Transcript:
(00:01) All right, guys. I'm incredibly excited for this video because for the first time in my life, I have something tangible to show people that begins to demonstrate the full scope of everything I'm trying to build and everything that's been on my heart for my whole life. And I feel like I owe it to any of you that for god knows whatever reason have chosen to stick around during this incredibly erratic period of my life.
(00:31) This video is for you because I feel like I owe it to you to explain what all of that was for, what all of that was always building toward, and where we're heading in the future. And so without further ado, I want to walk you through what I'm talking about. I'll try not to get too distracted on any one thing.
(00:50) Let me just get my setup set up and uh we'll go. All right, starting with the website. There are so many layers to this and perhaps one day everyone will be interested in the full story, but just know that so many of the things that we're seeing here have been years and years and years. Most things over 10 years in the making, but I'll try not to get too distracted.
(01:15) When you come to the website, this is the first thing that you're going to see whenever you load up the page, guys. Come on. That is cool. And so, what I'm trying to draw attention to is the catabsis, which roughly translates to the descent. I want you guys to go down. And when you go down, you're going to begin to see the message.
(01:43) And I'll read a part of this and I'll leave it up to you guys to go and check it out for yourselves. But I'll read the first part of this. The condition you were born into a world you did not build. Before you could speak, the world had already spoken for you. It gave you a language, a religion or the absence of one, a politics, a morality, a set of fears dressed as values.
(02:11) It gave you an identity assembled from inheritance, environment, and accident and told you it was yours. You never chose any of it, but you defend it as though you did. You argue from positions you absorbed. You trust judgments you never earned. You rest your entire life on a foundation you have never once examined from below.
(02:35) This is not an insult. It is the human condition. Every person alive starts here inside an inherited order that does the work their interior should be doing. It tells them what matters, what is real, what is good. And because it arrived before they could question it, they mistake it for themselves. Most people live their entire lives in this condition without knowing it exists.
(03:02) They suffer, but only locally. They question, but only within the frame. They never ask the question beneath all questions. Am I adequate to the judgments I'm making about reality. They are not bad people. They are untransformed people. And so you can continue the descent. And I again I promise I won't get too far into it, but this is an enactment of what I had been working on a decade ago that has now become known in my own lexicon as the four horsemen of inner apocalypse.
(03:43) And you can scroll through this descent and I talk about what a psychog is. I talk about what this is that this is not a website. It is the outer gate of a temple being built. The temple is not a building. It is the living structure that forms around those who are undergoing transformation. I restructured the membership.
(04:06) It was confusing before. Now everything is streamlined and straightforward and clear. And then I talk about the quest forum which is like I say where the temple's life happens. It is open to all, witness, initiate, or neither. You do not need to sign up, pay, or declare anything to enter. All who arrive with honest presence are welcome.
(04:32) And then you scroll to the bottom and you see this cool logo and whatnot. And over here, if you're on the desktop, you see this uh navigation little spy scroll thing. I don't know what they call it. You click on this icon, it brings you back up to the top. And so, again, I'm trying to contain everything. So, let me talk a little bit about the quest form.
(04:48) And I'll show you guys what it looks like here briefly. So this is really where you're going to get like this is where the community is going to live. This is where if you want to be notified, I chose to build everything on different kinds of platforms. So it didn't have to be dependent on any particular platform or services algorithm or notification system.
(05:21) This is so that we can have a direct relationship. Uh the website is going to focus if you join the website, it's going to focus on like big stuff, big video projects, when the book's arriving, any sort of major events and whatnot. But the Discord is like the lifeblood of the community. Let's say that I have a spontaneous live stream and I want to, you know, let you guys know a little bit in advance.
(05:44) That's going to be in the Discord via announcements. Let's say that um you want to ask me a question or let's say that you want to join one of my streams, whether voice or video, however you want to show up, you're welcome to do so. And all that's going to happen on the Quest forum. One of the coolest things about back when I actually had some semblance of a community was watching my community members interact with one another.
(06:08) It was mind-blowing to me and it was like one of the most special things I witnessed. And I always ever since back in the Google+ days was trying to build a structure that would allow people to interact with one another and that I could serve as the person who sets the tone not for what you can discuss or you know not not what you have to think but set the tone as far as what kind of people I could draw into a space and what kind of concerns could be present in this type of space.
(06:39) And I'm super excited to have finally realized that vision along with so many other things. And so I would encourage you guys to check out the quest forum here. You know, it's a standard Discord community. I went through this with such a beast to do, but you have like a welcome. There's an a simple onboarding process. There's a a guide to the forum.
(07:00) There's a layout of what every channel is for. There's an arrival hall where you introduce yourself. some simple rules and again the sort of announcements for all the different kinds of content. And if I come over to the website just to show you all the information, you can check it out on the Quest forum page where you can see what it's for, the structure, the different postures, what happens, the roles. I have a table here.
(07:35) The forum uses an alchemical glyph system and you can see the different glyphs and what they mean and and the color coding that you're going to see in the forum and whatnot. And then of course you have a link to join the forum. Uh super exciting. And so briefly talking about content and without getting too much into future content.
(07:53) I'm the kind of person who on the one hand wants to have highly intentional sort of polished evergreen canonical type of content, but I'm also the same guy that wants to walk outside at 2 in the morning and ramble for 20 minutes on some obscure topic. And I'm also the guy that wants to have a random eight hour live session on a random Thursday afternoon.
(08:21) And so I needed to figure out a way to contain all of those different things. And I I believe that I I have and I'm super excited about that. It's like whenever you live in an a disorganized space, it causes anxiety. But whenever you finally organize your space, not only do you quell and mitigate your anxiety, but that space becomes an attractive place that you actually want to inhabit.
(08:42) And for the first time, I'm so excited because I feel like I have the right avenues for all of my different energies. And so that's what the transmissions page uh sort of discusses like the different types of work. We'll have you know the full video essays, inscriptions are going to be solo work, articles, unlisted videos of me walking around talking.
(09:03) That way my YouTube stays clean of just the the the the big serious important work that hopes hopefully draws people into community. I have a content type we're calling echoes. That's the communal stuff. Let's say that we have a live stream, a Socratic dialogue, Q&As's, we have a mutual research session, whatever it is, and that's all going to happen in the Quest forum in probably the STOA, which is the main sort of voice and video chat.
(09:30) Well, then I'm going to have those videos that will be accessible through the website here. If you want to watch it at your own pace, if maybe you missed the event, you can watch it there. And then I have an archive for earlier work that I might want to surface from time to time. And uh guys, check out the artwork. This was one of the most fun things about building all of this.
(09:54) Briefly talk about the book. You can get an idea of uh what I'll be talking about in the book. And if you join the if you join the website, the idea is like you'll know when it arrives. Let's talk a little bit about the path. I won't give the whole history, but this has been a long a long time in the making.
(10:26) Uh I always wanted to create kind of a self-paced curriculum, not just a reading list of of books or whatever, but a different kind of more interesting type of path. And well, it has been iterated upon many times over the past decade, but you can read all about it here. It's super cool. I'm incredibly proud of everything. Uh you'll see the four disciplines of the quest. Guys, look at this.
(10:58) And I don't know if I've mentioned it yet, but I will have a gallery page where you can see all of the artwork, not muted, not opaque, the way that it it needs to be muted and opaque in order for the text to be uh centerpiece. But if I come over here to my Instagram, you can see guys, come on.
(11:15) I mean, this is these images are stunning. That's Anana, Socrates, Abraham, Arjuna. And so uh speaking again of the four disciplines of the quest, catabsis, the descent, noisis, the seeing, numa, the alignment and integration, the embodiment. I uh have a little quote and I have different paragonss across all different civilizations of who I think embodies the essence of what that aspect of what the quest is about.
(11:53) And so for the descent for the catsus I have Anana and Orpheus. I talk a little bit about their history just briefly and then I talk about a little bit about what each capacity that we're hoping to train. Then we see Nois, the two paragonss, Socrates and Buddha. We scroll down, we see uh Numa, we see Abraham and the other paragon is Jeremiah.
(12:19) We scroll down, we see uh integration, the embodiment. The two paragonss are Arjuna and Muhammad. You keep scrolling down, you can learn about the different phases of the path, the different like levels of the quest. Um, and then you can get into what kind of methodology we're hoping to use. And I want to say this, like obviously I'll be able to the temple's pedigogy will deepen as the community matures, right? I won't be able to execute the full-blown vision on day one because that's going to require other people who
(12:53) are also part of the temple structure teaching and leading and doing all sorts of interesting things. Um, but what's going to matter first and foremost above anything else is always going to be presence. And I say this on the website that before structure, before curriculum, before trials and initiation, there is proximity to the work and to the one doing it through the quest forum, through live discussions, through the transmissions themselves.
(13:19) The ancientmies did not begin with syllabi. They began with a person and those who gathered around them. And so again, as the temple grows, the pedigogy will deepen. And you can read about that. And then what lineages are we drawing from? I say this path does not belong to one tradition. It draws from the entirety of the human sacred project.
(13:42) Everything's going to be there from shamanism to zorastaster. Uh and I say that and I say that this is not synratism. It's not a buffet. It's a recognition that the same fire has erupted everywhere. and you can read more about that. Let's see what else haven't we showcased just yet.
(14:11) Oh, couple more things real quick. The vision page, super cool. It goes over like what is this really, right? Like I say, everything you've encountered so far, the transmissions, the disciplines, the quest forum, the book is the foundation of something larger. What is being built here is a new kind of institution. Not a church though it houses the sacred.
(14:32) Not a university though it forms the intellect. Not a political movement though it will produce people who reshape every domain they enter. Not a think tank though it will generate insight that existing institutions cannot. And so you can read all about that. I talk about like it's super super cool page. This is a super cool page to read.
(14:54) Um, and then let me just highlight this Adelon. Now, aside from guys, look at this artwork, right? Aside from building this website, I started building this this idea for what I back 10 plus years ago, I started using Evernote to collect all of my insights that would eventually go into creating my book.
(15:22) But I tried to create a system because like what if this particular note is a project or what if this particular note is an external resource or what if this particular note is a native insight of my own? How do I organize all of that? And what if I have a folder system where it's like let's say that you have a recipe book? Maybe one recipe is both a Mexican uh Mexican recipe but then also a paleo recipe and also a favorite.
(15:47) How do you deal with that? So, I had to create a new knowledge management system. And on top of that, I've always been I I how do you organize your intention? How do you organize your will? How do you organize your actions? Right? And so, I'll just summarize all of this. I basically created a quest log like in a video game.
(16:07) A quest log sort of stores all your progress in terms of how far you're progressing in the narrative. It has a map, shows you where you've explored, shows you different points of interest. It helps reduce the friction of re-entering an activity or task and it just make quest logs are really cool and I basically turned my life into a video game. I built the app.
(16:26) It was incredibly difficult. Um it's kind of like but it's kind of like whenever you build a car. Imagine all the engineering. But at the end of the day, using a car is very simple. You press a couple of pedals, you turn a wheel, and it all just works. And I've I can't even believe that I did something like this.
(16:43) And I hope to build this out for others as well, perhaps as an offering for those who enter the temple as infrastructure for them. But you guys can read all about Adelon and Proteius, my AI Damon and whatnot here on this on this page and and eventually I will have screenshots that showcase some of the features of this app and whatnot.
(17:05) And then just closing with some reflections on the book, guys. Like I left my job in October. I left the dojo like right before that. And I'll say this, like my grandma asked me if I regretted leaving my job. And I love my job. I worked with sweet people who believed in me. They supported me. They wanted to try to give me opportunities and I worked in it for basically 10 for 10 years, just long enough to be able to build all of this kind of stuff, right? So, it was very fortuitous.
(17:50) And the dojo guys, like I wasn't just a student. I'm a sensei. I helped teach for four or five years. I was there teaching anyone from someone who's four years old to 64 years old. And I wasn't just an assistant instructor as well. I was also someone that was very valuable presence to have in the room. I was like an architect.
(18:14) I was I was I was a good mirror for someone to I was in involved I was involved in a lot of conversations about the strategy, the business, the the architecture of curriculum and whatnot. And obviously I learned so much from that experience about how to build people, how to build systems, how to build paths, everything like that.
(18:39) I already had that instinct and I'd already been doing that in every area of my life before. But then actually living it in like a dojo setting was another thing. But I I felt called to sort of walk away from everything. Um and it wasn't out of nowhere like some people might think. I remember being 31 years old. So right before COVID happened, I wasn't yet working from home.
(19:05) And I remember calling the retirement people up to basically be like, "What are your policies, your penalties? What are the consequences if I take all my money out of retirement and I just have it? And I was trying to do the math of how much time that would buy me because what I always wanted was to have this period of my life where I could escape into the wilderness or live in a monastery and just have solitude.
(19:28) And I always wanted it to be in winter. And I cannot believe that. It's like all of my dreams come have come true, guys. I'm probably 20 25 pounds overweight. I haven't trimmed my beard since 2025. I'm so deconditioned that if I went on a long walk, I'd probably get sore because I don't even know what day of the week it is half the time or what time it is.
(19:52) I just work around the clock and I'm addicted to this and it's like I've fallen in love all over again with something I'm already in love with. And I couldn't be any more proud of everything I I've been able to build and I'm so excited really. And it's almost like I'm sure many of you have creative pursuits and you create something and you have that moment where it's like how did this even come out of me? And that's how I feel about all of this infrastructure I built and and about my book and just about everything I'm
(20:27) doing. And I'll tell you what, like talking to my grandma on the phone, she she when she asked me that, I was just like, it's like in a video game whenever you don't want to lose your progress. You want to make sure that you've saved everything. It's like I can't imagine it having been any other way.
(20:45) This was by far the best decision I've ever made in my life. And I'm so incredibly happy to be able to show you guys the beginnings of what that was all for, like what what everything was always for. And I hope you guys uh take the time to check out the website, maybe join the Discord, and uh I'll see you guys in the in the near future.