the same page as far as that goes, if I'm describing where you're coming from even remotely accurately.
You are addressing very clearly and accurately what I've described so far.
I guess what I want to try and move into is In the invisible world, right?
The world of energy and whether or not there is any legitimate...
Hang on, sorry to interrupt.
Feel free to move into the invisible world, but do not move into the inaudible world, because I can live with not seeing you on the non-existent webcam, but if you move into the inaudible world, it's going to be a little bit trickier to continue the show.
So go invisible, cloaking device, fine, cone of silence, not good.
I just wanted to mention that.
Okay, thank you.
Sorry about that.
So my question is whether or not there is any validity or use to these types of what are called divination arts to manage energy that is invisible.
So let me describe.
What I understand is there's four divination arts that are all interrelated and speak to each other.
Tarot, astrology, numerology, and Kabbalah.
And they all work by using archetypes, which it's almost like a Rorschach or one of those psychological tests that speak to things that resonate with man's psyche.
You're using words, but I don't know what you're talking about.
I'm sorry.
They resonate by talking to each other?
I mean, I... Okay, one at a time.
Okay.
So, astrology, right?
And astrology is, as far as I understand it, the belief that certain future events or personality types can be determined by the position of the stars at your birth.
Is that...
Or planets and stars at your birth.
Is that right?
I... Yeah.
Yes.
The movements and the relative position of celestial bodies are interpreted as having an influence on human affairs in the natural world.
And how is that influence exercised?
It can't really be gravity, and it certainly isn't light because they're very dim.
How is that...
How is that...
How does that occur?
So...
How does the influence occur?
So the influence occurs supposedly by men...
Projecting onto those bodies certain consistent archetypes that are unique to each body.
Wait, wait, hang on.
So the influence occurs from man to the stars?
Yeah, it's not like they are conscious beings that are actually...
Yeah, basically.
And that because there's a consistent pattern that goes from the stars to man...
That's why I kind of started with patterns and this concept of the Fibonacci...
No, no, no, no.
Don't fibonacci me, bro.
Not yet.
Not yet.
We're just working on astrology.
Just try and stay on the straight and narrow, annoying sort of balance beam of this particular aspect of the conversation.
So is it that human beings look up when they're born and see a particular constellation and say, I think I'll be an extrovert?
I mean, I'm trying to sort of figure out how this works.
Not from a metaphorical standpoint, but from a physical standpoint.
So the...
It's...
That's not it, right?
No, and I'm sorry.
I know it's not a great way of explaining it.
I'm just trying to understand it.
The constellations include stars that are hundreds, like dozens or thousands of light years away.
So it can't be any influence.
Like the moon is pretty close and the moon has an effect.
It draws blood out of women.
The moon has an effect on the tides and so on.
Maybe that, I don't know.
But Certainly the planet has an effect on us in that it tells us when we've had too much cheesecake.
But as far as the stars go, I'm sort of just trying to understand how it could work.
It can't be that the stars would have an influence on our personality.
I mean, I have a vague theory as to why or how it can work, if you don't mind me mentioning it very briefly.
Go for it.
Okay.
So the way that I think that what's called the zodiac signs or astrology could work would be something like this.
Particularly in climates with strongly differentiated seasons, I could see how when you're born in the year could have some effect on your personality.
So for instance, if you're born in the spring, then your first experience of the world will be more outdoors than indoors.
Let's say Canada, right?
If you're born in the spring, you're going to get more sunshine.
You're going to be outdoors more.
There's going to be more breeze.
You're going to see more trees.
You're going to get more of a sense of the elements.
You may be bathed in a brook or a lake or something, and that feeling is there.
The world is a more inviting and outdoorsy and Natural sensation occurring kind of place if you're born in the spring or the summer.
Now, you know, if you're born in December in Canada, well, you're not spending a lot of time outdoors, you know, for the first five or six months of your life.
So your world is kind of indoors and the outside world is like a blast of godforsaken witch-fart cold air that comes in when anybody cracks a window or a door.
And you may be more sort of hypnotized by fire in the house than you would like the gosh great sunlight that would be beaming down from the world as a whole.
You wouldn't see the stars if you were born in the winter because you wouldn't really be outside at nighttime or really during the day at all.
Whereas, of course, if you are born in the summer, you will see the stars in your first six months of life and so on.
And, I mean, obviously, when you are born in the winter, you'll hear more conversation than if you're born in the summer, particularly in an agricultural community.
Like in an agricultural community, if you're born in the summer, man, you're on the back, you know, it's harvest time, it's planting time, you know, I'm not a farmer, but it goes on some, it's when it's warm, warmer.
So you're sort of slung on a, like a little teepee on your mom's back and you're out there and, you know, she's working and all of that.
Whereas in the winter, in an agricultural community, there's really not much to do.
I mean, if you've got to take care of the cows, but there's no crops to tend in the winter.
You're just living off your summer.
Stored summer crops.
And so in the winter, there's fire lights, there's stories, there's music, there's so, you know, you'd be more focused on conversation, probably develop faster verbal abilities by being exposed more to language, and you'd be more interested in relationships because that's more of what's going on rather than you bouncing in a brightly lit pack on your mom's back as she hoes the back 40 or something.
And so, I mean, obviously, you'd see people playing more games indoors, you know, checkers, chess or whatever might be going on, cards and so on.
And so your focus would be more on people if you were born in the winter in terms of your early experience in the spring and summer, more likely to be outdoorsy and so on.
So, again, You could go on and on with this kind of stuff, but I can totally see, at least theoretically, how your initial experiences would be very different if you were born in the various different seasons, And this may have some effect on particular skills development or particular personality approaches.
And that is one possibility about how astrology could have some empirical validity in the real world.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah.
And the genes will be turned on and off depending on experience.
Like you would end up a different genetic person possibly born in the spring versus born in the winter because genes are turned on and off depending on environmental cues.
At least some of them are.
And the environmental cues for babies and toddlers are very different in the summer and the winter.
One last thing I'll mention too.
Since at least Caucasian babies learn to walk at about the age of 12 months, I think for black babies it's 11, for Asian babies it's 13.
But Caucasian babies learn to walk at about a year.
And if you're born in the summer, you're taking your first steps outside.
Right.
You've got the...
Grass in your toes.
You can explore.
You can go out into the dirt.
And the fact that you're outside means you're exposed to a lot more germs.
So you're likely to grow up a lot more hardy if you're working and, you know, doing all the baby stuff outdoors.
If you are born in the winter, you learn to walk indoors.
And you've got less scope for movement, less scope for exploration.
You're exposed to fewer environmental germs.
You're probably exposed to more people germs because everybody's indoors.
And so, again, you could sort of play this out in a lot of different ways.
And I have no, obviously, no empirical proof of this.
But it seems like a plausible thesis about how when you're born in the year might have an effect or some sort of collective effect on personality development or skills development.
I'm not saying do you agree with it.
Do you sort of make any sense as a potential theory?
Oh, certainly.
I mean, that feels very logical.
Absolutely.
And a lot of that has to do, I mean, also mountain people are different than valley people.
And if you're born near a coast, it may have a difference on your personality versus, you know, in a desert, right?
I mean, the valley people, I mean, according to Frank Zappa, you know, fairly shallow and materialistic.
I'm just kidding.
Go on.
So, well, you know, the moon, obviously, you know, you mentioned has an effect on the tides, right?
Yeah.
No, it is the tides.
It is the tides, right?
It drove Aristotle mad because nobody knew what the tides were.
And he couldn't figure it out.
It had no sense that the moon would have anything to do with it.
But anyway, go on.
Well, I think looking at the Earth as a non-closed system, as existing in a...
And a solar system that has an effect on the energy that's blasting the Earth constantly.
And so to the extent- Wait, wait, hang on, hang on.
What do you mean?
The moon has an effect on the energy that's blasting the Earth?
Well, it has an effect on the water on the Earth.
It has an effect on the water on the Earth, absolutely.
And man is like 70% water.
So, I mean, there's...
Yeah, but we don't have tides.
I mean, okay, but...
Okay, I'm willing to...
There is a full moon phenomenon, if I understand it correctly.
So, yeah, I'm certainly willing to...
Maybe it's just because it's lighter out, so thieves have more of a chance or less of a chance or something like that.
But I think there's more crime on a full moon.
I don't know if that's a myth, Mike, if you can check that.
I appreciate it.
But, okay, so, yeah, that which is large and close to the Earth, though, a sixth the size of the Earth and a quarter...
A million miles away, yeah, it's going to have some effect on human life.
Right.
So, the sun also has an effect on human life.
In that we're here, so yes.
Otherwise, we'd be like frozen bacteria on some asteroid.
So, that speaks to...
A celestial body impacting.
The energy that allows life to exist on this planet comes externally.
And even solar maxims, I understand, could be measured by looking at tree rings.
And so there's a way to measure sun's output, and it has an effect.
I mean, there's easier ways to measure solar maxims, but that's one way you could do it.
And, you know, the fact that it's able to have an effect on the woody, fibrous...
I'm sorry to be annoying, you just...
Solar Maximus!
It's the most tan gladiator in Rome.
Okay, that's it for that joke.
Go on.
No, I mean, this is an ambitious topic, and I'm not a...
I'm just interested in the subject, and, you know...
So anyway...
No, so far we're all in agreement and we haven't touched into mysticism at all.
I'm trying to get...
Yeah, right.
You pulled me there.
I'm willing to go.
I'm just saying that so far we've got some pretty prosaic potential explanations for some of the phenomenon that we're interested in or you're interested in.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, there was a Farmer's Almanac that was very popular and was...
You know, farmers would use consistently that would make predictions using astrology and things like that.
And when I say bodies, it's not so much the stars as much as the planets, I guess, the other seven plus planets, you know, Pluto included.
And that's one other sort of case study that Farmers are shrewd people, and it was consistently helping them with their crops, and they would spend on this almanac every year.
And so that's another sort of example of how...
some evidence, if you will, of the planet's measurably affecting life on the surface of the planet.
I don't know if that's compelling.
Well, I mean...
I don't know, obviously, about the degree of accuracy that the farmers' almanacs had.
I think that there do seem to be solar cycles.
I think there's an 11-year one.
There are some who argue that there was the medieval warm period and the very cold period that Iceland experienced in the early 1970s that mysteriously got scrubbed from global warming records.
But there is definitely patterns to weather and maybe over thousands of years people got those patterns to some degree and I think that's perfectly valid.
There is value in weather prediction even if it's inaccurate or has no relationship to accuracy insofar as, you know, one of the Great and terrifying things about the global warming or the climate change hypothesis is it really plugs into something very foundational to agricultural-based societies, which is a legitimate obsession with the danger of weather, like weather is life and death throughout most of human history for agricultural societies.
And so even if there's no value in predictions in terms of they're right or they're wrong, it gives people a sense of control.
Over that which they cannot control.
And people will pay a lot for a reduction in anxiety for things they cannot control.
And that's a lot to do with statism.
It's something to do with religion.
So even if the farmer's almanac was incorrect, in other words, it was right often enough that it's basically random and wrong often enough that it's basically random, people would still pay for it and would find value in it because it would give them a sense of predictability and control over something that they fundamentally can't predict and control.
And can't really respond to, right?
I mean, we're still dependent on the weather, but because of better farming methods and so on, we're less dependent on the weather for...
And we're certainly...
The weather doesn't generally mean we eat or we starve these days.
I guess in some places in the world, but certainly not in the West.
So, again, I think that we are still, you know, sun provides energy.
Moon has influence on behavior of matter on the Earth.
Yeah, and Mike's saying that the moon impacting crime appears to be total nonsense.
So this full moon is a complete myth.
I thought maybe it had something to do with visibility for thieves at night or something in the past, but all right, if it's nonsense, all right.
But I'm still hanging on to going to Australia and watching the Coriolanus effect make the toilets flush backwards.
I know they won't.
Actually, according to Flat Earth Theory, I think they flush differently because the water just pours out of the toilet.
Anyway, so again, I think we're sort of on the same...
Matthew, I think we're on the same...
Wavelength as far as this goes so far.
Right.
Okay, well let me take another stab at trying to put something out there that is going to...
Keep hitting it, baby.
Keep hitting it.
We'll get there.
So going into this, we've got four elements, right?
And there's this phenomenon where fire is always fire.
And it's kind of like there's one...
That element of fire where if you were to light a match and then that were to go out and you would light another match, that flame would come out of nowhere and it would be the same thing, but it never exhausts.
You can never exhaust the energy that exists behind the flame.
You can strike a million matches and they would still be fundamentally the same.
The way in which the Earth is not plugged into anything, there's no central energy source.
Behind life, the life principle.
And the question is whether or not there's kind of like this fifth element that is the ether or this overarching life principle that is just diversified through all the different kingdoms.
Okay, sorry.
Again, we're getting words that I don't...
So, ether is a discredited concept in physics that Einsteinian physics got rid of, right, Nick?
I mean, that was sort of late 19th century.
People believed in this ether.
So, ether, which I think now is a gas.
At least it used to be...
It's associated with drugging people for surgery, with anesthesia.
But let's go back to the fire thing.
I want to make sure I understand that.
Okay.
Okay, so fire is fire.
I'm with you on the tautology, but what does it mean to say that the fire's energy can never be exhausted?
That if you were to strike an infinite amount of matches in the universe, there's no end to the energy of that flame.
It's not like you can run out of a fire principle.
Well, hang on, hang on, hang on.
It's equally a tautology.
It's equally a tautology to say you can't run out of an infinite energy source.
Well, infinite by definition means you can't run out of it.
But there's not infinite energy in the universe.
Like, the idea that there could be infinite matches in a finite universe doesn't make sense, right?
Because that's like bounding infinity in a finite system, which would be a contradiction, right?
Right, okay.
My point is that energy is an invisible element that is a mysterious thing.
Fire is somewhat complicated.
It's a mysterious situation.
What's mysterious?
There's potential energy, there's kinetic energy, there's nuclear energy, there's I don't know that it's that mysterious to scientists.
I mean, they may not know all of the relationships and strong and weak forces.
I think there's still some challenges in the relationship.
But I don't think that it's that mysterious.
I mean, they know why the sun burns.
It's basically a giant nuclear bomb that goes off for billions and billions of years.
I don't think that I remember there was some story.
I can't remember the...
Was it Planck?
The physicist who first figured out why the stars burn was talking to his girlfriend and she says, oh, the stars are out pretty and they're pretty tonight.
And he's like, yes, and I'm the only man in the world who knows why they're burning.
Because he hadn't told anyone yet.
And I think that was in the 20s or 30s.
Again, I'm really talking out of my armpit here.
But I don't think it's that...
And I don't think energy is a hugely mysterious force in modern physics.
Yeah, I mean...
Now, it's important that it be mysterious for you, and that's interesting to me, but I don't think it's objectively mysterious.
Well, yeah, I mean, I look at the pyramids, for instance, and I came across this theory that a pyramid is an archetypal structure for a flame,
and that trying to decode why that's Such an interesting element in that basically, you know, why ancients would build a pyramid of all shapes and what the value is behind the concept of a flame as it relates to consciousness.
Why...
Sorry.
Why they would build a pyramid?
I mean, as far as I understand it, they are...
It's a death cult sarcophagus, isn't it?
I mean, this is where the king was laid to rest and he needed a big...
A big pyramid because he probably had a tiny penis.
I don't know.
But they needed this giant burial chamber to oar all of his minions into remaining under the thumb of the pharaohs.
Unless, of course, Ben Carson's got it right and it was a Walmart of grain.
But what's interesting to me is that it's important to you that this be something semi-mystical or something quasi-mystical.
Well, yeah, I mean, I just think it's an interesting subject.
Okay, but let me ask you this, if you don't mind.
Sure.
Nick, I must know.
Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick.
Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick.
Sorry to say that again until you post me there.
But what would your life be like if there were simple prosaic Scientific, empirical explanations for the things that you're talking about.
What would your life be like?
I'm not saying is there or isn't there.
Just if you can sort of imagine that mindset.
What would your life be like?
What would your heart be like?
What would your emotions be like?
What would your sense of life be like?
What would your sense of the future be like?
What would your life be like without the mysteries, if that makes sense?
Well, I gotta say, I appreciate you asking the question because one of the values I get from your show is not just the reason and evidence element of it, but it's the way you engage in this emotional dialogue with people.
And frankly, that wasn't something that was really modeled, you know?
And I think a lot of, you know, young guys in the West don't I don't know.
And that aspect of because, you know, we can't really argue the objectives of what the pyramids are all about.
I mean, we're neither experts and I don't even know the experts know.
But.
What is what what is we can we can answer it one of two ways.
What is your life like with this sense of mystery and the occult and mysticism and so on?
Or what would your life be like if you woke up tomorrow and it was just dull, plodding, prosaic, scientific, empirical, rational reality and there was no magic, no mystery?
Well, yeah, I mean, it would be less exciting.
I mean, I think that there is, there's got to be a mystery to life.
I'm almost interested in trying to...
No, no, no, no, no, don't get me to got to be.
Tell me more about what it would be like if you woke up tomorrow and didn't believe this stuff.
And look, I mean, I'll do it the same with you.
You can ask me the same question because I'll totally answer the question what it would be like for me if I woke up tomorrow and believed in the mystical stuff.
So I'm not trying to make this a one-sided conversation.
So I'm totally happy to have the conversation come back to me and I'll tell you about that if you want.
But I'm just really curious what it would be like if you woke up in my dull, plodding, scientific, empirical brain tomorrow.
What would be missing for you?
What would be lost?
There would be a lot of excitement out of my internal life and feeling that there's an opportunity to plug into and ride a wave of growth and development and that there's more opportunities to be guided.
A lot of it has to do with One of the things about your show that was so helpful is that it really identified everything that is aesthetics and all the requests and demands from people around me who want me to Agree with them in a moral way and make all these moral arguments.
Well, actually, there's a very slim category of what's moral and the rest is aesthetic.
So it's trying to understand what is my aesthetic preference on things.
You know, like my relationship to color.
I think we may have lost some of the emotional content of...
I'm asking for the emotional motivations, and I don't say this to disprove anything you're saying at all, right?
It's just that I know, like, as we're sort of plodding through this other more prosaic or science-based arguments that can explain some of the phenomena that you're interested in, I know that that's not emotional.
Like, you'll concede it, right?
But it doesn't emotionally capture something in you.
And that's what I want to try and understand.
If we go back to the feeling side, if you woke up tomorrow and you were like, wow, I can't believe that I was attracted to all this mystical stuff, there's prosaic explanations or whatever, what would your life be like?
How would it feel getting out of bed?
How would it feel having your morning coffee or whatever you do in the morning without this, without this magic?
It's hard to think of.
It's hard to think of.
I mean, I really...
Have, you know, I feel like it helps ground me and center me, and so it would be something kind of like, I don't know, there's less purpose, if you will.
I don't know.
Okay, good, good.
So if you felt less purpose, what feelings do you think would come up for you then?
Boredom.
I mean...
Okay.
Yeah.
Listlessness.
Like, life's not that exciting.
Yeah.
Like, I thought it was in an action movie and I'm just in Coronation Street.
I don't know, I just probably didn't even know those references.
So, boredom, a lack of excitement, listlessness, anything else?
Well, there's a lot of people and groups and people like Alan Watts and some of these other Existential sort of people would...
I don't know.
I would have to look at them, I don't know, in a different light.
I mean, it wouldn't feel bad.
I don't know.
I'm just trying to get to the truth of things.
I mean, like I said, I'm not...
I just think that these are interesting subjects.
They've been around...
No, no, no.
We're back to the feelings.
We'll get to the...
I mean, yeah, it's less exciting if it's not there, but it's not like I'm...
I don't know.
I don't think I'm dependent on it psychologically for whatever...
I didn't ask for dependence.
I'm not judging.
I'm just asking for the feelings.
Hard to stay with though, right?
Well, I don't really...
I mean, I guess.
I mean, I haven't been into this for like my whole life.
I mean, I could go back to how I felt.
No, see, excuses.
Do you want me to tell you what it would be like for me if I woke up mystical?
Sure.
Go for it.
Sheer fucking terror.
Yeah?
Absolute sheer terror.
If I woke up tomorrow...
Tarot cards, pyramids, crystals, numerology, Fibonacci, which still sounds to me like a Gibbons mating cry, but anyway, Fibonacci?
But I would feel disoriented.
I would feel like I was losing my mind.
I would feel terrified.
I would feel crazy.
Now, I'm not saying this is you.
I'm just telling you what my feelings would be.
Because I was raised by a mystic.
Who was crazy?
Right.
And again, please understand, like, I'm not putting you in this category.
I wouldn't have this conversation if you were in this category.
I'm just telling you my emotional experience, right?
So I was raised by somebody who was mystical.
Like, I won't say the whole shebang, but, you know, there was lots of paranormal books and magazines floating around my place when I was growing up, and there was lots of, you know, I actually got into the newspaper for spoonbending, and it was a very big thing in the 70s, this sort of ESP, telekinesis, and prophetic dreams, and time in flux, and back in...
It feels like my feeling is fear.
I'm out of control.
For you, it's exhilarating.
Some people love the roller coaster and some people don't.
This is not a judgment of any sort of metaphysical reality.
But I would feel out of control.
Reality is not predictable.
There are these movies.
Someone walks through a door and They close the door, they walk, they realize they forgot something, they turn around and there's a blank wall.
Door's gone.
Terrifying.
Terrifying to me because that means either reality is unpredictable, unquantifiable, and therefore reality is insane.
Like I'm in the mind of a crazy person because if I walk through a door, I turn around And it's like the back of the studio, like there's no door.
That means that reality is crazy.
Because reality has no fixed properties and can come and go at a whim.
I'm stuck in a dream.
And dreams are fun.
Dreams are fun at night for the most part.
Nice place to visit.
Wouldn't want to live there.
Because if I am...
The fear comes from is that if reality is crazy, it's either crazy in a predictable or unpredictable way.
Now, if it's crazy in a predictable way...
Then it's not crazy.
It just means I don't know the pattern yet, right?
That's kind of where I... I don't know.
But if it's crazy in an unpredictable way, then I am in the mind of a madman or a madwoman.
Reality that is around me is the dream of a psychotic person.
I am trapped inside the mind of a schizophrenic, not even with Jennifer Lopez.
So that is, to me, absolutely terrifying, because I grew up kind of trapped in the mind of a crazy person, and then if reality turned out to be a crazy person's mind, then I would never, ever be able to escape my childhood.
That's the level of visceral terror that I would have.
That I was trapped in the mind of a crazy person because I was raised by a crazy person, a mystic.
And so if reality turned out to be crazy, it means that I could never, ever leave my childhood home.
Ever.
I would be stuck there forever and life would barely be worth living, if at all.
If reality was crazy.
Now, if I walk through the door, I turn around and the door is gone, and it's not reality, then I'm crazy.
And then I've turned into a crazy person, which was kind of my enemy when I was growing up.
So I've become that which terrified me, that which almost broke me in two, that which dominated and horrified me by repeated assaults on any kind of rational integrity or empiricism that I had.
That's terrifying to me, too, because I've seen what crazy looks like.
I know how horrifying it is and the fact that it would then be my disease.
Would be the worst thing.
Certainly worse than cancer.
Cancer kills you or you survive.
Crazy just goes on and on.
So for me, I mean, I'm just, this is not, again, doesn't prove or disprove anything.
I'm just giving you sort of my emotional, visceral, bone marrow horror at the idea That what you call magic, I call crazy or insanity.
That this would be either embedded in reality, in which case I'm living in the mind of a crazy person, and since you can't escape reality save through dying, and God knows dying might be hell, which is an even crazier and evil mind to live in.
I can't escape crazy, or I am crazy, in which case I can't escape crazy, because the call is coming from inside the house, right?
That the crazy is coming from inside the house.
So, what you call magic, I call inescapable insanity.
And I'm just telling you that's my sort of visceral, emotional reaction to the idea that reality doesn't have stable, predictable, empirical properties.
Or that if something looks crazy to me, I just need to find a better way of measuring it and then the crazy goes away.
But the idea that crazy is embedded in reality, if craziness is in my perceptions, then it's either in reality or it's in my head.
Either way, it's kind of inescapable.
And that is a terminal disease where you don't die.
And that to me is a horrifying kind of existence.
So this is why I push back pretty hard against what people call magic.
Or what people call mysticism.
Part of it is a genuine concern that it's one thing when you're a young man.
I've seen how it metastasizes as you get older in people.
And the degree to which it conditions who you can spend time with and who wants to spend time with you.
And the degree with which it conditions your relationship to yourself, to your senses, to empiricism, to rationality, to philosophy, to logic, to external criticism or lack of validation of your emotional or deranged preferences.
So the degree to which it starts out as kind of a tendency, like it starts out as a cobweb and it ends up as a chain, the degree to which it starts out as, I think I'll go this way, and then it ends up with you tied to the back of a locomotive of crazy that you can't jump the tracks or ever get away from, the degree to which it starts out as a preference and ends up with a brain and soul destroying and relationship destroying and career destroying addiction...
Is the pattern that I have seen, which is not to say that this is for everyone.
I'm just saying that's my sort of visceral, branded-in-the-brain experience of what happens with mysticism.
And it might be a combination of mysticism plus physical beauty.
I don't know.
It could be any number of things.
But that is my particular concern.
So I push back against it partly because of that which is incredibly horrifying and terrifying to me.
I will resist.
Obviously, right?
I mean, that's natural, right?
A cornered rat will fight a bear if it has to.
And so I won't surrender an inch of that hard-won empirical sanity without overwhelming evidence Which, again, if I'm willing to accept evidence, I'm not crazy, right?
Because I'm willing to accept evidence.
So that's one of the reasons I push back.
The other is out of a genuine concern for people like yourselves, and again, not putting you in the same moral category as the woman who raised me, but of people like yourselves who are dabbling, put my, you know, it's like, oh, I think I'll just play with some pentagrams.
Roar!
You know, I'd summoned Beelzebub and I now have no soul and my eyeballs are dangling from his belt or something.
That there may be a risk and a danger in that because when you have these approaches to life, it really strongly conditions who it is you can spend time with.
Because our values are our first companions.
The people who are in our lives are merely shadows cast by the companions of values or the values.
The companions called values that we choose are our first friends and all the remaining friends and loved ones are mere shadows cast by our first friends that we choose called our values.
And that is it is out of not just a horror for myself and my own history and what I've seen but the potential for it to be horrifying for other people and the really terrible thing about this kind of horror is that because craziness is kind of accepted in in the world rather than in the person it becomes a weird kind of empiricism to stay crazy because empiricism is allowing your beliefs to be So
that's just sort of my densely packed emotional and...
Visceral reaction to waking up tomorrow as a mystic, where there's a door and then there's not a door.
And that wasn't really a lot of philosophical arguments in that, but that's sort of my visceral lived experience, if that makes any sense.
Man, you really connect with that well.
That's impressive.
Well, it's why I have a show.
You know, people are like, oh, wow, you're really good at debating empiricism.
It's like, yep, started when I was six months old.
Right.
Had to.
It was that or go mad!
Would you feel the same if it was just that ether principle that You know, you said Einstein disproved.
I mean, if there was that concept that existed in the world, I mean, because that wouldn't be so bad.
But the ether thing was a scientific hypothesis, and a scientific hypothesis being disproven is a mark of sanity, not of mysticism.
I mean, because it's disproven, and therefore empiricism has won over.
So, I mean, there's somebody else who did an investigation into that same concept, and his name was Wilhelm Reich, and he did a He was a psychiatrist who basically studied people having orgasms, actually.
I mean, that sounded like fun, I'm sure.
And he basically identified this ether concept, right?
And he called it Ergon energy.
And that is kind of a fundamental principle.
If, you know, that would have to exist, right, for any of this, you know, any aspects being reflected from in the solar system affecting, you know, other people.
I mean, you know, that is basically an animating principle of consciousness.
Hang on, hang on a minute.
It's a big box of words, but it's just like a word salad.
I don't know what any of this means.
So he did orgasm research.
Why do I think of orgone in a box?
Do I have that right?
Yeah, yeah.
He made an orgone accumulator, which was supposed to be a box that had organic and non-organic plates in it that was supposed to be contained.
Sort of like what?
Like a teenager's bedsheet?
He just collects the orgasm residue?
Is that...
I can't pry him off!
You know?
Like, interstellar sails.
So, no, but this orgasm energy which he collects in a box, does that seem like sane to you?
I'm just curious.
Ah, no.
Well, I mean, does he catch it with a butterfly net?
Does he catch it with glasses while he's kneeling?
I don't know.
What does that mean?
He catches his energy.
Does he catch it in slow motion to a 70s disco beat?
I don't know.
Like, I mean, what does that mean?
Yeah, I mean, he didn't catch it.
Well, yeah, I mean, he puts people in this box and supposedly has some therapeutic element.
No, he doesn't put people in the box.
I hope he doesn't put people in a box.
I mean, he puts orgone or whatever it is in a box, right?
Well, yeah, it's supposedly...
And then people would sit in this box and they would have a...
Therapeutic element, which I know sounds like, you know, pseudoscience, but I don't know.
No, no, no, no.
Listen, see, but here's where we can, you know, our paths diverged in a wood, but they might have come back.
Because somebody sitting in a box...
Yeah, it was a test.
Well, no, somebody sitting in a box might meditate.
They might be free of stimulus.
I mean, I remember once...
I was traveling with a woman...
Through Central America.
And she wanted to go off and do something that I'd already done.
So she just dropped me into town.
And I was going to have like a whole day, right?
I didn't really have any money.
And there wasn't really anything to do in the town anyway.
So what I did was I climbed into a resort area.
There was a little fence.
And I climbed into a resort area.
And I sat in a hammock.
I lay in a hammock.
I lay in a hammock.
And I had, you know, back in the day, like a 64 meg MP3 player was like king of media, right?
So I had this I think I even had a 32 Meg expansion card.
Meg, by the way, not gig.
And I listened to some songs that I had, and then I just stopped doing that, and I lay there for five hours.
I may have napped a tiny little bit, but I just lay there for five hours.
No stimulus, no doing anything, sitting with my own thoughts, and At hour four and a half, doesn't matter what, but a revelation came to me that completely changed my life.
Permanently, irrevocably, unforeseen.
That's, doesn't matter.
I want to get into that right now.
But the point is that that was a lack of stimulation for a number of hours that allowed something to bubble up from my unconscious, which wasn't I wasn't being distracted by busyness.
Like there's miners who are trying to drill up the whole time from your unconscious.
Here's the truth.
Here's what we've pieced together.
Here's what you're ignoring.
But they have to wait for the traffic upstairs to stop.
And the traffic upstairs almost never stops.
Like the chatter almost never stops.
You have to really make that effort.
This is why I did yoga.
It's why I did meditation and so on.
You have to stop the traffic upstairs in order for the miners to bring you their gold.
You know, it's like the trains have to stop for people to come up from below the subway tracks.
And so the idea that somebody sitting in a box for an hour or two or however long, even half an hour, the fact that somebody sitting in a box might get some therapeutic value, I can completely and totally accept and believe.
Does it have anything to do with captured orgasms?
I don't think so.
At all, because, you know, either the energy is measurable, in which case it's scientific, or it's not, in which case it's functionally not there, at least until it is measurable.
It can't be determined to be there.
Well, I can completely believe that you put someone in a box, they can get some value.
Right on, yeah.
And sensory deprivation tanks are awesome.
I mean, you could do that again.
Well, yeah, unless you're in them for 12 years and they call it government education, but I know what you mean, yeah.
Too much fear.
Nice, nice.
So again, you know, you're like, I don't know we need all of the captured orgasm stuff, but I do think that we need, like, we can fully accept that when you're in a situation where your stimuli is reduced, you become more sensitive to what is going on within you, which is very, very important.
So let me just ask you this as sort of, I guess, a final question.
From your knowledge, where does the mystery of consciousness, the unmapped element of being a conscious person, where does that begin?
You know, like, where is the area that you're...
I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be obtuse.
I don't understand the question.
Where does the mystery of consciousness begin?
Well, yeah, I mean, there's a...
But I assume my mother was picking up a pencil.
Anyway, go on.
What part of the question of how are we alive?
How is there life in the first place?
Where does this existence come from?
Why existence over non-existence?
There's plenty of non-existence.
The vast majority of the universe is non-existence.
So it's not existence or non-existence.
If God created it, man, he loves vacuum and apparently beetles, since they're like, I don't know, three-quarters of all biomass on the planet.
I don't know if there's a God, but he does seem to be inordinately fond of beetles, said some famous biologist.
Anyway, so yeah, there's much more nothing than something.
In the universe.
So it's not an either-or.
Why is there something rather than nothing?
There's mostly nothing and a tiny scrap of something here and there.
Right.
And most of it's hydrogen.
But why is there life?
Is that your question?
Well, more like what is the...
I mean it from the perspective of...
Do you know Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher?
Yes.
I mean, you know, sort of like existence...
What is the anatomy of man's psychic life?
And it's a big question, and it's kind of a curious mystery of where does man's psychic inner energy, internal life come from, and what fosters it?
Well, that's not a massive mystery.
Okay.
No, I mean, in terms of where does our energy come from, it comes from Food and drink, right?
I mean, you eat stuff.
You know, a human being is a great way of turning a pig into a poem, right?
I mean, you eat some bacon, write a sonnet, right?
I mean, our life comes from, our energy comes from, well, obviously, ultimately comes from the sun and certain activities, biochemical and geological or whatever within...
The Earth and around the Earth's surface.
But where does our energy come from?
I mean, it's pretty clear because we know exactly how to stop energy from coming and then you die, right?
I mean, you don't eat, you don't drink, and you neither hydrate nor get calories and you're dead pretty quickly.
So we know why we're alive.
It's because we eat and we drink.
You'd say sleep too, right?
I mean, that's a different function, right?
Yeah.
I mean, according to the doctor in Fight Club, You're not going to die from lack of sleep.
Sometimes it makes you want to, but you will eventually sleep.
Sleep becomes eventually involuntary, and you just have to do nothing to sleep, whereas to consume calories, you have to expend calories and gather food and so on.
But go on, sorry.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, the rejuvenation element of sleep and that curious sort of phenomenon of why living animals all have to sleep No, I don't think that's a huge mystery either.
The reason why sleep is important is that it conserves calories during a time when you can't hunt for food.
So if you're sleeping, you consume far fewer calories when you're sleeping.
Plus you're not moving around, so you're not usually moving around that much.
And therefore predators can't find you.
And as long as you find a protected place away from predators, it's like why do bears hibernate?
Because there's nothing to eat and they've got to survive till spring.
And the best way to do that is to put themselves in a low metabolic state.
Frogs will hibernate and some frogs can freeze solid and then thaw in the spring and they haven't had to really consume any calories during the winter.
So sleep, again, is one of these phenomenon that reduces calorie consumption during a time when it's too dark to hunt for food or if you're nocturnal, it's too light and too dangerous to be eaten.
And, oh, Mike's saying that I can die from a lack of sleep.
And he says, for humans, it's believed to have something to do with your body, removing a certain protein from the brain, like leftover sludge or socialism.
And, but yeah, I mean, so I, and so, and also I think it's a way of integrating the lessons during the day, which is why dreams, you know, when I talk about someone about their dreams, I say, okay, well, what happened the day off?
It's not just random.
Usually it has something to do with your day or the day before.
And again, I don't obviously know everything about it, but to me, the question is, to some degree, are you a biologist or are you a dancer?
I mean, this is the two categories that...
No, this sounds silly, but it's a fairly real question in that...
I'm clearly a dancer.
But if your goal in life is to move with beauty...
Then you don't need to study the body, you need to train the body.
Now if your goal is to be a sports doctor, or your goal is to be whatever, a doctor, then you need to study the body, you don't need to move with beauty.
To move with beauty, you need to know your body, you need to know your limitations and what's possible, but you don't need to study the muscles, you need to train the muscles.
And there are these two kinds of people in the world, someone to move with beauty and someone to study the body.
And this move with beauty sounds like an aesthetic trick, like, oh, well, everybody should want to move with beauty.
No, you get injured and you need to sports medicine and so on.
My goal is to move with beauty.
Now, I believe that it's important to know the mind, to know your own mind.
Self-knowledge is essential.
But I don't need to know how the mind works to move with beauty any more than a dancer needs to know the biochemical reasons why the muscles do X, Y, and Z. So he needs to train to move with beauty.
And I am somebody who, with his mind, attempts to move with beauty and attempts to move the world with beauty.
I attempt to raise the bar with what people expect from and can anticipate the benefits from human consciousness.
And to move with beauty, I don't need to know how every cell in my brain works any more than a dancer needs to know why or how every cell in her musculature works.
You train and you move with beauty.
The source of it is not as important as the beauty of it.
And in fact, it is the choice.
If you focus on the source of it, you can't move with beauty.
If you focus on moving with beauty, you will learn something about your body.
But the more you study the body, the less you are training the body.
The more you focus on the origin and biochemistry of things, the less you move with grace and beauty.
And my goal is to move with beauty through the world.
And if that means I have to step over certain questions, which A, can't be answered, and B, do not serve the purpose of moving with beauty through the world, you say to the dancer, you say, but you don't know exactly how your muscles work.
You don't know exactly where your muscles came from.
You don't know exactly the evolutionary progress of your muscles from single-celled organisms.
And the dancer will turn to you and say, I don't care, because I move with beauty.
My muscles are doing what they're supposed to do, which is to move with beauty.
The muscles are not supposed to know themselves, but to beautify the world.
And to inspire the world.
And to make people weep with gratitude at the beauty of the movement.
And for the muscles to spend their time figuring out why they were made or how they were made, that interferes with the goal and grace of moving through the world with inspiring beauty.
And I'm concerned that people who have the potential to move with beauty through the world, and you have great language skills, and you're a very personable fellow and a very positive fellow to have a conversation with, you can move with beauty through the world.
But I'm concerned that you're being dragged down into the underworld of unanswerable whys rather than the hows of moving through the world with inspiring glory and beauty.
Well, that was lovely.
That was like beautifully composed.
It's certainly better than watching me...
Listening to me do a dance analogy vastly different than watching me do an actual dance.
I shouldn't say I was a pretty good dancer, but anyway.
I'm sure.
Awesome.
Yeah, I mean, that's my concern, that you can get so stuck in the mechanics of things that you can't move.
Well, I'll take that message and meditate on it.
That's helpful.
Thanks so much.
An enjoyable conversation for you?
It was for me, and I really appreciate you bringing these topics up.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm not totally satisfied with my performance, but nonetheless, it was enjoyable to connect with you and really appreciate what you do.
So, thanks for your time.
Thank you very, very much.
A very enjoyable conversation.
And listen, I mean, I'm an empiricist and a rationalist logic, but call on in.
You know, I'm always happy to speak with people who have different approaches and perspectives.
And Nick, it was a real pleasure to chat with you.
And of course, a real pleasure to chat with you, the wonderful and glorious listeners who engage in the dance with me as we move in beauty through the world and bring people's eyes up from the muck of tortuous historical religiosity and the mindless soul Destroying conformity and marching of nationalism and all kinds of collectivism.
We move with beauty through the world and break people from the frozen prisons of conformity that unfortunately they were not born into but have been lashed into as they have aged and grown.
So we remind people of the grace and beauty and power Thank you so much for your time.
Thank you so much for your attention.
Thank you so much for helping us bring so much philosophy to a darkening world and turning it to a new dawn.
Thank you again so much.
Have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful week, everyone.
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