https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=g2XL8Vjx8mA
I need you all my do adore, As bright as their shadows Shaper nothing more. See, Lord, how thy serene glow, The highest gear of hide, Lost all lost in wonder At the God-gloved. See, touching days, See, our energy see, As as trusty healing That shall be beaming. What God so last only did, And what should I do? Truth themselves speaks truly For there’s nothing true. The cross of heaven, The sun, the sun, The mother, the mother, The son, the son, The mother, the son, Both still and unsaid, The very word the Holy Spirit kowtows. He, who is Quanto benitent Adorote, nevote Adorote, nevote Acquettimi sempre Magi ispredere Intestem operet Et ilicere O memoria, aletortis omini Panis meus vitro presens omini Pesta mea vetri De te iere De te iri sempre Dulce sapere I hem me li quam e Jesu topine Me li mundum, mundam Tuvum sarquine Cuius unassilam Sarvum facce ale Tutum mundum quita I am a little girl Stolen here below I’d be sleeping Spending what I’ve heard so Someday to day I’ll be faced no face denied And be blessed forever With thy glory side Good evening, happy Sunday everybody And you may notice that I’m not in my ordinary office right now I am being held against my will by a psychopath No, that’s not actually the case I am down visiting friend of the show, Mark Lefebvre He has kindly allowed me to use his rig to do my ordinary Sunday night live stream So I know there’s thousands of you watching right now And I’m glad I was able to not disappoint We have been having quite the adventure down here in South Carolina It rained all day Wednesday, which was not what I was hoping for But we survived that and he showed me around the South Carolina State Museum Which was delightful They had a big telescope up there but they couldn’t open up and show us things because it was raining A lot of really neat exhibits I did not know that a state museum could actually be that interesting so that was a lot of fun On Thursday we went to a state park And I got us lost and it was dark and we were in the woods And we had to call the forest service to get us out So that’s not good I am using Mark’s setup Don’t worry, he’ll be back I haven’t killed him and stolen his things All the evidence they have against me is circumstantial How you doing Ted? I’m doing really well Father Eric, it’s good to see you Yeah, it’s good to see you too Yeah, I’ve just been having adventures down here in South Carolina Welcome to the South, yeah Yeah, thank you, thank you I lived in South Carolina for five years actually We were all on Shaw Air Force Base, my dad was in the Air Force So going to Point Set State Park was supposed to be like Oh, we used to go hiking here and this will be so much fun And then all of a sudden we couldn’t find a map for starters The little map thing was empty, but I thought we’ll be fine And then Mark left his smartphone in my car and I only had a dumb phone No flashlights, no water, my phone was running low on batteries And we picked the craziest trail in the world, it was just going all over Like switchbacks, nothing but switchbacks And then it was dark and we were turned around and we couldn’t get back Oh my goodness You know you reminded me of this book that I read 15 years ago called Deep Survival It was basically all in the psychology of why some people make it out of the woods and some people don’t And what you’re telling is basically, not to freak you out, but that’s the textbook story of how people die Where they’re like, oh yeah, I know the place, it’ll be fine I can totally handle this So what was interesting was it’s not like a survival guide or anything like that It’s just like, what is the thinking behind going on in the heads of people that do make it out and don’t make it out And one of the things that I remembered, he had this term he called bending the map Which is people’s ability to convince themselves, oh yeah, that rock totally looks like the one we passed earlier And like, yeah, you know, we just go a little bit further That inability to reconcile with the fact that you’re actually lost and start doing the sensible lost person things is what kills people And so one of the things that always stuck with me is he said one of the groups of people that is most likely to survive in the situations is not tough, able men It’s like children Because they know when they’re lost, they know when they’re cold, they know when they’re wet and they just act like that’s the case and then they get found by rescuers And it’s the guys who refused to come to terms with what’s happened to them that don’t make it out Yeah, yeah, no, we were both like, this trail is not going in the right direction If we keep on walking and then at one point I had to say, Mark, what’s your threshold for us calling for help? And it’s like when it’s done, it’s like, okay And yeah, my battery is getting pretty low and the dispatch here, the dispatch was not helpful initially I call 911 dispatch and they’re like, well, what county are you in? And I’m like, I don’t know, I’m in Poinsett State Park Well, I don’t know where that is and it’s like, not hard to find You just Google that one Google Maps And then they were trying to connect us with the Sumter County, they had to ping our towers to figure out where we were And then they tried to connect us with the Sumter County 911 and they were like, oh yeah, we’ll send a deputy out to get you And it’s like, are they the most qualified? I won’t say no, but are they the most qualified? Why don’t you call the Park Rangers? Which every state park has And then they were going to call the Park Rangers, but they had the wrong number because that guy hadn’t been there for a year But they eventually found the right number and they came out on ATVs and gave us a ride home So anyway, Mark is blaming me 100% and I’ll just take it because why not Bear the burden for him, bear the burden of a bruised ego Oh yeah, yeah, and then they asked us, okay, why don’t you just take out your phone and look up a map And it’s like, bro, if I could have done that, we wouldn’t be calling you We wouldn’t be on this phone conversation Oh my goodness, that’s awesome Oh, it was wild, it was wild You know what? We got to the point where We got to the point where it was just like, yep, we can’t get out of here We’re going to have to call for help And thankfully we had, I had enough battery and we had cell tower access and we didn’t freeze to death Because, you know, it is the south, but it would have been cold enough where it would be kind of touch and go Yeah, yeah, especially if you’ve got like cotton on and it’s been raining and it’s like 42 out and windy Look out, man, like that’ll get you, that’ll get you right there Yeah, yeah, wow, well, there you go, there’s, you know, there’s the south for you It’s all warm and welcoming and then you get out in the woods and it’ll bite you Preferably not being bitten by like a timber rattler or something like that We do have, and we have an abundance of copperheads and rattlesnakes and cottonmouths and all that sort of stuff out here There’s this famous story in my family of my grandfather’s, he’s got some land on a little river north of here in the Ozarks And we’d go out there all the time in the summer And for one of my birthdays, we went up to one of the swimming holes You know, you always check for snakes and this time, sure enough, there’s a cottonmouth like on the rock that, you know, we kind of went down into the water, saw this sandstone And you’d think, okay, you chased the snake off, not my grandfather No, he went after it with a stick and started beating the snake and the snake’s like, I’m getting out of here, guys And like makes a beeline for the water and he chases after it and throws it back up on the shore with a stick and keeps trying to beat it to death And finally, after like three or four bouts of this, like the snake trying to get out of there, he like overcomes it And, you know, and other than probably my brother and I were like, cool, can we cut it up and use this fish bait? Oh my goodness Well, Father, I’ve got something that I’d like to hear your thoughts on if you’re interested Sure, go for it Yeah, so there’s, it’s this, something that’s been bouncing around sort of in this corner of the internet Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, sorry, I just got a, we have rules here Oh You don’t, you don’t Shh Oh, okay, okay, there’s this thing that these guys that I like to listen to on podcasts occasionally have been talking about One of them is named Dr. Peterson, have you heard of him before? I’ve heard of this Dr. Peterson, yes I think he’s like from New England or something, I don’t know Anyway, he says some cool stuff and people will probably like get interested in him at some point He might make it big He might make it big at some point So, so on that conversation with, with that most recent conversation with Verbecky, there’s this, there’s this whole point where they’re talking about Verbecky’s talking about like, goodness, like adverbial qualities and like total consciousness events and this sort of like being in touch with like the ground of being If such a thing were possible for humans, go on There’s a lot of questions about that, but, but at one point, the part where I got, the thing that I want to bring up is at this point, Peterson brought up In the account of Exodus where Moses goes to the burning bush and he says, hey, look, the way you’re talking about sort of like fundamental being Doesn’t it seem like that’s what is going on at the burning bush with the, with the, with the tetragrammaton, the I am that I am And they sort of like went off on that and there’s a lot of this sort of like, if you’ve listened to it, I mean, it’s very, I don’t think I’m reading into this at all in Verbecky’s, in Verbecky’s language It’s this very like, like, departicularized way of talking about it, like he’s, you know, there’s the things and then there’s the through lines and then Verbecky’s like, I want the through lines of the through lines of the through lines And you like, recursive relevance realization, recursive relevance realization that leads you to out of any particularity And then they went off on that and so what was, so here’s sort of like my point of discussion and I think, I think Paul VanderKlay brought this up too I did listen to part of his talk on like, personality and fiction or something and he brought this up a little bit But what no one’s talked about, what I haven’t heard anyone say is that at that point God gives Moses not one name for himself but two names, right Because he gives him the name, I am that I am sent you, he says, right, he says, what, he says, what shall I tell the Israelites, like who’s sending me? And he says, tell them I am sent you and then at the end of the conversation he says, tell them I am that I am, tell them that the God of Israel, I’m sorry, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob has sent you And my reading of that has always been this sort of, has been a very clear articulation of both the transcendent quality of God, which is obvious Everyone sees that as well as a profoundly personal eminence, right, he says, look, I’ll buy that, like as being a way of talking about that statement about God, that he is the total ground of being, right I think something like, God is being itself, being himself, I don’t even know what pronoun to use there, but that’s not it, right, because then he goes around, he turns around and he says, also, I’m the God of your forefathers Specifically these three forefathers who you know the stories about them, you know how I was in their life So I find that to me sort of like the balance there that’s like, wasn’t discussed at all, you know, prior conversations about, you know, what’s this interaction between Christianity and Platonism That seems to be that sort of like bent of Platonism to turn away from the particulars, and it seems like the biblical narrative is presenting it in a way that’s like, you can’t get away from the fact that like The ground of being is personal, which is an extraordinary claim, right, I mean that’s sort of the mystery of, part of the mystery of the incarnation is to claim that God becomes particularized, like Whoa, I mean, what do you say about that almost, I guess you just worship that, I don’t know Yeah, yeah, and it’s, I mean, we have to deal with, you know, even in our preaching in the church, it’s like we have to deal with the fact that Jesus came to us in a backwater province of the Roman Empire Into a culture not very similar to our own, and yet, like that extremely particular, you know, 33 year time span has spread out over the whole earth is something that anybody can participate in now And so it’s like, if you try and, that’s kind of the materialist threat, is to try and say, you know, I can just look at all this from nowhere, and I can like actually be in charge of that, like, well, no, maybe God can do that But if you want everything, you just have to humble yourself, because the meek will inherit the earth, right, you got to accept just what you have, just this very particular universe that you’re living in, your own little corner of the vineyard, and through that you actually get everything Not by trying to be, you know, super big green, you get the universal through the particular, not by extracting away from the particular Yes, yeah, yeah, that’s been the thing that I’ve been really trying to get my head around, is like that is, and I was talking with my sister about this, and that sort of, if you do want to diagram one of the differences between sort of Aristotelian epistemology and Platonic, it seems, there’s this, correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like the Platonic ideas that you get to the universal, you get to the universals by abstracting out of the universe The universals by abstracting out of the particular, whereas the Aristotelian is that you come to the universals through the particulars, is that right? Right, because you encounter, so, you know, we’ve got this really interesting remembrance theory of knowledge in Plato, right, is that you remember these things, and that’s how you can recognize them, you can recognize the copy of the true form, right, and Aristotle’s like, I think I can do that a little bit better, you know, the form of the thing is in the particular thing, right, and that is the only way that you can actually encounter the form of the thing, right, and that is the only way that you can actually encounter the form of the thing, right, and that is the only way that you can actually encounter the form of the thing, right, and that is the only way that you can actually encounter the form of the thing, right, and that is the only way that you can actually encounter the form of the thing, right, and that is the only way that you can actually encounter the form of the thing, right, and that is the only way that you can actually encounter the form of the thing, right, and that thing is in that particular thing, but because that structural functional organization is present in whatever object you’re trying to figure out, once you get that pattern, the structural functional organizational pattern out of the object, at that point it becomes universal, because you can recognize it every time there’s a different instance, even if it’s made out of different matter. Right. And so do you think that there’s a connection between that and the Thomistic idea that every angel is an individual species, this sort of like intrinsic particularity to reality, that like even when you abstract, even when you’re in this, you know, the non-corporeal spiritual realm, that you don’t sort of enter into this place that everything’s like copies or non-particular, universal, it’s like no, actually particularity increases as you move out of the physical into the spiritual. Would you buy that? Yeah, I mean, that’s interesting. Thomas Aquinas, the principle of individuation for material beings and the principle of individuation for non-material beings are different. So you and I have the exact same kind of soul. Yes. We have the exact same pattern. And it’s not even like a men and women thing. There’s just the human soul, human faculties, all of that. What makes us particular and what makes us different is the bodies that we are embodied in. Yeah. Yeah. Now, if you don’t have a body that can’t particularize you, so it’s like a metaphysical necessity for angels to have a different pattern. That’s so interesting. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be different. Yeah. Yeah, back from, I remember in, I think it’s probably in Mere Christianity by Lewis, he makes that distinction in terms of this when he’s trying to talk about the Trinity. There’s this sort of like, well, you start thinking about why couldn’t God have more than one son? He’s like, but you realize that as soon as you start talking about every possible way of differentiating that which proceeds from God, he’s like, you just end up in this sort of spatiotemporal thing. One comes before the other, and you end up in all these qualities that are all just, yeah, again, they’re materially embedded. And then you’re like, okay, well, that starts to make sense in terms of why we’re not the light to the Trinity in that case. So I’m sure he’s pulling from somewhere else. Speaking of particularities. One particular thing that you’ve got to attend to right now. Oh, goodness. Yeah. Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, do you, when you think about particularities as it relates to Christian doctrine, is there anything else that I’ve just been kind of like trying to work through? I mean, other things I think about, you know, sort of the Catholic emphasis on family, right? This sort of you, this recognition of the particularity of your existence as you enter into it. And like, well, I guess there seems like there’s a really strong connection between particularity and givenness. That seems like a very strong connection right there. Particularity and given. Talk more about givenness. Yeah, givenness being like those things that you don’t choose, right? The things that, oh, goodness, I’ve heard I’ve also called it her thrownness. Like the quality that you’re just that quality of life in which you’re like, you’re just here. Like you were born. Creation. Yeah, creation. Right. Creation has this quality of, well, you didn’t choose who you in a lot of ways. You have the DNA that you’ve got. You’ve got the parents. I mean, you start talking about the DNA and you start to, you know, you get all this like, you know, biotech stuff. But like you were born to certain people and there’s just no, there’s actually no changing that. And like you were born in a place. I mean, to go back to the example of Christ, like a place, a time, a person, you know, a sort of a set of circumstances in which you didn’t do anything to choose. And they’re non, they’re not abstract. They’re like, they’re just what you’re given. And so then and then everything builds on that. You know, I think about our children and especially when they’re this young, I think, well, there’s a sort of like, well, you know, they’re not going to remember anything that happens to them now. But let’s say, well, OK, at what point did they first start to have conscious memory? It’s like, you know, anywhere from like two to four. You know, like, well, what’s what’s framing those memories? Well, it’s the things that they don’t remember, but they did remember then. And you can sort of just like there’s this recursive loop of all the way back. It’s like at no point have you lived in a world and this is sort of, again, that like where are you standing from? You’ve never been an experience in which most of it wasn’t given to you in the sense of it coming to you from the outside. It’s that sort of you’re a thou first before you’re an I. Right. And so that’s sort of like particularity and givenness and limited and and limitedness. I guess those are all well, OK, no, here’s so here’s an interesting niche. I mean, you brought up creation notice that, yeah, particularities and aspect of creation. But to go back to that first point, like. It seems like it seems like the biblical corpus is clear that in Christian theology is clear that God is particular, the infinite is particular. Is that is that sayable? I don’t know. Yeah, I would. What am I? What am I driving at? Yeah, it’s like the infinite, the infinite God above all things outside of time. Has chosen to create particular things, right? He has chosen to create you and your wife and your children and the state that you live in and all these different things. And so I think I think it’s it’s that the infinite is actually found in and through the particular. Yeah. Right. And not like abstracting away from it, not like escaping from it. But it’s like, no, you just engage because you’re engaging with it. Yeah. And and existence, existence is self is something that we participate in God with. Right. Because he is, you know, the subsistent act of being itself. Right. He is just, boom, it’s all of the existence. And so when we are actually engaging with reality and we are actually engaging with these very particular finite things around us, we’re actually engaging with God. Yeah, somehow we’re engaging with his providence in creation. Yeah. OK, maybe that’s maybe that’s the thing that I’ve been trying to pick apart in sort of that in that Vervecky Peterson talk, is that there seems to be this like. Well, OK, but well, OK, let’s then let’s take Peugeot’s language. Vervecky seems to be this like you send up this you send up and then you’ve you’ve reached this sort of like level of abstraction and reached total being. But you can’t live on top of the mountain. But you can’t live on top of the mountain. You need to live. Yes, exactly. Then you come you. And so the degree to which that well, and then, OK, this is yeah. So then what does our Lord say? Right. He’s like, you know. What the in terms of loving God, right, he says you do that when you’ve done that to the least of these, the least of these being like individual human beings in front of you. And yeah, I just I when you’re talking when you’re saying that, I was thinking about the Divine Comedy because you have that was so interesting. One of the interesting things about the Divine Comedy, not what’s so interesting, one of the great things about the Divine Comedy is that it’s this movement out of this sort of abstract allegory of the Middle Ages into this deeply particularized thing, right? You don’t have lust. You don’t have loyalty. You don’t have avarice. You know, whatever you have people. You have souls that Dante talks to in his journey. And then in particularly in the figure of Beatrice, like more than anything else. And that’s why I think people have argued so much about what she is. And you’re like, well, she is God’s love in Dante’s life. She is also a girl in Florence that, you know, married and died young, married someone else and died young. And she’s also God’s love in his life. And it’s not that you need to try to resolve those things that like that union as a poetic image. Is almost like an epistemological statement about reality. If you had eyes to see, you would be able to see a lot of people, maybe even everybody as God’s love in your life. Yes, yes. So, yeah, Charles Williams makes that point basically in his book, The Figure of Beatrice, which is a very interesting book. And he contends in a very T.S. Eliot kind of way that the reason that we don’t is because we grow tired of glory. It’s not that we can’t. It’s not that it’s not there to be seen. But that like as we are, we just like wear out from being like from seeing that much glory in other beings, which is like a kind of cynical thing, I guess. I don’t know. Or hopeful. It’s both maybe. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it depends on what your reaction to that is, because if you’re like, oh, I get tired of glory. I I’m a bad person and being as corrupt, you know, it’s like, well, that’s one response or, oh, I get tired of glory. It’ll be nice to be in the next world when I’ll have the strength to actually handle it because of my resurrected flesh. Yeah, yeah. Well, and that’s like that, you know, that great image that I keep coming back to, which I think we talked about this right where where Dante says, why aren’t you smiling? And Beatrice says, because I destroy you like my smile would destroy you. It’s like, oh, it’s not. Yeah, we’re the problem. I mean, basically, that’s what it says. Like, we’re the problem, which is great. Who says this? There’s someone that I read recently. Some interesting quote about, like, when someone oh, I think it was Chesterton. Maybe not, though. Anyway, basically, like, would you rather would you rather find out that, like, all the problems in your life were caused by someone else or by you? Like, oh, I’d rather be my fault because then, like, there’s some hope. I think that was T.S. Elliott. Is that also talking to a woman at a party? Yes. Yeah. OK. OK. Yeah, I guess that’s Elliott. That does. I mean, it does sound like something Elliott would say. Oh, my goodness. Father, are you familiar with the podcast, Sacred and Profane Love? No, I am not. Oh, it’s actually the lady who runs it is in South Carolina. You should go talk to her. She’s a professor. It’s basically like she talks with, like, authors and intellectuals and stuff about it. But it’s about some favorite work of literature of theirs. So it’s really it’s really fun and, you know, covered the whole gambit of of of literature. And at any rate, they just I just listened to the one on T.S. Elliott. I learned a tremendous amount about that. It was it was very interesting. He made a very compelling point about maybe a bit more of there being a continuous arc of Elliott’s life rather than the sort of like, you know, sort of like manic, depressive days of the wasteland that so many people see. And then suddenly this like, no, he’s just this really happy Christian guy who writes the four quartets and saying like, no, that’s really not how you should see this, particularly, you know, and what I think makes the four quartets so valuable is like that that darkness is still there and that he is. Well, he’s expressing hope, right? Because it’s not I mean, why would you express hope if everything’s great? You still have this wonderful descriptions of the Eucharist and Pentecost as these sort of terrible, violent events that are also our salvation. Poetically, those are so valuable because of how rough they are. I like Elliott. Yeah, I honestly the only one I’m actually familiar with at all is the wasteland. Oh, well, you have a treat ahead of you if you ever pick up the four quartets. It’s it’s you know, I’m a good American. I don’t read poetry. Oh, my goodness. Oh, yeah. Just watch your Marvel movies and eat popcorn and don’t ask questions. Just watch poetry. That’s for that. Poetry is only for professionals now. That is not the way this country was founded. Yeah, yeah. Gone are the is the idea of the what is it? The intellectual agrarian, the learned yeoman. Yeah, I had I had a high school teacher that made me what made us do poetry out loud. And I memorized a poem by John Donne and I won for our classroom. And then I was sick the day they did the the the main competition. And I didn’t have a chance to throw myself in at the whole school. So do you remember which Dunpo man was off the top of your head? Death be not proud for some have called the mighty and dreadful for thou art not. Oh, for those whom thou thinkst thou dost overthrow, die not for death. No, yet, canst thou kill me? There’s more there, but I’d have to I’d have to I’d have to polish the rust off. But it but it gets in you. I mean, that’s the thing about memorizing stuff is like, you know, how long has that been? It’s been a little while and well over a decade. Yes. Yeah. And it’s still in you. I was actually just talking about the value of memorizing with someone. And I was like, they’re asking me why I don’t do it more. And I said, I don’t know, because it pays very high dividends in terms of what it does. You know, I remember reading at some point a while back. Paradise Lost. I also like fairly well as it as English poetry. This is some like retired firemen decided to use kind of memorize Paradise Lost, you know, not some crazy memory wizard or competitor or anything like that, just like retiring firemen. And he’s he’d I think at the time of this article, he’d memorize he he could recite something like 75 percent of it just verbatim. But he said that it was like having a cathedral in his head that he could just go and walk through. Mm hmm. Yeah. And that’s that’s why the church has the Liturgy of the Hours. Mm hmm. Right. Because after 10 years, they’re just inside of you. Right. So yeah, and I was especially bad at this and seven days. I’ll do it. I’ll just like respond to something with a quote from the Psalms, you know. I don’t know if that would be bad if you know, I don’t know if that’s a bad thing to do, but you know, I had so there’s a really traditional Benedictine monastery about three hours from here in eastern Oklahoma. Our Lady of Clear Creek. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it. I have, I think. OK, yeah, I spent some was out there a couple of times last year and I’d like spend the night for the first time there. And so, you know, I was going to the hours and it finally struck me. I’m like, these guys are these guys are actually chanting in Latin like five hours a day. Every single day of their life. And some of these guys are 50, 60, 70. What does that do to you? What does that? That’s got to do something to you after all that time. I mean, and you sit there and on this old in this not old, it’s it’s sort of a Romanesque very like subdued brick Romanesque church that they’re building with wonderful acoustics. And you just like you can feel the chant all the way through your body. And that’s not even when you know, and you know the difference between listening to music, like group singing and actually being part of it, like profoundly different things and thinking like, what is that like when that is the mainstay of your existence is to be is to be. Oh no. Yeah. I hear you. I hear you. Yeah. Even with the new Brevery, with the four week cycle, a lot of those songs still get into you. Oh, I believe that. I believe that. I mean, the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept remembering Zion on the poplars that grew there. We hung up our hearts. Sing for us, they said. One of Zion’s songs. How could I sing the song of a Lord on alien soil? If I should forget you, Jerusalem, let my right hand wither. Let my tongue cleave to my mouth. If I remember not Jerusalem of all my joys. And then the last line, which is cut from the Brevery, and so I don’t have it memorized, but oh, the happiness of the man who throws their little ones against the rocks. Yeah, I’ve heard that I’ve heard the Eastern interpretation of that is that it’s about dealing with your your sinful your sinful thoughts at the moment they enter in your head. Yeah, yeah. Well, just about every Christian is has come up with a spiritual allegory of what that line is supposed to mean. And it’s still there. That’s how it is. That’s how it is. That’s what that line means. Means nothing more whatsoever than that. And now we’ve got friend of the show, Andrew Kay. Hello, Andrew. Hello. All righty. We’re just talking about the Psalms and memory and having a cathedral in your head. There’s a cathedral in my head. If you memorize all of Paradise Lost, then yes, you have a cathedral in your head. Okay. That’s pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think so. How have you been? I’ve been well. How are you? I’m doing well. You may notice I’m not in my normal space. I’ve invaded Mark Lefebvre’s house and taking over the computer. Oh, good. Where did you put him? Where did I what? Where are you keeping Mark now? I assume if you’ve taken over his house, you tied him up and put him somewhere? Yes, yes, because a strong man, if a strong man guards his possessions, they’re safe. But if one’s stronger than he comes up and ties him up and then he can plunder all his possessions. That’s what happens. That’s what happens. That’s what happens. Yeah. Yeah. So having a good time in South Carolina. How are you? How is Ted is muted. Ted’s muted. He’s got a fussy baby. He’s trying to calm down, you know, because he’s all mature and adult like that. Right. So, but yeah, yeah, we were just talking, talking about memorization and the benefits of that. When you have the certain things memorized, they become a part of you rather than just saying, oh, I could look it up on Google later. So anyway, do they make you memorize a lot of stuff in architecture? Yes, actually, I was just looking at a whole bunch of stuff we have to. Memorize for sure. Actually, it’s not quite as much memorization for the most part. It’s more critical thinking than that. The most we have to memorize might be like jargon, words that we have to know to communicate things. And I suppose you could memorize a bit about how to like pour footings or set foundations and stuff, but you could just look that up again later anyways, I guess. What you should do is you should pick your top five buildings and memorize as much of their architecture as you can manage and like be able to do your own virtual tour through it. Like if you could do your own imaginary tour through St. Peter’s Basilica, then you would have St. Peter’s Basilica. Like you memorize all the different altars. That might be an idea. Actually feasible. But anyway, that’s your mission. You have to do that. I’ll go memorize St. Peter’s Basilica. And then when I’m building a church 20 years from now, you’ll be my architect and you can move the ball forward on Western church architecture. Yeah, good idea. It’ll be awesome. I’ll get the money. Don’t worry. Okay, good. Mark will be a millionaire by then, a multimillionaire by then. He’ll just be fantastic. And Catholic. Well, I’ve been working on him on that. He’s in budgeting. Okay. Well, 20 years. That’s a long time. And you know, sometimes it comes on a person all of a sudden like it did with us. Sometimes you just don’t see the Catholic Church coming until it gets you. Yeah, yeah. The hound of heaven pursuing you. Yeah. So Andrew, you’re an architecture student, is that right? Yes. Yeah. So you know what fascinates me about architecture is that like, well, one of the things is that like there are certain, I look at certain buildings and I love them. And I like, if you told me to describe to you how they’re different from other buildings, there’s this like, I’ll give you a really good example. So looking at like pictures of old English brick farmhouses. So I look at one of those and I recognize like it’s made out of brick, generally got pretty small windows, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And then I look at like a ranch style house built in like the 60s or 70s around here, which also has pretty small windows, also built out of brick. And I’m like, no, I don’t like it at all. And then I, it’s this whole thing of like knowing there’s this like all these levels of like knowledge embedded in it that I simply can’t see. And architecture is one of these things that I have like really strong responses to emotionally and I also have like almost total incapacity to recognize why I have them. So it’s just really interesting to be, to look at that and be like, and I can get to the point where I’m like, okay, maybe it has something to do with like the fact that like the casement on the windows is different or like, I feel like I should pay attention to like the eaves. But beyond that, I’m like. It’s the context of the English farmhouse, right? You think so? Okay. Yeah, because it’s like they. Yeah. It’s, they, so like you didn’t have fancy dancy architecture firms, right? You had a bunch of farmers who would get together and they would like help each other build their houses, right? They had traditional, you know, they had stonemasons too, I’m sure, to do some of the more difficult, the technical work that had to be run done right. But they had these traditional ways of building houses. And it’s like, we’re in England. What do we need? We need to keep the wet out, right? Like that is priority number one needs to be high and dry inside, you know, and they’re just operating under all of these constraints, right? What materials do we have available? What are the skills? What are the skills that we’re getting in? And then what is the climate? And all of that goes into building a sturdy farmhouse that’s going to last generations, you know, so you can pass it on, right? Because we’re not just going to tear this down in 50 years and rebuild something else versus the suburbs where like you’re just embodying this spirit of efficiency or at least imagined efficiency. Hmm. Is that, I mean, I’ve always understood that as sort of the idea of the vernacular. There’s this sort of constrained, these sort of like constraints that are just you’re operating within. And then, well, it makes me think of several things. One, a friend of mine who’s in art school talking about his favorite, his very favorite assignment in all of art school. And it was they were given a sheet of paper and a ballpoint pen and they had to use up the entire ballpoint pen on the sheet of paper. And so because they had this really strong constraint, like he ended up doing all these things he never would have thought of doing just to run out of ink. And, you know, and that that fired a lot of thoughts in his mind, you know, it’s sort of the same idea of like, why do you write a sonnet, you know, instead of reverse or all of these things, it’s like, you know, and you can see all this ties together again. It’s where where is like where’s the greatest fan of creativity is not in being as unconstrained as possible. It’s actually being there’s this sort of this golden sweet zone of like having a lot of constraint that you have to operate within and then stepping outside of that. But and you know, speaking of southern England and like here you are, you know, you’ve got your stuff, you go around between these villages, you can actually tell what the geology of the place is because all the stone buildings look different because you you are going to haul rock from 60 miles away, man, when you had horses like, you know, what can you dig out of the pit down the road? Like, that’s what you build a house out of. And so it’s like you can see all these like subtle changes in the geology there because, hey, it’s right there on the wall of the house. Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And so it’s I mean, that’s why God created finite beings, right? Well, because and he created us so finite with all of our particularity because it’s the particularity that actually shows variety. Variety is the right word. But it’s like they like there was a whole lot that God wanted to say. And he didn’t necessarily, you know, he like we can’t handle it all at once. He’s got to break it up into little pieces so that we can experience it bit by bit, you know, and the like when you take constraints off of people, they just get lazy and sloppy. As far as I can tell. What do you think, Andrew? I mean, does that does that mesh with like the creative work that you’ve done in architecture school at all? Is that fair on your experience? That’s a good question. We have done projects with constraints and we have also done projects with seemingly much less constraint. Well, for instance, one of the projects we had in our first semester when we build models and design, I wouldn’t say structures, but spaces maybe because it’s meant to be abstract. We’re not working with structure yet for the first few projects. So the second project we did, all it was was we have two words that are opposite to each other. And then we have to figure out how to abstractly represent both those words in space and figure out how to make a transition space between them, which is pretty open ended. One of my professors said this is probably the only project we will do that’s most like just making a sculpture or something like that, not really making an actual building or construction. And it was, people just kind of made all sorts of wild things. But that was pretty much the only constraints. Oh, there was one other one. And that was that the pieces that we were assigned to use with certain dimensions, there’s like sticks that are three inches by a quarter inch or something and cubes, which are one inch in every dimension. And we had a certain number of each of them we had to use. And those pieces had to all be touching each other. And then we could use some Funkor board as the quote unquote base for the first project, our everything was sitting on the base. But for this project, the base, we could cut it up and move it however we wanted and have it wrap around the whole project or sit on the ground like usual or anything. But the constraint was all the pieces had to be touching and they have to represent these two words. And then the other project we did, which was much more constrained, was we had a certain site in Central Park bordering Fifth Avenue. And we were given a set of singers to choose from who are famous for being affiliated with New York somehow. And then we would have to represent that singer in the space as a memorial. So now we have something that’s a structure. We have to think about how we’re going to get people down from the sidewalk to Central Park. So now we have to think about stairs and also how we’re going to get people down. The code for stairs, what’s required for a stair, they have to be, I think, like what is it, seven inches tall and 11 inches across for certain kinds of stairs. So we have that. And we again have certain pieces to work with. And now we have a whole site and it’s in a real location, Central Park, with real context. So now we have to think about the trees and the sunlight and what do the tall buildings do to the lighting and what does that do to the perspective of everything that’s going on there and what about cars that are driving by and how will people in cars see it compared to people walking and all this sort of thing. And I think it is pretty good to have those constraints to work with because otherwise you could do really anything and then what would you do? You know, and it was interesting to see the difference between the previous project where it was so much more open-ended, just represent these two words abstractly, and then seeing the projects that had an actual location and that sort of thing. I think it might be more difficult to do the really abstract stuff, but I think thinking about that first is really good before diving into, you know, all the stuff with following code and the site and thinking about all those things and making sure the building’s standing and all that. So, yeah. It’s interesting, Andrew, because I’ve heard at least sort of maybe I could think of at least three different ways of looking at architecture that have been brought up already. So, one of them is the sort of abstract idea-based thing. I mean, you can recognize a lot of modern architecture. It’s like, what is it? I have no idea. It represents some abstract, like the Oculus in New York is a great example. I mean, I think like sort of like a line drawing way. It’s cool. Like it’s a cool shape, but it’s like, what is it? It feels like this sort of, you know, void thing. Like part of the reason that it’s interesting to us is because it doesn’t behave in the way that we expect materials to behave. And I don’t know that that can justify a structure to existence, but like that’s a lot of the interest, I think. And then another one is sort of like following code, right? And so the stairs have to be this size. You know, you have to integrate and you look out at like, you know, I look at like industrial buildings and I’m like, yeah, that’s code. Basically right there. It’s like, you know, how do we enclose the largest amount of volume with least amount of material and still maintain like safety standards? And then the third one is something that you’ve sort of mentioned and that Father Eric was also mentioning, which is these, which is not to beg the question, but like the teleological view of architecture. Right. So it’s like, what is this space for? And yeah, it’s because the thing that I would, you know, you’re contrasting it being helpful to look at sort of these abstract ways before you start to look at say, how does this all integrate with code and the size of the stairs and everything? But what I wonder is like, what do you think about in comparison to looking at like use first, if you will? Like, I mean, is that something that’s even that’s like talked about? Like when they say like, what kinds of like purposes are you presented with as driving your architectural design when you’re in school? Are you talking about like form following function and that sort of thing? Yeah, yeah. In a very broad and let’s say in the broadest context possible, because there’s the form follows function like, you know, we need a vehicle to pass this tunnel and so this size and so we have to have the tunnel be this size. And then there’s this form follows function of like, well, what’s the function is like, is it to keep people dry or is it to let people have homes? Right. Because those are different things, you know, and the moment you say, well, I want it. I want people to feel at home. Then you open the entire world of human experience and people’s expectations and culture. And, you know, like I can see these just even in these three windows here that there’s different, you know, there’s different expectations about what a home would look like. And I find that I mean, I find that fascinating. I spent quite a bit of time in the field of design. I think I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Latin America and like I never really there’s so many places where I didn’t feel at home, not because they weren’t homes, but it’s just like, that’s not my expectation for home. Right. Yeah, there’s there’s an entire material language there that does not feel familiar to me. And so I would say, yeah, form form following function. But like, let’s let’s take the broadest sense of function there. And I don’t know. I think you end up I think so. At least the beauty that appeals to me, so much of it comes out of that, that really slow organic process of form coming out of function. Well, I could say I could talk about what I heard on one of my first days of our class on architectural theory. My professor is talking about why he went into architecture and the project we’re doing now is bridges. And he was talking about how he was talking about concepts. So coming up with the concept of the feeling and the idea you want to convey with the design that you have. And he was saying, so with these bridges, what you might think is, OK, well, I have to design something where you get from point A to point B and the thing has to stand up and we have to do it as cheaply as possible and make it work. And he said, but that’s that’s not architecture. That’s engineering. Engineering is just making it work. Architecture is different from that. And he said, I would have never done architecture if what it was is, you know, putting sticks together to put up a building or just figuring out how to get people from point A to point B on a bridge. And when we do our projects, the concepts we come up with is never, well, I’m going to get people from this town to this town over this lake. And that’s what’s that’s what it’s going to be. It’s always something something different and more abstract. Like I want to represent the cultural differences between these two towns. I want to represent how maybe this town is the one we have right now. One of the towns is like a historical site and the other one is like this modern park or something like that. It’s gone through all sorts of changes over the years and has had radical successes and problems over the years. And now we have to bridge those two. And how are we going to connect those two and represent those differences? And and so we’re we’re thinking as architects more about what can we say about these two towns or about the lake or about the bridge and take all this context into account? And how are we going to design this bridge to in some way represent that maybe not in a super literal way where it’s really obvious, but maybe in a subtle abstract way where you just kind of it makes sense as you’re walking through it. You can just feel that this belongs here between these two towns. So that’s that’s more what we go for, I think, at least in this project. And I guess the last project we had was much easier. No, no, that’s not true, because the last project we did, the concept wouldn’t be I’m going to represent Singer X. It was more like I want to tell this part of this person’s story and I want to maybe for one of the people was Lena Horne. Maybe I want to represent her struggle with being being someone who looks either black or white or could pass for both. Or maybe I want to represent her the part of her life where she’s struggling to feel free and and and find maybe a good relationship in her life or something. So there’s all sorts of different things that people can show that people could have the same exact person and create something totally different because of what they choose to express or convey through their project. And that’s because I was going to say that because they’re seeing different parts of the same in scape. Right, Father? In scape. Yeah, I remember you. That’s a word. That’s actually a funny word because there is a program called N scape that’s a rendering engine for like Sketchup and Rhino and architectural stuff like the letter in dash scape or INSC. I think it’s EN scape. Oh, okay. Yeah, this is this is something else. But yeah, it is. But it’s just funny because I keep hearing N scape. Oh, yeah, that’s rendering. Of course. Yeah. Carlos, how are you doing, man? Hey, folks. It’s been a while. Yeah, it’s all good. All good. Yeah. It’s a it’s a bit of a quiet Monday morning today. So I said I should come on here and at least say hi. How are the kids doing? Oh, growing fast and coming a little hard to handle. But it’s not rocket science exactly. But not too bad. Yeah, every single one of your ancestors managed to figure it out. So yeah, I know. I know. It’s amazing. I’ve also heard that referred to as like the mother of all selection biases. But Well, so far, none of the kids are dead yet. So success. Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah. Carlos, you do a different kind of architecture, right? Yeah. The computer kind. Yeah. Yeah. Is it ever beautiful? It can be depends on what you mean by beautiful. If you’re the sort of person who finds mathematical proofs beautiful, then I guess, you know, it’s all very abstract. Yeah, I guess it can be that you could put it that way. I could definitely I could say that a lot of computer architectures can also be very ugly. And if you ever wondered why every time some software of yours just crashes randomly or fails to work after an update. And yeah, yeah, most of everything out there. If you think modern architecture is ugly, most of modern computer architecture also happens to be like, it’s just grotesque. I can tell you that much. It’s yeah, I guess it can be beautiful, but it’s going to be very hard to find such things, mostly because things keep changing all the time. It’s ridiculous because nobody bothers to fix things. It’s just a this thing doesn’t work the way we want to anymore. So we’ll just abandon it and come up with a new one and slash or come up with a clutch on top of whatever was there in order instead of actually trying to fix what’s underneath. Right. So yeah, that’s that’s that’s the problem with modern computer architecture. Laura’s happy to see you, Carlos. Hey, Laura. And Mark has been telling me all about ugly computer architecture all week. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, you’re not going to find disagreement here. OK. Yeah, I mean, I try my best to make it better. But yeah. Yeah. Good, good. Fail forward, fix bugs by writing new things, not fixing broken things, no learning why, just do or die. Yeah. Carlos is computer based. Thank you. Well, I got to beat my job. So and, you know, we’re we’re Catholic. We got to be make things beautiful a little bit at a time. That’s the only way to do it, really. So, yeah. Very good. Very good. Glad you’re you’re. Trying to make that work. Are you expected to have a release every two weeks code release every two weeks? It really depends. Some. Some I’ve worked on projects where you just keep get working on things and haven’t done it. Anything at all for basically two years until the project just died, which is actually unfortunate. It’s a lot more common than people realize. You spend literally millions on something, hire several dozen folks and then nothing comes out of it. And then there are things that just release all the time. So. So never mind two weeks. There’s some things that release every two hours. So there’s there’s a there’s a an idea called continuous development where basically if you make one small change, then then it automatically propagates and actually it’s a continuous development. And an idea called continuous development where basically if you make one small change, then then it automatically propagates. And after all of the tests and everything fast, it goes out into the wild. So a lot of things that you’re if you’re using something on on the Internet, the chances are it’s already changing and you have. You just didn’t notice or sometimes you will notice because things will look a little bit different, work a little bit different or. Maybe not work a little bit different, you know, which tends to be more the case. It really depends. Two weeks is that there’s a very there are very popular. There are very popular. Software development methodologies that that like the two week cycle. And I would say it’s pretty common for things to release every two weeks. Yeah, interesting. Mark was not happy about that philosophy and says that the code isn’t actually tested properly. Yeah, I mean, it breaks constantly. Yeah, yeah, I fully agree with that. My problem with it is that. The two week thing becomes kind of a dogma. Like we have to release every two weeks or bust, you know, whereas the basic idea is sound, which is you iterate things quickly. You try a thing, you try small changes like like on the surface. It’s like it’s very conservative, technically, technically speaking. Right. So so you make a small change so that you have a small release and do that in in in quick increments so that you improve things in a. Gradual controlled manner instead of here, one hundred changes that I’m going to make and then I’m going to deploy them all at the end of six months. That’s just asking for trouble. Right. So the basic idea is sound. The problem is that instead of instead of people like, OK, so let’s do this thing slowly. Build it up to the point where it actually works and, you know, that they are saying that there I say it’s beautiful, you know, as we like to put it. What tends to happen is we have to release it every two weeks. It’s the two week thing that becomes the annual and be all of things. Here’s a bunch of oh, they’re not done yet. OK, so so but no, we have to release it. You release the not done things and it it just becomes worse. And now we have a longer list of things to fix for the next two weeks. I guess. And then it just spirals downwards. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know. What do you do, right? Try and fix it. Yeah. Yeah, that the technical debt. Yeah, I really love that analogy. You fix it now, do it properly or fix it later with compound interest. And then there’s a full list of things that you can do. Do it properly or fix it later with compound interest. And then there’s a flood if you aren’t keeping things fixed up properly. Yeah, everything just goes back into chaos. Yeah. Yeah. Who would have thought that you could relate coding to the Bible? People’s been grow so great that God has to punish it with a flood. The flood is the computer crashing and not turning back on in case that was unclear. Yeah. All righty. I suppose I suppose I’m supposed to lead the conversation in a new direction now that things have come to a halt. Yeah. Well, I see Andrew’s here. Hey, Andrew, how are you? Well, how are you? Yeah. So you know, it’s too bad that you remember from it’s been it’s been almost three years we’ve been talking about, hey, my my job is supposed to be a And that never got around to happening because, you know, something that’s been happening in the past three years. So funny enough, I still have my visa, never got around to using it. They the company paid for it and everything. And yeah, it’s still valid, actually. So I think it’s a good thing that you’re still using it. Well, maybe we’ll head on over to Philadelphia anyway. Yeah, I don’t know. I got to find an excuse to go somewhere. You know, I remember we it wasn’t it wasn’t really a plan. It was like, hey, I’ll be around for a couple of weeks and maybe I’ll be able to get a visa. I remember we it wasn’t it wasn’t really a plan. It was like, hey, I’ll be around for a couple of weeks and maybe we could meet up. And I know it was you and and Andrew L. I don’t know if he’s still around. I think he left the discord already. I don’t think he’s in discord land anymore. He’s he’s out like on a like a little farm in Maine and maybe he’s got like a wife and a kid now. Who knows? I don’t know. Not to worry about him, though. He seemed in a good going in a good direction last time I talked to him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s been a while that he’s a good man. I know. So I’m not worried about him. I’m just wondering if you guys have heard from him recently. No, I have not. Maybe I should see if I can follow up with him. But if they don’t answer our discord, it’s like, well, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I’m still on this court, but I just looked, you know, so maybe I check it once a day. I haven’t really had the time or energy to be and then there are a lot of new folks on the discord now. So I don’t I don’t even know. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, most of the folks that are there. So yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s it’s it’s an online space, right? So it’s not even a space, properly speaking. And it’s low bar to entry and low commitment when you get there. Yeah. So they just tend to be very fluid. They have their place and their purpose. But most human beings should try and settle into something a little more solid, I think. That’s true. Yeah. It’s a good it’s a good stepping stone, right, to get somewhere. But it’s not a good place to hang out forever. Absolutely. Absolutely. Good training ground. If you have anxiety, right, you can just click off at any time. I’m safe. And then once you get used to people again, you can winters can start peopling. Doesn’t make any sense to remain, which is good. I mean, it’s sad for people who can’t leave, but everyone else wins. Well, and if you can make a few good friends over discord and keep up with them, you know, you can make friends that you wouldn’t be able to in your local community. Yeah. Yeah. Meet up with them in Thunder Bay. Right. And the next thing you know, you’re vacationing at their house. It’s great. Could happen theoretically. Anything is possible. Yeah. That sounds familiar. Yeah, it’s actually happening right now. Spoilers. This is not my office. Yeah, Mark’s been awful good. But the problem, one of the problems with the Internet is that it’s already a filter and whatever space you’re in is already a filter. So you’re going to end up with a whole bunch of people who are already similar to you and you won’t learn how to deal with people who are dissimilar to you. Yes, exactly. I’ve been waiting for someone to figure that out. I keep telling them it’s a filter. What is that? It’s a filter. You got it, Eric. Well done. Yeah. And one thing that I’ve noticed, like for the past few years, the Internet’s gotten boring. Maybe not the Internet by itself, but when I look in my YouTube, for example, all my suggestions are there’s the Catholic stuff, there’s the computer stuff, there’s the video game stuff, and there’s the car stuff. And I click on the video and like, yeah, I know about this. I’m like, I’m going to do this. And then it’s just the suggestions are a dozen more similar videos. Right. Look, I’ve seen this show me something different and interesting, and it never gets around to doing that. It’s like the algorithm. And I work with search engines. So I’m like, I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this. And I work with search engines. So and I know the kind of bias that a recommendation engine can introduce into the algorithm, because what it does is that most people, you know, you’ve let’s say bought something on Amazon, a desk. Let’s say yours is broken and you need to buy a new one and you buy a new desk every 15 years or so. So you buy one and then for the next three months, Amazon is going to recommend to you all of the desks that you don’t need anymore because you’ve already bought one. Right. So what it tends to do is to give you suggestions from all of the people who are obsessive about that particular video or item or topic that you have just looked at or bought or whatever. Because those are the same people who spend so much time on that platform obsessively looking at those things. And so the Internet has gotten boring because I’m just looking at all of these four topics. I still grew up, as a kid, I really liked pop science books. I read, you know, the pop style kids encyclopedias and stuff. And then if you read those things cover to cover, which I was a nerd. I was a nerd. So when I got bored, I started reading some of them. Besides some aside from that and a bunch of old Archie comic digest that my aunts kept around for whatever reason. You just read random things that are completely new to you that I would have never read about certain topics if they weren’t in that book just because I had no other choice other than to read. But now you go on the Internet and you go on YouTube, you go on Wikipedia. It’s all related stuff and just go like super deep into something that I don’t know, you can have like super encyclopedic knowledge about whatever. I don’t know, Pokemon, I guess. Yeah, it goes deep. Everything goes deep because what people don’t realize is that in order to be an algorithm, it has to normalize against a standard. And so when you start normalizing against standards, eventually you just reach equilibrium, which is great if you want equality. But if you want novelty, you know, you have to and you can get around, you can introduce novelty into the algorithm. But algorithms are normalizers. That’s what they do. They they normalize data. That’s the purpose of an algorithm. Otherwise, it’s not an algorithm. It’s something else. And how would you measure that something else? Well, you can’t. And so they measure against the normalization standard. And if you read anything about AI, they’ll talk about normalization. Talk about data normalization coming in. That’s how you get the problem of desks. Oh, most people repeat byproducts on Amazon. Once they find a product they like, they repeat by it. Right. And then they don’t put in the exception case, which is furniture, obvious exception case. Yeah. You know, or, you know, there’s dozens of things that you never repeat by or at least not in the next few years. Or at least not in the next five years or ten years. They don’t account for that in the data normalization. So they normalize the data. They’ve got a normalizing algorithm. And then you get a bunch of desks. Yeah, I had the same problem. I looked at desks once for someone else and then I got desks and I’m like, I’m not on the business of desks. I don’t need any. Yeah. Yeah. I was about to say, because I know that most of the people who buy desks will repeat by them for mainly for two reasons. Either they have to buy them for someone else. That’s what happens to me. I buy something and my mom says, hey, I want one of those, you know, vacuum cleaners on me. Okay, I’ll buy you one. It’s great. Or they are in the business of, you know, reviewing them, reselling them, whatever. Or you’re buying batteries. And if you buy batteries, you’re going to buy them every month. Yeah, you’re going to buy them every month. Yeah. Or they’re consumables. Right. Yeah, most of the stuff you buy, you buy again. Right. And buy it again is a big deal. But it just doesn’t apply to certain items, but they don’t exclude them from the algorithm like they should. So they get weird results. And when it comes to Internet content in particular, who are the people who like do watch videos or read articles repeatedly? A bunch of nerds, right? Who are very obsessed about that particular topic. And so it’s just like, for example, Catholic YouTube, it’s all just a bunch of nerds, really. And I’m one of them. Yeah. I’m one of them. I enjoy that stuff. But, you know, at some point, you know, you got to just get off the Internet and actually do the prayer and sacraments and stuff. Too much thinky talky, not enough do-y do-y. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is there any way to like introduce noise into an algorithm? Oh, yeah. Tons. Yeah. The question is, if you do. Oh, yeah. A lot of the algorithms have it. And then you have to, again, you have to if you normalize the data incorrectly, and most of them do, because it’s actually tricky, then you come up with weird results. But also, how do you add noise into a general unbounded set of YouTube videos? Because I don’t want children’s videos ever because I’m not a child. Right. And so like you have to rule those out. All right. Well, what is if if if all I watch are and I don’t do this, but let’s say it’s lathes and we’ll say Jordan Peterson. Right. And, you know, maybe Justin Briarley or something. Right. How do you add noise into that set with all the other things you could? Because, you know, there’s YouTube videos on cars. Do you introduce those? He likes lathes, but, you know, it’s mostly, you know, talk stuff. And, you know, what if I have a history channel or a survival channel? But what does noise look like in the content? Because there’s no you can’t circumambulate those things. So what it tends to do is focus on, well, what are other people doing that like? And to Carlos is excellent point. If they’re nerds, they like detail. And so you’ll go deep instead of wide. And then noise deep looks different from noise wide. This is all they don’t understand the difference. And when you don’t understand the difference, you’ve got one problem. But when you do and then you realize, oh, there’s no such thing as noise at the level of topics, because, you know, what would it be like? Like nothing on the Internet knows that I like H.P. Lovecraft. Nothing. It’s that data is not there. You could infer it maybe. But and there’s a bunch of stuff that I like that the algorithms know nothing about for various reasons. Some of them are I’ve hidden the information. Right. And some of them are it’s just stuff I’ve never looked up on the Internet because I have, you know, original like a lot of the computer stuff. I have the original books. I don’t need Google. I don’t need to look that stuff. I have the book. I go to the I go to the bookshelf. I grab Stevens. I’ve got all the TTP IP network code I could ever want. Right. If I want sea library stuff, I’ve got the Plager book. I can just look up all the sea library stuff. I don’t need to go to Google for any of that. So Google actually doesn’t know that I’m a sea coder. There’s probably no way in hell that Google knows anything about it. Except now you’ve spoken it into their their website and they’re going to take the transcripts and they’re going to match it to your voice, which they have hours of recordings of. And then and then and then the lizard people from inside the earth are going to steal your soul. They’re not they’re not going to spend that much money on me, Eric. Everybody thinks like, oh, they’re doing this. And I’m like, do you have any idea how much money that would cost? They are not doing that for you. You are not worth that much money to them. Sorry. You’re just not. Yeah. You know, it actually happened one time that it was so uncanny what what YouTube ended up suggesting to me. I know it wasn’t targeting me in particular, but sometimes it can feel that way because I remember at my dad’s house, one of the air conditioners there failed. And so we were just talking about it over over lunch. Actually, I was doing a video chat with them. So what happened with the air conditioner? It had a failed capacitor. I just had the I just had an electrician come in and replace it and it’s not working again. And then the next time I open YouTube, it says how to replace air conditioners failed capacitor. OK. So but but, you know, I do watch electronic repair videos on YouTube. So it’s possible that it just ended up on the top of the few on that particular morning. But it was so uncanny. I like you. You guys read my mind like or listening to what I’m talking about. So it was really crazy. If you’ve got that that Google Assistant voice activated Google Assistant turned on, it has to listen to you all the time. Right. Yeah. Because otherwise, if it’s not listening, it’s not going to hear you say, OK, Google. Right. Yeah, they do. They do collect that data to Alexa does as well. But also look, the zeitgeist hits everybody at the same time. That’s what it is. And then once it hits your friends and they do a search for something on Google, then Google’s going to hit you next. So it’s the zeitgeist driving Google, not the other way around. And nobody knows what the zeitgeist is or how to control it. So they freak out. Right. That’s where you get agregores and all this other stuff from. Yeah. The thing is, the algorithm is part of the zeitgeist by now. Well, it amplifies it. Technology is just an amplifier for other things. Right. It’s a compressor of time and space, and it’s an amplifier for a bunch of things. And that’s all it is. And then when we mistake that for consciousness, because we have a conversation with the chat GPT thing or whatever, and then it’s really just reflecting us back and we don’t realize that. Right. That’s why I like I like when John Verveke talks about it. He says, yeah, get two of those things to talk to each other and watch what happens. They spin out pretty quickly. Of course they do, because they’re trying to mirror each other and there’s nothing there. So they spin out and then they don’t say anything. And that’s how you know they’re not conscious. It’s really it’s funny. It’s not that hard. Nobody runs that test, though, because they all want to sell the dream of AI consciousness. That’s going to lead us to the equal world. And yeah, I have a new video on navigating patterns about that, by the way. They will run that test, but with different goalposts like that. They’ll have an AI program play chess against itself or play go against itself and say, oh, it’s so but yeah, but it’s a game. It’s bounded. It’s bounded. It’s bounded. Yeah. I remember reading an article about chat GPT when it first came out and there was this professor complaining about, hey, my student submitted to me a bullshit article. Sorry. That’s that’s his word. OK, not mine. About. Manuel can’t or something, you know, so so it was a philosophy professor. And what I find disappointing about that article is that he was complaining about the plagiarism more than the bullshit. Right. But that if professors took their job seriously enough. It. If he thought that, hey, this article, this essay is full of crap and I will fail it on the basis that it is full of crap. And then it turned out that, hey, this this this kid actually copied it from a computer program and. And that’s interesting. That’s an interesting side note. No, the main point was he copied off the computer program and then the BS was kind of a side note. Like, guys, they say this is a game changer for higher education only because the professors made it so that everybody got so sloppy. Professor students that when I was in high school, I I copied an article of the Internet about consumerism. I don’t even remember what it was about, but they asked us to talk about it. And my teacher approached us saying that you guys did write this. And we sort of had a like bathroom deal saying that you redo this article. I know you copied it and I’m going to give you. I am going to regrade your essay with some deductions, but don’t do this again. And so when I was in high school, it was like, hey, you didn’t write this. I know you do this again. And that was in high school when when when I was a kid, when the Internet was we had Internet here in the Philippines, but it was still dial up and it was difficult to to connect and not a lot of people can afford it or especially not a lot of people back then to the computer. So so so I thought, hey, that’s that’s we’re being lazy. Let’s just copy something off the Internet. Nobody will ever know. And I know for a fact that my teacher did not have Internet access at the time, but he knew that we didn’t write it. And he called us out. And I thought, you know what? If more more professors, more teachers just do this, none of this AI crap is going to be relevant because none of it will will will will even the kids will never even think of copying something off the Internet because they know that their professors will never allow it. But unfortunately, yeah, they know that sloppy. Yeah, if you if you think your professor knows you, then when you’re not being your authentic self, you’re going to be like, oh, I know I’m going to get caught because the professor knows me. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s a good point. It’s a really good point. And that’s always been a thing, right? Like you could copy a paragraph out of somebody else’s book. It’s easier to do with the Internet, but like the plagiarism has always been a temptation in the Academy because, yeah, we’ve always had books, you know, and I don’t know. It seems like the chat GPT actually kind of has a voice and it stinks. It’s not interesting at all, but but it does have like a voice. So unless you you tell it to do something in the style of something and then it like tries to give this weird computerish like like the prompt was a story about a guy who put a peanut butter sandwich in a VCR. In the style of the King James Bible and that produced a pretty amusing result because it’s got the King James Bible and it can it can it can copy that voice. And it was just as ridiculous about the peanut butter sandwich, you know, but unless you do something like that, it just seems to just be so bland. Yeah, it’s weird how you can even tell, but you can’t and you don’t know how you can tell, but you can. And that’s the real key. It’s like, oh, you can tell there’s nothing behind this. There’s no spirit, right? It would be interesting to have it do like a homily or something for, you know, in the style of a Catholic Catholic priest and see what it comes up with. Do it with like, can you can it do it in the style of Fulton Sheen? Can it do it in the style of Bishop Barron? Yeah, and see what and see what happens because I bet that I bet the spiritual deadness would come right through. Yeah, yeah, interesting. The unfortunate thing is that that that that comes through with actual Catholic homilies and for academic lectures, you know, academic lectures and everything like that. And that’s how a chat GPT can pass for, you know, oh, this is a game changer because now now we cannot detect plagiarism. Yeah, only because we’ve allowed it. Only because we ourselves have been so emptied. Like we don’t have inner lives. A lot of modern people don’t. And I’ve only noticed the fact that I used to have an inner life when the whole thing was explained to me. What’s an interior life? You know, and then and then many, many years later, I was like, oh, I’m going to go to the church. You know, and then and then many, many years later of trying to figure out, you know, prayer sacraments and then and then suddenly it’s there. I don’t know at what point I didn’t have an inner life and at what point I did. But most folks, I think, ignore their inner lives and its own noise. And that’s why it seems spiritually dead to the point that we think that computers can substitute for actual thinking, actual consciousness and things like that. But they can’t. Stupid computer won’t tell me what to do. I’m the boss here. Until I need directions and I’ll do exactly what the computer tells me to. That’s an interesting idea that, you know, there are priests that are that are so dead inside that they’re giving AI like homilies in their sermons or whatever. Yeah, that’s an interesting. Yeah, we really have become more material, more mechanical, more robotic. And so it looks like, oh, he is really getting there. It’s like, no, we’re just closer to AI. That’s the eyes that coming up. We’re going down. Yeah, yeah. Well, in Catholic preaching, Catholic preaching, like anything is on a bell curve. You know, some of it is really bad and most of it’s OK. And then there’s some real rock stars. It’s just how it goes. So, yeah, yeah, when you’re in that middle, middle category where it’s just sort of like, yeah, that’s pretty good. Every once in a while, you’ll you’ll get something nice. But otherwise, not going to have any of the fireworks. It’s nice. That’s one of the nice things about a vacation is I don’t have to come up with any homilies while I’m here. We just we could just let that land lie foul for a week. We don’t need to we don’t need to tell it. We don’t need to harvest it. It’s just rest. So on that note, Father, do you when you do daily mass, do you give the optional homily or do you just do that for Sunday? Oh, I do. I do. I give the homily. Yeah, you know, I just during my prayer, I’ll look at the scripture and then I’ll go for it. Basically, sometimes I, you know, honestly, because they’re a little more extemporaneous, sometimes they end up being really good because just just channeling the spirit, you know, just just a medium. Maybe that’s not the right language anyway. And then other times, they’re just kind of lame and generic. But as long as they’re not too long, nobody really minds if it’s generic. So, yeah, yeah, I do. And it’s kind of an expectation in my area that you do the you do the daily mass homilies. I think if you were to regularly omit them, that would that would cause. It would cause a comment, you know. Right. Yeah, I actually think and then again, it’s not a one size fits all thing that it’s given us an option for good reason. I actually think some priests would do well to just omit the homilies when they do the daily mass, because I think some folks just run out of steam. So so whatever works. But I guess it also depends on what your parish is expecting. I know Filipino pastors will expect a homily that that’s for sure. So that I guess that’s why most priests would do the daily mass homily unless you were attending at the convent or monastery or something where, you know, it’s not the expectation. But in the usual diocesan fire setting, yeah, the priests will give the homily and the and the church ladies that are there and the one odd youngish focus they dad. Would would be half expecting a homily to be there. Yeah. And, you know, I know my pastor, his daily mass homilies are short. He’s done in like a minute usually, and he’s just got one point and he’s just going to make it. And then we’re just going to move on. But I always have something to say. I’ve always got like you people need to know this. This is important. So it usually takes me a little I’m usually going five minutes or less, but it can be. Well, then it’s just really get going, you know, and I can’t stop. Everybody tells me what a wonderful job I’ve done. So, you know, if they’re not going to get me a homily, I’m going to go. I’m going to go. I’m going to go. I’m going to go. I’m going to go. I’m going to go. I’m going to go. I’m going to go. I’m going to go. I’m going to go. I’m going to go. I’m going to go. I’m going to go. I’m going to go. I want to have to leave mass early. And so but yeah, I’ve never I haven’t been assigned to a parish that has a working man’s mass yet. So yeah, I was just at noon. So, you know, how was it? How was it in the medieval days? they do for our masses do you know? I bet you they rarely ever preached on a weekday. I’d be curious to find out if they I’d be surprised if they didn’t. You know I remember I remember hearing somebody um was Dr Lev and she was talking about church architecture and church practice and that there was a time and a place somewhere in the church history where the preaching wasn’t even done at Sunday mass. It was done on the Saturday night before and these guys would go like two hours and you were expected to laugh you expected to cry you were expected to have your life transformed by them and they were like professional preachers who were like circuit writers. I don’t know anything about it but that’s just like a different world you know and so and so it was like it was just something you do it’s like well on the afternoon there’s no Saturday afternoon there’s no such thing as Netflix yet we’ll just go here with that preacher who’s in from out of town we’ll go see if he’s any good you know and hopefully they’d send one of their best ones there but uh yeah you know I’d heard about them and I just but you didn’t give like any dates or times for when this was done so it’s just hard to track it down and I’ve never done any research on it because I don’t know why I would. Somebody else research that just give me the answer. Okay Google chat GPT to give me an answer what was the history of preaching in the catholic church? It sounds more like entertainment like a troop show or something yeah that’s bizarre. Well some some some people created as such even to the modern day I presume like hey I don’t go I go to that patch because the feature’s funny I don’t go I go to that patch because the feature’s funny yeah so for what it’s worth my anecdotal experience is that the one time that there was not a daily homily was was during the time when my local church had a TLM that the deos is on one right traditional mass is what you’re talking about yeah so so so there was a there was a daily low mass I remember it was eight o’clock in the morning and and yeah that’s the only time that there wasn’t a kind of some sort of daily homily even a short one like two to three minutes and every other time the the priest always gave one but that that’s that’s an anecdote of one you know so so I think that that’s a great with the grain of salt yeah yeah well I mean part of it is is that doing a low mass even that takes at least 40 minutes if you’re distributing communion it might be more like 45 50 uh compared to if I were to do a novas ordo mass I could get that done in like 20 and it wouldn’t be disrespectful at all so so it might be just a matter of the the timing on it you know if you’ve got people trying to get off to work or whatever they’re but you know it might also be the ethos of it right that they just uh they just view preaching differently in the old the old ways anyway right yeah 20 minutes sounds about correct is um when um I remember when I was in college I sometimes attended daily mass at the local opus day center and they wouldn’t preach like it was over 20 minutes but the the the usual thing that opus day does is that you sit there for half an hour um doing your morning meditation before the mass and then you spend 10 minutes of meditation after the mass for for thanksgiving so so the mass itself’s like 20 minutes but you’re actually there for a full hour okay so it’s like you’ve got a holy hour with mass yes two-thirds of the way through that’s not bad that’s not bad you know the the pope’s assassins they’ve got that figured out right uh-huh opus day right that that was the pope’s assassins and the da vinci code I think yeah that’s us assassinating during the day and bringing flowers to your wife and reading bedtime stories to your kids at night so oh my goodness ridiculous ridiculous we had an opus day priest at uh at the seminary he was austrian man senior schlag and he taught us the church’s social teaching catholic social teaching and it was good he pointed out to me that in this or to the whole class uh that in the soviet union like sometime in the 1970s they legalized private gardens you could grow your own food in you know that was illegal right because all of the production was controlled by the state right and then within like five years that was half of the soviet economy oh wow oh wow the private gardens I mean the private gardens yeah and probably you know like part of that economy was people getting seeds uh people exchanging equipment getting fertilizer all those sorts of things but uh but yeah right it’s just like this distributed system you know where you’ve got lots of little systems rather than one big top-down system quite a bit more agile and uh you know people liked that certainty of knowing where their groceries were coming from I’m sure rather than rationing uh constant rationing interesting I think what I’ve seen I mean look I didn’t grow up under communism but all of the the documentaries I’ve seen about communist or ex-communist countries whether it’s sympathetic or not they always end up pointing out that it ends up something like that right so so at first the state centralizes everything and then eventually they they have some form of uh private enterprise whether it’s like gardens or like little markets or such for the simple fact that if that doesn’t happen people starve so I think I watched this Netflix I don’t know if it was a Netflix documentary about North Korea where they had this crazy Spaniard who joined the North Korean military and then he was the their host the the host of journalists who went there and they actually went around central Pyongyang and they they showed markets there that you can like look like Hong Kong you know I mean this is modern day North Korea look like Hong Kong or or Singapore or you know some of the some of the markets here in Manila even um and I remember they they posed a question to their host saying that why is it all in hard currency hard currency we mean to say South Korean won or US dollars you know and and then they were like oh this is this is a tourist area and then they were like we don’t seem to see any tourists around here these are all locals so so I mean the the the journalists were very respectful um they they were not like very overtly that hey North Korea is bad this is against their ideology or anything like that it was a very sympathetic portrayal you know but but but even they were noticing things like this this did look like tourists to me spending foreign currency and also so my goodness when it’s obvious enough that the the journalists can actually notice it that’s pretty day gone obvious yeah and one other thing father Eric that because you’re a Catholic priest and you know um I the the the journalist was also a Spaniard I think he was Catholic and he said hey where can I go to mass and apparently they had a Catholic church there um and they did have a priest and then so they had some kind of prayer service with without without a mass and I think without communion and I I found that interesting because apparently North Korea and as always is in this one of the religions that are still legal um and I found it interesting that they were respectful enough of our faith to not have a mass if there wasn’t a priest I’m like hmm yeah I I found that interesting that so so besides the marketing that that was the thing that I found interesting because you can have you know you can have all of these earth saps masses with whatever you know people do it all the time so so casually and and but but the North Korean authorities are fun you’re respectful enough of the act of actual Catholicism to I don’t know if it was a fake church or or or anything like that to be upfront with saying that hey we don’t have a regular piece here so it’s just you know whatever you got me uh curious now yeah it was a long time ago I’ve seen that so I don’t even remember the Bible yeah I can see that with a lot of people respect religion for no reason and it overrides politics and economics and all kinds of areas and people don’t think about it or talk about it but yeah it’s quite common I mean even even in uh Stalinist Russia they didn’t prevent people from worshiping right but they did prevent them from having too many copies of the Torah and stuff so too many Bibles if you’re distributing that religion that’s a problem so Changchun Cathedral is the nominal cathedral of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Pyongyang North Dakota North Korea oh boy there’s a Freudian slip um is one of only four official Christian places of worship in Pyongyang it operates under the Korean Catholic Association but to be fair both places are cold yeah as far as I’m concerned it’s not affiliated with the Holy See oh oh yeah that’s where you have no bishop or even an ordained priest there’s no resident youth priests either any masses that are actually offered there are offered by foreign clergy interesting interesting indeed so that means somebody’s coming from somebody official clergy is coming from some other country it might be the case that only like diplomats ever get mass there or something and if they like bring a priest along he’s like hey we’ve got this building you know I was like well bread wine gold vestments book okay we could do this and then if you’re like uh clergy traveling with an ambassador you’ve probably figured out how all these things work from the official channels yeah yeah I’m I’m a big fan like if you’ve got to go to a Catholic church bring your own priest I did that today it’s a good idea I sat around and did nothing the whole time well you get a job offer out of it it’s good I did I did yes the priest was like you wanna join the uh the Charleston Diocese and I okay you gotta think about that pretty warm in this with this time of year it’s kind of great yeah it’s uh it’s negative uh it’s negative 10 in Fargo right now it’s 50 degrees here how about that all righty well I’m starting to get tired anybody got any parting shots no it’s uh it’s been great to have you here so I’m glad I can carry around a Catholic priest whenever I need one now it’s great all righty Carlos I’m delighted you hopped on yeah yeah and nice nice talking to everyone and seeing everyone again um it’s just about time for lunch here so I gotta gather the kids and you know in the afternoon get back to work so all righty you take care thanks everyone yeah all right Carlos bye Andrew did say he might have to step away for a bit so if you’re not here Andrew I’m just gonna end the stream and that won’t hurt you God bless you all you’re all beautiful God bless