The Perfect Disciple?

• Steve opens with a piece of housekeeping that doubles as a principle: no Tao of Now today, because Pol has yet to release the first one. He suggests instead a five-minute Riverside sound check so Pol can get his levels right against Steve's voice, which is now a fixed reference point — "you kind of now know what I'm gonna sound like, because I'm always gonna sound like that." • The real pitch is the first Timesian episode: the guru and the disciple meet and talk about what it means to be a Timesian. Steve frames it as an induction — the way Mormons would spell out the terms of entry: you do realise that if you're going to call yourself this, you've got to believe in the holy sanctity of the book, the golden plates, all of it. • The Mormon bit escalates properly. Steve notes they don't want to be called Mormons anymore because it sounds like "moron" — "I'm sure I'm not the only person who has noticed this" — and it only took them a couple of hundred years to work it out. His diagnosis: "They didn't have many fours, I imagine, in the founding fathers of Mormonism. They didn't have many fours and fives." Hence the rebrand to Latter-day Saint: you believe all that bullshit so you can then walk around as a standard narcissistic human with a better title. • Underneath the joke is the actual design brief. Steve wants the Zahedian frame — an admission of crackpottery built into the launch itself. "Imagine if the morons had actually said right from the start, this is crackpot. We know it." The plates, the this, the that — clearly fantasy more than sci-fi, though he concedes there's a clear distinction and Pol will know it. The tragedy is that nobody takes that deal: "No one wants to be a moron. They want to be a latter-day saint." • Steve is explicit that the sincerity must be real, not ironic cover. He wants "just enough show about the show energy" alongside a genuine, non-ironic account of his own fallenness — "I am a fallen creature and so I clearly need some kind of religion" — even without buying the whole undergirding, particularly the moral objectivism. This becomes a live question for the episode: does moral objectivism preclude him from being a Timesian? Religions are founded on in-group/out-groupism, so what would actually discount him in his fallen state? • He tests the Christian answer and rejects it. Jesus loves the sinners, God has space for all — "But not really, right?" Sign up to the off-the-shelf version and every way in which you are a fallen, morally subjective creature has to be knocked into shape. He suspects Timesianism has to have its own version of this and wants to find out on camera. • Setting the improv: "Pol is the guru, Steve is the disciple. Steve is a four, he is by and of himself a fallen, broken piece of shit." And yet the same creature has "aspirations to soar like a dove into the sky and through the clouds" — spiritual guff is one of his existential kinks, and he enjoys the feeling of being that elevated person. The deep dualism is the material, not a problem to be solved before recording. • The typological punchline is the sharpest thing in the message. "There's no fucking way I could ever be a guru because I'm a piece of shit" — and he pre-empts the objection: "you could say oh self-pitying — no, this is clear-sighted four-five-eight." By contrast Orion Taraban, an 8-5-4, is happy to be the guru because the recognition that he's a piece of shit, that a human has no more inherent worth than a leaf on a tree — which has enormous universal worth if you're a four, but no inherent worth — is buried very low in his stack. • The conclusion he arrives at is a genuine casting insight: he leads with four, and fours cannot be gurus, therefore "I am perfect disciple material." Better still, he's good disciple material for a five specifically, "because I'm not gonna lick the five's ass. And fives do not want their ass licked. They want rigour."